Palantir Technologies, an American software company founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp with two others, is often referred to as “the AI arms dealer of the 21st century.”
Palantir is involved in everything from government surveillance and predictive policing to gathering battlefield intelligence and monitoring nuclear safeguards. It is ensconced in the US government and its armed forces. It is everywhere the US is supporting wars, including against Russia, Palestine and Iran.
The company is as controversial as the billionaires who founded it. Thiel, a founder of PayPal and Palantir, is described in The New York Times as “the most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years” and “an early investor in the political careers of Donald Trump and JD Vance.” Karp, chief executive of Palantir, is on the other end of the political spectrum; he “has referred to himself as a socialist and even a neo-Marxist.”
Nonetheless, they are self-described philosophers and warriors against what they perceive as the weakness and stagnation of Western power; to that end, they see Palantir as their project to promote democracy and strengthen Western militaries.
According to Time magazine, Palantir was initially funded in 2022 by the US Central Intelligence Agency’s venture-capital arm to provide “data-analytics software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)], the FBI, the Department of Defense, and a host of foreign-intelligence agencies.”
In March 2025, soon after assuming office in his second term, President Trump issued an executive order instructing all federal employees to ensure access to their data to Elon Musk’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and, according to the Guardian, from DOGE to Palantir’s AI-powered superdatabase. In June 2025, the US Army created a special unit and swore in senior executives of the top four American AI companies, including Palantir, as senior advisers and lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve.
Time reports that Palantir has become a pillar of Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression; it provides battlefield intelligence for targeting, collecting evidence of war crimes and clearing landmines. Like many others in the tech and defense industries, including Musk’s Starlink satellite company, Palantir reportedly offered its services free to the Ukrainian government. Palantir, Starlink and others have turned Ukraine into “an AI war lab,” raising sensitive legal and ethical issues as well as security concerns that such technologies could fall into the wrong hands.
Palantir has also contributed to Israel’s genocidal war machine in Gaza. In January 2024, after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the company boasted about its “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply the country with technology for its military. In her report “[f]rom economy of occupation to economy of genocide,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, cited Palantir’s strategic partnership with Israel and concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Palantir’s AI platform has been used in Israel’s “unlawful use of force,” causing disproportionate loss of civilian life in Gaza.
Albanese called on Palantir and the other companies she cited in her report to prevent the misuse of their technology and/or to withdraw their involvement with the Israeli military at the risk of becoming legally liable for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As reported by PassBlue, Albanese also called on the UN to review its contracts with Palantir and five other cited companies to ensure compliance with the UN’s own financial and ethical rules, noting that “Palantir has maintained a major contract with the World Food Program since 2019, worth $45 million, to help analyze aid distribution data.”
Apparently, Palantir has also played a role in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear program cited by Israel and the US to justify their illegal attacks against Iran and its nuclear facilities. The IAEA had contracted Palantir in 2015 to modernize its safeguards information technology in a $50 million project known as MOSAIC, which, according to the IAEA’s own news release, allows it to consolidate safeguards in-field verification, including planning, reporting and reviewing into a single application.
Bloomberg News subsequently reported that Palantir was at the heart of the IAEA’s safeguards inspection regime in Iran, which relied on its data-mining and predictive technology — a technology that raises concerns about blurring the line between monitoring and targeting. While the IAEA’s latest report resurrected lingering questions about the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program, it concluded that there is no credible evidence of weaponization.
The name “Palantir” derives from the palantiri, or “seeing eye stones,” featured in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Concerned about Palantir’s role in the second Trump administration, former employees of Palantir wrote a warning to their fellow tech workers in Silicon Valley. They recalled that in the epic novel, “the myth of the powerful seeing stones warned of great dangers when wielded by those without wisdom or a moral compass, as they could be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality.”
Similarly, the Palantir employees warned that the “Palantir Technologies’ platform grants immense power to its users, helping control the data, decisions, and outcomes that determine the future of governments, businesses, and institutions — and by extension, all of us.”
A warning that, in light of Palantir’s apparent global reach, the whole world should heed.
This is an opinion essay.
We welcome your comments on this article. What are your thoughts on Palantir?
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Mona Ali Khalil is an internationally recognized public international lawyer with 30 years of UN and other experience, including as a former senior legal officer in the UN and the IAEA, with expertise in peacekeeping, peace enforcement, disarmament and counterterrorism. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in international relations from Harvard University and a master’s in foreign service and a J.D. from Georgetown University. She is the founder and director of MAK LAW INTERNATIONAL and an affiliate of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict. She has co-authored several publications, including Empowering the UN Security Council: Reforms to Address Modern Threats, the UN Security Council Conflict Management Handbook and Protection of Civilians.
