Palantir: The Surveillance State Wearing a Startup’s Clothes — The Company That Was Built to Watch You

When Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, took his seat at the 2026 Bilderberg meeting in Washington D.C. alongside the Secretary General of NATO, the Secretary of the US Army, and the CEO of Pfizer, it was not a coincidence of scheduling. It was the visible surface of something that has been building, quietly and deliberately, for over two decades.

This is the story of that something.

Chapter One: Born From Intelligence, Not Innovation

Most technology companies begin with an idea. Palantir began with a mission.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel alongside Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and Stephen Cohen. In addition to funding from Thiel’s venture capital firm, Palantir raised $2 million from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm. In-Q-Tel’s investment helped Palantir make inroads within the defence and counter-terrorism communities.

This funding relationship was not merely financial. Palantir was described as having been created through an iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years.

The CIA was not an investor in a company that happened to be useful for intelligence work. It was a co-creator of a company specifically engineered for intelligence purposes.

Palantir was founded with a mission based on "defending the West," and received seed funding from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, in 2005.

The significance of this origin cannot be overstated. Every technology company eventually faces the question of what it is for. Palantir never had to ask. The question was answered before the company existed.

What conventional Silicon Valley rejected, the intelligence community embraced. During its early start-up phase, Palantir struggled to attract investors. An executive at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins reportedly told the founders their company was doomed, a moment that has since become part of Palantir lore. The company's first major breakthrough came in 2004 when it secured early backing from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

The commercial venture capital community's rejection of Palantir is historically interesting. These were investors who successfully identified Google, Amazon, and Apple. They looked at Palantir and passed. What they saw — a company whose primary market was classified government intelligence operations — was exactly what the CIA was looking for.

Chapter Two: The Architecture of Total Information

To understand what Palantir does, you need to understand what data fragmentation meant for intelligence work before it existed.

Before Palantir, government agencies held siloed data: the FBI had criminal records, the CIA had foreign intelligence, the NSA had communications intercepts, the DMV had vehicle registrations, the IRS had financial records. These systems did not speak to each other. An analyst who wanted to build a complete picture of an individual had to query each system separately and manually correlate the results — a process that took days or weeks.

What Palantir does is integrate surveillance data, financial transactions, communications intercepts, travel records, and criminal databases into one unified platform. Used by the CIA, Pentagon, ICE, local police, and NHS, its platforms — Gotham for defence and police, Foundry for commercial and government use, Apollo for deployment to classified systems, and AIP for AI automation — represent a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure.

Similar to Palantir's other systems, ImmigrationOS pulls together vast amounts of data, detects patterns, and flags individuals who meet certain criteria.

The system is not searching for known criminals. It is algorithmically scanning the population for patterns that match enforcement targets. The distinction matters enormously: one is investigation, the other is prediction.

This is a capability that did not exist at population scale before Palantir. The company did not merely improve existing intelligence tools. It created a new category of state power.

Chapter Three: The Contract Portfolio — Scale of Penetration

The breadth of Palantir's government contract portfolio is the clearest evidence of how completely the boundary between private technology company and state surveillance apparatus has dissolved.

As of mid-2025, the Trump administration had spent $113 million on existing and new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, plus a contract of $795 million with the DoD. On July 31, 2025, the US Army awarded Palantir an Enterprise Service Agreement valued at up to $10 billion over 10 years.

That $10 billion Army contract consolidated 75 existing Palantir contracts into one — giving Palantir access to every Army database and operation. It is the largest contract in the company's history.

The Pentagon also awarded Palantir a contract ceiling boost of $795 million in May 2025, and later a contract worth up to $10 billion allowing the Department of Defense wide-reaching access. Palantir made $1.6 billion in net income in 2025 and joined the list of the 20 most valuable US companies, with its stock more than doubling in value in the first half of 2025 alone.

The scope extends far beyond defence. The USDA signed a $300 million National Farm Security Action Plan contract with Palantir, covering a "One Farmer, One File" initiative consolidating farmer data across agencies, retiring approximately 1,000 contractors in favour of automation. The same company that built ICE deportation tools is also building workforce surveillance tools for government employees.

There is a pattern here that goes beyond contract wins. Palantir is systematically becoming the operating system of the American state — the platform through which government agencies store, process, and act on data about citizens. When a single private company holds that position, the distinction between state surveillance and corporate surveillance ceases to be meaningful.

Chapter Four: ImmigrationOS — The Proof of Concept

The most concrete demonstration of what Palantir's infrastructure enables in practice is ImmigrationOS, the AI platform built for ICE that began operating in 2025.

ImmigrationOS uses AI and data mining to identify, track, and deport suspected noncitizens. The $30 million contract runs through September 2027. ICE is paying Palantir for a platform that will pull together vast amounts of data, detect patterns, and flag individuals who meet certain criteria.

