Silicon Valley’s darkest and most secretive unicorn “has finally made it big”. But at what cost to the rest of us?
For almost two years, the British government has been holding an inquiry-cum-whitewash into the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the recent witnesses to that inquiry was Louis Mosley, the executive vice-president of Palantir Technologies UK (and, incidentally, the grandson of the 1930s British fascist Oswald Mosley), who during his testimony saw a rare opportunity to plug his company’s products. It was one he seized upon with relish.
The UK government, he said, should invest in a “common operating system” for its data, encompassing the full gamut of departments and local authorities — a system that Palantir would presumably be more than happy to develop:
“[The government should] deploy this common operating system capability immediately and not wait until the next pandemic or civil challenge on the scale of COVID-19 is already underway. An investment of this kind is already long overdue.”
This comment is very similar to a remark made by Palantir’s Chief Technology Operator Shyam Sankar in 2021 — with regard to the US government:
Turning to government, we continue to advance our mission of becoming the US government’s central operating system as we extend our footprint across defence, healthcare and civilian agencies.
As outlandish as the idea may seem that one company could aspire to exclusively provide and manage a central operating system for the governments of both the US and the UK, there can be no doubting Palantir’s ambitions to expand its influence throughout government on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a company, after all, whose founder, Peter Thiel, has long marketed himself as a libertarian while lauding the benefits of monopoly capitalism and helping build the infrastructure of the modern surveillance state.
As Iain Davis writes in his excellent two-part series on the “Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate”, the “proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Elon Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise”:
Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.
What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.
Silicon Valley’s Darkest Unicorn
Palantir, Silicon Valley’s darkest unicorn, is now reaping the rewards of the rising appetite for war and repression in the collective West — including, of course, Israel.
Few US companies have so brazenly aligned themselves with Israel during its ongoing genocide in Gaza. As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, Palantir, together with the US National Security Agency, has furnished Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities. The company has even reportedly developed software to help expedite Israel’s generation of kill lists for the Gaza strip.
In a recent panel discussion, Palantir’s Chairman (and former classmate of Thiel’s) Alex Karp described Gaza anti-genocide protesters as an “infection inside out society.”
The company Thiel founded just over 20 years ago, with CIA funding, began life by providing big data and surveillance support to military, intelligence and police agencies. Its main line of work is data fusion — taking a million disparate pieces of information and turning them into something useful.
The company was created to be the privatised version of a post-9/11 surveillance program called Total Information Awareness (TIA), as Whitney Webb has documented over the years. The program sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA but it was ostensibly shut down by Congress in 2003.
Today, Palantir Technologies’ client list includes a wide array of government departments, from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to NHS England, as well as banks, other tech firms, insurance providers and Wendy’s. A company that aspires to be “in every missile (or drone)” has found fertile room for growth in both the US’ private healthcare industry and the UK’s publicly owned NHS. While two-thirds of its sales are still US-based, the company is rapidly expanding its overseas operations, particularly to the UK.
The Trump and Starmer governments may differ wildly in terms of style, language and professed ideals, but they have some things in common. Both are looking to transform their respective countries into AI powerhouses while also launching similar full-frontal assaults against basic democratic rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech and the right to protest. Both have launched brutal crackdowns on protests against Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
Automating Deportation and Streamlining Tax Collection
To help them achieve these aims, both are turning to Peter Thiel’s Palantir. In the US, for example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build an immigration OS surveillance platform. Once operational, that platform will provide the agency with “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the United States and will also help ICE choose who to deport, according to a contract justification published in a federal register on Thursday.
A recent exposé by WIRED, citing IRS sources, suggests that Palantir is also participating in an effort by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to build a new “mega API” for accessing Internal Revenue Service records:
APIs are application programming interfaces, which enable different applications to exchange data and could be used to move IRS data to the cloud and access it there. DOGE has expressed an interest in the API project possibly touching all IRS data, which includes taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns, and employment data. The IRS API layer could also allow someone to compare IRS data against interoperable datasets from other agencies.
Should this project move forward to completion, DOGE wants Palantir’s Foundry software to become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and have the ability to possibly alter all IRS data in one place. It’s not currently clear who would have access to this system.
Foundry is a Palantir platform that can organize, build apps, or run AI models on the underlying data. Once the data is organized and structured, Foundry’s “ontology” layer can generate APIs for faster connections and machine learning models. This would allow users to quickly query the software using artificial intelligence to sort through agency data, which would require the AI system to have access to this sensitive information.
In other words, while sources within the Trump Administration, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, were recently claiming that Trump was toying with the idea of eliminating the IRS altogether, presumably to impress his libertarian followers, the stone-cold reality is that DOGE, with Palantir’s help, is looking to expand and streamline the IRS’ data collection and use.
The irony in all this is that while Trump has tasked both Musk (directly) and Thiel (indirectly, through DOGE’s hiring of former Palantir workers) with slashing government spending through DOGE, their own companies are hugely dependent on government contracts. In the case of Palantir, those contracts appear to be growing…
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Nick Corbishley 