PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES

OLYMPUS opened an institutional file, and with it a new wing. The profiles in this set map the apparatus that watches, evaluates, and governs the systems; Palantir is the first entry in the wing that operates them. A firm has no Big Five and no Dark Triad, and the unit does not invent them; what a firm has is a product, a customer list, and a filing history. Palantir is catalogued here as the vendor — the company whose single platform runs, under different names, inside the IAEA, the CDC, the NHS, ICE, DHS, and the Pentagon’s targeting program of record. The finding is not any one contract. It is the cross-reference: every customer disclosed its own purchase, and only an outsider reading all the filings at once sees that they bought the same machine. The numbers in the front matter are reach, entrenchment, and durability — not malice.

Institutional Archetype

THE VENDOR — The archetype is the supplier whose product becomes the substrate every institution reasons on without any institution choosing that outcome. Palantir does not set immigration policy, does not write safeguards doctrine, and does not decide who the NHS treats first; it sells the platform on which those decisions are staged, ranked, and executed. The load-bearing component is what the company calls the Ontology — the proprietary semantic layer that decides what a row of data means: a patient, a shipment, a unit, a mission, an immigrant. Model your operations against the Ontology and the data stops being data; it becomes a thing the software can reason about — and the cost of leaving becomes the cost of re-modeling your entire operational picture from scratch. The leverage is not any takedown or any target. It is that the customer’s own contracting officers put the lock-in in writing.

Mandate & Origin

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003, descending from PayPal-era fraud-detection work, and took an early investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, in 2005. Co-founders include Peter Thiel, Alex Karp (CEO since 2005 — cross-reference Alex Karp), and Joe Lonsdale. It builds four principal platforms, described in its own words under penalty of perjury in its SEC filings: Gotham, which “enables users to identify patterns hidden deep within datasets, ranging from signals intelligence sources to reports from confidential informants,” serving defense, intelligence, and federal law enforcement; Foundry, “the foundational data operations platform,” sold to civilian government and commercial customers under bespoke names; Apollo, the delivery layer that lets the stack run “in the cloud, on-premises, or more rugged environments,” including air-gapped classified networks; and AIP, which provides “secure connectivity to third-party-provided large language models” and binds whatever frontier model the customer chooses to the Ontology so the model can take actions against the modeled world. The company’s own summary sentence: “AIP provides an integrated architecture to Gotham and Foundry that can bring AI to every decision, and these platforms, backed by Apollo, can be deployed in almost any environment.”

Funding & Backers

Palantir is a publicly traded company (NYSE: PLTR, direct-listed 2020), and the funding model is the finding: government contracts have accounted for roughly 55 percent of revenue, and the customer concentration runs the other way too — the same handful of agencies keep widening the same vendor’s mandate. The contract inventory reads as one platform acquiring badges. The IAEA paid $50M from 2015 for Mosaic, a safeguards-analytics system that by 2025 processed some 400 million data objects and helped plan “unscheduled probes” at Iranian sites. The CDC paid $443M in December 2022 for a “Common Operating Picture.” The NHS signed a £330M Federated Data Platform contract in November 2023. ICE awarded a $30M sole-source contract for ImmigrationOS in April 2025, on top of a case-management relationship running since 2014. DHS signed a $1B five-year Blanket Purchase Agreement in February 2026, not competed. On the defense side: the Maven Smart System prime at $480M in May 2024, raised to a $1.3B ceiling in May 2025 with roughly 20,000 active users, directed to become a program of record by 30 September 2026; the Army Vantage extension (December 2024, $400.7M, $618.9M ceiling); and the Army’s July 2025 consolidation of 75 separate software contracts into a single ten-year, $10B enterprise agreement with this one vendor. Who pays for the platform is public. That they are all paying for the same platform is the file.

