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We have received many questions about Palantir. Given the high interest in our company, we collected the questions we receive most often and use this blog post to answer them.
Palantir Technologies is a software company that provides data operations and AI infrastructure platforms as well as related operational and maintenance support services to organizations across the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Through the deployment of our software, we help our customers deliver vital mission outcomes and are trusted by organizations that manage complex and highly sensitive data. We were founded in 2003 and are headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Palantir solutions are deployed across more than 50 sectors. In the commercial sector, this includes banks, automotive and aircraft manufacturers, and food production companies. In the public sector, our customers include government agencies such as the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the US Department of State, as well as international defense ministries, healthcare systems, and law enforcement organizations. We also work with NGOs and humanitarian organizations as they further their important missions. Building on years of partnerships with some of the world’s most important institutions, we deploy our platforms quickly and efficiently, reducing implementation time from months to days.
Palantir platforms specialize in integrating vast, siloed sources of data — regardless of data type, scale, or source — with all elements of decision-making, from logic orchestration to systems of action, into one unified environment and common operating picture. We refer to the systematic mapping of data, logic, and action to meaningful semantic concepts as an “ontology.” Organizations benefit from building and using an Ontology to organize and leverage their data, enabling connectivity at scale to view local decisions in a more global context, interpretability for more robust and effective analysis, economies of scale with the ability to build entire applications and use cases in the existing Ontology, decision capture through write back actions made in-platform to original source systems, and operational AI/ML directly in-platform.
Palantir also builds industry-leading security, transparency, privacy, and governance capabilities into our platforms, enabling a clear picture of data transactions within the platform and compliance with varying regulatory standards around the world. Our software enables organizations to generate actionable insights, optimize their operations, and better serve the people who rely on them, all while upholding the highest standards of privacy and security.
We act as a data processor, not a data controller, of the data our customers choose to process using our software. Data that is integrated into, analyzed, and managed by customers using Palantir software is entirely collected, owned, and controlled by the customers themselves, not by Palantir. Customers direct the use of Palantir software in the management and analysis of their own data.
No, Palantir is neither a data broker nor a data collector.
We build software products to help customers integrate and understand their own data. Our business model is built on customer procurement and licensing of Palantir software. Importantly, we generally act as a data processor, not a data controller in relation to customers’ data. With respect to our platforms, customers always retain full ownership and control over their data, unless otherwise directed for purposes determined by those customers. While Palantir engineers may interact with customer data when acting in technical support capacities and at the express direction of customers, and sometimes assist customers with their data integration and analysis, this is only at the direct request of customers and under specific guidelines to ensure customers always retain full control of their data. Palantir does not collect, hold, store, or sell customer data for its own purposes.
Palantir does not resell data from one customer to another. Each customer engagement is contractually, operationally, and technologically distinct and completely walled-off from every other Palantir customer. Though our software and occasionally our business relationships may be used to facilitate our clients’ access to and use of third-party mission-critical data assets, Palantir as a business does not own or broker access to data; rather, we provide the software necessary to ensure appropriate sharing, integration, and decision-making.
No, we do not use our customers’ data ourselves. Nor do we develop or train AI models based on customer data. We do not use customer data in any other way — either for our own purposes or by selling it to third parties.
Privacy and data security are fundamental to Palantir and have been built into the software’s architecture from the start. Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company. We do not sell personal data of any kind. We don’t provide data-mining as a service. Palantir is a software company. Unlike many technology companies, our business model is not based on monetizing personal data. Instead, we develop and license software platforms that enable our customers to integrate and analyze their own data assets to make better decisions.
Each Palantir customer gets a unique instance of our software, over which they have control. They define which data is integrated, who has access to it, and how it is used. We do not have unfettered access to customer data processed with Palantir software. Nor do we share, transfer, monetize, or otherwise use such data for our own business purposes. If any Palantir engineer has temporary access to data, this is at the explicit instruction of the customer, who grants individual access to their instance of the software, and assigns the permissions necessary to carry out discrete technical tasks. This access is then revoked once the project is complete.
Our software and services are used exclusively on behalf of our customers: the customer determines how the data is used. Our customers have full control over where and how analyses are performed. In addition, any relationship with a customer is completely — legally, operationally, and technologically — separate from all other customer relationships, unless, as mentioned above, our customer expressly authorizes collaboration with another entity.
