# Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies Inc. is an American publicly traded company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Alex Karp in 2003.
The company has four main projects: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and Palantir AIP. Palantir Gotham is an intelligence and defense tool used by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts. Its customers included the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense. Their software as a service (SaaS) is one of five offerings authorized for Mission Critical National Security Systems (IL5) by the U.S. Department of Defense. Palantir Foundry is used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Palantir Apollo is a platform to facilitate continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) across all environments.
Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve both international as well as state and local governments, and also to private companies.

## History
### 2003–2008: Founding and early years

Though usually listed as having been founded in 2004, SEC filings state Palantir's official incorporation to be in May 2003 by Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal), who named the start-up after the "seeing stone" in Tolkien's legendarium. Thiel saw Palantir as a "mission-oriented company" which could apply software similar to PayPal's fraud recognition systems to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties."
In 2004, Thiel bankrolled the creation of a prototype by PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings and Stanford University students Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen. That same year, Thiel hired Alex Karp, a former colleague of his from Stanford Law School, as chief executive officer.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company initially struggled to find investors. According to Karp, Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz doodled through an entire meeting, and a Kleiner Perkins executive lectured the founders about the inevitable failure of their company. The only early investments were $2 million from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and $30 million from Thiel himself and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund.
Palantir developed its technology by computer scientists and analysts from intelligence agencies over three years, through pilots facilitated by In-Q-Tel. The company stated computers alone using artificial intelligence could not defeat an adaptive adversary. Instead, Palantir proposed using human analysts to explore data from many sources, called intelligence augmentation.

### 2010–2012: Expansion

In April 2010, Palantir announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters to sell the Palantir Metropolis product as "QA Studio" (a quantitative analysis tool). On June 18, 2010, Vice President Joe Biden and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag held a press conference at the White House announcing the success of fighting fraud in the stimulus by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). Biden credited the success to the software, Palantir, being deployed by the federal government. He announced that the capability will be deployed at other government agencies, starting with Medicare and Medicaid.
Estimates were $250 million in revenues in 2011.

### 2013–2016: Additional funding

A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Special Operations Command, the United States Military Academy, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. However, at the time, the United States Army continued to use its own data analysis tool. Also, according to TechCrunch, the U.S. spy agencies such as the CIA and FBI were linked for the first time with Palantir software, as their databases had previously been siloed.
In September 2013, Palantir disclosed over $196 million in funding according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. It was estimated that the company would likely close almost $1 billion in contracts in 2014. CEO Alex Karp announced in 2013 that the company would not be pursuing an IPO, as going public would make "running a company like ours very difficult." In December 2013, the company began a round of financing, raising around $450 million from private funders. This raised the company's value to $9 billion, according to Forbes, with the magazine further explaining that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley’s most valuable private technology companies."
In December 2014, Forbes reported that Palantir was looking to raise $400 million in an additional round of financing, after the company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission the month before. The report was based on research by VC Experts. If completed, Forbes stated Palantir's funding could reach a total of $1.2 billion. As of December 2014, the company continued to have diverse private funders, Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller, In-Q-Tel of the CIA, Tiger Global Management, and Founders Fund, which is a venture firm operated by Peter Thiel, the chairman of Palantir. As of December 2014, Thiel was Palantir's largest shareholder.
The company was valued at $15 billion in November 2014. In June 2015, BuzzFeed reported the company was raising up to $500 million in new capital at a valuation of $20 billion. By December 2015, it had raised a further $880 million, while the company was still valued at $20 billion. In February 2016, Palantir bought Kimono Labs, a startup which makes it easy to collect information from public facing websites.
In August 2016, Palantir acquired data visualization startup Silk.

### 2020

Palantir is one of four large technology firms to start working with the NHS on supporting COVID-19 efforts through the provision of software from Palantir Foundry and by April 2020, several countries had used Palantir's technology to track and contain the contagion. Palantir also developed Tiberius, a software for vaccine allocation used in the United States. In August 2020, Palantir Technologies relocated its headquarters to Denver, Colorado.
In December 2020, Palantir was awarded a $44.4 million contract by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, boosting its shares by about 21%.