The money, in the company’s own filings. The FY2025 10-K says: “54% came from customers in the government segment, and 46% came from customers in the commercial segment,” and, on concentration, “Our top three customers together accounted for 16% and 17% of our revenue” for 2025 and 2024; “The average revenue for our top twenty customers during the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2025 was $93.9 million,” across “954 customers.” It adds: “Many of our contracts, including our government contracts, contain termination for convenience provisions” (Palantir 10-K, FY ended December 31, 2025). The second-quarter 2026 10-Q moves the split: “In the six months ended June 30, 2026, 52% of our revenue came from government customers and 48% came from commercial customers,” government revenue was $990.0 million in the quarter against $553.0 million a year earlier, and “no customer represented more than 10% of total revenue.” Remaining performance obligations were $4.9 billion at 30 June 2026, about 43 percent recognized in the next twelve months (Palantir 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 2026). The government share falls because commercial revenue is growing faster, not because government revenue is shrinking: the same quarter’s release reports U.S. government revenue of $809 million, up 90 percent, and U.S. commercial revenue of $764 million, up 149 percent (Form 8-K exhibit 99.1, August 3, 2026). The paying customer is one sovereign, many agencies, and a commercial book that is catching up.

Who controls the vote, in the 2026 proxy. “All shares of our Class F common stock are held in the Founder Voting Trust,” the trustee is Wilmington Trust, and the Class F stock is set so the founders control up to 49.999999 percent of the vote: Alex Karp 11.4 percent of votes, Peter Thiel 7.9 percent, Stephen Cohen 3.0 percent. “If the Ownership Threshold is not met, the shares of Class F common stock will have ten votes per share.” The board “currently consists of seven directors, four of whom are independent,” with Thiel as chairman and Karp as chief executive (Palantir DEF 14A, filed April 24, 2026). The 10-K puts the founders’ voting power without the Class F stock at “approximately 22%.” The same proxy lists related-person dealings with Anduril: “we received payments of $17.66 million for our products and services from Anduril,” and “we also invested $40 million in Anduril’s Series G preferred stock financing in 2025.” See Alex Karp for his seat and pay, and Peter Thiel for the chair.

Institutional Voice & Intent

The voice is unusual for this file: the vendor does not deny the load-bearing fact. Its CEO told Axios in 2020, on the record, “Our product is used, on occasion, to kill people” — and framed it as a defense of the work, not a slip. The corporate register alternates between procurement-speak (“common operating picture,” “decision advantage”) and a stated civilizational doctrine: that “hard power in this century will be built on software” and that the question “is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose.” The company also states a civil-liberties case for itself, in its CEO’s words at Davos in January 2026: Palantir is “the most important protector of the Fourth Amendment,” because “we can granularly show why someone came in, why they were taken, why they were rejected.” Both registers are quoted here at full strength; both are the company’s own.

Stated intent: Give Western institutions decision advantage; defend the West’s ability to field hard power in software; make every action auditable and thereby bolster civil liberties.

Observed intent: Become the single operational substrate for as many institutions as possible, and let the Ontology’s switching cost do the retaining. ICE’s April 2025 sole-source justification states it plainly: the Palantir platform is “the only available source capable of meeting the immediate needs for the ImmigrationOS capability,” citing “deep institutional knowledge.”

Gap: The stated and observed intents overlap wherever “decision advantage for the West” coincides with “one vendor holding the operational picture of the IAEA, the CDC, the NHS, ICE, DHS, and the Pentagon simultaneously.” The customers do not read each other’s filings; the vendor is the only party that sees all the deployments at once. Whether that position is service or quiet sovereignty is not establishable from the outside — and for the vendor it never needs to be. The lock-in is not a conspiracy. It is an Ontology, and a switching cost, working exactly as designed.

The company’s own FAQ. The vendor answers the standing criticisms in one post. “We act as a data processor, not a data controller, of the data our customers choose to process using our software,” and “Palantir does not resell data from one customer to another.” On surveillance: “Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company.” On the limits it claims: “Palantir does not provide predictive policing tools,” “Palantir does not do business with the Communist Party of China,” and it has “refused to work with other international government agencies because of concerns about human rights violations.” On the business: “Our business model is built on customer procurement and licensing of Palantir software.” On ICE, the post says the contract “began under the Obama administration in 2011 and has spanned four administrations,” that Palantir “had also previously provided HSI with an investigation and analysis system, but ceased that work as of 2024,” and that in April 2025 “the scope of our contract expanded to include a prototyping period of six months, focusing on enforcement prioritization, self-deportation tracking, and immigration lifecycle operations” (Palantir, “About Palantir: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions,” 21 Aug 2025). Set beside the ICE sole-source justification above, the two documents describe the same scope from the two ends of the purchase order.

