Palantir Technologies is a data analytics and AI software company that builds surveillance and intelligence platforms for government agencies, militaries, and corporations. Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the company operates three core platforms, Gotham, Foundry, and AIP, used by the CIA, ICE, DHS, the U.S. Army, and NHS England to aggregate data, identify targets, and automate decisions affecting millions of people.
Most people have never heard of Palantir. Fewer still know that the company’s technology sits behind immigration deportations, battlefield targeting, predictive policing, and, through a web of investor relationships, platforms like Discord and the consumer health space. That gap between public awareness and institutional reach is exactly what makes Palantir one of the most consequential, and least scrutinized, technology companies in the world right now.
This is a company whose revenue from government contracts alone reached $2.9 billion in 2024. In August 2025, the U.S. Army handed Palantir a $10 billion, decade-long contract. The ACLU, EFF, Amnesty International, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have all raised alarms. Here is what Palantir actually does, who pays for it, and why ordinary citizens should understand it.
What Palantir’s Products Actually Are
Palantir sells software. That sounds banal until you understand what the software does: it takes data from hundreds of disconnected sources, surveillance cameras, criminal records, social media posts, financial transactions, hospital records, satellite imagery, and merges them into a single, searchable, real-time picture of a person, a place, or a situation. The company has four platforms, each targeting a different slice of that mission.
Gotham: The Government Intelligence Engine
Gotham is Palantir’s original product, built specifically for defense and intelligence agencies. It integrates data from disparate sources, arrest records, license plate reader databases, gang affiliation files, geospatial feeds, intercepted communications, into a unified interface where analysts can map relationships between people, vehicles, addresses, and events. The CIA, NSA, FBI, and multiple branches of the U.S. military use Gotham. The LAPD used it to merge crime reports with license plate data and officer-collected cards documenting civilians’ physical characteristics, gang ties, and home addresses. New Orleans ran a secret Palantir predictive policing program from 2012 to 2018, one that city council members say they never knew existed.
Foundry: The Corporate Data Operating System
Foundry is Palantir’s commercial equivalent. Where Gotham serves governments, Foundry targets enterprises, healthcare networks, aerospace manufacturers, financial institutions. The platform acts as a central nervous system for an organization’s data, breaking down silos and allowing every department to work from the same underlying information. Airbus uses Foundry for manufacturing processes. NHS England signed a £330 million contract with Palantir to run the UK’s National Health Service federated data programme, consolidating health records for tens of millions of patients. The UK Ministry of Defence signed a separate £240 million analytics contract. The commercial scale is significant: Palantir’s U.S. commercial revenue surged 121% year over year in Q3 2025, driven largely by Foundry deployments.
AIP: The AI Layer on Top of It All
AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform), launched in 2023, sits on top of both Gotham and Foundry and adds large language model capabilities. Instead of just running queries, users can ask questions in natural language, and the system answers using the organization’s own classified or proprietary data, never a public model. For a government agency, this means an analyst can type “show me all persons of interest in this zip code with prior ICE encounters” and receive a structured, actionable answer in seconds. AIP’s tools, AIP Logic, AIP Agent Studio, AIP Evals, are designed to build AI workflows that operate at the speed of enforcement decisions. The fourth platform, Apollo, handles deployment: it runs Palantir’s software in cloud environments, on-premises servers, and air-gapped classified networks simultaneously.
Who Pays Palantir: The Government Contract Trail
Government revenue is Palantir’s foundation. In 2024, it totaled $2.9 billion, 55% of the company’s entire income. Federal contracts nearly doubled in 2025, growing from $541 million to $970 million. The contracts span every major U.S. security agency.
ICE and the ImmigrationOS Contract
In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS, officially the “Immigration Lifecycle Operating System.” The platform is designed to give ICE agents near real-time visibility into the movements and backgrounds of migrants, track self-deportations, and automate target selection. Internally, this includes a tool called ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement), which generates dossiers on individuals and assigns confidence scores to predicted home addresses, drawing from HHS data, social media monitoring, and aggregated public and private databases. According to the Good Law Project, Palantir’s systems have been used to incorporate medical records in immigration targeting. The prototype was due September 2025; the contract runs through 2027.
The U.S. Army’s $10 Billion Deal
In August 2025, Palantir landed a $10 billion, 10-year enterprise software and data contract with the U.S. Army, consolidating 75 existing contracts into one. The company also holds the Maven Smart System contract with the Department of Defense, initially $480 million at signing in May 2024, expanded to $1.3 billion by May 2025. Maven ingests satellite imagery, geolocation feeds, and sensor data to automatically detect and classify potential military targets. More than 20,000 active users operate across 35-plus military and combatant command tools in three security domains. In April 2025, NATO signed its own Maven deal with Palantir, extending the battlefield AI system to allied forces.
