Tag: palantir

Palantir Quietly Lands In Education Department Through Foreign Funding Portal

Palantir is expanding its reach into the Education Department, where the data analytics and software giant is helping develop the agency’s new portal for universities across the country to report foreign donations.

The quiet move marks the technology company’s latest expansion into federal government work, particularly in data management services.

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed Palantir was involved as a subcontractor for its revamped foreign funding portal, which is set to be rolled out early next month.

The agency announced the portal project this week, but did not name the vendors behind it. The portal will serve as a central place for schools to disclose to the department any foreign-source gifts and contracts worth $250,000 or more, the agency said.

Palantir is a subcontractor to Monkton, a northern Virginia-based computer and network security company, the spokesperson told FedScoop. According to federal spending records, the Education Department awarded a contract to Monkton in September that obligated $9.8 million for the design, development, and deployment of a “Section 117 Information Sharing Environment Capable of Providing Greater Transparency.” Palantir, however, is not publicly listed as a subcontractor on the project.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires schools to disclose foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000.

The contract with Monkton could cost the agency up to $61.8 million, more than six times the cost of the modernization project for the ed.gov website, which was allocated $10 million in 2022.

Speculation over the portal began after the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer registered a new federal domain, foreignfundinghighered.gov, which was discovered by a bot tracking new government domains.

When FedScoop visited the link shortly before 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, the website showed a blocked network alert, which read, “The network connection you are using is not in your enrollment’s ingress allowlist. Please contact your enrollment administrator or Palantir representative.”

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Israel Used Palantir Technology In Its 2024 Lebanon Pager Attack

Palantir software was used by Israel in its 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon, according to a new book by Alex Karp, co-founder of the Palantir tech company. On September 17, thousands of pagers belonging to Hezbollah members, including civilians not involved in any armed activity, were detonated across Lebanon.

Many showed “error” messages and vibrated loudly prior to exploding, luring Hezbollah members or, in some cases, their family members to stand close by at the point of detonation. The next day more communication devices exploded, including at the public funerals of Hezbollah members and civilians who had been killed the previous day.

While many Israeli figures celebrated, praised and even joked about the attacks, United Nations experts called them a “terrifying” violation of international law. In total, 42 people were killed and thousands wounded, many left with life-altering injuries to the eyes, face and hands.

Karp’s new biography reveals that Israel deepened its use of the company’s technology after it launched the war on Gaza in October 2023, deploying it in numerous operations.

“The company’s technology was deployed by the Israelis during military operations in Lebanon in 2024 that decimated Hezbollah’s top leadership,” wrote Michael Steinberger, author of The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.

“It was also used in Operation Grim Beeper, in which hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were injured and maimed when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded (the Israelis had booby trapped the devices).”

He said that the demand for Palantir’s assistance by Israel “was so great that the company dispatched a team of engineers from London to help get Israeli users online“.

The involvement of a range of tech companies in Israel’s attacks on its neighbors in recent years, as well as for attacking and surveilling Palestinians, has sparked anger from rights campaigners and UN officials.

In a report produced by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese in July, several tech companies were accused of profiting from crimes including illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide in occupied Palestine. The report referenced AI systems that were developed by the Israeli military to process and generate targets during the war on Gaza.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defense infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision making,” the report said.

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U.S. Tech Giants Palantir and Dataminr Embed AI Surveillance in Gaza’s Post-War Control Grid

American surveillance firms Palantir and Dataminr have inserted themselves into the U.S. military’s operations center overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction, raising alarms about a dystopian AI-driven occupation regime under the guise of Trump’s peace plan.

Since mid-October, around 200 U.S. military personnel have operated from the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in southern Israel, roughly 20 kilometers from Gaza’s northern border. Established to implement President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan—aimed at disarming Hamas, rebuilding the Strip, and paving the way for Palestinian self-determination—the center has drawn UN Security Council endorsement.

Yet no Palestinian representatives have joined these discussions on their future. Instead, seating charts and internal presentations reveal the presence of Palantir’s “Maven Field Service Representative” and Dataminr’s branding, signaling how private U.S. tech companies are positioning to profit from the region’s devastation.

Palantir’s Maven platform, described by the U.S. military as its “AI-powered battlefield platform,” aggregates data from satellites, drones, spy planes, intercepted communications, and online sources to accelerate targeting for airstrikes and operations. Defense reports highlight how it “packages” this intelligence into searchable apps for commanders, effectively shortening the “kill chain” from identification to lethal action.

Palantir’s CTO recently touted this capability as “optimizing the kill chain.” The firm secured a $10 billion Army contract over the summer to refine Maven, which has already guided U.S. strikes in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

Palantir’s ties to Israel’s military run deep, formalized in a January 2024 strategic partnership for “war-related missions.” The company’s Tel Aviv office, opened in 2015, has expanded rapidly amid Israel’s Gaza operations. CEO Alex Karp has defended the commitment, declaring Palantir the first company to be “completely anti-woke” despite genocide accusations.