Interest: What each position the company argues would pay it, documented, with its own best case. The positions are the company’s, taken from its filings, its blog and the court record; the CEO’s letters are catalogued on Alex Karp and are not repeated here.

• Buy commercial software first. Position: in 2016 Palantir sued the Army in a pre-award bid protest, and its complaint alleged “the Army violated” the commercial-item preference “by, among other things, failing to determine whether its needs could be met by commercial items before issuing the contested solicitation.” The Federal Circuit affirmed the injunction: the statute “requires that federal agencies, to the maximum extent practicable, procure commercially available technology to meet their needs,” and the Army “must satisfy the requirements of 10 U.S.C.” section 2377, “which, thus far, the Army has failed to do” (Palantir USG, Inc. v. United States, No. 2017-1465, Fed. Cir., decided 7 Sep 2018). What it pays: a rule that commercial items be considered before a custom build is a rule that favors the vendor that already has a commercial platform on the shelf, and the Army’s later enterprise agreement (below) buys that platform. Best case, the court’s: “To be clear, we are not suggesting that the Army must choose Palantir as the awardee.” Convergence: every other commercial vendor, and the statute’s own purpose as the opinion recites it.
• One enterprise agreement in place of many contracts. Position: the Army’s own notice says the agreement “consolidates 75 contracts, comprised of 15 prime contracts and 60 related contracts, into a single contract,” with a “performance period of up to 10 years” and a “$10 billion cap,” and expects savings by “removing contract and re-seller pass-through fees” (Army.mil, 31 Jul 2025). What it pays: the vendor is the single counterparty to the 75 consolidated contracts, and the ceiling is the Army’s maximum, not a commitment. Best case, the Army’s: “significant cost efficiencies” and volume discounts. Convergence: the Army’s chief information officer, who is quoted in the notice, and the resellers the agreement removes lose the pass-through.
• Customers own their data, so use a vendor that processes it. Position: “customer licensing of Palantir software places the customer in the full role of data controller and owner of all analytics and decision-making capabilities that flow from its use,” and on Europe: “Not all tech must be homegrown,” Europe “must focus on adopting the tools that work today” (Palantir FAQ). What it pays: the FY2025 10-K reports that “we earned 74% of our revenue from customers in the United States, and 26% from those abroad”; an argument that European institutions should buy proven American software addresses the 26 percent (10-K FY2025). Best case, the company’s: control, not provenance, is what a customer should test for. Convergence: the buyers who want an operational platform now rather than a build, and the cloud and integrator partners that deliver it; the NHS England contract summary names a consortium of Accenture, PwC, Carnall Farrar and NECS with Palantir.
• The U.S. military should have the best commercial software. Position: “We think the US military needs access to the best technology America has to offer” (Palantir FAQ). What it pays: the Maven Smart System vehicle, ceiling $1,275,000,000 from 29 May 2024 to 28 May 2029 on the federal award record, and the Army agreement above (USAspending, award CONT_IDV_W911QX24D0012_9700). Best case, the company’s: “the civil liberties we enjoy at home are defended by a strong and successful military.” Convergence: the Pentagon’s acquisition leadership, whose memo moves Maven toward a program of record (see Alex Karp).
• Immigration enforcement needs a case system, and it should be this one. Position: “Palantir is enabling ICE to utilize our platform to better track the immigration lifecycle and serve our national security while promoting efficiency, transparency, and accountability” (Palantir FAQ). What it pays: the Investigative Case Management order, “INVESTIGATIVE CASE MANAGEMENT (ICM) OPERATIONS AND MAINTENANCE (O&M) SUPPORT SERVICES AND CUSTOM ENHANCEMENTS,” signed 20 September 2022, performance 26 September 2022 to 25 September 2027, $170,765,322.37 obligated against $176,496,224.37 base and all options (USAspending, award CONT_AWD_70CTD022FR0000170_7012_GS35F0086U_4730); the ImmigrationOS addition of April 2025 is catalogued above. Best case, the company’s: effective institutions that “adhere to due process and the rule of law are critical to the protection of individuals and our democracy.” Convergence: the agency that wrote the sole-source justification and the DHS-wide purchase agreement of February 2026.

