Editor’s Note: In light of the recent New York Times article, this blog post seeks to identify and respond to specific allegations, assumptions, and statements made in the article about Palantir, offering corrections to inaccuracies and clarifying misrepresentations about the work Palantir does and doesn’t do.
Overview
At Palantir, we welcome, to the greatest extent possible, transparency, scrutiny, and even active criticism in relation to our work at large, and with the U.S. government in particular. But at the same time, we expect credible reporting — and especially reporting from a paper of record — to hold itself to the highest standard of journalistic integrity. The falsehoods and misleading statements documented below in relation to The New York Times May 30, 2025 article appear to fall well below such standards and even raise questions about the authors’ adherence to The New York Times’ Guidelines on Integrity.
Despite a wealth of information in the public domain about Palantir’s products and business, recurring false themes about our work persist and are exacerbated by deficient, flawed, and at times malicious reporting. We don’t respond to every flawed or egregiously misleading article, as we prefer to focus our efforts more on continuing to serve our customers’ missions as effectively and ethically as possible. In this case, however, given the stature of this paper of record and the high regard many of us continue to have for it, it is especially important to hold the article to account and state plainly what it gets wrong about Palantir and our work.
Palantir is committed to providing transparency around who we are and what we do. Since our founding, we have always placed the preservation of privacy and civil liberties at the center of our mission. That is why the Times’ allegation that “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans” — falsely claiming that Palantir is actively collecting data or otherwise providing infrastructure for some “master list of personal information” in order to surveil the American public — is so reckless and irresponsible in its falsehood. Beneath the titular allegation, the recurring insinuations in this article are that Palantir has the ability to 1) proactively share data across federal government sources; or 2) access, scrape, or otherwise compile data on American citizens for its own purposes. Both of these assertions are also false.
These false allegations are in direct contradiction with our company’s founding mission and our commitment to privacy and civil liberties, principles that have guided our work for over 20 years, helping the U.S. government deliver essential services to the American people.
Claims & Responses
In the following, we take specific quotes and themes from the article and, in the aim of good faith transparency, walk through where there may be partial or whole truths, complete inaccuracies, or misleading insinuations that require clarification. We strive to be as exhaustive as possible. There may, however, be individual clauses or sub-claims not fully addressed. This is not an attempt on our part to skirt the truth but a matter of focusing on responding to the most blatant allegations. We are open to engaging further on these claims with any stakeholders earnestly interested in knowing the real story.
Headline: “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans”
- This headline is provably false. Palantir is not a vendor on any master database project to unify databases across federal agencies. Palantir has not proposed the US Government build a ‘master list’ for the surveillance of citizens, nor have we been asked to consider building such a system for any customer. Such a hypothetical project is fundamentally at odds with Palantir’s values and our commitment to work in support of liberal democracies.
- This headline also misrepresents the very nature of Palantir’s business. Palantir does not own or control data that our customers integrate using our software, meaning Palantir does not direct the collection, scraping, sourcing, or otherwise “compilation” of data on behalf its customers. We also do not provide data mining as a service.
- Additionally, “compile” is a misleading term used throughout this article, which consistently implies that Palantir is proactively collecting data on people in a malignant way.
- Palantir is a software company and, in the context of our customer engagements, operates as a “data processor”– our software is used by customers to manage and make use of their data. This is a crucial distinction, as detailed in our recent blog post Palantir is still not a data company.
“In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”
- This statement, which provides one of the initiating premises of the article, is misleading and speculative. A close reading of the Executive Order is merited to better assess the intent and to observe the Order’s language that specifically directs any data sharing efforts to align with existing legal authorities and procedural standards, and for the express purpose of addressing inefficiencies in government programs. Inefficiency, waste, fraud, and abuse reduction initiatives have been nonpartisan and regular focuses of multiple administrations. The statement draws on a vague rhetorical maneuver (“raising questions”) to extrapolate from a common sense government initiative — that of IT modernization — to the presumption of nefarious and dystopian intent.
- There is a genuine need and indeed legislated requirements (e.g., The Modernizing Government Technology Act, The Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA)) to update IT systems and digital infrastructure in the federal government in order to improve operational efficiencies and prevent unnecessary waste. Such efforts can and should be pursued responsibly, to be sure. But the article’s imputation from the initiation of such efforts to “raising questions” of malicious intent appears to overreach in the face of the Order’s explicit acknowledgement of the necessity of pursuing these goals to the “extent consistent with law,” including deeply entrenched legislation such as the Privacy Act of 1974 and FISMA.
“[B]ehind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.”