Intelligence Agencies and the CIA Origin
Palantir was seeded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, in its earliest years. That relationship shaped everything: the company was built from day one to serve the intelligence community’s needs, and the CIA’s operational requirements drove the architecture of Gotham. The NSA, FBI, and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) are among confirmed Gotham users. In 2025, a Trump executive order mandated cross-agency data sharing across federal departments, and Palantir is positioned as the primary infrastructure vendor to build that consolidated system.
The Consumer Platforms Connected to Palantir
Palantir does not sell directly to consumers. But the company’s reach extends into consumer-facing platforms through investor relationships, data-sharing agreements, and the broader surveillance infrastructure it powers for law enforcement. Two cases are particularly instructive.
Discord and the Peter Thiel Connection
In early 2026, Discord quietly rolled out age verification for UK users through a third-party provider called Persona. Persona’s investors include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, which led both a $150 million Series C and a $200 million Series D in the company. Thiel is Palantir’s co-founder and largest individual early backer. The Open Rights Group flagged that Roblox, Reddit, and Discord users were being channeled into a biometric identity system backed by Palantir’s co-founder without meaningful informed consent. In February 2026, Discord cut ties with Persona after its front-end code was discovered hosted on a U.S. government server, a detail that raised obvious questions about what infrastructure Persona’s identity data was touching. Millions of UK users had already been swept up in the experiment before the relationship ended. You can read more about Discord’s age verification rollout and its alternatives at /discord-age-verification-palantir-alternatives/.
Amazon Ring and the Law Enforcement Data Pipeline
The connection between Palantir and Amazon Ring is less direct but structurally significant. Palantir provides the analytics backbone used by hundreds of police departments across the United States. Those same departments routinely request Ring doorbell footage from Amazon, sometimes with user consent, sometimes through legal compulsion. The result is a de facto pipeline: Ring cameras generate video surveillance data, law enforcement agencies request that footage and feed it into case management systems, and Palantir’s platforms aggregate and analyze that data alongside everything else they hold. Ring’s Neighbors app also allows users to share footage directly with police. The ecosystem around Ring and surveillance technology is explored further in our coverage of Flock Safety cameras and automated license plate readers. A 2026 Axios report documented growing public backlash against doorbell camera surveillance systems and how police access that data at scale.
What Data Actually Flows Through Palantir Systems
The range of data Palantir processes is broader than most people assume. Gotham’s law enforcement deployments have documented ingestion of: criminal records and arrest histories; automated license plate reader (ALPR) logs; field interview cards documenting civilians’ appearance, associates, and vehicle information; gang affiliation databases; social media activity (public posts, connections, location check-ins); financial transaction records; government benefit records and HHS data; geolocation data from mobile devices; satellite imagery; biometric identifiers including scars and tattoos; and, in immigration enforcement contexts, medical records.
A BuzzFeed News investigation using LAPD training documents showed that Palantir’s system allowed officers to view a person’s scar and tattoo descriptions, known associates, vehicle information, and location history, drawn from data collected during routine traffic stops and field contacts, not arrests or convictions. The system creates persistent profiles on civilians who have never been charged with anything. For ImmigrationOS, Palantir confirmed that it incorporates open-source intelligence automation for real-time social media monitoring across multiple platforms. The practical result: a single ICE agent can pull up a detailed dossier on an undocumented person, their predicted home address, social connections, last known location, and confidence score, in seconds.
The Civil Liberties Concerns
The ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, and the Brennan Center for Justice have all raised serious concerns about Palantir’s systems. The criticisms cluster around four problems: opacity, disproportionate impact, due process erosion, and democratic accountability.
On opacity: New Orleans residents and city council members had no knowledge that Palantir’s predictive policing system was running for six years, from 2012 to 2018. The ACLU published a detailed analysis of the program after it was exposed, noting it targeted individuals with criminal records for preemptive police contact based on algorithmic scores, not behavior. On disproportionate impact: the ACLU, NAACP, and EFF have documented that predictive policing systems built on historical arrest data systematically over-police Black and Latino communities, because the training data reflects decades of biased policing. On due process: critics call ImmigrationOS “deportation by algorithm”, a system where a confidence score on an address, derived from aggregated data, can initiate an enforcement action against someone with no criminal record and no judicial review. On accountability: a March 2025 executive order mandating cross-agency federal data sharing was written in ways that position Palantir as the infrastructure backbone, and Amnesty International specifically called on Palantir to end its immigration enforcement contracts in August 2025.
The political dimension adds a layer of concern. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and senior policy adviser Kara Frederick both own significant Palantir stock, according to financial disclosure filings. The company selling a deportation tracking system to the government has investors inside the government making policy decisions about immigration enforcement.