Helping our customers build autonomy and independence has always been at the heart of Palantir’s approach to developing technology solutions. Integrating and analyzing data in our platforms is not an end in itself, but a means to help our customers derive insights that can be translated into operational workflows and mission outcomes. Facilitating our customers’ data-driven decision-making and thereby enabling them to act more efficiently and reliably is at the core of our business model and our success.
We strive to be transparent about the security and privacy controls in the technologies that we design, build, and deploy, publishing blogs, videos, documentation, and engaging at events.
Palantir’s products were built to thrive in the most secure and highly regulated environments. While many organizations aim for compliance, we also know that regulations will often lag against the pace of technology, so we have invested in building privacy protective technologies that anticipate the future direction of privacy and security requirements, including around the development and use of AI.
The organizations we work with often operate in highly sensitive and complex digital environments, subject to strict government regulation. To help meet their ethical and legal requirements, Palantir integrates privacy and governance features into our products and develops software through a privacy-by-design engineering approach. We are committed to helping organizations get value from their data while protecting sensitive information from misuse and abuse.
With our software, the customer can precisely determine data access controls and use limitations and conditions. In addition, the customer can specify exactly how long the data should be kept. Because a detailed history of the integration and transformation of each data point is stored, the customer can trace when and how the data was created or changed. Such versioning within Palantir platforms simplifies reporting and supports compliance with data auditing, retention, and other data handling policies.
Our platforms act as a robust governance solution, with products and features that:
Our approach enables our customers not only to meet the base privacy requirements relevant to them, but also achieve more ambitious privacy objectives.
Our partnership with the Danish National Police demonstrates how Palantir’s products enable strict data protection and responsible handling of sensitive information. The Danish National Police selected Palantir through a rigorous, multi-year public competition that included comprehensive data protection requirements. All other competitors ultimately dropped out of the competition due to the complexity of these requirements. Within the first year of implementation, even non-technical users were able to analyze activities on the platform using standard auditing functionality in Palantir software. This functionality also enables the identification of data access incidents.
No, Palantir is not a surveillance company.
Palantir develops software that enables our customers to process their own data legally, securely, and efficiently. We do not conduct surveillance, we do not provide surveillance services, nor do we sell our software for the purpose of enabling unlawful surveillance. Our software enables our customers to interact with data to which they have lawful access in ways that minimize risks of privacy and civil liberties harms.
In some cases, our software is deployed by intelligence and security organizations in service of their missions. In these instances, the use of our software for intelligence functions is conducted under lawful processes and in accordance with relevant data handling regulations. We provide an industry-leading suite of privacy and governance software to help ensure these uses minimize risks to privacy and civil liberties by incorporating concepts such as data minimization, access controls, purpose limitations, and other governance principles.
Importantly, this also means that we do not monitor or surveil customer use of our products in unlawful or privacy-intrusive ways. In accordance with administrative functions required for software-as-a-service operations, restricted Palantir personnel may have limited capacity to review de-identified product usage metrics for designated and consensual purposes of administering products, maintaining information security, fixing bugs, conducting product development, or as is elsewhere required by law. Palantir maintains clear communication with customers on these themes, especially given the complexities of modern AI model deployment, how data is stored, accessed, and shared, and as new legal requirements are developed.
No. Palantir does not provide predictive policing tools, nor do we support any predictive policing workflows. Palantir software is used by some law enforcement agencies in a limited set of jurisdictions, including in Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, so that they can perform their operational and investigative work more efficiently and in accordance with existing guidelines and procedures.
Palantir is proud to support the US military and its allies around the world, including in the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression. But our software is also used far more widely: helping the UN World Food Programme deliver life-saving assistance, supporting the resettlement of refugees, and aiding the documentation of war crimes by Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General.
Palantir was founded to support critical national security missions. Palantir’s support for the US military is one of our defining commitments as a company, as is our work across the Department of Defense, from Special Forces to Space Force. We have worked across a number of mission sets, from counterterrorism workflows in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, to the more recent focus on conventional, nation-state adversaries.