- This statement is grounded in a false premise. There is no contract under the Trump administration for Palantir to begin something like a whole-of-government master database on Americans, as the article seems to imply. Such an effort would not only run afoul of any number of legislative, policy, and procedural restrictions on the federal government, but it would also be at odds with Palantir’s long-established and deeply entrenched regard for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.
- The statement is further misleading. Palantir has longstanding work with the U.S. government, going back to the founding of the company. In fact, the company was started with the driving focus of providing software to support the U.S. government and its allies to more effectively and responsibly manage and make use of their data. The company has grown over recent years, but these statements imply a surreptitious, even ominous, conspiracy to amass data for the purposes of surveilling the U.S. public, which is categorically incorrect.
- Finally, Palantir is but one of many software vendors used by the U.S. government and does not, as this article implies, have a monopoly on recent government data processing contracts.
“The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.”
- This statement distorts the truth. It is no secret that Palantir has long worked with the U.S. government. As reported in our public filings, revenue from U.S. government customers was $373.0 million for the three months ended on March 31, 2025, and in the last quarter of the prior administration (Q4 2024), our U.S. government revenue grew 45% year over year. We are honored to have grown in that mission of support since the founding of the company and we remain optimistic that — on the merits of our products and business focus — we can further expand our impact under the current administration.
- The mentioned contracts are a matter of public record, with many of them beginning (either in negotiation or signing) under the previous Biden administration. It is false to imply that continued growth in our federal government work has been solely the result of the Trump administration coming into office. The insinuation is particularly tenuous to make for anyone (including in the media) with even a rudimentary understanding of the complexities and protracted processes (in the rightful service of transparency and fairness) of government contracting.
“Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.”
- This statement is misleading. Palantir has longstanding work with the I.R.S., supporting the agency’s criminal investigative workflows starting in 2018, which is a matter of public record. Discussions with customer and prospective customer agencies are no grounds for insinuation of nefarious intent. On the contrary, Palantir, as a U.S. federal government contractor, has discussions with agencies in the government because that is simply part of the business development cycle. Finally, Palantir’s privacy protective technology has been used to enforce privacy laws in our work with the I.R.S..
- Moreover, separate discussions with various government agencies simply do not represent evidence of some broader effort to build a “master list”. The suggestion, again, misperceives the structure of our customer licenses and product infrastructure. All of our government contracts and the corresponding deployments of software instances are unique to the contracting agency, with legal, procedural, and technical guardrails in place to protect each agency’s data.
“The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.”
- This statement is false. While it’s unclear which agencies are included in this so-called ‘push’, the two listed are departments with whom Palantir has longstanding contracts (DHS contracts date back to 2010 and HHS contracts date back over a decade), as well as pursuing new opportunities. The further suggestion that separate contracts with federal agencies “paves the way” to facilitate merging data across those agencies is inaccurate because it fundamentally distorts how our product and business contracts work. It suggests that “adopting Foundry” somehow means that all data by the contracting agencies is then readily merged within a single system. But these are not single systems — they are multiple, distinct instances of a single software product called Foundry. The suggestion is the equivalent of claiming that a spreadsheet application can ‘easily merge information’ across all users of the application — it distorts how software works.
- Our work with the U.S. government is a cornerstone of our business, and our ability to continue to operate relies on trust within those institutions. The statement that Palantir’s software products ‘pave the way … for merg[ing] information’ without apparent regard for the legal, procedural, and fundamental technical restrictions on such activity is dangerously wrong because it would represent a massive breach of that trust and be an existential threat to our business.
- It is also wrong to suggest that any sharing (or so-called ‘merging’) of data across partner agencies implies malicious or motivated by bad intent. One need only query one’s preferred search engine for ‘government data usage or data sharing agreement’ to understand the shape and commonality of efforts by federal government agencies to cooperate on initiatives involving limited, purpose-specific information sharing to support legitimate cross-agency workflows.
“Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the [master list/database] project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials.”
- This statement is false. Palantir is not a vendor on any “master list” or similar project to unify databases across federal agencies. To our knowledge, no such effort exists driven by the Department of Government Efficiency or otherwise.
“At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.”
- This statement distorts the truth. Palantir does not control where its employees go after leaving the company. Where this statement becomes misleading is by implying that either prior relationships with former Palantir employees or any more recent discussions between Palantir and government officials (DOGE or otherwise) lend credence to a conspiracy to surveil the American public.
“Some current and former Palantir employees have been unnerved by the work. The company risks becoming the face of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, four employees said, and could be vulnerable if data on Americans is breached or hacked. Several tried to distance the company from the efforts, saying any decisions about a merged database of personal information rest with Mr. Trump and not the firm.” and “This month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its endeavors with Mr. Trump…a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it.”