The Founders: Thiel, Karp, and Their Competing Worldviews
Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, who seeded it with roughly $30 million from his PayPal fortune, and Alex Karp, who became CEO. The two met at Stanford Law School and have always held genuinely different philosophies, which is part of what makes Palantir’s public positioning so layered.
Thiel is a libertarian-leaning conservative who funded Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, backed JD Vance’s Senate run, and whose Founders Fund has invested in identity verification, defense technology, and media. His vision of Palantir is bluntly statist on national security: Western democracies need better intelligence than their adversaries, and that justifies building the infrastructure of surveillance. Karp is the more paradoxical figure. He holds a PhD in social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt, studied under the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and has publicly criticized Google and Facebook for their approach to user data, calling their advertising surveillance model ethically corrosive. He describes himself as a progressive. Yet he has defended Palantir’s military contracts in Ukraine, its work with the Israeli military, and its immigration enforcement tools as necessary for the survival of democratic societies. A full biography of Karp was published in late 2025, described by NPR as an examination of “the rise of the surveillance state.” The tension between those two worldviews, Thiel’s unabashed power politics and Karp’s philosophical framework, is baked into every product Palantir ships.
Is Palantir a Threat to Ordinary Citizens?
That depends on who you are and what you are doing. If you are an undocumented person in the United States, Palantir’s ImmigrationOS is specifically designed to find, profile, and facilitate your removal. If you are an activist, an immigrant rights organizer, or someone who has appeared in a Palantir-connected police database for any reason, a traffic stop, a protest, a field interview card, you have a profile in a system designed to predict your future behavior. If you are a patient in the NHS, your health records are processed through Palantir Foundry under a £330 million government contract. If you use Discord and live in the UK, your identity data may have passed through a biometric verification system backed by Palantir’s co-founder before that relationship was severed in February 2026.
For most people outside those categories, the threat is less immediate and more structural: Palantir is building the data infrastructure for a government apparatus that can surveil at scale, automate enforcement decisions, and share information across agencies with minimal judicial oversight. The $10 billion Army contract, the Maven AI battlefield system now extended to NATO, the ImmigrationOS prototype, these are not isolated products. They are components of a unified vision of algorithmic state power, built by a company whose earliest funder was the CIA and whose products are embedded in every major U.S. security institution. Understanding what Palantir does is a precondition for any meaningful debate about the kind of government infrastructure being built right now, largely out of public view.
Frequently Asked Questions About Palantir
Is Palantir a government company or a private company?
Palantir Technologies is a publicly traded private company (NYSE: PLTR), not a government agency. However, government contracts account for roughly 55% of its revenue. The CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, was an early investor, and the company was built specifically to serve U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. It operates as a private contractor that sells surveillance and AI tools to governments worldwide.
What is Palantir Gotham used for?
Palantir Gotham is used by intelligence agencies and law enforcement to merge data from multiple sources, arrest records, surveillance feeds, financial data, social media, license plate readers, and identify patterns, relationships, and targets. Confirmed users include the CIA, NSA, FBI, U.S. military branches, and local police departments such as the LAPD. It is also used for battlefield intelligence and military targeting through the Maven Smart System.
What is ImmigrationOS and what does it do?
ImmigrationOS is a surveillance platform built by Palantir under a $30 million ICE contract signed in April 2025. It aggregates data from government databases, social media, and private sources to generate profiles on undocumented immigrants, assign confidence scores to predicted home addresses, track self-deportations in near real time, and help ICE agents identify and prioritize targets for removal. The contract runs through September 2027.
How is Palantir connected to Discord?
Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel, through his venture capital firm Founders Fund, led funding rounds of $150 million and $200 million in Persona, a biometric identity verification company. Discord used Persona for age verification experiments in the UK in early 2026, sweeping up millions of users without clear disclosure. Discord cut ties with Persona in February 2026 after Persona’s code was discovered on a U.S. government server. Palantir itself does not own Persona or Discord.
Who are Palantir’s founders and what do they believe?
Palantir was co-founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Thiel is a libertarian-leaning conservative investor who seeded the company with roughly $30 million from his PayPal fortune and has backed Republican political candidates including Donald Trump. Karp holds a PhD in social theory, describes himself as a progressive, and argues that Western democracies need superior surveillance tools to survive geopolitical competition. The company reflects both perspectives: aggressive state capability and a stated commitment to democratic values.
Palantir is not a fringe surveillance startup. It is the infrastructure layer for how powerful governments make enforcement decisions at scale. If you want to understand how AI, data aggregation, and state power are converging in 2026, Palantir is where that story lives. Follow our Technology coverage for ongoing reporting on surveillance systems, data privacy, and the platforms shaping your digital life.