It only took a few months after President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to question their company’s commitment to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir appeared to be the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement apparatus, providing software to identify, track, and help deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees began sounding the alarm.
At that time, the two ex-employees called again. As soon as they got on the phone, one of them asked, “Are you tracing Palantir’s birth into fascism?”
“That was their greeting,” said one former employee. “It’s not this feeling of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and difficult,’ but, ‘This feels wrong.’
Palantir was founded—with the CIA’s first investment—at a time of national consensus following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when many saw the fight against terrorism abroad as the most important task facing the US. The company, founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that serves as a powerful data aggregator and analytics tool that powers everything from private businesses to the US military’s targeting systems.
Over the past 20 years, employees have had to accept a lot of criticism from outside and negative conversations with family and friends about working for a company named after JRR Tolkien’s all-seeing company. But a year into Trump’s second term, as Palantir deepens its relationship with many managements that workers fear is causing damage at home, workers end up expressing these concerns internally, as the US war on immigrants, the war on Iran, and even the manifestos issued by the company forced them to rethink the role they play in everything.
“We hire the best and brightest talent to help protect America and its allies and to build and deploy our software to help governments and businesses around the world. Palantir is not one-sided, and we shouldn’t be,” a Palantir spokesperson said in a statement. “We all pride ourselves on a culture of fierce internal discussion and even disagreement about the complex areas we work in. That has been true since our founding and remains true today.”
“The broader Palantir story as told to itself and to employees is that coming out of 9/11 we knew there was going to be a massive security crackdown, and we were concerned that that security might infringe on civil liberties,” one former employee tells WIRED. “And now the threat is coming from within. I think there is a problem of self-awareness and a little challenge. We should have been the ones stopping most of this abuse. Now we are not stopping it. We seem to be allowing it.”
Palantir has always had a secretive reputation, barring employees from speaking to the media and requiring alumni to sign non-disparagement agreements. But throughout the company’s history, management has always seemed least open to internal involvement and criticism, many employees said. Over the past year, however, much of that response has been met with a philosophy of soliloquy and reorientation. “It’s never been that people are afraid to speak out against Karp. It’s still a question of what he would have done, if anything,” one current employee told WIRED.
While internal tensions at Palantir grew last year, they reached a boiling point in January after the violent killing of Alex Pretti, a nurse who was shot and killed by federal agents during protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis. Employees from across the company commented on a Slack thread dedicated to the news seeking more information about the company’s relationship with ICE from management and CEO Alex Karp.