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CEO of Palantir Says He Spends a Large Amount of Time Talking to Nazis

While you were busy wasting your time listening to podcasts and doomscrolling on your phone, one of America’s leading AI overlords was educating himself by talking to Nazis.

This was the startling admission made by Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of the software company Palantir, a company that’s come under increasingly heavy scrutiny for its growing role as a provider of AI-powered surveillance technology to the military and government.

In an interview with podcaster Molly O’Shea published this week, Karp, who has Jewish heritage, was discussing German culture and his time in the country before going on a tangent about how outrageous it is that people online “laud the Nazis.” Then he fessed up to something even more eyebrow-raising.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Nazis,” Karp said, implying that this is an ongoing pastime of his. “Like, real Nazis,” he emphasized.

Karp explained that it was his way of “understanding what made them tick,” before making an ironic observation.

“Part of the crazy thing about people who laud the Nazis nowadays is there’s not a single Nazi that would ever have included them in their movement and would have shipped them off to the camps quicker maybe than they shipped me off to the camps!” he chuckled.

He then pulled off the smoothest segue of all time.

“Uh, but, um, and uh, and it’s like, it’s uh but” — the interview mercifully jumps cuts —  “the thing that’s crazy unique about America,” Karp began to muse.

Beyond his role as Palantir’s head honcho, Karp is known for his philosophical ramblings, his “eccentric” personality, and his affinity for German culture. He has a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt, and draws on his background to defend Western values — in particular American ones — as especially good for the world.

This year, for instance, he published a book about how the US needed to embrace having the most technologically advanced weapons possible to preserve its dominance. An excerpt of that book was published online as an essay under the headline “We Need a New Manhattan Project.”

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ICE to Deploy Palantir’s ImmigrationOS AI to Track Migrants’ Movements

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving forward with ImmigrationOS, a new AI system built by Palantir Technologies to give officers near real-time visibility into immigrants’ movements and sharpen enforcement priorities nationwide. The agency awarded Palantir a $30 million contract in early 2025, with a working prototype due by September 25, 2025 and an initial operating period of at least two years, according to agency planning documents and contract disclosures. ICE frames the system as a way to speed removals of people already prioritized for enforcement, better track self-deportations, and coordinate federal data that now sits in disconnected silos.

What ImmigrationOS is meant to do

ImmigrationOS is designed to pull together a wide range of government-held records to sort, flag, and route cases to officers in the field. ICE officials say the tool will help them focus on individuals linked to transnational criminal organizations, violent offenders, documented gang members, and those who have overstayed visas.

The system is also built to register when people leave the United States on their own, so field offices can avoid wasted detention and travel costs on cases that no longer require action. While the agency describes the platform as a needed modernization step, civil liberties groups warn that an AI-driven system with sweeping data inputs risks mistakes that could touch the lives of lawful residents and even U.S. citizens.

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Palantir, Fractal And Your Personal Data Privacy – Get used to being used, because YOU are the product

Who controls the data the government collected from you for a generation?

Your insurance company collected data on your driving – so did your Lexus – who owns that data?

You told your doctor about controlled substances you used – and now it gets brought up in an interview.

If you can’t exclude someone from using your data, then you don’t control it. That means you really don’t own it. It’s that simple.

What does “own” mean here, let’s define the terms.

Owning the data means you can do anything you want with it – share it, sell it, mine it or build an A.I. language model with it.

From birth until the last Social Security check gets cashed, your data is collected by federal and state agencies, corporations and of course the internet.

Your teen daughter puts every waking moment on Facebook or Instagram – so who owns those hundreds of images?

TSA Pre Check, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, government or military retirement, Tri-Care, veterans hospitals, and of course, the IRS – gather more data about every citizen than has ever been gathered in the history of mankind.

Each agency gathers different data, at different times, for slightly different purposes. And those purposes may change over time.

Who owns the rights to that data?

It’s a far stickier question than you think.

The knee jerk response is the government owns the data. They collected it for their purposes, so it’s theirs.

The government will certainly say so.

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Palantir Secures Historic $10 Billion Army Contract for AI-Driven Defense

The U.S. Army has awarded Palantir Technologies a monumental $10 billion contract, consolidating dozens of existing agreements into a single enterprise deal over the next decade.

This landmark agreement, announced on July 31, 2025, positions Palantir as a cornerstone of the Army’s data and software infrastructure. It underscores a strategic shift toward leveraging commercial AI to enhance military readiness and efficiency.

The contract streamlines 75 separate agreements, offering volume-based discounts and eliminating redundant procurement costs.

This approach maximizes buying power while delivering cutting-edge data integration and AI tools to soldiers faster. The deal reflects a broader Pentagon push to modernize warfare capabilities amid rising global tensions, from Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific.

