How Defense Efforts Align with Human Rights
Palantir’s Founding Connection to Human Rights
Palantir has its origins and identity in the defense of the values and traditions of liberal democratic societies. Our company was founded in response to the 9/11 attacks with the mission of supporting bedrock defense and intelligence institutions without compromising the protection of the right to privacy and the enjoyment of civil liberties. Our partnerships in the U.S. defense space continue to this day.
While Palantir has grown, our roots in security and defense remain deep, and continue to ground us in our initial and enduring mission. These beliefs, exemplified by our pride in partnering with the U.S. military, are something we have never shied away from. We assert today, just as we did at Palantir’s founding over 20 years ago, that supporting the U.S. — along with the values, traditions, and principles it represents — and its global allies and partners is the best means of ensuring the protection of fundamental rights and liberties around the world.
In earlier posts, we explained Palantir’s privacy-first engineering approach and launched a series about how we instill our commitment to AI ethics and responsible AI directly into the product development of Palantir AIP. Core to these pieces, and our Human Rights Policy, is our position that privacy and security need not be held as mutually exclusive, although they often exist in tension with each other. By embracing that complexity — i.e., taking a pragmatic approach to navigating complexity in our products and work — we further the advancement of challenging institutional missions while also helping to ensure the protection of privacy and other fundamental rights.
In this piece, we examine another tension in the space of human rights: how we reconcile the overlap between respecting fundamental rights and working in defense. We also demonstrate different platform features and capabilities that we deploy with our defense customers to incorporate International Humanitarian Law (IHL) [1], and Civilian Protection aims into their use of our software.
How Does Palantir Conceptualize Human Rights and Working In Defense?
As a company operating at the intersection of technology and military applications, Palantir faces complex challenges in balancing its work with the U.S. military and its commitment to human rights. The defense of nation-states and their institutions through military capabilities may raise tensions with protection of fundamental rights. We acknowledge how our products can be and are used, including in decision support frameworks that enable kinetic actions, such as targeting decisions in conflict. War, by its nature, threatens lives — both of combatants deliberately and non-combatants as unintended collateral damage — and the rights to safety and security. Yet war can also serve as the means to defend and uphold these very rights when prosecuted responsibly and justly. Palantir tackles this tension head-on, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the deep interconnection between security and human rights.
Our commitment to fundamental rights is framed through a core belief: strong institutions, such as the U.S. military, play an essential role in defending human dignity and liberty. Human rights truly flourish when states and their institutions ensure the individual benefits and enjoyment of those rights. For example, the right to education requires a functional education system, and rights to security and life depend on peace and protection from aggressors.
At the heart of Palantir’s work in defense is the understanding that security is a prerequisite for the realization of most human rights. Without security, other rights — such as the right to life, liberty, and property (including one’s own bodily security and integrity) — cannot be guaranteed. This aligns with the view that military actions, when conducted ethically and legally, protect the rights of individuals both within and beyond national borders. Palantir sees its role as enabling ethical defense missions, helping to ensure military operators conduct their duties in ways that minimize harm and maximize respect for fundamental rights.
Importantly, Palantir does not absolve itself from the responsibility to ensure our products are built ethically, function properly, and place the right information in front of experts to inform sound decision-making. Compared to a traditional SaaS model, Palantir sets a high bar to ensure our platforms are developed and deployed responsibly. (For more details on how Palantir incorporates human rights into its business practices, see our company’s Human Rights Policy.)
Finally, the company’s involvement in the defense sector is not solely about supporting military power but about ensuring it is wielded ethically, responsibly, and in a manner that upholds international legal standards, such as IHL.
Why Does Palantir Prioritize Work with the U.S. Military?
Palantir firmly believes in the importance of security and defense for protecting human rights, despite the criticism we receive for those military collaborations. Many in the American tech industry are hesitant or refuse to work with government defense initiatives, concerned about the militarization of technology and potential unethical uses. This frequent tension between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military is marked by arguments that any defense involvement contradicts values of peace and human dignity.
This criticism raises the question of why Palantir continues to prioritize and grow our work in defense, such as the recently expanded partnership with Project Maven Smart System. As we conceptualize defense as a key enabler of human rights, our position is rooted in a strong belief that engagement, especially with those institutions charged with the preservation of national security, is the best means we have of ensuring the continued enjoyment of fundamental rights themselves.
We reject the false dichotomy presented by many tech companies that working with the military opposes human rights. Instead, we view our partnership with the U.S. military as a contribution to global security and human rights. Robust national defense is not in opposition to human rights, but a critical component of realizing them. To refuse to work with the U.S. military would be a failure to recognize the military’s role in defending democratic institutions and the rules-based order that has undergirded decades of relative peace, stability, and prosperity. This order, while imperfect, has been foundational to the protection of human rights worldwide, let alone our ability to exist as a business in the U.S. enjoying the benefits of American prosperity and innovation.
Palantir asserts that by engaging with the defense sector, we are positioned to help promote and support more ethically defensible outcomes. For example, Palantir’s technology enhances accountability and ethical decision-making in conflict zones and supports human rights missions, such as documenting war crimes. This proactive and intentional engagement with the defense sector is a critical part of Palantir’s approach to ethical engineering practices.
