AI Endgame: PALANTIR

Newsletter #27

Mar 29, 2025

https://debbiecoffey.substack.com/p/ai-endgame-palantir

March 28, 2025

By Debbie Coffey, AI Endgame

Thank you for reading AI Endgame newsletters. The risks of AI are beyond our comprehension, and there are too few voices sounding the alarm about the many unknowns of AI.

In the movie Die Hard, when John McClane (Bruce Willis) finds himself in a dangerous situation, far from what he originally planned or imagined, he mutters, "Come out to the Coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs..."

Although I’d rather share a few laughs with you, I’m writing this newsletter so we can try to keep up with the rapid progression of AI and the power players behind it.

One company you may not have heard about is Palantir, a data mining company that is now one of the biggest surveillance companies in the world.

Palantir also has an AI platform.

Palantir

Palantir has offices and clients across North America, Europe, Asia, and other regions. [1]

Some of Palantir’s customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security (CIA, FBI, ICE), Department of Health and Human Services, the Royal Navy, Airbus, Merck, PG&E, and BP.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Carp, and others, and, as of March 27, 2025, it has a net worth of over $211 billion. [2]

Palantir is set to grow even bigger.

Wedbush financial analysts predict Palantir will benefit from federal spending on AI, even as other government contractors face spending cuts. [3]

Elon Musk, who’s been busy gutting Federal agencies, likely won’t cut any funding from Palantir. In February, Palantir announced it would integrate Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI, into its Artificial Intelligence. [4]

Palantir is now tied at the hip with Musk’s xAI.

Palantir is Total Information Awareness on Steroids

Could Palantir’s history be a prelude to its future decisions and uses of its AI?

Journalist Robert Scheer, in his book “They Know Everything About You - How data-collecting corporations and snooping government agencies are destroying democracy,” describes the early history of Palantir by starting with a government program called Total Information Awareness.

Total Information Awareness (TIA), initiated about 2002, was run within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It was the brainchild of, and headed by, John Poindexter (Reagan’s national security advisor), who was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. At Congressional hearing on Iran-Contra, when Poindexter was asked questions, he answered “I don't remember'' about 124 times in his eight hours of testimony. [5]

TIA was a plan to integrate all government databases into one big, centralized database, and to develop data mining and profiling technologies to analyze the data. [6]

The TIA database was to include data on credit card purchases, magazine subscriptions, web browsing histories, phone records, academic grades, bank deposits, passport applications, airline and railway tickets, driver's licenses, gun licenses, toll records, judicial records, divorce records, drug prescriptions, medical records, fingerprints, gait, face and iris data, and DNA. [7]

Does this sound eerily familiar to the data that’s being collected on all of us today by private companies? There’s a reason for this.

How times have changed

In 2003, Congress was so outraged by TIA’s threat to our privacy that it dismantled the TIA program.

Poindexter must not have remembered this either, because he then bypassed Congress by outsourcing TIA’s work to private companies, and sending some parts of the TIA program (under different titles) to other government agencies.

In 2004, Palantir, a private start-up company, received a $2 million investment from In-Q-Tel, CIA’s venture capital arm. The CIA was Palantir’s “only customer” from 2005-2008.

Palantir gained access to the CIA’s secret databases, in-house technical experts, and prospective clients. [8]

More importantly, this meant that a private company began surveillance on US citizens on behalf of the CIA. (The CIA is not allowed to operate domestically in the U.S.)

Palantir’s software

Palantir has four main software platforms: Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and Artificial Intelligence Platform (“AIP”). [9]

Palantir sends specialists called “forward deployed engineers” to spend weeks to years with clients as they customize and expand Palantir’s software to meet a client’s specific needs.

Two things that stand out about Palantir’s software are:

Palantir’s software is sold under a commercial license, which means that although Palantir builds custom software for clients, Palantir owns the software it builds.

Palantir can then sell this customized software to other clients. [10]

Did Palantir steal your data from the Los Angeles Police Department?

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) started using Palantir’s software in 2009. [11]

In the 2020 article “Scars, Tattoos and License Plates: This is What Palantir and the LAPD Know About You,” Buzzfeed News technology reporter Caroline Haskins pointed out that documents from two training manuals revealed the Los Angeles Police Department used Palantir’s Gotham software.

Palantir’s software not only collects the names of people arrested or suspected of committing crimes, but also the names of anyone an officer speaks with or is even in the area when a crime happens.

In other words, it rakes in the names of innocent people.

