It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s second term to Palantir employees to question the situation of their company. commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir appeared to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software that identifies, tracks and helps deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, when current and former employees began sounding the alarm.
Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Just as they took the call, one of them asked, “Are you following Palantir’s descent into fascism?”
“That was his greeting,” says the other former employee. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and difficult,’ but of ‘This feels wrong.'”
Palantir was founded (with an initial venture capital investment from the CIA) at a time of national consensus following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when many viewed fighting terrorism abroad as the most critical mission facing the United States. The company, co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that acts as a powerful data aggregation and analysis tool powering everything from private companies to the US military’s targeting systems.
For the past 20 years, employees could take intense external criticism and uncomfortable conversations with family and friends about working for a company named after JRR Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb. But a year into Trump’s second term, as Palantir deepens its relationship with an administration that many workers fear is wreaking havoc on their country, employees are finally raising these concerns internally, as the U.S. war on immigrants, the war in Iran and even manifestos released by companies have forced them to rethink the role they play in all of this.
“We hire the best and brightest talent to help defend the United States and its allies and to build and deploy our software to help governments and businesses around the world. Palantir is not a monolith of beliefs, nor should we be,” a Palantir spokesperson said in a statement. “We all pride ourselves on a culture of intense internal dialogue and even disagreement about the complex areas in which we work. That has been true since our founding and remains true today.”
