Palantir’s annual general meeting took place on June 3rd. The tech giant has been the subject of much discussion as it recently published a bellicose manifesto on social media, calling on the West to dominate the world with AI-enhanced weapons, and asserting that some cultures are superior to others. A techno-fascist pamphlet that seemed fully in line with the positions of the leaders and founders of Palantir and the company’s operations. And even more concerning given that, since the reelection of Donald Trump, the company has been embedding itself deeply within the U.S. administration.

$300 billion Valuation

Palantir was founded in 2003, in the wake of 9/11, with one promise: to provide software capable of processing and interpreting vast amounts of data, in order to predict and anticipate new attacks, which official intelligence agencies had failed to do. “The service offered is to connect datasets that were previously siloed to make sense of them,” explains Valentin Goujon, a sociology PhD student at Science Po’s Medialab. “It involves processing ‘big data’: very large amounts of diverse types of information—text, video, images, audio... - and at very high speed.”
The project won over the CIA, which invested two million dollars in it through its investment arm, In-Q-Tel. This funding added to that provided by the Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm. A co-founder of Palantir, he had previously made his fortune through PayPal.

This shows how deeply integrated Palantir is into the world of Silicon Valley giants. Peter Thiel’s so-called “PayPal Mafia” includes Elon Musk, the founders of LinkedIn and YouTube, and several big names in venture capital. Thiel was also Facebook’s (now Meta) first external investor and served on its board of directors for many years. Palantir relies on the cloud infrastructure of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon for its platforms, and works with Anthropic and OpenAI to integrate AI models (LLMs or large language models). The company also calls upon consulting firms such as Accenture, Deloitte, and PwC for the deployment of its software by their clients. Palantir also works with the American defense giant Lockheed Martin, as well as with the startup Anduril, a specialist in drones and other autonomous weapon systems (in which Peter Thiel is also an investor via the Founders Fund).

Today, Palantir is valued at over $300 billion. A staggering figure for a company that reported revenue of “only” $4.8 billion in 2025 —up 56% from the previous year—and which illustrates investors’ growth expectations regarding this company. The company anticipates revenue of $7.2 billion for 2026, driven by the continued increase in its customer base—954 in 2025 compared to 711 the previous year. 54% of Palantir’s revenue in 2025 came from government contracts, and it generated three-quarters of its revenue in the United States, with France being its third-largest global market, behind the United Kingdom (see related article). Its prosperity strongly benefits the executives and shareholders of the group, starting with current CEO and co-founder Alex Karp, whose wealth increased by $11 billion in 2025, including his salary and the rise in the value of his shares in Palantir. In 2024, the increase was $6.8 billion for the year. The company has 4,429 full-time employees, 28% of whom are based outside the United States. France—where Palantir had an average of 90 employees in 2024—is the only country where unions are recognized .

Symbiose avec les politiques de Trump

It is an understatement to say that Donald Trump’s return to power has been a boon for the company. “I saw the administration roll out the red carpet for AI companies like Palantir so they can take full control of the decision-making process with their technologies,” says Juan Sebastian Pinto, a former Palantir employee who left the company in late 2022. According to the website usaspending.gov, which tracks U.S. government contracts, Palantir has received over $1.9 billion in government contracts since 2008. While the company has worked for every successive US administration, the collaboration has intensified since the 2024 elections. According to Alex Karp’s May 2026 letter to shareholders, “revenue from our U.S. government clients, including defense and intelligence agencies, reached (...) $687 million in the last quarter, an 84% increase compared to the same period the previous year.”

Conversely, Palantir has also fully benefited from the tax breaks provided by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, passed by the first Trump administration, and the One Big Beautiful Bill of 2025. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the company paid no federal taxes in 2025 despite its strong performance, for the third consecutive year.

Last March, a Pentagon memo confirmed the integration of Palantir’s Maven system into all branches of the U.S. military in the long term. This data analysis and targeting software is already widely used by the United States in Iran, and is said to have previously been used to track down Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Maven allows for the merging of dozens of types of data, from radar detection to social media, to suggesttargets that the military need only approve or reject. In Iran, the United States reportedly struck more than 1,000 targets in the first twenty-four hours of Operation Epic Fury, confirming fears that using these systems will accelerate wars and destruction, especially with AI hallucinations and biases. To expand its roll-out, the Pentagon is now asking Congress for $2.3 billion over the next five years. The manifesto published on X in April, which calls for AI-driven rearmement against enemies that they claim threaten the West, must therefore also be read as directly serving the company’s commercial interests.

Beyond the military and intelligence sectors, Palantir is securing more and more contracts with all branches of the U.S. federal government. Infamously, it is also working with ICE, the immigration police, to track down people for deportation. This collaboration was denounced as early as 2020 by Amnesty International due to the human rights violations against migrants that it caused. As Donald Trump is currently pursuing even more brutal policies, this criticism has intensified, though it has not prevented the company from securing new contracts (read our article). Palantir also provides systems to the IRS, the U.S. tax agency, and the Department of Agriculture, to streamline public support for farmers. Its software is also used to shut down research projects related to diversity, equity, and inclusion by tracking keywords related to these topics online.

