Palantir Is Extending Its Reach Even Further into Government
95 comments
·August 4, 2025TrackerFF
TriangleEdge
Ex FDE here. Part of Palantir's pitch for Foundry back in the day is connecting disparate databases from agencies that don't collaborate well. They're also really good at getting demos up and running in a few days. The tech was good back when I was employed.
They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
chpatrick
I've heard people say it's basically SAP with some spooky mystique for marketing.
FergusArgyll
This was an article that really helped me understand it
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
prng2021
I’d like to hear from others, but my assumption has been that they’re the ones that 1) have staff with the required clearance to work on DoD projects and 2) the required security and compliance certifications in their product. On the latter, it’s not easy to provide a product that is DoD IL5 certified, so that is a differentiator for them.
jxf
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
whilenot-dev
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
[0]: https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-former-chancellor-se...
lolive
I will comment only on the Foundry stack that we work extensively with, at my company. Given the complete havoc that the other IT ecoaystems had become, we are constantly struggling with proper data access data exchange data transformation and data alignment. To a point where a political layer has appeared on top of that, which looks like the middle age baronies.
Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company. The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterprise data work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.
And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !
walterbell
> more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects
Do data barons attempt to replicate silo control within Palantir?
> Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative
With this profitable existence proof in the market, are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data?
Molitor5901
I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pass just because of their perceived political leanings.
ants_everywhere
Palantir is unique in that one of its founders has publicly stated he doesn't believe in democracy, the bedrock of the American system.
rayiner
Hostility to democracy is literally the bedrock of the 20th century american federal government. We live in the nation Woodrow Wilson created: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad...
giancarlostoro
Its really easy to read this and be scared without being given any context, not everyone in the room knows who you are referring to and if your reading of their remarks are accurate.
You got a name and a raw source?
estearum
That's on the tame end of Peter Thiel's rather demented belief system.
Another tidbit: he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist.
hnhg
You can also sign up to Curtis Yarvin's Substack and read the kind of thinking that Thiel likes to surround himself with: https://graymirror.substack.com/
ants_everywhere
Peter Thiel. He says "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
The beginning of the essay
> I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
The full essay https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
yosito
To be fair, I'm not sure there are very many people who believe in US democracy right now.
ants_everywhere
I don't believe this is true. The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe. It's frequently expressed online, but a lot of that is not from human Americans.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
__MatrixMan__
Also its named after a technology that most often causes its user to die or lose a war by exposing them to disinformation. That's an odd bit of messaging for a surveillance company.
tylerchilds
definition of treason?
definition of treason.
RajT88
Thank you for demonstrating you have not looked up the definition of Treason in the US legal system.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S3-C1-...
agent_turtle
"Yeah the house may be on fire but we can't even begin to put it out until we make sure every other house in the city is not also on fire."
photochemsyn
Whataboutism is designed to deflect attention from a particularly egregious example of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence etc. by claiming "everyone's doing it, why pick on my guys?"
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
jncfhnb
Whenever I hear about palantir it ends up just being a basic cloud service provider like AWS
Bombthecat
Pretty sure it's just the beginning. Palantir Will be the dystopian super company you see in sci-fi movies
energy123
Least authoritarian libertarians
_joel
Considering they run killbots, probably already there.
oceansky
Already is
XorNot
Do you even know what Palantir actually do? Because I see so many people talking about Palantir, but it seems apparent they've no idea what the business does, or sells, or how it even makes money except "through the government".
Like...they're a software firm. They specialize in government contracting. They sell software to the government, to fulfill tenders and requests asked for by the government (which is its own subset because government contracting generally sucks and is it's own skillset).
cess11
They're proudly complicit in genocide and war crimes.
https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Basically they're selling BI-solutions for tyranny, usually by convincing government officials that it's a good idea to aggregate data sets that are separate for good reasons and then they'll achieve greater power over their subjects. That's the idea in the NHS project, that's what they're doing in the US and so on.
baal80spam
Time to buy?