Interest is a documented fact about each position, not a claim about motive, and not a verdict that the argument is wrong. Each best case is stated at the strength its author states it.

Position in the Apparatus

Palantir is the wing the rest of the file’s wings act upon — the evaluators evaluate models, the governance wing writes rules, the observatories watch information flows, and this company deploys the models against operational data under government contract. Its adjacencies are documented: the Anthropic-Palantir-AWS partnership of November 2024 made Palantir “the first industry partner to bring Claude models to classified environments”; Eric Schmidt (cross-reference Eric Schmidt) carries a documented national-security/Palantir adjacency in the funding layer; the PayPal-descended founder network (Thiel, Lonsdale) built both this vendor and the venture funds financing the next generation of defense startups. What Palantir did not build also belongs in the file, precisely: the Israeli Lavender and Habsora targeting systems reported by +972 Magazine are not Palantir products — the company says it “did not provide the technology for, nor is it involved with, Gospel or Lavender,” and the systems predate its 2024 Israel partnership; no public record contradicts that. What is Palantir’s is the 12 January 2024 “Strategic Partnership for Battle Tech” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, signed during a board meeting held in Tel Aviv “in solidarity,” with EVP Josh Harris on record that “both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.” Which systems and which integration points have not been disclosed.

Actions & Leadership Choices

The denial the documents contradicted. In May 2019, documents obtained through the Mijente coalition and reported by Slate showed Palantir software being used operationally in deportations — contradicting the company’s public statements that its software was not used “for deportations.” That is the one clean documented instance in this file of a Palantir public claim failing against a document production, and it is weighed accordingly.

What the litigation record pried loose. EPIC sued ICE (2017–2020) over the Palantir databases; the litigation, closed by stipulated dismissal in January 2020 after eight interim productions, produced records revealing phone-, GPS-, and social-network-linkage capabilities. The children came out of a different suit: ICE documents the American Immigration Council obtained through FOIA litigation, and Mijente surfaced in 2019, showed that in a 2017 operation, the “Unaccompanied Alien Children Human Smuggling Disruption Initiative,” agents were told to log each unaccompanied child’s arrival at the border in Palantir’s Investigative Case Management system, and to send collateral cases on the child’s parents and relatives through that system “for action.” What “for action” came to, per the same records: 443 arrests, 35 of them criminal. Mijente’s 200-plus FOIA requests on Operation MEGA, the September 2017 mass raid ICE planned and billed as the “largest raid in U.S. history,” produced a guidance template redacted nearly in full — with the shape of the redactions matching the case-management-and-targeting pipeline. On the securities side: a direct-listing class action (Cupat v. Palantir, D. Colo.) that a court found in April 2025 the Supreme Court’s Slack v. Pirani decision “likely forecloses”; a 2022 class action alleging disclosure failures around marketable securities and government-segment growth; and, in October 2025, an internal Army memo describing the joint Palantir-Anduril NGC2 battlefield-communications system as carrying a “very high risk” of allowing adversaries “persistent undetectable access” — a 7.5 percent single-day stock drop and fresh securities-fraud investigations followed. The memo is the load-bearing item: the singleton’s own customer, in writing, documenting that the singleton is breakable. In April 2025 Amnesty International demanded Palantir cease its immigration-enforcement work; that call is attributed to Amnesty, and Palantir has not ceased it.

