Palantir and the Age of Authoritarian Entrepreneurs

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

Through the Trump administration’s countless erratic attempts to cripple, remake, or simply take more direct control of every part of the government, one theme has emerged: a fixation on data. Aside from the mass firings, getting access to government databases was one of the Department of Government Efficiency’s primary tasks; under the guise of “eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency” and “the identification and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse,” a March executive order demanded that agency heads “rescind or modify all agency guidance that serves as a barrier to the inter- or intra-agency sharing of unclassified information.” Putting aside the enforceability of such an order, the intent was clear: Whatever the reason, Americans’ personal data would now be made maximally available to the executive branch.

This week, the New York Times fleshed out some related efforts with a nightmare of a headline: “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans.” Palantir, the data firm and government contractor co-founded by Donald Trump (and Elon Musk) ally Peter Thiel, and run by Alex Karp, has been working with the federal government since the Obama administration. But now it’s getting some much bigger contracts:

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

One of Palantir’s core products, an all-in-one data-processing platform called Foundry, is reportedly in use at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, while the IRS and Social Security Administration are “speaking” with the company. The open menace of these initiatives was a little much for even a few MAGA diehards, who, after years of complaining about government persecution, sense a bit of danger in the establishment of an even more severe surveillance regime by a 78-year-old man who — even if they trust him — will be in charge of it only for a few years. You can ignore those paranoiacs, though, because Alex Jones has figured out what’s really going on:

For everyone else, the story is fairly understood in outline: The government would officially like to obliterate the already inadequate rules for compiling and sharing data about citizens and noncitizens and is seeking the help of a politically loyal firm to carry out its plans.

It’s fair to point out that this impulse has existed within the government for decades and that past revelations — hello again, Edward Snowden — revealed similar attempts to combine data sources, albeit typically by intelligence agencies, justified by vague national security concerns rather than vague gesturing at efficiency and waste. It’s likewise fair to push back against the highly cultivated image of Palantir as a fearsome and opaque dark-tech enterprise. In reality, Palantir is less like its Lord of the Rings namesake than Salesforce with a particular sort of client list. It’s a general-purpose enterprise-data software company led by people who have made it clear to potential customers and their own workforces that they see contracting for, say, ICE or the IDF not just as an uncomplicated business decision but as a mission to pick up the slack left by a generation of “woke” American tech firms (many of which have recently come around to military contracting anyway) in defense of “the West.”

So what is Palantir actually doing in the Trump administration? The company’s militarized LinkedIn-ese describes Foundry as a “highly available, continuously updated, fully managed SaaS platform that spans from cloud hosting and data integration to flexible analytics, visualization, model-building, operational decisionmaking, and decision capture.” Or, in the words of people who have been tasked by their private employers with using it, it’s either an “absurdly expensive tool that is sold to executives that get caught up in the hype before talking to their technical counterparts,” a “great tool to prototype big data based applications for business users,” a “very expensive” solution that’s “very hard to remove once it’s in there,” or “great if all your data is there and you’re ok going whole hog on buying into their ecosystem.” In other words, it’s one of many platforms for managing, representing, and processing large amounts of data, with a particular focus on customers with data-security requirements and maybe a lot of nontechnical employees. You provide it with data — about people, products, sales, places, or things — and it provides ways to organize and look at it all.

I point out that Palantir makes general-purpose enterprise software that competes with offerings from other start-ups, or firms like Amazon and Microsoft, not to diminish its role so much as to demystify it; “general-purpose enterprise software” can be used to optimize sales flows for a retailer or build a punitive, Americanized social-credit system on behalf of a runaway executive branch. What makes Palantir’s participation here most significant, in other words, isn’t the company’s technology or its unique ability to combine spreadsheets or profiles in uniquely powerful or worrying ways. More important is what Palantir says it’s willing to do and the ways it’s willing to discuss those things. Anduril, the defense contractor founded by Palmer Luckey and funded by Thiel, is a start-up that makes weapons, and its founder talks about how crazy it is that other tech companies aren’t rushing to do the same. Clearview, another Thiel-funded venture, is a facial-recognition company that courts right-wing clients and pitches universal government surveillance as a goal. Palantir works with the government to track down immigrants for deportation, and with the Israeli military to pick targets in Gaza with AI, positioning itself not just as a neutral technology provider but as ideologically aligned with its clients. 

Palantir’s most important pitch, in other words, isn’t that it makes better software or offers better support than its peers. Instead, it’s an avatar of a form of ideological entrepreneurship that’s paying off in the second Trump era: a bet not just that there’s some market for standard technologies implemented to explicitly authoritarian ends but that the techno-authoritarians will win and their project will eventually need the same sorts of software as any other — with the right politics, of course.