### Valuation

The company was valued at $9 billion in early 2014, with Forbes stating that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies". As of December 2014, Thiel was Palantir's largest shareholder. In January 2015, the company was valued at $15 billion after an undisclosed round of funding with $50 million in November 2014. This valuation rose to $20 billion in late 2015 as the company closed an $880 million round of funding. In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued the company at $6 billion.
On October 18, 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir was considering an IPO in the first half of 2019 following a $41 billion valuation. In July 2020, it was revealed the company had filed for an IPO.
It ultimately went public on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct public offering on September 30, 2020 under the ticker symbol "PLTR". On September 6, 2024, S&P Global announced that the company would be added to the S&P 500 index. Palantir’s share price rose 14% the next trading day.
On November 14 2024 Palantir Technologies Inc. announced its transfer of stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to the Nasdaq Global Select Market, effective November 26, 2024. The company's Class A Common Stock will continue to trade under the ticker symbol "PLTR."

### Investments

The company has invested over $400 million into nearly two dozen special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) targets according to investment bank RBC Capital Markets, while bringing alongside those companies as customers.

## Products
### Palantir Gotham

Released in 2008, Palantir Gotham is Palantir's defense and intelligence offering. It is an evolution of Palantir's longstanding work in the United States Intelligence Community, and is used by intelligence and defense agencies. Among other things, the software supports alerts, geospatial analysis, and prediction. Users can use Gotham to analyze multiple types of intelligence. Palantir's online demo shows how the software can be used to track an adversary's troop movements. Foreign customers include the Ukrainian military. Palantir Gotham has also been used as a predictive policing system, which has elicited some controversy over racism in their AI analytics.

### Palantir Foundry

Palantir Foundry is a software platform offered for use in commercial and civil government sectors. It was popularized for use in the health sector by its use within the National Covid Cohort Collaborative, a secure enclave of Electronic Health Records from across the United States that produced hundreds of scientific manuscripts and won the NIH/FASEB Dataworks Grand Prize. Foundry was also used by the Center NHS England in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in England to analyze the operation of the vaccination program. A campaign was started against the company in June 2021 by Foxglove, a tech-justice nonprofit, because "Their background has generally been in contracts where people are harmed, not healed." Clive Lewis MP, supporting the campaign said Palantir had an "appalling track record."
As of 2022, Foundry was also used for the administration of the UK Homes for Ukraine program. to give caseworkers employed by local authorities access to data held by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, some of which is supplied by the UK Home Office.
In November 2023, NHS England awarded a 7-year contract to Palantir for a federated data platform to access data from different systems through a single system, worth £330 million, criticized by the British Medical Association, Doctors Association UK and cybersecurity professionals. In 2024, picketing by medical professionals outside NHS England HQ demanding cancellation of the deal occurred.

### Palantir Apollo

Palantir Apollo is a continuous delivery system that manages and deploys Palantir Gotham and Foundry. Apollo was built out of the need for customers to use multiple public and private cloud platforms as part of their infrastructure. Apollo orchestrates updates to configurations and software in the Foundry and Gotham platforms using a micro-service architecture. This product has led Palantir's business model toward providing software as a service and away from developing bespoke solutions for customers as similar to a consulting company.

### Other

The company has been involved in a number of business and consumer products, designing in part or in whole. For example, in 2014, they premiered Insightics, which according to the Wall Street Journal "extracts customer spending and demographic information from merchants’ credit-card records." It was created in tandem with credit processing company First Data.

#### Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)

In April 2023, the company launched Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) which integrates large language models into privately operated networks. The company demonstrated its use in war, where a military operator could deploy operations and receive responses via an AI chatbot. Citing potential risks of generative artificial intelligence, CEO Karp said that the product would not let the AI independently carry out targeting operations, requiring human oversight. Commercial companies have also used AIP across many domains. Applications include infrastructure planning, network analysis, and resource allocation.
AIP lets users create LLMs called “agents” through a GUI interface. Agents can interact with a digital representation of a company’s business known as an ontology. This lets the models access an organization’s documents and other external resources. Users can define output schemas and test cases to validate AI-generated responses. AIP comes with a library of templates that can be extended by clients. Palantir also offers five-day boot camps to onboard prospective customers. The company reports that some attendees leave with prototypes in hand. Palantir hosts an annual AIPCon conference featuring demos from existing customers.