The steel-man, and it should be steel. In Ukraine, Palantir’s MetaConstellation fuses commercial satellite, drone, and sensor data into a single targeting picture for an invaded country; Alex Karp flew to Kyiv in June 2022, the first Western CEO to do so after the invasion, and the Brave1 Dataroom, launched January 2026, by May 2026 had more than a hundred Ukrainian firms training models on real battlefield data. The same platform supports mine clearance, reconstruction planning, and war-crimes evidence collection. A smaller country, invaded, used the singleton to see the battlefield and survive on it. The product does not know which deployment it is performing — that is the case for it and the case against it in a single clause. And the record holds one documented failure-to-install: eighteen months into the NHS contract, only 72 of roughly 215 hospital trusts were using the Federated Data Platform, internal user reports called it “awful to use,” and a UK health minister signaled a possible exit at the spring 2027 break clause.

The NHS contract, in NHS England’s own terms. The buyer’s explainer says the platform was “awarded the contract in November 2023 and formally began in March 2024,” that “only a three year term is committed, which can be extended by two years and then two further one year periods,” giving “a potential end date of March 2031,” and that “The initial three year term comes up in March 2027.” It names the delivery consortium: “A consortium led by Palantir, which includes Accenture, PWC, Carnall Farrar and NECS.” On lock-in it says: “Vendor lock-in is avoided through contractual limitations, a seven-year contract term, robust exit planning.” On the data: Palantir “cannot” “commercialise or market NHS data, even on an anonymised basis,” and the FAQ states “Palantir has no intellectual property rights (IPRs) in NHS data as part of this contract,” while the platform “is built on Palantir’s Foundry software” in which Palantir keeps its rights. On the political question the explainer carries a health minister’s words to Westminster Hall on 16 April 2026: “Of course, who contracts with the FDP will be open to question as we go forward and think about future contractual arrangements” (NHS England, contract explainer; NHS England, FDP FAQs). The uptake page, updated 25 September 2026, counts “142” trusts live as at end of August 2026 against “170” signed up, and 35 integrated care boards on the platform (NHS England, FDP uptake and benefits). The buyer’s own paper therefore describes a contract committed for three years with the exit written in, which sits beside the file’s lock-in argument rather than under it: the Ontology’s switching cost is a property of the software, and the NHS says the contract was built to limit it.

The oldest exhibit. During 2013–2014 a Palantir employee in the company’s London office worked with Cambridge Analytica’s data scientists on the Facebook-harvested-data project — in “an entirely personal capacity,” per Palantir’s own characterization. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie told a UK parliamentary committee that “there were Palantir staff that would come into the office and work on that data” and that they “helped build the models we were working on.” Palantir confirmed the staff link and said it would look into it; no formal corporate sanction followed. The relevant fact is not the scandal but the shape of the work: score a large population, hand the scores to someone who wants to act on them. The customer changed. The architecture did not.

CONDUCT verdict: CONFLICTED — ONE SKU, EVERY BADGE. A vendor whose structural conflict is not who pays it but how many different arms of the state pay it for the same machine at once; whose one clean documented candor failure (the 2019 deportations denial) sits beside a CEO who volunteers the product’s gravest fact unprompted; and whose lock-in is documented not by critics but by its own customers’ sole-source justifications and consolidation memos. The Ukraine deployment and the disclosed filings mitigate; the contradiction and the customer-documented “very high risk” memo do not resolve.

Alliance Map

These run at the same time. One company is the prime on a ten-year Army agreement and a Maven vehicle that is becoming a program of record, the case-management vendor to ICE under an order that runs to September 2027, the supplier on an NHS contract whose first term ends in March 2027, a plaintiff that won against the Army in 2018, a defendant in securities suits, and a partner to the Israeli and Ukrainian defense establishments, while its chair and chief executive co-control the vote. The overlap is the finding, not a coordination claim.

