Palantir was founded after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center to help US defence build a single data environment from which to monitor threats. Named after a stone in JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that grants near-omniscience, the company now works with governments worldwide.
In January, Ukraine's defence ministry launched the Brave1 Dataroom with Palantir, using battlefield data to train artificial intelligence for military applications. Valerii Markus, a Ukrainian serviceman and former chief sergeant, wrote on Facebook that “Ukraine has something that no other country in the world has. We are paying with blood for data that someone else can convert into capital, international influence, and big money.”
Palantir, in an emailed statement, said “customers own and control their data” and that its software helps them “integrate and analyse their existing data sets.” It added: “Palantir never uses or retains customer data for its own purposes.” Elke Schwarz, a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, said Palantir does not need to possess the data to benefit from it, noting that “those with access to [it] have a strategic advantage.”
The company’s technologies have been implicated in human rights abuses. Its core platforms, ICM and FALCON, facilitated the Trump administration in detaining and deporting thousands of people, including asylum seekers. Palantir has also assisted Israel in its war in Gaza, which a United Nations inquiry found bears the hallmarks of genocide. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese last year found “reasonable grounds” to believe Palantir provided AI platforms used for battlefield data integration and automated decision-making in the war that has killed more than 74,500 Palestinians since October 2023.
In the UK, the National Health Service signed a 330-million-pound ($440m) contract with Palantir to provide a new data platform. Watchdog Corporate Accountability launched a campaign against it. Deputy campaigns director Fatimah Shaikh said “Palantir is not a corporation we can trust” to hold British citizens’ sensitive personal information. Ilia Siatitsa of Privacy International argued the company could potentially use personal information to train its products without explicit consent. Britain announced in June it was reviewing the NHS data contract after parliamentary pressure.
Growing dependencies on private tech firms have raised concerns. Anna Nadibaidze, researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, said “we’re used to state armies being the main players,” but now those players rely on products from the private sector. She cited SpaceX's Starlink as an example, which provoked a communications blackout for Ukraine during a pivotal push in September 2022. France, Germany and Spain have moved to distance themselves from Palantir over strategic dependency fears.
Palantir’s reliability has also been questioned after it finalised a strategic partnership in September with Nebius, a Dutch company founded as an offshoot of Russian technology giant Yandex. Denys Shtilerman, chief designer of Ukrainian defence-tech company Fire Point, wrote on X that “the very same Palantir that works with Ukrainian combat data” had struck a deal with Yandex cofounder Arkady Volozh. He wrote: “Our combat data is not free raw material for Western technology corporations. It is a strategic asset of the state. Ukraine has paid for it with blood.”