A surveillance company

The Trump administration also called upon Palantir to deploy surveillance software on federal employees, collecting, “data on the mapping of employees and facilities, facility usage, and office occupancy”, according to public information. In short, the goal is to monitor employees’ comings and goings and measure staff occupancy rates. This is a far cry from Palantir’s stated ideology: in its February 2026 letter to shareholders, the company’s leaders claimed to want to “protect freedom from unjustified government surveillance.” Far from the “granular” and strictly necessary data access permissions, the power and scope of Palantir’s software allow for example, cross-referencing of IRS data, phone records, or even Medicaid (the U.S. health coverage system) to track migrants on U.S. land.

Palantir strongly denies being a surveillance company, pointing out that it does not possess any data but merely makes platforms available to its clients. However, the very act of providing this type of infrastructure opens the door to abuse. “The real problem lies in the gathering of vast amounts of sensitive personal data within a single, opaque system, especially when it is designed and run by a provider like Palantir, whose business model relies on data integration and the expansion of surveillance capabilities,” explained Chioma Chukwu, director of American Oversight to The Intercept. For example, Palantir’s tools allow the IRS to search for and see connections between millions of records and thousands of links within databases managed by the tax agency and other federal agencies. “With what Palantir offers, it’s tempting to engage in mass surveillance. It’s a tool that can enable authoritarianism,” says Duncan McCann of the British NGO GoodLaw Project.

Palantir refuses to sell its software to China and Russia but does not hesitate to work with the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia and Dubai, in addition to the Trump administration. In March 2026, according to the ministry’s website, Rashad Nabiyev, the Minister of Digital Development and Transport of Azerbaijan reportedly met with Palantir representatives to discuss opportunities for cooperation. Moreover, the multinational company has been collaborating with Israel for years. This collaboration appears to have intensified since the October 7th attacks. In January 2024, Palantir held a board meeting in Tel Aviv. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp then met with representatives of the Israeli Ministry of Defense to finalize a strategic partnership. At that time, a complaint against Israel for acts of genocide had already been filed with the International Court of Justice.

Political investments

To defend its interests with the U.S. government, Palantir spent over $6 million on lobbying in 2025. But the company’s political investments go back much further. Peter Thiel was one of Donald Trump’s earliest supporters in Silicon Valley. In 2016, he reportedly contributed over $1 million to this campaign, before joining his transition team. Thiel is also close to Vice President JD Vance, whose election campaigns he also funded and who worked for his venture capital fund, Mithril Capital.

Like many business leaders in the United States, Palantir executives are accustomed to contributing to the campaigns of both Democratic and Republican candidates—a way to demonstrate political support in some cases, but above all to secure the favor of future officials. In the 2024 elections, for the first time, political Palantir-related contributions were larger for Republicans. In 2024, Palantir CEO Alex Karp donated one million dollars to MAGA Inc., a Trump-supporting super PAC, before contributing another million dollars to the president’s inauguration committee following his election. Palantir is also one of the companies that contributed to the funding of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project. The company was a sponsor of America 250, the organization in charge of commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States, which organized the military parade on June 14, 2025, in Washington. And Palantir is also a donor to Freedom 250, another Donald Trump initiative which organizes events as part of this anniversary, including a “Christian day of prayer” on May 17. All of these donations are widely seen as a way to buy the president’s favor.

Revolving doors

In addition to the donations, Palantir has built a real network of influence in Washington, particularly through a significant revolving-door system outlined in an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project in February 2025. At the White House, Donald Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency “czar” is David Sacks, who has invested in Palantir (as well as in many other tech companies) through his venture capital fund, Craft Ventures. The Federal Chief Information Officer, Gregory Barbaccia, worked for Palantir for ten years between 2010 and 2020. At the Department of Health and Human Services, Clark Minor has taken the position of Chief Information Officer after spending twelve years as an engineer at Palantir. Jacob Helberg, a former advisor to Alex Karp, left that position to become Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment in the Trump administration. Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s Chief Technology Officer, was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. In 2020, he explained that Palantir’s goal was to be “in every missile, in every drone.”

Conversely, Palantir hired Machalagh Carr, former chief of staff to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and wife of Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appointed by Trump to lead the battle against “liberals” and “wokeness” in the US media. Former members of Trump’s first administration such as Matthew Turpon and Alexander Alden have also joined Palantir. Between 2020 and 2025, the Tech Transparency Project also identified five individuals who moved from the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office to Palantir, or vice versa.