Alifatisk
Their stock has tripled since november, they are way to overvalued. Either way I would not put my money on their stock, I do not want to support such company. Vote with your wallet.
dpoloncsak
Speak for yourself....Writing was on the wall the minute I saw where the funding for Palantir was coming from. Been in since $12 a share, holding tight until they take over.
Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
barrenko
If nothing to hold until the holidays.
newsclues
Was before the election
grafmax
I wonder if the VCs have given up on growth. AI isn’t really profitable. Unless you can get government to pay for it (“socialism for me, capitalism for thee”). That means military contracts. So we have a top heavy system with a perverse incentive to justify itself with war. Unsurprisingly, I guess, the US is gearing up to do just that in 2027 with China.
laimewhisps
A lot of VCs are Zionists and personally dedicated to making war and violently attacking Muslims. If you doubt, go read the twitter feeds from Sequoia MDs like Shaun Maguire. They're very open about their goals and very pro-Palantir, which has also been very open with their Islamophobia and explicit desire to ethnically cleanse Palestine.
zeroCalories
I don't buy it. The money for government contracts is so much lower than the money from regular economic activity. It seems like every other business should be conspiring to avoid war, even if a small group wants it.
untrust
Why 2027?
A_D_E_P_T
That's the meme. It's not going to happen IRL because it doesn't look like China is rising to the bait, because Russia is still advancing in Ukraine, because American industrial production capacity is by every estimation not equal to the task, and because the Middle East is as bad a mess as it has ever been and is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
When your Navy literally can't defeat the Houthis, you know for an ironclad 100% certainty that there's zero chance they're capable of beating China -- right off the coast of China!
the_sleaze_
This is fundamentally wrong on many levels, including what a War is and why they happen.
You actually need a balance of power to prevent an armed political conflict, so the adults in the room will maintain one.
grafmax
Unfortunately there is a chance you are underestimating the hubris of our leaders.
cess11
They can blow up some dams and cause enormous civilian suffering. After having lost in Ukraine I expect certain states to be on the look-out for actions that will cause massive destruction that they can consider quick wins.
XorNot
This is like saying the American military couldn't defeat the Iraqis.
The American military could not successfully build a stable Iraqi democracy or completely suppress sectarian violence.
They absolutely destroyed the Iraqi conventional military and occupied the country for 8 years though.
dmix
> Following massive contract terminations for consulting giants and government contractors like Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte, Palantir has emerged ahead.
Just swapping different big consulting firms around.
I remember when Booz Allen was the bad guy. I just checked and apparently this is what they call themselves these days "an American company specializing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
MOARDONGZPLZ
BAH was the “bad guy” in the sense that they were grifters competent at only winning contracts and then extending them indefinitely through incompetent delivery to suck as much money out of the government as possible at the expense of having good systems and taxpayer money.
Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.
bayindirh
> Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.
What's their promise?
MOARDONGZPLZ
Just kind of summarizing from the comments in this topic (I also couldn’t be bothered to Google Palantir’s thesis): sticky/useful tools to combine and enrich data sources with a focus on a sector where there is a lot of compliance-driven security, data sources that aren’t easily queryable outside of their direct users, and high barriers to entry.
adolph
From the parts I've seen (Foundry et al), the promise is ability to sense of data and controlling its stocks and flows. There is a bit of Pachyderm-like versioned pipelines, notebooks, lots of access controls and audit logging. This is a place that was bought into Oracle "data democracy", reluctantly used Foundry and then was won over by the product.
Hizonner
Further than the Vice Presidency?
adamc
Technologists who work on this are evil.
Rodmine
Most countries use Palantir or similar data-analysis systems today. This fear-mongering spiel is aimed squarely at most uninformed peasants, but I guess they do it because it works.
calvinmorrison
Palantir is a government agency...
We received a presentation/demo of their products when I worked in the gov (not the US gov. though) a couple of years ago.
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.