Correcting the Record: Response to the Recent American Conservative Article on Palantir

Correcting the Record: Response to the September 15, 2025 American Conservative Article on Palantir

Editor’s Note: This blog post responds to allegations published by the American Conservative questioning Palantir’s commitment to privacy and civil liberties. We believe it’s important to address misconceptions about our technology and business practices with transparency and factual accuracy.

The American Conservative article about Palantir published on September 15, 2025 contained a number of inflammatory accusations regarding Palantir, our business model, and historic or ongoing areas of work — many of which could be addressed with even the most basic attempt at due diligence to understand what we do. The article ignores the facts that we have a founding commitment to the preservation of privacy and civil liberties, that our products have been used to enforce privacy laws in the US government, that we build platforms which operationalize the highest standards of privacy and governance safeguards, and that we write and contribute extensively to discussions surrounding privacy and the creation of technological systems that respect civil liberties. Instead, this article presents an unabashed polemical screed.

Nonetheless, it is important to rebut allegations that Palantir is enabling some dystopian future of mass government surveillance, as we have with previous unfounded reports on the same topic.

To be clear and to reiterate once again, Palantir is not — and has never been — a surveillance company. We do not conduct surveillance, we do not provide surveillance services, nor do we sell our software for the purposes 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.

Statements Surrounding Palantir’s Work with US Intelligence

The article references statements from our CEO, Alex Karp, at a recent event and points to a mischaracterized portrayal of our previous work with US and international government customers as conclusive evidence of our involvement in surveilling US citizens. The article’s references to the National Security Agency’s XKEYSCORE intelligence analysis tool misrepresents the nature of our work in intelligence, alleging we were involved in “vacuuming up the private communications of millions of Americans into the ultimate system for turnkey tyranny.”

In reality, Palantir has never contracted with the NSA and therefore Palantir played no role in building the NSA’s XKEYSCORE intelligence analysis tool.

The source of these allegations, a 2017 article in The Intercept, fundamentally misconstrued both Palantir’s customer engagements and software footprint. In referring to leaked documents, it conflates the function of a limited-use, peripheral software module (“XKEYSCORE helper”) for querying select extracts under lawful interagency agreements, with the XKEYSCORE system itself. The two are as identical as a faucet in a Las Vegas household is to the entirety of the Hoover Dam.

Because declassified details of the system in question were only recently made public, we were unable to speak to these clarifications at the time of the 2017 article. Our commitment to adhere to our obligations to protect national security interests and to adhere to the nation’s laws, however, no longer constrain us from correcting these falsehoods and clarifying that the documented software connector served a marginal role in enabling legal, proportional access to data for select partner agencies, and did not, contrary to the recapitulated suggestion from your article, facilitate widespread spying on the American public.

More broadly, in our work with domestic and international government customers, our software is deployed by intelligence and security organizations in service of their missions. In these instances, the use of our software for intelligence analysis is conducted under lawful processes and in accordance with relevant data collection and processing regulations. We provide an industry-leading suite of privacy and governance software to ensure these uses minimize privacy and civil liberties risks by incorporating concepts such as data minimization, access controls, purpose limitations, and other governance principles.

Broader Statements Regarding Palantir

The rest of the article does little to establish a pattern of fact or substantiate claims, instead opting to swing for the fences by stating Palantir is simultaneously facilitating genocide, furthering a coordinated pro-Israel propaganda campaign in American media, making dossiers to crush student activism and dialogue on campus, targeting political opponents domestically, and forming “the backbone of an unconstitutional mass surveillance regime that collapses the line between American and Israeli power.” Finding facts to support these claims would indeed be difficult, as they are untrue to a point of absurdity, and do not merit a serious response.

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Correcting the Record: Response to the Recent American Conservative Article on Palantir was originally published in Palantir Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.