Palantir’s role builds on its success with the Maven Smart System, which received a $795 million boost earlier this year to expand AI-driven targeting across U.S. forces.

The system fuses intelligence from drones, satellites, and sensors to identify threats in near real-time, maintaining human oversight for critical decisions.

This capability has proven vital in conflicts like Ukraine, where rapid data analysis drives battlefield outcomes.

Founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, Palantir has deepened its federal footprint, securing $373 million in U.S. government revenue in Q1 2025 alone, a 45% increase year-over-year.

The Trump administration’s emphasis on cost efficiency and commercial partnerships has propelled Palantir’s rise, with new contracts spanning the Navy, ICE, and CDC.

Critics, however, warn that such dominance by a single vendor could stifle competition and innovation.

The Army’s enterprise agreement not only enhances operational efficiency but also aligns with President Trump’s vision of a leaner, tech-driven military.

By consolidating contracts, the Army projects significant savings, freeing resources for mission-critical programs.

Palantir’s software, like the Foundry platform, enables seamless data integration, empowering soldiers with actionable intelligence.

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The ‘Economy of Genocide’ Report: A Reckoning Beyond Rhetoric

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion of speaking truth to power. This “power” is not solely embodied by Israel or even the United States, but by an international community whose collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Her latest report, ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’ submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on July 3, marks a seismic intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians, but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this unfolding horror.

Albanese’s ‘Economy of Genocide’ is far more than an academic exercise or a mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple, interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing international mechanisms in Gaza.

Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement, not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel’s overall settler-colonial project.

First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a database that listed 112 companies involved in business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants – including Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia – for helping Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.

This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the United Nations’ consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the US and Israel. The US said it was an attempt by “the discredited” Council “to fuel economic retaliation,” while Israel called it a “shameful capitulation” to pressure.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023, however, served as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing UN mechanisms to achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated that the world had “failed the people of Gaza.”

This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the UN’s inability to even manage the aid distribution in the Strip, entrusting the job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in November 2023, she confronted the international community for “epically failing” to stop the war and to end the “senseless slaughtering of innocent civilians.”

Albanese’s new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the genocide possible. “Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the obliteration of innocent people’s lives must cease,” the report declares, pointedly demanding that “corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account.”

According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities.

These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.

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Data Collection Can Be Effective and Legal

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Data Collection Can Be Effective and Legal

Introduction

It’s an Artificial Conundrum

It is not necessary to make an end-run around the U.S. Constitution to thwart terrorism and other crimes.

Those claiming otherwise have been far from candid – especially since June 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed gross violations of the Fourth Amendment by NSA’s bulk electronic collection. U.S. citizens have been widely misled into believing that their Constitutional right to privacy had to yield to a superseding need to combat terrorism.

The choice was presented as an Either-Or conundrum. In what follows, we will show that this is a false choice. Rather, the “choice” can be a Both-And. In sum, all that is needed is to place advanced technology that has been already demonstrated into the hands of officials not driven by lust for a cushy retirement.

Sophisticated collection and processing technology that also protects the right to privacy has been available for decades, enabling highly efficient and discriminating collection. Despite that, top officials have opted for quasi-legal, cumbersome, ineffective – and wildly expensive – technology that has done little more than line the pockets of contractors and “old-friend” retirees.

U.S. officials have been caught lying under oath – with impunity – with false claims about the effectiveness of the intrusive, high price-tag technology they procured and implemented.

In the Annex to this Memo we briefly portray the illustrative behavior of one such senior official. We do so in the belief that a short case study may shed light on the apparent motivation of many senior officials who seem to take far too lightly their oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States.

We took the same oath. It has no expiration date.

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Peter Thiel Warns: One-World Government A Greater Threat Than AI Or Climate Change

In a wide-ranging interview on the future and global existential risks, billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel raised alarms not only about familiar threats like nuclear war, climate change, and artificial intelligence but also about what he sees as a more insidious danger: the rise of a one-world totalitarian state. Speaking to the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Thiel argued that the default political response to global crises—centralized, supranational governance—could plunge humanity into authoritarianism.

Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, shared his worries using examples from dystopian sci-fi stories. “There’s a risk of nuclear war, environmental disaster, bioweapons, and certain types of risks with AI,” Thiel explained to Douthat, suggesting that the push for global governance as a solution to these threats could culminate in a “bad singularity” – a one-world state that stifles freedom under the guise of safety.

Thiel critiqued what he described as a reflexive call for centralized control in times of peril.

“The default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance,” Thiel observed, pointing to proposals for a strengthened United Nations to control nuclear arsenals or global compute governance to regulate AI development, including measures to “log every single keystroke” to prevent dangerous programming. Such solutions, the investor warned, risk creating a surveillance state that sacrifices individual liberty for security.

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