As a builder of powerful software systems, we believe that it is our responsibility to ensure the capabilities we build and workflows we enable are built out in a way that is informed by our customers’ obligations under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and their need to make critical decisions quickly and confidently. Palantir software is built to ensure that the relevant subject matter experts ultimately make these highly consequential decisions, especially those that may impact the lives and well-being of others. We think the US military needs access to the best technology America has to offer, and that we can work in partnership to ensure this technology is developed and deployed ethically and responsibly. Ultimately, the civil liberties we enjoy at home are defended by a strong and successful military, and we believe improving their ability to deter adversaries and, if necessary, fight and win wars is, itself, a moral good.
You can find more on our defense work here, on our approach to ethics and defense here and here, and on the impact of our civilian protection products here.
Palantir holds a contract with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the division of ICE whose primary mandate is to investigate transnational crime and criminal organizations, including human trafficking, drug and weapons smuggling, and money laundering. This contracting relationship began under the Obama administration in 2011 and has spanned four administrations.
Over the years, Palantir’s work with HSI has focused on the agency’s transnational criminal organization investigative mission through provisioning HSI’s case management system (ICM), the case management software for HSI. ICM has served as the system in which HSI agents track information for activities and operations.
Palantir had also previously provided HSI with an investigation and analysis system, but ceased that work as of 2024. In late 2024, HSI leadership re-engaged Palantir about bringing commercial software back into the investigative space. Following multiple discussions, in April 2025, the scope of our contract expanded to include a prototyping period of six months, focusing on enforcement prioritization, self-deportation tracking, and immigration lifecycle operations.
Palantir is enabling ICE to utilize our platform to better track the immigration lifecycle and serve our national security while promoting efficiency, transparency, and accountability. By improving data integration and data-dependent workflows, our software can help ICE more effectively and reliably perform its core functions.
Upholding fundamental human and civil rights was central to the founding mission of Palantir, and our commitment to those ideals continues today. Effective institutions of government that adhere to due process and the rule of law are critical to the protection of individuals and our democracy, and for our part, we believe technology has a critical role to play in enabling accountable government practices.
Yes — this has occurred in several cases, and Palantir critically reviews the ethical considerations of our work at regular intervals.
Palantir has a founding and enduring commitment to the support of fundamental rights, namely privacy and security, and to furthering the work of key institutions and ideals. We are dedicated to supporting the United States, and only partner with Western liberal democracies and their strategic allies. We carefully evaluate potential clients and possible applications of our software for compatibility with our values and principles. For example, as we make clear in our ongoing reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Palantir does not do business with the Communist Party of China, does not host platforms in China, and imposes restrictions on platform access from China. We do not share our software with the Russian government or operate in any capacity in Russia. Palantir has also refused to work with other international government agencies because of concerns about human rights violations.
Further, Palantir rigorously considers the ethical impact of our work in sensitive use cases, ranging from privacy considerations to the responsible use of AI. For example, we do not work on any political campaigns, or in political social media in any context. This extends to regular use cases where we are constantly analyzing the most privacy-protective way to build solutions. Palantir has a dedicated team focused on data protection and data ethics issues for many years, and a shared responsibility model for analyzing the potential impacts of our work before it occurs. You can read more about Palantir’s approach to Privacy and Civil Liberties here.
Importantly, with exceptions in certain cases where firm restrictions have been established, Palantir does not dismiss outright potential work. The core thesis of our company is to help the world’s most important institutions solve their hardest problems. Those problems are inherently complex and fraught with risk — they occupy contested spaces in the public and private realms. For Palantir to operate from a position of pure avoidance over any hypothetical risk would also mean foregoing the substantial positive impact for good that we could have, and have demonstrated over the last 20 years. Therefore, we see it as our responsibility to comprehensively examine the issue space before committing to or excluding an opportunity. Ultimately, we seek to make the best-informed, holistic decisions based on a deep understanding of both the risks and opportunities to contribute to critical mission outcomes and the mitigation of attendant risks, as opposed to relying exclusively on general perceptions and sentiments that often reflect prejudgments and political biases that may blind decision-makers to a fuller understanding of what’s at stake.
Palantir’s software platforms are built to enable maximal customer control and assurances around the use of their data in adherence to applicable regulatory, institutional, or other requirements. It is central to our technology infrastructure, security posture, value proposition, and client trust that customer licensing of Palantir software places the customer in the full role of data controller and owner of all analytics and decision-making capabilities that flow from its use.
