It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to question their company’s commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, when current and former employees started ringing the alarm.
Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”
“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”
Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA—at a moment of national consensus following the September 11, 2001, attacks, when many saw fighting terrorism abroad as the most critical mission facing the US. The company, which was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that acts as a high-powered data aggregation and analysis tool powering everything from private businesses to the US military’s targeting systems.
For the past 20 years, employees could accept the intense external criticism and awkward conversations with family and friends about working for a company named after J. R. R. 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 at home, employees are finally raising these concerns internally, as the US’s war on immigrants, war in Iran, and even company-released manifestos has forced them to rethink the role they play in it all.
“We hire the best and brightest talent to help defend America and its allies and to build and deploy our software to help governments and businesses around the world. Palantir is no monolith of belief, nor should we be,” a Palantir spokesperson said in a statement. “We all pride ourselves on a culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement over the complex areas we work on. That has been true from our founding and remains true today.”