#### TITAN

Palantir’s TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node) is a truck that is advertised as a mobile ground station for AI applications. After being prototyped with IRAD funds, the project is now developed in partnership with Anduril Industries, Northrop Grumman, and other contractors. The company claims that TITAN can improve customers’ ability to conduct long-range precision strikes. Palantir is under contract to deliver 10 units to the U.S. Army.

#### MetaConstellation

MetaConstellation is a satellite network that supports the deployment of AI models. Users can request information about specific locations, prompting the service to dispatch the necessary resources. MetaConstellation has been used by customers including the United States Northern Command.

#### Skykit

Skykit is a portable toolbox that supports intelligence operations in adverse environments. Palantir offers “Skykit Backpack” and “Skykit Maritime” to be transported by individuals and boats respectively. Contents include battery packs, a ruggedized laptop with company software, and a quadcopter supporting computer vision applications. Skykit can also connect to the MetaConstellation satellite network. In 2023, various sources reported that the Ukrainian military has begun receiving Skykit units.

#### Palantir Metropolis

Palantir Metropolis (formerly known as Palantir Finance) was software for data integration, information management and quantitative analytics. The software connects to commercial, proprietary and public data sets and discovers trends, relationships and anomalies, including predictive analytics. Aided by 120 "forward-deployed engineers" of Palantir during 2009, Peter Cavicchia III of JPMorgan used Metropolis to monitor employee communications and alert the insider threat team when an employee showed any signs of potential disgruntlement: the insider alert team would further scrutinize the employee and possibly conduct physical surveillance after hours with bank security personnel. The Metropolis team used emails, download activity, browser histories, and GPS locations from JPMorgan owned smartphones and their transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations to search, aggregate, sort, and analyze this information for any specific keywords, phrases, and patterns of behavior. In 2013, Cavicchia may have shared this information with Frank Bisignano who had become the CEO of First Data Corporation. Palantir Metropolis was succeeded by Palantir Foundry.

## Customers
### Corporate use

Founded as a defense contractor, Palantir has since expanded to the private sector. These activities now provide a large fraction of the company’s revenue. Palantir has had 55% year-over-year growth in the U.S. commercial market in Q2 2024, although the company serves foreign customers as well. Example applications include telecommunications and infrastructure planning.
Sales by business (2023) :
| Business | Sales in billion $ | share |
| Government | 1.2 | 54.9% |
| Commercial | 1.0 | 45.1% |
Palantir Metropolis was used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms.
Sales by region (2023) :
| Region | Sales in billion $ | share |
| United States | 1.4 | 61.9% |
| Rest of World | 0.6 | 27.5% |
| United Kingdom | 0.2 | 10.6% |
Palantir Foundry clients include Merck KGaA, Airbus and Ferrari.
Palantir partner Information Warfare Monitor used Palantir software to uncover both the Ghostnet and the Shadow Network.

### U.S. civil entities

Palantir's software was used by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to detect and investigate fraud and abuse in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Specifically, the Recovery Operations Center (ROC) used Palantir to integrate transactional data with open-source and private data sets that describe the entities receiving stimulus funds. Other clients as of 2019 included Polaris Project, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Institutes of Health, Team Rubicon, and the United Nations World Food Programme.
In October 2020, Palantir began helping the federal government set up a system that will track the manufacture, distribution and administration of COVID-19 vaccines across the country.

### U.S. military, intelligence, and police

Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor (responsible for the GhostNet and the Shadow Network investigation). Gotham was used by fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, a former US federal agency which operated from 2009 to 2015.
Other clients as of 2013 included DHS, NSA, FBI, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED Defeat Organization and Allies. However, at the time the United States Army continued to use its own data analysis tool. Also, according to TechCrunch, "The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir."
U.S. military intelligence used the Palantir product to improve their ability to predict locations of improvised explosive devices in its war in Afghanistan. A small number of practitioners reported it to be more useful than the United States Army's Program of Record, the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A). California Congressman Duncan D. Hunter complained of United States Department of Defense obstacles to its wider use in 2012.
Palantir has also been reported to be working with various U.S. police departments, for example accepting a contract in 2013 to help the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center build a controversial license plates database for California. In 2012 New Orleans Police Department partnered with Palantir to create a predictive policing program.
In 2014, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded Palantir a $41 million contract to build and maintain a new intelligence system called Investigative Case Management (ICM) to track personal and criminal records of legal and illegal immigrants. This application has originally been conceived by ICE's office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), allowing its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by other federal and private law enforcement entities. The system reached its "final operation capacity" under the Trump administration in September 2017.
Palantir took over the Pentagon's Project Maven contract in 2019 after Google decided not to continue developing AI unmanned drones used for bombings and intelligence.
In 2024, Palantir emerged as a "Trump trade" for further enforcing the law on illegal immigrants and profiting on federal spending for national security and immigration.