How Does Palantir Balance Ethical Duty and National Security In Product Design?
Palantir’s product design philosophy centers on embracing complexity and balancing competing equities. This approach enables us to solve critical problems using highly sensitive data without compromising privacy and security. By adhering to best practices such as data minimization, robust access controls, and explainable, accountable AI, Palantir ensures that operational outcomes strengthen institutions while maintaining ethical standards.
Ethical Principles in Defense
Palantir applies its commitment to ethics in two concrete ways:
- Embedding Ethical Principles into the Defense Platform: This is done explicitly, via features which instantiate policy intended to reduce civilian harm placed in front of qualified human operators. For example, embedded and automated checks for collateral concerns in the vicinity of targets are a prime example of translating human rights and IHL into practical, operational tools. These technologies aim to help U.S. military personnel and their allies operate in accordance with doctrine, improving decision-making in real-time and reducing the potential for unintended harm to civilians. By integrating tools that allow military operators to make informed, legally compliant decisions, Palantir is helping to ensure that the U.S. military can meet its defense obligations while upholding international law and human rights standards. These tools also enable transparency and accountability, which are critical for protecting human rights in wartime, and keep humans in the loop for operational decisions. By enabling decisions to be traceable and justifiable under international law, Palantir’s technology helps military operators act responsibly and ethically, even in the most challenging situations.
- Supporting Ethical Decision-Making Beyond Specific Tools: Palantir’s core technology integrates and operationalizes disparate data, enabling faster and more informed decision-making. In high-intensity conflict environments, where decisions have profound consequences, this capability is crucial. Centralizing real-time intelligence feeds allow warfighters to positively identify adversaries and protect forces and allies with the speed necessary to save lives.
Palantir acknowledges the ethical challenges inherent in our defense work, but we frame these challenges as part of a broader duty to contribute to national security and human rights protections. This approach demonstrates that technology can be a force for good, even in sectors with significant ethical concerns.
Incorporating Human Rights Into Defense Work Via Civilian Protection Workflows
Incorporating IHR and other doctrine into defense products is essential. The U.S. military employs a robust methodology for estimating the impact of operations in targeting on the battlefield. This methodology provides a replicable and consistent means of informing proportionality, a core consideration in IHL. The recent DoD Instruction 3000.17 on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response advances the standards Palantir’s partners uphold above and beyond IHL.
DoD Instruction 3000.17, pg. 25:
“Commanders should take additional protective measures not required by the law of war as they deem appropriate to the circumstances when planning and conducting military operations, such as […] Considering other possible alternatives to an attack against a military objective that poses risks of civilian harm, even when the attack would be lawful.”
Palantir embraces this ambition and works to implement long-standing and forward-looking U.S. doctrine in our platform. Here, we share features that detail how our platform directly supports the civilian protection goals outlined above.
Scenario: Planning an Anticipated Operation
Suppose this notional scenario: U.S. military users of Palantir software plot an anticipated operation by the adversary. This is done in Gaia, Palantir’s geospatial intelligence application for everything from strategic decision-making to tactical-level operations to intelligence and analysis. They build a diagram of a likely move by an enemy armored contingent to take high ground in a rural area (example 1).
The Challenge
Although the enemy’s intentions may be understood, the picture above is incomplete, especially regarding the civilian environment. Military analysts may have labeled the area as “rural” without understanding the civilian infrastructure and presence. Operators cannot easily reference this intelligence against the Modernized Integrated Database (MIDB) No Strike List (NSL) [2].
A Partial Solution
An immediate remediation can be to integrate canonical data sources of protected sites, such as the U.S.-maintained MIDB, directly into the user interface (though the data here are notional). In U.S. military targeting workflows, facilities in the MIDB No Strike List (NSL) must be accounted for, and collateral damage against them must be mitigated as much as reasonably possible. Palantir’s platform shows MIDB NSL data by default (see screenshots below), putting this critical information at the forefront of decision-makers.
Outcome
By incorporating the NSL directly into Gaia, operators are informed of a church in the intended area of operations. This information would have been surfaced in the mandatory order of operations, but by bringing MIDB into Gaia, Palantir supports doctrinally required steps in the targeting lifecycle and allows operators to use a single platform to understand the complete picture of information. This also sets the basis for how the platform enables operators to exceed what is minimally required by DoD Instruction 3000.17.
Scenario: Dynamic Battlefield and Up-to-date Intelligence
Continuous Updates
Palantir software can do much more than pulling in the NSL. In a dynamic battlefield, up-to-date intelligence is key. MIDB may be outdated or miss elements of the civilian environment. And while U.S. military personnel may have all the data required to inform the right operational decision, it could exist across different systems and formats, requiring manual compilation. This takes time and implicates efficacy if multiple incongruous systems require cross-checking before making a decision.
Enter the “implicit” aspects of Palantir software, which help to uphold IHL. The ability to seamlessly integrate dozens of live data feeds, such as recent satellite imagery, enables warfighters to validate the reality on the ground. This informs a more accurate, complete, and dynamic view of the landscape, allowing operators to analyze potential variables when making targeting or other operational decisions.