The data sources integrated into this system are breathtaking in their scope. ImmigrationOS is a platform that combines passport data, Social Security records, IRS information, and licence plate reader data into a single operational system. ICE's own budget for information technology and data services has expanded sharply, with DHS awarding more than $1 billion in IT contracts over roughly the first year of President Trump's second term.

The same infrastructure also powers ICE's complete surveillance arsenal including Mobile Fortify facial recognition, Clearview AI, and Flock Safety licence plate scanners.

According to internal ICE documents, DHS investigations used Palantir platforms and apps to track air travel, analyse information from driver's licence scans, and track people's locations using cell phone records.

Civil liberties organisations have raised an alarm that extends beyond the immediate immigration enforcement context. Civil liberties groups warn that systems like ImmigrationOS pose significant risks to the general public, in part because it’s unclear how the system would be limited only to people living illegally in the US. Such a system could easily be expanded to target any American.

Reports from advocacy organisations and legal clinics describe ICE already compiling information on activists who attempt to disrupt enforcement actions, using the same imaging and social media tools that underpin other parts of the agency's work.

The system is not constrained to undocumented immigrants. It is not constrained to immigrants at all. It is a general-purpose population surveillance platform, currently deployed with a specific political mandate, but architected for universal application.

Chapter Five: Maven — When Surveillance Becomes Lethal

If ImmigrationOS represents Palantir's domestic surveillance function, the Maven Smart System represents its external application: the automation of killing.

Maven now has more than 20,000 active users. The platform was used during the 2021 Kabul airlift, to supply target coordinates to Ukrainian forces in 2022, and most recently during Operation Epic Fury against Iran in 2026, where it reportedly enabled processing of 1,000 targets within the first 24 hours. NATO acquired a version in March 2025. An initial $480 million Maven contract was awarded in May 2024, with the ceiling raised to $1.3 billion in May 2025.

In three weeks of Operation Epic Fury beginning February 28, 2026, the US military struck between 5,500 and 6,000 targets in Iran. The first 1,000 strikes happened in 24 hours. The system making those targeting decisions possible was Palantir's Maven Smart System, a platform that fused nine separate military intelligence systems into one interface and compressed the kill chain — the process from detecting a target to striking it — from hours to minutes.

Palantir CEO Karp celebrated this publicly. Karp said in the aftermath: "AI precision targeting has fundamentally shifted modern warfare."

United Nations expert panels have cautioned that AI-driven weapons targeting without human oversight creates ethical, legal, and security hazards. Machine learning systems absorb biases from their training data, and those biases can carry lethal consequences on the battlefield.

The company that began by helping the CIA analyse counterterrorism data is now the operating system for air strikes. The company's own name — Palantir, the seeing stones from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, used by Sauron to surveil and dominate his enemies — reads less like a quirky Silicon Valley reference and more like an accurate self-description.

Chapter Six: The Conflict of Interest Network

The political capture of the regulatory environment that might otherwise constrain Palantir is documented and specific.

Peter Thiel, Palantir's co-founder, is a Steering Committee Member of the Bilderberg Group. In the second Trump administration, Thiel's influence is more visible than ever, as numerous associates and acolytes are set to play various influential roles.

Both Peter Thiel and Alex Karp are steering committee members of the Bilderberg Group. While Karp has traditionally supported progressive politicians and described himself as a radical leftist, and Thiel has supported conservative politicians, both men are now united in support of the Trump administration. While there may be real political differences between Karp and Thiel, there is no daylight between the two when it comes to technocratic solutions.

Thiel's most significant political investment may be JD Vance, whom he mentored, employed, introduced to Trump, and then bankrolled with a record $15 million in his 2022 Ohio Senate race.

The conflict of interest is not merely structural — it is financial and specific. Stephen Miller owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir — the company that has several lucrative contracts with ICE to conduct surveillance on undocumented immigrants. Miller is the chief architect of the Trump administration's immigration policy. At least 11 other White House officials and staffers own stock in Palantir, including Gregory Barbaccia, Trump's Chief Information Officer — a former Palantir employee.

Ethics experts say the investment raises serious concerns given Palantir's deepening relationship with DHS and ICE. "If an official holds an interest in an entity that they are tasked with working on in their government role, they would have a conflict that would need to be resolved before they could actually work on that matter," said Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Don Fox, former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, stated: "Miller has a track record of getting involved in the details of immigration enforcement rather than engaging solely on high-level policy, which heightens the conflict-of-interest concern."

The architecture is elegant in its circularity: Thiel funds the Vice President. Thiel's co-founder sits on the Bilderberg Steering Committee alongside world leaders. The immigration policy architect personally profits from the contracts his policies generate. The company that executes those contracts is exempt from competitive bidding. The chief information officer of the US government is a former employee of that company. And none of this receives sustained mainstream media coverage.

Chapter Seven: The Threat to Competitors

Perhaps the most alarming recent development is Karp's explicit posture toward technology companies that refuse to participate in the surveillance and weapons infrastructure.

