The artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance company Palantir has secured more than $10 billion in contracts with U.S. government agencies since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. These contracts have granted Palantir access to the financial records, locations, criminal histories and social media usage of every U.S. citizen. Palantir’s unprecedented access to government data has allowed the company to grow significantly and has provoked widespread backlash.
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp founded Palantir in 2003, and its earliest work being in counter-terrorism. Since then, Palantir has expanded its network and now works with law enforcement, immigration enforcement and the military.
“The government is now using a private company. … How is that company benefiting from housing and storing and using all this data?” said Camelia Perez, director of educational technology and innovation.
Since the start of its collaboration with the U.S. government, Palantir has become the highest-valued government contractor. Part of Palantir’s large valuation comes from its wide range of products that use AI to solve tasks including threat detection, data organization and supply chain management.
Gotham, Palantir’s first product, launched in 2008. Its goal is to help users plan missions and run investigations using data from different sources.
The LAPD used Gotham’s platform to combine data from arrest reports, automated license plate readers, rap sheets and other sources. Using this data, Gotham’s built-in AI created a points-based system, called a LASER score, that highlights hot spots of crime and identifies individuals likely involved in crime based on location, arrest history and other attributes.
Operation LASER has faced public criticism over its use of AI to make policing decisions. “I don’t know if we could really trust an AI producing something that the police are going to use to then go and track people and to make decisions based on where they’re going to put more police presence,” Perez said. “In many ways, it could also start profiling certain groups of people.”
In April 2019, Operation LASER ended due to public outcry and the release of documents proving that Gotham was directing officers to overpolice nonwhite communities.
These documents exposing racial profiling in Palantir’s products has not stopped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using the same technology. “ICE currently employs Palantir’s commercial software [in] the Investigative Case Management (ICM) System,” ICE wrote in their contract with Palantir. This partnership has received widespread criticism, including from Palantir’s former employees.
Many are concerned about how Palantir plans to use the data it now has access to. “I’ve heard that [Palantir] plans to weaponize people’s personal data against them in the future,” Ajay Haddad ’26 said. “I do not trust AI with my data.”
One of Palantir’s clients, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), uses Palantir to create lists of targets in its occupation of the Gaza Strip. During its partnership with Palantir, Israel has killed 543 aid workers in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023 — more than any country in the last 30 years, according to a report by the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD). Although it’s unclear how many deaths were caused by the use of AI targeting, it was permissible for the Israeli army to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians for every junior Hamas operative that AI marked according to Al Jazeera.
Stronger safeguards may be needed as AI becomes more integrated into government and military decision making. Perez said, “I do believe that AI will continue to be used in our government, but I do hope that they have people that are overseeing it and making sure that we as a public are protected from those potential dangerous use cases.”