### British National Health Service (NHS)

The firm has contracts relating to patient data from the British National Health Service. In 2020, it was awarded an emergency non-competitive contract to mine COVID-19 patient data and consolidate government databases to help ministers and officials respond to the pandemic. The contract was valued at more than £23.5 million and was extended for two more years. The awarding of the contract without competition was heavily criticised, prompting the NHS to pledge an open and transparent procurement process for any future data contract.
The firm was encouraged by Liam Fox "to expand their software business" in Britain. It was said to be "critical to the success of the vaccination and PPE programmes,” but its involvement in the NHS was controversial among civil liberties groups. Conservative MP David Davis called for a judicial review into the sharing of patient data with Palantir.
The procurement of a £480m Federated Data Platform by NHS England, launched in January 2023 has been described as a 'must win' for Palantir. The procurement has been described as a "farce" by civil liberties campaigners, alleging that Palantir have a competitive advantage as it "already has its feet under the table in NHS England" and benefits from a short procurement window. In April 2023 it was revealed that a consortium of UK companies had been unsuccessful in its bid for the contract.
In April 2023, Conservative MP David Davis publicly expressed his concern over the procurement process, stating that it could become a "battle royale". Davis is one of a dozen MPs pressing the government over privacy concerns with the use of data. Labour peer and former Health Minister Philip Hunt voiced his concern about Palantir's use of data, stating “The current NHS and current government doesn’t have a good track record of getting the details right, and the procurement shows no sign of going better.”
In April 2023, it was also reported that eleven NHS trusts had paused or suspended use of the Palantir Foundry software. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care stated that this was due to "operational issues".
In January 2023 Palantir's founder, Peter Thiel, called Britain's affection for the NHS "Stockholm Syndrome" during a speech to the Oxford Union, going on to say that the NHS "makes people sick". A Palantir spokesman clarified that Thiel was "speaking as a private individual" and his comments "do not in any way reflect the views of Palantir".
In March 2023 it was revealed that NHS hospitals had been 'ordered' to share patient data with Palantir, prompting renewed criticism from civil liberties groups, including for supporting genocide, privacy and security practices, and "buying way in". Campaign groups including the Doctors' Association UK, National Pensioners' Convention, and Just Treatment, subsequently threatened legal action over NHS England's procurement of the FDP contract citing concerns over the use of patient data.
NHS England's former artificial intelligence chief, Indra Joshi, was recruited by Palantir in 2022. The company said they were planning to increase their team in the UK by 250. Palantir's UK head, Louis Moseley, was quoted internally as saying that Palantir's strategy for entry into the British health industry was to "Buy our way in" by hoovering up smaller rival companies with existing relationships with the NHS in order to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.”
In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to create and manage the Federated Data Platform.
In April 2024, medical professionals picketed on the entrance of NHS England HQ demanding end of contract with Palantir over contracts with IDF.

### Europe

The Danish POL-INTEL predictive policing project has been operational since 2017 and is based on the Gotham system. According to the AP the Danish system "uses a mapping system to build a so-called heat map identifying areas with higher crime rates." The Gotham system has also been used by German state police in Hesse and Europol.
The Norwegian Customs is using Palantir Gotham to screen passengers and vehicles for control. Known inputs are prefiled freight documents, passenger lists, the national Currency Exchange database (tracks all cross-border currency exchanges), the Norwegian Welfare Administrations employer- and employee-registry, the Norwegian stock holder registry and 30 public databases from InfoTorg. InfoTorg provides access to more than 30 databases, including the Norwegian National Citizen registry, European Business Register, the Norwegian DMV vehicle registry, various credit databases etc. These databases are supplemented by the Norwegian Customs Departments own intelligence reports, including results of previous controls. The system is also augmented by data from public sources such as social media.