- This passages draws conclusions and extrapolations about both how Palantir holds its work and how its employees (current and former) hold the work. Palantir views its work with the U.S. government as an enduring mission that transcends political shifts and administrations. That work should not be halted and restarted based on public opinion towards a particular administration. The small number of former Palantir employees raising concerns are certainly entitled to express their views on these matters. They might, however, have been better served by first exploring a conversation with their former colleagues through which to better understand that which they sought to protest. The statement about current and former Palantir employees’ personal beliefs is incomplete at best, in that it purports to paint a picture of broad dissent. To be clear, Palantir is not an ideological monolith, nor do we aspire to build a culture around a narrow set of beliefs or political affiliations. To the contrary, Palantir prides itself on a culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement on difficult issues related to our work.
“Mario Trujillo, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said the government typically collected data for good reasons, such as to accurately levy taxes. But “if people can’t trust that the data they are giving the government will be protected, that it will be used for things other than what they gave it for, it will lead to a crisis of trust,” he said.”
- This statement raises fair considerations that are, in fact, central to Palantir’s mission, work, and culture. Trust in the government’s ability to carry out its most vital mandates is, we believe, essential to the preservation of liberal democracies. Palantir recognizes that and it is why we have placed privacy, security, and governance features as the cornerstone of our software. For more on this, please read our Privacy and Civil Liberties engineering page and thought leadership.
- There is of course always the risk of misuse — with Palantir software as with any other software, product, or tool in government or in private hands. The reality that “technology is not ethically neutral, and can be used for good or harm,” is noted in Palantir’s code of conduct, to which all Palantir employees are accountable. We are ever mindful of such risks and build our software to help support accountability functions that can be used to audit and investigate instances of misuse or abuse of sensitive data.
“Some details of Palantir’s government contracts and DOGE’s work to compile data were previously reported by Wired and CNN.”
- This statement distorts the truth. The referenced articles propagate similar inaccuracies about Palantir’s actual work with U.S. government federal agencies. To reiterate, Palantir has no contracts with DOGE and in implying a connected network of DOGE, Palantir, and other players combining to create the alleged “master list” to surveil American citizens, The New York Times seems to favor specious fear-mongering over straight journalism.
“Palantir, which was founded in 2003 by Alex Karp and Mr. Thiel and went public in 2020, specializes in finding patterns in data and presenting the information in ways that are easy to process and navigate, such as charts and maps. Its main products include Foundry, a data analytics platform, and Gotham, which helps organize and draw conclusions from data and is tailored for security and defense purposes. In an interview last year, Mr. Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, said the company’s role was “the finding of hidden things” by sifting through data.”
- This statement presents a grossly distorted characterization of Palantir. Palantir is a software company that specializes in helping large institutions, ones that often have highly decentralized data landscapes, bring their data (that they legally have access to) together into a unified platform for effective data management, analytics, operational workflows, and accountability functions. This description of the company is misleading because it insinuates Palantir as a service-oriented company in which Palantir employees are presumably accessing work at their own discretion and conducting analytics on data for their own purposes. In reality, Palantir itself does not engage in “finding patterns in data” for its own purposes, but rather our business is to provide our customers with the software capabilities to use their data effectively and in accordance to their legitimate mandates.
- To state clearly, Palantir implementation engineers interact with enterprise customer data when expressly directed to by our customers. This only occurs under their direction, within their unique and secure domains, and for durations and under terms dictated by our customers. Customers retain full control over their data for their purposes and Palantir does not share, transfer, monetize, or otherwise use customers’ data for its own business purposes.
“Mr. Trump’s election in November boosted Palantir’s stock, which has risen more than 140 percent since then. Mr. Karp, who donated to the Democratic Party last year, has welcomed Mr. Trump’s win and called Mr. Musk the most “qualified person in the world” to remake the U.S. government.”
- This statement draws false conclusions and and confuses correlation with causation. While it is correct to observe that Palantir’s stock price has grown since the 2024 election, the further insinuation that this growth is somehow directly attributable — in whole or even in part — to the second Trump administration seems to be without merit and in service to the article’s false ambitions of claiming that Palantir is actively engaged in assembling some master database on Americans at the behest of the administration. By comparison, Palantir’s stock price also grew ~320% under the Biden administration. Would that growth also be tied to some sinister plot or improper affiliation with the prior administration? Or might it be worth entertaining the prospect that the company’s market success has at least something to do with recognition of our products as truly valuable to organizations around the world — from the U.S. government, to humanitarian orgs, to the private sector (where, incidentally, revenue has grown at a faster rate than Palantir’s government business)?
