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The military and intelligence contractor Palantir has been embroiled in nonstop controversy during Trump’s second term.
It’s been directly involved in the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, an effort that’s been implicated in numerous deaths. The company has even been linked to US airstrikes that leveled a school in Iran, killing over 120 schoolchildren.
Last week, the Peter Thiel-cofounded company poured fuel on the fire with a 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” an ominous corporate manifesto that critics called a “hideous ideology” and “example of technofascism.”
Now, Palantir’s seemingly endless run of bad press has current and former employees shaken, Wired reports, with some starting to wonder whether “they’re the bad guys.”
“I think there’s a bit of an identity crisis and a bit of a challenge,” one former employee told the magazine. “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 told Wired, workers and alumni are required to sign non-disparagement agreements and forbidden to speak to the press.
Meanwhile, employees have vented in internal Slack threads, voicing their growing concerns over Palantir and ICE’s relationship, especially after the shooting death of numerous protesters. Palantir started auto-deleting conversations in at least one Slack channel after seven days, per Wired, raising even more questions.
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 asked in a Slack channel if “were we involved,” and whether the company is “doing anything to stop a repeat,” as quoted by Wired.
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