Challenge
In this scenario, our notional warfighters observe a small village proximate to the church, not captured in our initial data source. Operators can directly annotate Gaia (screenshot below), and these changes are immediately visible to any member of the unit viewing the same map. This feature enhances shared understanding and decision-making, and, in a military context, compounds knowledge of the landscape and ensures that on-the-ground context is not lost, even when individuals rotate out of deployments. With this new information, operators realize that the adversary’s expected path intersects with the village. This brings us to a core problem: how can product design place at its center civilian considerations and responsible decision-making?
Platform Solutions
Our notional warfighters decide to interdict the adversary, conducting an operation to prevent the tactical outcome (adversary gaining high ground) and mitigate collateral damage (village and church being in the line of fire). They move from Gaia to Target Workbench (see screenshot below), another application in the Palantir ecosystem for target identification, coordination, and management. Targets are grouped in columns by stage of development, from possible targets to identified adversaries, to conducting post-strike analysis.
Scenario: Ensuring Quality Decision-Making
Customizable Checklists
Checklists in the Target Workbench interface (see screenshot below) facilitate quality decision-making. Targets can have different requirements that must be met before they can move to the next stage. In this scenario, a target can progress from initial identification only after recent imagery intelligence corroborates the initial detection. These requirements instantiate key processes but remain highly configurable. They are entirely user-defined and are intended to reflect the commander’s intent.
Revisiting the Challenge
Returning to our challenge, how can our user ensure they successfully limit enemy operations while minimizing collateral damage? The workflow of identifying a target, validating its position, selecting the appropriate munition, and coordinating all response steps to deliver the intended effect is complex. Further complicating this picture is the crucial question: how can the platform help elevate collateral damage concerns without impinging on operational efficacy?
Automated Checks
One technical solution is having an automated check on targets to indicate if any annotations added in Gaia are in the vicinity of the target. The unit can configure a requirement for a user to acknowledge the results of the check prior to moving it to the next stage. This enables users to quickly check for collateral concerns at any time through the process.
Outcomes
In this notional scenario, military users conduct an operation to interdict the adversary without harming the village and church on the ground. The timeline of these actions is logged in the front-end, including recommendations inputted by users when they approved the NSL check, ensuring transparency. All users who have access to the Target Workbench board can view this log.
The Palantir platform places vital, dynamic information in front of military operators, enabling them to 1) act on the complete picture of data; 2) update and share knowledge; 3) readily leverage NSLs to minimize collateral damage; and 4) rely on clear logging for auditability. These capabilities empower Palantir’s defense customers to act decisively with greater throughput and precaution, helping the U.S. military to understand and respond to the complex, real-time environment, including civilian considerations.
While this blog post is not intended to provide an exhaustive overview of related capabilities, our intent is to illustrate how Palantir actively addresses the tension between humanitarian concerns and global security in conflict situations.
Looking Forward
Palantir’s commitment to upholding human rights while supporting defense operations demonstrates that these two objectives are not only compatible but also intertwined facets of enabling more ethical approaches to defense missions. By embedding features into our platform that prioritize transparency, accountability, and civilian protection, Palantir is helping military operations better align with international law and humanitarian standards, even in the face of complex and high-stakes situations.
Our proactive engagement with this critical aspect of defense work allows us to play a significant role in influencing the ethical application of our technology and contributing to safeguarding fundamental rights globally. Palantir’s efforts stand as a testament to the belief that security is a prerequisite for the realization of human rights. Responsible defense efforts, when guided by moral and legal principles, serve to protect these rights.
By recognizing and navigating the inherent tensions between national defense and human rights, Palantir actively shapes a future where technology not only advances security but also upholds the dignity and freedoms that security is meant to protect. This is the path to ethical defense: a balance of power with principle, ensuring that human rights remain central to the mission of global security.
Authors
Mikey Adams, Privacy and Civil Liberties Human Rights Lead, Palantir Technologies
Wendy R. Anderson, Senior Vice President, Federal, National Security, Palantir Technologies
Courtney Bowman, Global Director of Privacy and Civil Liberties Engineering, Palantir Technologies
Esteban Burgos-Herrera, Privacy and Civil Liberties US Government Lead, Palantir Technologies
References
[1] As detailed in our blog titled AI, Automation, and the Ethics of Modern Warfare: “Sometimes called ‘Law of Armed Conflict’ or ‘International Humanitarian Law,’ the Law of War is specifically intended to address the circumstances of armed conflict, and comprises both customary international law and treaties. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) maintains introductory material at https://www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law for readers interested in the underlying treaties and customs, whose concepts are then implemented by state actors. For example, the United States Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual at https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/DoD%20Law%20of%20War%20Manual%20-%20June%202015%20Updated%20Dec%202016.pdf?ver=2016-12-13-172036-190.”
[2] The No Strike List (NSL) collates information on civilian presence, infrastructure, and protected sites (ex: churches, schools), among other data, for reference by military operators to ensure targeting decisions incorporate holistic proportionality assessments. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) Joint Publication 3–60: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Joint_Staff/21-F-0520_JP_3-60_9-28-2018.pdf
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