What Does Palantir Actually DO?

by James Corbett corbettreport.com | June 22, 2025

In case you hadn’t noticed, Palantir is everywhere these days.

That’s right, everyone’s least-favourite deep state intelligence cutout is suddenly all over the newswires.

Investopedia is touting Palantir’s record-high stock price.

The New York Times is reporting on Palantir’s new contract to create an IRS “mega-database.”

People are hitting the streets to protest Palantir’s creepy surveillance technologies.

Heck, Palantir’s Chief Technical Officer has even taken to the pages of The Free Press to brag about becoming joining the US Army as part of the Army Reserve’s new “Executive Innovation Corps” of tech nerds and businessmen.

As a Corbett Reporteer, you’ll be well-placed to understand how odd this sudden influx of attention paid to Palantir is. After all, for the past decade the only place you were likely to see anything at all about this data-mining surveillance behemoth was on Unlimited Hangout or The Last American Vagabond or The Conscious Resistance or The Corbett Report or other websites in the independent media space.

So, what’s going on? Why is Palantir suddenly the subject of such scrutiny? And what does that mean for the future of Palantir and the future of humanity?

Let’s find out.

What Is Palantir?

If you caught How Palantir Conquered the World, then you’re already up to speed on what Palantir is and why we should be so concerned about this deep state asset masquerading as a government contractor.

How Palantir Conquered the World

The Corbett Report October 23, 2022

But in case you didn’t read that important article, here’s a one-sentence summary:

Palantir, named after the magical seeing stones in Tokein’s The Lord of the Rings, is a swamp-dwelling intelligence cutout that provides panoptic surveillance and data mining software that tracks everyone and everything on behalf of the absolute worst elements of the deep state.

That about covers it. But for those who require more detail, here’s the slightly bigger picture:

In 2003, the creepy “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) office—a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) program seeking to collect, analyze and data mine every available piece of transaction, communication and travel data on every person in the world, including American citizens—was officially scrapped due to public backlash. By a remarkable co-inky-dink, at the exact same time that TIA was going down, PayPal mafia kingpin and future Bilderberg steering committee member Peter Thiel (yes, that Peter Thiel) was busy setting up Palantir Technologies Inc., a “software company” (definitely NOT a data company!!!) that, as one popular account put it, “elegantly accomplished what the TIA had set out to do.”

So impressed was disgraced ex-TIA director (and disgraced Iran-Contra criminal) John Poindexter with Palantir’s TIA-like capabilities that he personally referred the company to In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. This led to the CIA becoming the Palantir’s first and most reliable customer and also established the Palantir precedent: intelligence agencies, government agencies, police departments and many other government agencies, departments and entities could use Palantir as a cutout to avoid being directly implicated in surveillance, spying, data mining and other questionable activities.

And that brings us to today, when Palantir is earning upwards of $3 billion a year providing its AI-driven big data analytics software to governments and private businesses around the globe.

What Does Palantir Do?

So, what does Palantir actually do? Well, these days, just about everything!

Some examples:

Panoptic Surveillance of Everyone

Perhaps this one goes without saying, but I have to say it anyway. From its very inception, Palantir’s selling point has been that it provides advanced AI-driven data mining and big data-driven surveillance and analytics programs for the deep state. That’s why Poindexter was interested in the company in the first place, and that’s why the CIA and the NSA became two of the company’s first and most dependable clients.

Not only did Palantir promise to allow the various US intelligence agencies to do their illegal spying on American citizens more efficiently, and not only did it allow them to do that spying by way of a middleman cutout that could be thrown to the wolves if it were ever discovered, it also allowed them to use an interoperable system that would help to connect these agencies’ individual databases, which had previously been siloed from each other.

But as creepy as Palantir’s surveillance technology has always been, that technology has only grown creepier over the years, extending (as we shall see) into every aspect of people’s daily lives, from their workplace to their supermarket to their doctor’s office—and everywhere in between.

In fact, this technology is no longer simply being used to track what people have done in the past. It is now being used to predict what they will do in the future . . .

Pre-crime

In 2018, it was revealed that the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) was employing Palantir’s software in a program that “traced people’s ties to other gang members, outlined criminal histories, analyzed social media, and predicted the likelihood that individuals would commit violence or become a victim.”