LAPD’s database contains information from the DMV, so anyone with a California driver’s license has been unknowingly swept into Palantir.

Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s software database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system. The only way for a person to remove their information from Palantir, according to the LAPD, is to get a court order.

Palantir’s software screen consists of boxes connected to other boxes by radiating lines labeled with the relationship, including: “Colleague of,” “Lives with,” “Operator of [cell number],” “Owner of [vehicle],” “Sibling of,” even “Lover of.”

Dozens of California police departments, sheriff offices, and airport police signed data sharing agreements with the LAPD between 2012 and 2017. They agreed to send daily copies of their own police records (like warrants and arrests), license plate readings, and dispatch information to LAPD to be added to the Palantir software database.

School police were also dragged in. The Los Angeles School Police Department, Compton Unified School District Police Department, El Camino College, Cal Poly University Police Department, and California State University all signed data-sharing agreements.

Palantir’s Gotham software has also been used by police departments in New York City, New Orleans and Chicago. The Northern California Regional Intelligence Center gave hundreds of police departments in California access to Palantir’s software. [12]

This massive amount of data continues to add value to Palantir as it becomes an exponentially more powerful data mining and surveillance company.

On ICE

In 2017, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used Palantir technology to arrest migrant parents and caregivers, leaving children unaccompanied and harming their welfare. ICE also used Palantir technology to plan a 2019 raid in Mississippi, again separating children from their migrant parents and caregivers. Palantir’s ICM and FALCON technology were used by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to identify migrants, share information, investigate, and track migrants for arrests or raids where they worked. [13]

12 Inc.

Software company 12 Inc. accused Palantir of “misappropriating” its intellectual property through a Florida shell company that claimed to be a private eye firm and was registered to a family member of Palantir’s Director of Business Development, Shyam Sankar. For four years, this company licensed 12 Inc. software and development tools, then sent them to Palantir. I2 Inc. sued Palantir in federal court, alleging fraud, conspiracy, and copyright infringement. Palantir paid 12 Inc. almost $10 million to settle the lawsuit. [14]

Shyam Sankar is now Palantir’s Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President. [15]

Palantir blames “rogue” employees

In 2010, Palantir employees, along with two other contractors, were involved with a proposal for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to run a secret sabotage campaign against the group’s liberal opponents, which included snooping on their families, creating fake identities to infiltrate the liberal groups, and planting false information to discredit them.

Palantir stated this was the work of a single “rogue employee.” [16] (However, it was later revealed that several Palantir employees were involved.) [17]

Palantir employees also helped Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm working for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, harvest the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users, in order to develop psychological profiles of individual voters.

Palantir stated that an employee was “working on his own time.” [18] [19]

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a former computer engineer for Cambridge Analytica, told U.K. lawmakers that although there wasn’t an “official contract between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica…there were Palantir staff that would come into the office and work on that data” and Palantir staff “helped build the models we were working on.” [20] Wylie also stated “… we would go and meet with Palantir staff at Palantir.” [21]

Is anyone concerned about Palantir employees being embedded within our government agencies?

Peter Thiel

Billionaire Peter Thiel is a co-founder, and the Chairman, of Palantir Technologies. Thiel is also a co-founder of PayPal, a big investor in Facebook, and a founder of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm.

Per reporter Chris McGreal, a former South Africa correspondent for The Guardian, Thiel was born in Germany, and then lived in South Africa as a child. His father, a mining engineer, lived in Johannesburg, later moving to South West Africa. Until the age of 10, Thiel went to a German school in Swakopmund, notorious at the time because people openly greeted each other with “Heil Hitler” and celebrated Hitler’s birthday there. Thiel’s family then moved to the U.S. [22]

Thiel has mentored, and bankrolled, J.D. Vance’s career for many years, including (along with other Silicon Valley donors), Vance’s bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022. [23]

Palantir has become an international data behemoth. Palantir’s software is used by approximately 90 industries around the world, including U.S. government agencies and our military. [24]

Considering the overwhelming amount of data Palantir’s software contains, we’re far beyond worrying only about privacy issues. Palantir also has AI.

How will Palantir use its AI?

Additionally, on March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order to eliminate “Information Silos.” Information Silos prevented certain sensitive personal data, like medical files and tax returns, from being accessed by anyone. President Trump’s Executive Order allows this personal information to be handed over to any federal official the President chooses. This further erodes your privacy. https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-trump-executive-order-information-silos-privacy/

Find links to all past AI Endgame newsletters HERE.