At the a16z American Dynamism Summit in March 2026, Karp warned that tech companies that don't cooperate with the government risk having their firms nationalised — explicitly linking corporate survival to compliance with surveillance and autonomous weapons development.

This was not an abstract philosophical position. It was a statement made weeks before Bilderberg, against a specific backdrop: the Pentagon's confrontation with Anthropic.

During a renegotiation of a July 2025 contract, Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s demand to add language that would allow "any lawful use" of its AI and to remove previously accepted terms restricting Claude’s use for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons. In response, the Pentagon labelled Anthropic a "Supply Chain Risk," and President Trump ordered all federal agencies to transition away from Claude within six months.

Anthropic refused to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance on Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons, leading the Pentagon to designate the company as an "unacceptable supply chain risk" with a removal deadline of September 2026.

The message to the technology industry is unambiguous: companies that maintain ethical limits on surveillance and autonomous weapons face state-orchestrated destruction of their commercial relationships.

Companies that comply — like Palantir — receive $10 billion Army contracts, Pentagon program-of-record status, and seats at the Bilderberg table.

This is what Karp's "nationalisation threat" means in practice. It is not a prediction about economic policy. It is a description of the enforcement mechanism already in operation.

Chapter Eight: The Financial Paradox

Palantir paid $0 in federal income taxes in 2025, despite making $1.6 billion in net income — while raking in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to build out a mass surveillance network in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security.

The paradox is complete: taxpayers fund the construction of a surveillance infrastructure that monitors them, administered by a company that pays no taxes on the profits generated by that funding, run by executives who sit on the steering committee of the secretive network that coordinates the policies their company executes.

Palantir's US government revenue grew 84% year-over-year to $687 million in the most recent quarter, with total contract value of $2.41 billion, up 61% year-over-year.

The company is not merely profitable. It is accelerating. Every new administration expands its contracts. Every new security concern generates new funding. Every new enforcement priority creates a new platform. There is no political configuration in which Palantir loses. It is embedded too deeply in too many systems, holds too many contracts that are described as too urgent to rebid, and has too many former employees in too many positions of regulatory authority.

Chapter Nine: The Bilderberg Connection — Closing the Loop

Palantir's co-founder Peter Thiel is a member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee. Alex Karp, the CEO, is also a steering committee member. Both men attended the 2026 meeting in Washington D.C. alongside the Secretary of the US Army, the Secretary General of NATO, senior figures from Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Meta, the European Investment Bank, and editors from CNN, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and The Economist.

The Bilderberg Steering Committee does not merely attend meetings. It selects who else attends. It shapes the agenda. It determines which rising politicians, executives, and journalists get access to the network. Peter Thiel — the man who funded JD Vance's career, who co-created the company that is becoming the operating system of the American state, who helped build the AI targeting system used in 5,500 strikes against Iran — has a seat at that steering table.

When the 2026 meeting discussed artificial intelligence, warfare, and the future of Western power, it did so in a room that included the two men whose company is currently the primary private contractor for both domestic surveillance and military targeting AI, sitting alongside the military official who commands the Army that just signed a $10 billion contract with their company.

This is not networking. This is coordination. And it took place with a complete media blackout — no minutes, no press release, no coverage from the CNN, Bloomberg, and Economist editors who were in the room.

Conclusion: The System Is the Product

Palantir likes to say it builds tools, not policies. The tools, the company argues, are neutral — it is the humans who decide how to use them.

This argument collapses under examination. A system architected to integrate passport data, IRS records, Social Security numbers, facial recognition feeds, and cell phone location data into a single targeting platform is not a neutral tool. The architecture is the policy. The decision about which data sources to integrate, which patterns to flag, which thresholds to trigger action — these are political decisions embedded in software, invisible to public scrutiny, and exempt from democratic override.

Palantir's technology has been used by the US intelligence community to analyse surveillance data, in the Ukraine war to help identify targets, and to develop technology to automate the killing of human targets, with AI making final decisions on who lives and who dies.

Palantir grew so much in 2025 that it joined the list of the 20 most valuable US companies, with its stock more than doubling in value in the first half of 2025 alone — while paying zero federal income taxes on $1.6 billion in net income.

The company that was born in the CIA's venture capital portfolio, grew on classified intelligence contracts, built the targeting system for an air campaign against Iran, built the deportation tracking system for ICE, is extending surveillance tools to track federal employees and farmers, has its co-founders on the Bilderberg Steering Committee, has its executives coordinating with the Secretary of the US Army at a secret meeting that received zero mainstream media coverage, and has its stock held by the immigration policy official whose policies directly generate its contracts — that company is not a technology company with government clients.

It is a private expression of state power, operating outside democratic oversight, accountable to no electorate, serving interests that are never subjected to public vote.

The surveillance state did not emerge from government overreach. It was outsourced.

https://medium.com/@hsalpsdum/palantir-in-the-uk-the-900-million-surveillance-creep-nobody-voted-for-fc1564b980bb