“At the I.R.S., Palantir engineers joined in April to use Foundry to organize data gathered on American taxpayers, two government officials said. Their work began as a way to create a single, searchable database for the I.R.S., but has since expanded, they said. Palantir is in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S., they said. A Treasury Department representative said that the I.R.S. was updating its systems to serve American taxpayers, and that Palantir was contracted to complete the work with I.R.S. engineers.”
- This statement distorts the truth. The work described here is a feature of our business, like countless other software providers, in that we provide technical support to our customers to enable their use of our platforms to manage and use their data effectively. The extent to which this statement insinuates either nefarious intent to apply sensitive I.R.S. data outside of legitimately mandated I.R.S. roles or to suggest an impropriety on the part of the supporting Palantir employees is inaccurate and misleading. Palantir has longstanding contracts spanning multiple administrations to provide enterprise software to the I.R.S., as we do with many other federal agencies.
“Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time. Some D.H.S. officials exchanged emails with DOGE officials in February about merging some Social Security information with records kept by immigration officials, according to screenshots of the messages viewed by The New York Times. In a statement, Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, did not address Palantir’s new work with the agency and said the company “has had contracts with the federal government for 14 years.””
- This statement is correct with respect to Palantir’s work with ICE. Palantir has worked with ICE since the first Obama administration. We did recently sign a contract expansion across three lines of additional work. We cannot, however, speak to conversations between government officials to which we were not a party.
“Palantir representatives have also held talks with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education to use the company’s technology to organize the agencies’ data, according to two Palantir employees and officials in those agencies.”
- This statement distorts the truth. Palantir has worked with the federal government, across many agencies, spanning several administrations. This and other similar statements throughout the article, however, position the normal course of our business as a federal contractor as somehow nefarious and motivated by a desire to monitor and surveil the U.S. public. Further, as mentioned above, the instances of our software platforms associated with each of our distinct government agency engagements are unique, agency-specific, and restricted by legal, procedural, and technical measures.
“The goal of uniting data on Americans has been quietly discussed by Palantir engineers, employees said, adding that they were worried about collecting so much sensitive information in one place. The company’s security practices are only as good as the people using them, they said. They characterized some DOGE employees as sloppy on security, such as not following protocols in how personal devices were used.”
- This statement is false. Palantir is not a vendor on any “master list” or “merged database” project to unify data across federal agencies. As a company that focuses on building privacy and civil liberties protective technologies, as well as one that fosters a culture of open dialogue on controversial topics impacting our business, we consider many types of risks associated with our customer engagements and products in order to help avoid or mitigate concerns. There likely may still be residual risks of misuse for any product or tool, technical or otherwise. But our efforts to discuss, understand, and address such risks are one of the reasons that some of the most critical institutions in the world spanning public, private, and non-profit sectors trust Palantir and our products.
“[S]ome employees have left after disagreements over the company’s work with the Trump administration.”
- This statement is correct. Palantir is no monolith of belief, and we should not be. Employees have left over disagreements on our work, now and in the past, and we pride ourselves on a culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement over the complex but impactful domains our work touches.
Concluding Remarks
We find this reckless and irresponsible reporting by The New York Times in this article to be highly worrying during an especially volatile period in American politics. Where this article could at least consider the many legitimate ways that data could be used to improve the lives of Americans, we instead observe the incantation of a bogeyman of worst possible abuses. This reads to us less as journalism than polemical provocation. Left unchecked, the false content of this article also serves as the basis for derivative reporting that repeats, compounds, and amplifies confusion and misstatements about the actual nature of Palantir’s work with U.S. federal agencies, compounding the unfair damage already caused by the original article (see, for example, the subsequent June 6, 2025 article Palantir’s Collection of Disease Data at C.D.C. Stirs Privacy Concerns recycling many of the insinuations addressed above). To avoid the further compounding of this damage, we expect the The New York Times to take immediate measures to remedy and correct these falsehoods.
For our part, Palantir is focused on promoting trust, transparency, and efficacy in the work of federal government agencies and the civil servants at the core of that work. While we remain mindful of reasonable risks and have built our products and business to help our customers prevent or mitigate misuse and abuse of information, we also appreciate that government needs to work and fulfill its mandate to provide high quality, essential services to society.
The importance of free press and critical examination of organizations, especially those who support the ideals of the United States and its institutions, is absolutely necessary and must be upheld during times of increased polarization. Palantir is always willing to engage in rigorous discourse with those seeking truth. However, this article’s primary aim seems to be to spur fear and division, based on a series of unsupported falsehoods and insinuations that collectively paint a picture that Palantir is leading the charge on a master database that would compromise the privacy and civil liberties of the American people — those same fundamental rights that we as a company have spent twenty years seeking to enshrine and protect.
Correcting the Record: Responses to the May 30, 2025 New York Times Article on Palantir was originally published in Palantir Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.