Palantir is arguably one of the most notorious corporations in contemporary America. Cofounded by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the software firm's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Department of Defense, and the Israeli military has sparked numerous protests in multiple countries. Palantir has been so infamous for so long that, for some people, its name has become a cultural shorthand for dystopian surveillance.
But a number of former Palantir employees tell WIRED they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works. Some people think it's a data broker that buys information from private companies and resells it to the government. Others think it’s a data miner, constantly scanning the internet for unique insights it can collect and market to customers. Still others think it maintains a giant, centralized database of information collected from all of its clients. In reality, Palantir does none of these things, but the misconceptions continue to persist.
Palantir has tried to correct the record itself in a series of blog posts with titles like “Palantir Is Not a Data Company” and “Palantir Is Still Not a Data Company.” In the latter, Palantir explains that “misconceptions can arise because our products are complicated,” but nonetheless, “it is absolutely possible” to accurately describe them to “people who are curious.”
The problem, however, is that even ex-employees struggle to provide a clear description of the company. “It's really hard to explain what Palantir works on or what it does,” says Linda Xia, who was an engineer at Palantir from 2022 to 2024. “Even as someone who worked there, it's hard to figure out, how do you give a cohesive explanation?”
Xia was one of 13 former Palantir staffers who signed an open letter published in May arguing that the company risks being complicit in authoritarianism by continuing to cooperate with the Trump administration. She and other former Palantir staffers who spoke to WIRED for this story argue that, in order to grapple with Palantir and its role in the world, let alone hold the company accountable, you need to first understand what it really is.
It’s not that former employees literally don’t know what Palantir is selling. In interviews with WIRED, they spoke fluidly about how its software can connect and transform different kinds of data collected by government agencies and corporations. But when asked to, say, name its direct business competitors, two former Palantir employees who requested anonymity to speak freely about their experiences, struggled to come up with anything. “I still don't know how to answer that question, to be honest,” says one.
Juan Sebastián Pinto, who worked as a content strategist at Palantir and also signed the open letter, says it sells software to other businesses, a category commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as B2B SaaS. Another former staffer says Palantir provides “really extravagant plumbing with data.”