Palantir, the military and intelligence contractor, has been embroiled in continuous controversy throughout the Trump administration’s second term. The company was directly involved in the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, an effort implicated in numerous deaths. Furthermore, Palantir has been linked to U.S. airstrikes that leveled a school in Iran, resulting in over 120 schoolchildren fatalities.
Last week, the Peter Thiel-cofounded company intensified scrutiny by releasing a 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s upcoming 2025 book, “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.” This corporate manifesto, described by critics as a “hideous ideology” and an “example of technofascism,” further fueled criticism against the firm.
According to Wired magazine, Palantir’s seemingly endless string of negative press has left current and former employees shaken, with some beginning to question if “they’re the bad guys.” One former employee told Wired, “I think there’s a bit of an identity crisis and a bit of a challenge. We were supposed to be the ones who were preventing a lot of these abuses. Now we’re not preventing them. We seem to be enabling them.”
While Palantir prides itself “on a culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement over the complex areas we work on,” as a spokesperson informed Wired, employees and alumni are required to sign non-disparagement agreements, prohibiting them from speaking to the press.
Internally, employees have expressed their growing concerns over Palantir’s relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Slack threads, particularly after the shooting deaths of numerous protesters. Wired reported that Palantir began auto-deleting conversations in at least one Slack channel after seven days, raising further questions about transparency.
Palantir maintains that its ICE contract allows the firm to make a “difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes,” according to an internal blog post.
Following the deadly strike on the Iranian school, one employee questioned in a Slack channel, as quoted by Wired, “were we involved,” and whether the company is “doing anything to stop a repeat.”
The company’s most recent manifesto summarizing Karp’s book also provoked a heated internal reaction. “I’m curious why this had to be posted,” a frustrated employee wrote in a Slack thread viewed by Wired. “Especially on the company account. On the practical level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the US (for sure in the current political climate), and I doubt we need this in the US?”
Another employee commented, “I’ve already had multiple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post.” A third worker remarked, “It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs. I hope no one who decided to put this out is surprised.”