Palantir

Palantir Technologies Inc. () is an American publicly traded company that develops data integration and analytics software. Palantir is headquartered in Miami, Florida, and was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings. Palantir's customer base includes federal agencies, state and local governments, international organizations, and also private companies. The company has four main operating systems: Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and AIP. Gotham is an intelligence tool used by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts, including the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense. Multiple police departments have used Gotham for crime analysis. Apollo is a platform to facilitate continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) across all environments. Its software as a service (SaaS) is one of five offerings the U.S. Department of Defense authorized for Mission Critical National Security Systems (IL5). Palantir has been used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Palantir has been criticized for its involvement in expanding government surveillance through artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems. Critics have raised concerns about its contracts with the Trump administration and the aggregation of sensitive data on Americans. Civil liberties organizations have criticized Palantir's police technology as predictive policing. CEO Alex Karp disputes this characterization. Others observe that Palantir does not collect or store data, but only helps analyze data that customers have already collected and provides services and platforms where customers retain the rights, although examples of data management failures have been noted. Some note the active or passive responsibility of Thiel and Karp in allowing conspiracy theories about Palantir to spread.