The ties between Palantir and the federal government extend all the way to Donald Trump himself, who is a shareholder in the company. In January 2026, he purchased between $65,000 and $150,000 worth of stock in Palantir, then sold shares worth between $1.1 million and $5.3 million in February, before buying back shares worth between $200,000 and $500,000 the following month. In April, as the stock was falling, the President of the United States posted on his social media platform Truth to praise the company: “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!” Palantir’s stock price then rose slightly.

Long-standing ties to the reactionary international

Recent controversies over statements by Palantir executives and the company’s close involvement in the Trump administration’s policies are part of a longer history of ties to the far right. As early as 2009, its founder Peter Thiel, a self-proclaimed libertarian, wrote that he no longer considered democracy and freedom to be compatible, and regretted women’s right to vote, because they were “notoriously tough for libertarians” (he later clarified that he did not wish to roll back this right). He compares Greta Thunberg to the Antichrist, and in 2019, researcher Adam Becker denounced Thiel’s financial support for a pseudoscientific journal entitled “Inference: International Review of Science,” which publishes, among other things, creationist and climate-skeptic articles. A worldview that Peter Thiel has also championed in Europe, such as at MCC Feszt 2025, a festival organized by the pro-Orbán, anti-EU Hungarian think tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium. The director of the French “Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie,” Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, was also present at this event.

In the United States, Thiel was one of the first funders of the American national-conservative “NatCon” conferences, in which he participated on several occasions alongside Trump supporters and figures linked to the global far right. In September 2025, Shyam Sankar spoke again at the NatCon in Washington, D.C., where, at a time of heightened hostility toward AI from MAGA, he defended his worldview in which the “talents”of the tech sector are as heroic as the Founding Fathers of the United States and must prevail despite the obstacles posed by governments.

In February 2025, it was the head of Palantir UK/Europe, Louis Mosley, who took the stage at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London. Grandson of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in finance and was a candidate for the Conservative Party before being recruited by Palantir. The ARC conference brings together conservative figures who are pro-Brexit, climate skeptics, and who espouse rhetoric of a clash of civilizations and the defense of the West against immigration. In his speech, Louis Mosley criticized globalization and condemned “bottom-up” censorship by fact-checkers, experts, media outlets, and NGOs of those who challenge established narratives on, for example, the origins of COVID-19 or immigration. Perceiving Brexit, Donald Trump’s victory, and the actions of Elon Musk’s DOGE as signs of a rebellion underway against these “elites,” he expressed his hope that the tech sector would rally behind this cause. In his view, Elon Musk has liberated Twitter/X, and he asserted that at Palantir, “we use AI to defend the West against its enemies.” Peter Thiel and the British far-right leader Nigel Farage were also present at the conference, as well as Alexandre Pesey, founder of the French “Institut de formation politique” and the “Bourse Tocqueville.”

Leaving Palantir?

“In the event of a political shift, will tech players be willing to give up their current place? That’s not certain. They might become politically involved to maintain their position, following Palantir’s example,” warned Maud Quessard of the Institute for Strategic Research at the École Militaire (IRSEM) during a parliamentary hearing in early April.

As the midterm elections are coming up this November in the United States, Palantir executives are again pulling out their checkbooks, whether for Republican or Democratic candidates. But several civil society organizations are mobilizing, in particular as part of the Purge Palantir campaign, to encourage Democratic elected officials to refuse these donations. Activists are also calling for parliamentary investigations to determine the company’s responsibility for privacy infringements and human rights violations. To date, nearly a dozen candidates have announced they will refuse Palantir’s campaign contributions or re-donate those already received to charitable organizations.

Investors are also being targeted. In October 2024, Storebrand, one of Norway’s largest asset manager, divested its $24 million worth shares in Palantir, fearing that the company’s activities on behalf of Israel could expose it to a risk of violation of international and human rights. Last April, Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, the largest pension fund in the Netherlands, which held €825 million in Palantir shares, divested from the company.

The question of the responsibility of companies that use Palantir could also be raised. While contracts with governments attract the most attention, even in the private sector, the deployment of each software allows engineers to improve functionality and develop new decision-making algorithms. Last May, Alex Karp announced a 133% increase in Palantir’s contracts with other U.S. companies for the first quarter of 2026.

“Hypothetically, if a water management company asks Palantir to develop a tool to calculate the number of occupants per household based on water consumption, what guarantees that it couldn’t be used by ICE to track down people hiding in a house? They can develop new features with each use,” explains Juan Sebastian Pinto. From JP Morgan Chase to car rental companies Avis and Hertz, as well as pharmaceutical firms (including Sanofi), ExxonMobil, and BP, dozens of companies are choosing to process their data with Palantir software, despite these risks.

While the accelerated processing of a mass of commercial or industrial data may seem less dangerous than intensifying bombings or monitoring individuals, in both cases, it’s the same company which develops the tools. And Palantir has definitely made blurring of the lines between the economic and the political its “business model.”