Realizing that a program designed to predict people’s criminal behaviour before it even happens would be controversial, the NOPD went to extraordinary lengths to keep its relationship with Palantir secret from the public. “No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” admitted James Carville, the Democrat political operative who works as a paid adviser to Palantir and who was instrumental in bringing about the NOPD/Palantir partnership.

Originally reported by The Verge, the revelation that a police department was using a shadowy government contractor to predict people’s government behaviour was intended to be a gotcha—a revelation that would spark public backlash and bring the NOPD partnership and other such programs to an end. On the contrary, the relative disinterest in the story seems to have encouraged other police departments to pursue a similar partnership with Palantir.

In 2023, for instance, it was reported that the Los Angeles Police Department was using Palantir software in its “Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration).” The program, according to reports, “involves Palantir-provided software that gathers data on criminal history and affiliations from sources like license plate readers and social media networks, and calculates a ‘chronic offender score’ for the individual.”

Subsequent reporting confirmed that Palantir’s spying and “predictive policing” technology is also being used by police and sheriff’s departments in New York and Chicago and that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), run by the Department of Homeland Security, is using Palantir’s “Gotham” operating system to run digital dragnets on a further 7.9 million people. Per the arrangement between the NCRIC and the 300 police departments it serves, any police department in the region could request data from Palantir but local law enforcement would never have to disclose the source of that information.

It’s not just police in the US who are working with Palantir, however. Last week it was revealed that police in the UK are employing Palantir software in their “Project Nectar,” an operation that aims to provide a “single, unified view” of data drawn from multiple sources and to use it to warn police when someone is “about to commit a criminal offence.”

So, the next time you’re stopped by police for a crime that you haven’t committed yet, you’ll know it’s quite likely that Palantir software triggered the arrest!

AI Weapons

Here in the 21st century, a new breed of high-tech, cutting-edge, AI-pimping military-industrial contractors are rising up to displace the stodgy, reliable, suit-and-tie-wearing military-industrial contractors of yore.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: the would-be kingpins of the new military-industrial complex are every bit as psychotic, deranged and bloodthirsty as their forebears. They just happen to also be more tech savvy.

And, as it turns out, Palantir is among the high-tech companies seeking to displace the Raytheons, Boeings and Lockheed Martins of the world in the race to sell instruments of death and destruction to Uncle Sam.

Despite touting itself publicly as a company providing “software platforms” for big data analytics, Palantir is no stranger to the world of military contracting.

In “The Strange Story of Peter Thiel – Part Two: Buying Politicians is Easy,” I told the story of how Palantir embedded its key staffers and consultants in the US Department of Defense (DOD) during Trump’s first administration before winning an $800 million contract from the DOD—the largest single contract in company history—to provide “a comprehensive combat intelligence hardware and software suite for the US Army.”

The blood money contracts have only continued to accrue since then.

In March of last year, Palantir won a $178.4 million contract to develop and produce ten “Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node” (TITANs) for the US Army. They are described as AI-powered ground stations “used to connect Army units to high-altitude and space sensors, which in turn provide targeting data to the soldiers.”

And in May of last year, Palantir landed a $480 million contract to develop a prototype targeting system for the Pentagon that “uses AI generated algorithms and memory learning capabilities to scan and identify enemy systems.”

It’s not just Washington that’s interested in Palantir’s AI weaponry, either. In April of last year, South Korean shipbuilder HD Hyundai Heavy Industries signed a memorandum of understanding with Palantir to develop “Unmanned Surface Vessels” (naval drones), which, they assert, “will be a game-changer in future naval warfare.”

And, as lucrative as the high-tech, whizz-bang weapons industry has already been for Palantir, the future under the new Trump administration looks even brighter.

Last December, Palantir formed a consortium with fellow Thielverse company Anduril to (in the sickening words of their joint press release) “deliver the technological infrastructure, from the edge to the enterprise, that can enable our government and industry partners to transform America’s world-leading AI advancements into next-generation military and national security capabilities.”

Naturally, Palantir and Anduril’s advanced AI targeting systems and drone technologies have already been deployed in Ukraine and Gaza, helping fuel the mass killing taking place in two of the world’s hottest war zones.