Though there is a common and persistent misconception that US software provides a “backdoor” to surveillance by US intelligence and security services, this is neither how we operate nor what we believe to be the appropriate role of a trusted technology provider. Beyond operating strictly as a data processor and providing explicit legal and strong technical assurances to reinforce customer control over their data through the use of Palantir software, Palantir also works with customers with acute concerns to further address specific risks of customer data requisition by the US government through legal process or other means.
Palantir’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. Alex Karp, has often expressed his admiration for Europe’s social market economy and the tradition and vast experience of European industry. As our partnerships with European companies deepen, we believe it is increasingly important to consider not just where technology originates, but how it is implemented and governed.
Palantir encourages a refocusing of the discourse around European digital sovereignty to address more concrete considerations of data control and decision autonomy, rather than over-indexing on the belief that all digital components must be built from scratch in Europe by European firms. To build capacity tomorrow, Europe must focus on adopting the tools that work today — regardless of whether they were designed in Silicon Valley or its technology hubs — and bootstrapping adoption and further development on top of a firm foundation of proven tech.
Not all tech must be homegrown. European public and private sector institutions should continue to insist that procured tools, regardless of their provenance, place primacy on data control and data protection that European users can demonstrably rely upon, as with Palantir’s products. Decision-making authority should also remain at the local or regional chain of command. Technology components built with trust should serve to reinforce the self-reliance and capacity of Europe’s defense agencies and alliances to inform and execute operations, planning, strategy, and tactics.
Palantir has partnered with the US government across a variety of domains, including intelligence, defense, healthcare, and others, since our founding in 2003. While the policies and priorities of each administration vary, we see our role as an enduring partner for the US government to ensure it has access to the cutting edge of commercially developed technology for critical missions. Palantir maintains a robust, proactive risk analysis framework for evaluating work with all partners, including the US government, and this is applied to new and existing opportunities at regular, key intervals. We only support work that is in alignment with our values and the importance we place on preserving and furthering privacy and civil liberties.
This commitment to support the United States and our adherence to non-partisan, value-aligned work remains consistent under the current administration, as it has under previous administrations and in those to follow. Palantir exists to serve the institutions themselves, regardless of the party in power.
You can read more about our ongoing support of the US government here.
Global organizations are often faced with operating challenges either across different jurisdictions or in partnership with other entities in their industry. Data is subject to different regulations depending on where it is held, who needs access to it, and for what purpose. Palantir’s platforms enable global organizations to securely collaborate with full control over what data is shared, with whom, and under what conditions, all at the data owner’s discretion.
Skywise is a prime example of how our products enable secure and controlled collaboration within and between organizations. Skywise is a digital ecosystem for the entire aviation industry, provided by Airbus and powered by Palantir Foundry. Airlines and suppliers in the aviation industry worldwide use Skywise to improve operational efficiency and safety, and prevent delays. This collaboration allows suppliers to optimize their inventory and reduce delivery delays. Airbus is accelerating production and developing new business models. Skywise connects different organizations into a single ecosystem. This collaboration is made possible by a unified data integration architecture in which participants can manage their own information and work together toward a common goal by securely exchanging specific data.
Importantly, as described in the sections above, wherever Palantir’s platforms are used to facilitate sharing across organizations, it is done so at the direction of those organizations, with limited scope and purpose as determined by data owners, and with regard for any applicable legal, policy, and technical requirements.
When looking for new colleagues, we look for people who are passionate about what they do and invigorated by our mission. To get the most out of our software, Palantir needs people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences. We’ve hired former artists, Olympic athletes, opera singers, and nuclear physicists, as well as Veterans and industry leaders.
We hire new graduates, but also people who are experts in their fields. What unites us is an unwavering passion and dedication to our mission. Wherever you are, and whatever team you work in, you are part of a group of people who work together to build solutions to the most important problems, in a company that values the best ideas. That’s our engineering culture.
If you’re excited about working on the world’s most important problems and want the freedom to solve them, we want to work with you. Read about the application process here.
Anyone can sign up for our AI platform, Palantir AIP, and test it out for themselves. In fact, we encourage this to see firsthand how our software works.
For media inquiries, please contact media@palantir.com. To learn more about Palantir products, please visit www.palantir.com.
About Palantir was originally published in Palantir Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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