#### Ukraine

Karp claims to have been the first CEO of a large U.S. company to visit Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Palantir's technology has since been used close to the front lines. It is used to shorten the "kill chain" in Russo-Ukrainian War. According to a December 2022 report by The Times, Palantir's AI has allowed Ukraine to increase the accuracy, speed, and deadliness of its artillery strikes. Ukraine's prosecutor general's office also plans to use Palantir's software to help document alleged Russian war crimes.

### Israel

The London office of Palantir was the target of demonstrations by pro-Palestine protesters in December 2023 after it was awarded a large contract to manage NHS data. The protesters accused Palantir of being "complicit" in war crimes during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war because it provides the Israel Defence Force (IDF) with intelligence and surveillance services, including a form of predictive policing. In January 2024, Palantir agreed to a strategic partnership with the IDF under which it will provide the IDF with services to assist its "war-related missions". Karp has been emphatic in his public support for Israel. He has frequently criticized what he calls the inaction of other tech leaders. His position has prompted several employees to leave Palantir.
In 2024, Irish politician and former employee of Palantir, Eoin Hayes was suspended by his party, the Social Democrats, after he was found to have misled the party about when he disposed of his shares in the company. Hayes had worked for Palantir between 2015 and 2017 but denied having any role relating to any military contracts. The Social Democrats have been some of the most vocal critics of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip and Hayes has been accused by a rival politician of "profiting from genocide".

### Other

Palantir Gotham was used by cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor, a Canadian public-private venture which operated from 2003 to 2012.
Palantir was used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to verify if Iran was in compliance with the 2015 agreement.

## Partnerships and contracts
### International Business Machines

On February 8, 2021, Palantir and IBM announced a new partnership that would use IBM's hybrid cloud data platform alongside Palantir's operations platform for building applications. The product, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, is expected to simplify the process of building and deploying AI-integrated applications with IBM Watson. It will help businesses/users interpret and use large datasets without needing a strong technical background. Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data will be available for general use in March 2021.

### Amazon (AWS)

On March 5, 2021, Palantir announced its partnership with Amazon AWS. Palantir's ERP Suite was optimized to run on Amazon Web Services. The ERP suite was used by BP.

### Microsoft

On Aug 8, 2024, Palantir and Microsoft announced a partnership where Palantir will deploy their suite of products on Microsoft Azure Government clouds. Palantir stock jumped more than 10% for the day.

### Babylon Health

Palantir took a stake in Babylon Health in June 2021. Ali Parsa told the Financial Times that "nobody" has brought some of the tech that Palantir owns "into the realm of biology and health care".

## Controversies
### Algorithm development

i2 Inc sued Palantir in Federal Court alleging fraud, conspiracy, and copyright infringement over Palantir's algorithm. Shyam Sankar, Palantir's director of business development, used a private eye company as the cutout for obtaining i2's code. i2 settled out of court for $10 million in 2011.

### WikiLeaks proposals (2010)

In 2010, Hunton & Williams LLP allegedly asked Berico Technologies, Palantir, and HBGary Federal to draft a response plan to "the WikiLeaks Threat." In early 2011 Anonymous publicly released HBGary-internal documents, including the plan. The plan proposed that Palantir software would "serve as the foundation for all the data collection, integration, analysis, and production efforts." The plan also included slides, allegedly authored by HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, which suggested "[spreading] disinformation" and "disrupting" Glenn Greenwald's support for WikiLeaks.
Palantir CEO Karp ended all ties to HBGary and issued a statement apologizing to "progressive organizations ... and Greenwald ... for any involvement that we may have had in these matters." Palantir placed an employee on leave pending a review by a third-party law firm. The employee was later reinstated.

### Racial discrimination lawsuit (2016)

On September 26, 2016, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Palantir alleging that the company discriminated against Asian job applicants on the basis of their race. According to the lawsuit, the company "routinely eliminated" Asian applicants during the hiring process, even when they were "as qualified as white applicants" for the same jobs. Palantir settled the suit in April 2017 for $1.7 million while not admitting wrongdoing.