But don’t worry, everyone! According to Palantir CEO (and Bilderberg Steering Committee member) Alex Karp, Palantir’s aim in becoming a top military contractor is not to make money off the blood of the innocent. No, they’re helping end the bloodshed and violence!

“Our goal as a company is to help the United States and its allies avoid war,” Karp told Fast Company last year. “The only way to do that is to project such overwhelming technological and strategic superiority that we scare the daylights out of our adversaries.”

Lest you think Karp’s logic is dubious, consider that Palantir has reaffirmed its support for human rights and completely denies having anything to do with those bad AI targeting programs you’ve heard are being used to kill civilians in Gaza! So, as long as you believe that Palantir’s billions are being made by selling humanitarian love drones and AI happiness systems to militaries around the world, then you can rest easy knowing that Karp and his crusaders for peace are keeping us all safe!

Genomic Surveillance

As Covid Code whistleblower Zowe Smith points out in her work on Medical Surveillance (and in her recent appearance on The Corbett Report), Palantir is not only involved in the AI kill chain that is being used to target and slaughter Palestinians in Gaza and Russians in Russia. It is also participating in the AI kill chain in America!

Specifically, Palantir helped build out the contract tracing / vaccine passport / digital ID surveillance grid infrastructure that was put in place during the scamdemic. Writes Smith:

Palantir has a heavy hand in merging AI with electronic healthcare records or EHR programs. Palantir was contracted by the CDC to build a contact tracing app. For Operation Warp Speed, Palantir provided an artificial intelligence program called Tiberius. It was supposed to monitor the ICU bed capacity and ventilator availability. It layers 225 databases across the public and private sector and places them into one “ecosystem.” Tiberius can target ethnic groups based on risk behavior and location. It doesn’t just map data, it can predict behavior. Palantir was a member of the Covid-19 registry and information sharing coalition. Palantir also provided the AI platform used by HHS protect to distribute Remdesivir, the deadly drug that causes kidney failure. Not only that, Tiberius was also used to identify patients for vaccine clinical trials

Smith goes on to reveal that Palantir’s role in the genomic surveillance of everyone doesn’t end there.

Palantir has been a long-time partner of the CDC’s for Covid vaccine bio-surveillance program named HHS Protect. The contract was for Palantir to deliver surveillance software, and the program they produced is called Tiberius. AI software is often only good at one task; programs are built within a program to handle multiple tasks. Much like the movie Inception. It is common operating procedure to enlist multiple programs that work in tandem. The other program utilized in HHS Protect is called Gotham. Tiberius assigns targets a risk score, while Gotham’s function is to locate and autonomously decide when to deploy countermeasure attacks. Gotham is also used by police, ICE, and the military for target acquisition in various applications, including for AI-powered kill chains.

In case you are suffering from a lack of imagination and haven’t yet grasped what is so incredibly dangerous about such surveillance, you need only look at what has been done with this technology in the past.

In 2015, leaked Palantir documents emerged, showing, among other details, that the US Marines use Palantir’s software to “upload DNA samples from remote locations and tap into information gathered from years of collecting fingerprints and DNA evidence.” The results are returned almost immediately, telling the Marines whether to apprehend the person of interest or let them go.

Now, the US government (and other governments) are using Palantir to do biosurveillance and to assign risk scores to the individuals in their gene banks. What could go right?

Optimizing Wage Slavery

Given that Palantir has made its fame and fortune catering to the likes of the CIA and the Pentagon, the company raised more than a few eyebrows when it announced in Feburary 2024 that it had struck a deal with Coles, the Australian supermarket giant, to “enhance efficiency and streamline operations” for the retailer.

What? Palantir working in the retail sector? And with a supermaket chain, no less? What does that mean?

A number of press releases masquerading as news stories helpfully explained what it means. The plan was to use Foundry, Palantir’s data analytics platform, to “ingest an impressive 10 billion rows of data, offering profound insights into every aspect of Coles’ operations, from its 840 supermarkets to its 120,000 employees, 9,000 suppliers, and $41 billion in revenue.”

But what does that really mean, behind the PR lingo? Well, it really means that Palantir and its corporate cronies are now seeking to realize the technocrats’ wet dream of using “scientific management” to render every aspect of their business operations as “efficient” and “streamlined” as possible.

By tracking customers’ every movement with cameras from the moment they enter the store to the moment they leave with their final purchase, retailers can determine how best to lay out the store and guide the shopping experience to maximize sales.

And by tracking employees‘ every movement, retailers can more efficiently squeeze every productive minute out of these wage slaves and continue to reap record profits in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.

Unsurprisingly, even when Palantir isn’t helping the worst elements of the deep state kill innocent civilians or to spy on their own citizens, it’s still helping bring about a technocracy in which data is paramount and humans are treated as mere objects to be algorithmically manipulated.

Palantir + Trump = ?

Yes, whether we’re at home or in the office or in the hospital or in the killing fields of Gaza, it seems there is no place on Earth where we can escape the creepy tendrils of the Palantir panopticon. And, exactly as I forewarned, now that Peter Thiel’s minion is safely ensconced as Trump’s Veep and Thielversians populate every corner of the Trump 2.0 administration, things are set to become even worse for advocates of liberty and opponents of tyranny in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

These aren’t just the ravings of a devoted anti-statist and conspiracy realist. It’s documentable (and documented) fact that, ever since Trump took office this past January, Palantir’s stock price has almost exactly doubled, from $73 the week of Trump’s coronation to $139.74 as of press time.

Finally, however, it seems that Palantir might have crossed the threshold from being the creepy company that many people have heard of (but didn’t know anything about) to the creepy company that people are actively protesting.

The straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have been “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans,” a detailed New York York Times report published last month. That report links Trump’s innocuous-sounding “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” (an executive order he signed in March) to various US government agencies’ use of Foundry, a software platform that collects and analyzes data from disparate sources.

As the NYT article goes on to explain, Palantir has so far received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office in January and has won another $795 million contract from Trump’s DoD. In addition, four government agencies have so far begun using Foundry and two more—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service—are exploring the idea. The use of Foundry could end up allowing all of these federal agencies to combine their data on American citizens and to share that data freely among one another, thus creating a massive digital dragnet that would capture all sorts of private, sensitive information on everyday citizens.

These moves worry people whose head is screwed on straight, including 13 former Palantir employees who signed a letter last month calling on tech workers to resist any and all moves toward the creation of intrusive mega-database.

And now, finally, those of us in the independement media warning about the dangers of Palantir are not lone voices in the wilderness. Now everyone is joining in the chorus of concern.

The Dems are hyperventilating about Palantir and the IRS.

The socialists are warning about Palantir’s technofascism.

Heck, even MAGA is angry: ‘Trump Flipped On Us’: MAGA Reacts to Potential National Citizen Database.

Of course, we should question the motives of some of these voices of concern. No doubt there are left/right politics being played here, with some members of the left simply sensing a chance to attack the Trump regime on a different front. And there is equally little doubt that if and when a Democrat gets back into power, those same voices of opposition on the left will fall silent as quickly as the anti-war protesters in the Bush years fell silent once Obama was in the Oval Office.

But regardless of the motives and intention of some of these voices of opposition, the point is that there are now voices of opposition to Palantir and its activities. And even if some controlled actors are protesting Palantir only for crass political reasons, there are a multitude of concerned citizens who are becoming aware of and standing up to a threat they were formerly unaware of.

This is a good thing. In fact, the worst thing of all would be for Palantir’s denouncers to spend more time on attacking their fellow opponents of Palantir than on attacking Palantir itself. Such a strategy would be beyond counter-productive.

Recall that the Total Information Awareness office was officially scrapped more than two decades ago because it received such widespread vocal opposition from the public. That was why the deep state changed horses mid-race and started using the Palantir cutout to do their dirty work. Now that Palantir is being exposed as TIA on steroids, if the public does not stand up en masse and derail the deep state’s plans once again, that would be the biggest tragedy of all.

Yes, for the first time in decades, the public is rising up in anger over a genuine threat to their freedom and privacy: Palantir. It’s time for those of us who know a thing or two about the company to start spreading the truth about the Palantir panopticon far and wide. It’s up to us to “Yes, and . . .” the controlled opposition and politically motivated actors raising the alarm about Palantir with clear, well-sourced information about this threat to humanity.

This is a golden opportunity to end the deep state plan for total surveillance once and for all. Let’s not waste it.