### British Parliament inquiry (2018)

During questioning in front of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Christopher Wylie, the former research director of Cambridge Analytica, said that several meetings had taken place between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, and that Alexander Nix, the chief executive of SCL, had facilitated their use of Aleksandr Kogan's data which had been obtained from his app "thisisyourdigitallife" by mining personal surveys. Kogan later established Global Science Research to share the data with Cambridge Analytica and others. Wylie confirmed that both employees from Cambridge Analytica and Palantir used Kogan's Global Science Research and harvested Facebook data together in the same offices.

### ICE partnership (since 2014)

Palantir has come under criticism due to its partnership developing software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir has responded that its software is not used to facilitate deportations. In a statement provided to the New York Times, the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations. However, documents obtained by The Intercept show that this is not the case. According to these documents, Palantir's ICM software is considered 'mission critical' to ICE. Other groups critical of Palantir include the Brennan Center for Justice, National Immigration Project, the Immigrant Defense Project, the Tech Workers Coalition and Mijente. In one internal ICE report Mijente acquired, it was revealed that Palantir's software was critical in an operation to arrest the parents of children residing illegally.
On September 28, 2020, Amnesty International released a report criticizing Palantir failure to conduct human rights due diligence around its contracts with ICE. Concerns around Palantir's rights record were being scrutinized for contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants.

### "HHS Protect Now" and privacy concerns

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted tech companies to respond to growing demand for citizen information from governments in order to conduct contact tracing and to analyze patient data. Consequently, data collection companies, such as Palantir, had been contracted to partake in pandemic data collection practices. Palantir's participation in "HHS Protect Now", a program launched by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of the coronavirus, has attracted criticism from American lawmakers.
Palantir's participation in COVID-19 response projects re-ignited debates over its controversial involvement in tracking illegal immigrants, especially its alleged effects on digital inequality and potential restrictions on online freedoms. Critics allege that confidential data acquired by HHS could be exploited by other federal agencies in unregulated and potentially harmful ways. Alternative proposals request greater transparency in the process to determine whether any of the data aggregated would be shared with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to single out illegal immigrants.

### Project Maven (since 2018)

After protests from its employees, Google chose not to renew its contract with the Pentagon to work on Project Maven, a secret artificial intelligence program aimed at the unmanned operation of aerial vehicles. Palantir then took over the project. Critics warned that the technology could lead to autonomous weapons that decide who to strike without human input.

## Corporate affairs
### Leadership

Jamie Fly, former Radio Free Europe president and CEO, serves as senior counselor to the CEO.
Matthew Turpin, former director for China at the White House National Security Council and senior advisor for China to the Secretary of Commerce during the first Trump administration, serves as senior advisor.

#### Board of directors

As of December 2024, the board of directors of Palantir includes:
* Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir
* Alexander Moore, co-founder and former CEO of NodePrime
* Alexandra Schiff, former reporter of The Wall Street Journal
* Stephen Cohen, co-founder and president of Palantir
* Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir and Founders Fund
* Lauren Friedman Stat, former Fractional Chief Administration Officer at
* Eric Woersching, former general partner at Initialized Capital

### Ownership

The largest shareholders of Palantir in early 2024 were:
| Shareholder name | Percentage |
| The Vanguard Group | 9.4% |
| Peter Thiel | 7.2% |
| BlackRock | 4.7% |
| SOMPO Holdings | 3.9% |
| Alex Karp | 2.5% |
| Renaissance Technologies | 2.1% |
| State Street Corporation | 1.9% |
| Geode Capital Management | 1.4% |
| Jane Street Capital | 1.1% |
| Eaton Vance | 1.1% |
| D. E. Shaw & Co. | 1.0% |
| Others | 66.2% |

### Finances

For the fiscal year 2023, Palantir reported earnings of US$210 millions, with an annual revenue of US$2.2 billion, an increase of 16.8% over the previous fiscal cycle.
| Year | Revenue (US$ ml.) | Net income (US$ ml.) | Total assets (US$ ml.) | Employees |
| 2018 | 595 | −598 | − | − |
| 2019 | 743 | −588 | 3,735 | 2,391 |
| 2020 | 1,093 | −1,166 | 2,691 | 2,439 |
| 2021 | 1,542 | −520 | 3,247 | 2,920 |
| 2022 | 1,906 | −374 | 3,461 | 3,838 |
| 2023 | 2,225 | 210 | 4,522 | 3,735 |