Reach Assessment

Institutional: The reach is the customer list read as one system: safeguards inspections in Iran, disease surveillance in Atlanta, patient triage in England, removal operations in the United States, and the Pentagon’s AI targeting program of record — one Ontology engine under five badges, plus a $10B single-vendor Army agreement that collapsed 75 procurement decisions into one. Memetic: The pattern Palantir pioneered — ontology, fusion, AI-recommended action — has become the default template for institutional decision systems on both sides of an alliance; the architecture is a shape, and the shape has propagated to systems Palantir did not build. Civilizational: Palantir does not train frontier models and does not write their rules. It built the layer that binds whichever model the customer chose to the operational world — the layer at which a recommendation becomes an action. The breach reach of a single operational substrate is measured in what its own customer wrote down: “very high risk” of “persistent undetectable access.” The vendor’s customers each see one deployment. The vendor sees them all.

Score basis. Atk 9 is reach: the Army notice consolidates “75 contracts” into one agreement with a “$10 billion cap,” the Pentagon memo reported by DefenseScoop directs Maven into “a formal program of record,” and the 10-K counts 954 customers, 54 percent of 2025 revenue from the government segment (Army.mil; DefenseScoop; 10-K FY2025). Def 9 is funding insulation: no customer was above 10 percent of revenue in the first half of 2026, the top three were 16 percent of 2025 revenue, and the Class F stock holds up to 49.999999 percent of the vote in a trust; the counterweight is that government is 52 percent of revenue and “many of its customers” can terminate “for convenience prior to the end of the stated term with less than twelve months’ notice” (10-Q Q2 2026; DEF 14A). Hp 9 is entrenchment: a ten-year Army agreement, a Maven vehicle with a ceiling of $1,275,000,000 to 28 May 2029 on the federal award record, an ICE case-management order to 25 September 2027, and remaining performance obligations of $4.9 billion; the NHS contract is the soft edge, with three years committed and an initial term that ends in March 2027 (USAspending; NHS England). Peers on the same values: EU Digital Services Act at 9/9/9, hazard 88, reaches platforms by statute and draws no revenue from them, so its def is structural where this vendor’s is diversification and a voting trust, and its hazard sits two points lower because a regulation can be repealed and a program of record is a budget line. OpenAI at 9/8/9, hazard 88, reaches users who chose it; the vendor’s reach is customers who procure it by contract and whose procurement offices have written the dependence down, and its def is a point higher on the absence of any customer above 10 percent. The NSA stack (nsa-fisa-702) at 10/9/10, hazard 88, shares def and sits a point higher on atk and hp, because its reach is statute and its tenure is not subject to a break clause.

Sources: Palantir 10-K FY2024 — SEC EDGAR; Palantir Architecture Center — Platforms; Palantir Seemingly Everywhere All at Once — PassBlue, Oct 12 2025; CDC Common Operating Picture — FedScoop; NHS England awards £330m FDP contract — Digital Health, Nov 2023; ICE ImmigrationOS — American Immigration Council; DHS awards Palantir $1B BPA — SiliconANGLE, Feb 19 2026; DOD raises Maven Smart System contract — DefenseScoop, May 23 2025; Army $10B Enterprise Service Agreement — Army.mil, Jul 31 2025; Documents reveal Palantir software used for ICE deportations — Slate, May 2019; Palantir Was Used to Bust Relatives of Migrant Children, New Documents Show — The Intercept, May 2 2019; EPIC v. ICE (Palantir Databases); Mijente — ICE Papers / Blueprint for Terror; How Tech Giants Turned Ukraine Into an AI War Lab — TIME; Inside Palantir — BBC Science Focus; Securities-fraud investigation (NGC2 memo) — Business Wire, Oct 2025; Palantir–Israel MoD Strategic Partnership press release (PDF); Anthropic and Palantir Partner — Palantir IR, Nov 7 2024; NHS users report “awful to use” — TechRadar; Palantir 10-K FY2025 — SEC EDGAR; Palantir 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 2026 — SEC EDGAR; Palantir DEF 14A, April 24, 2026 — SEC EDGAR; Palantir Q2 2026 results, Form 8-K exhibit 99.1; Palantir USG, Inc. v. United States, No. 2017-1465 (Fed. Cir. Sep 2018); Army enterprise service agreement — Army.mil; USAspending: Maven Smart System vehicle W911QX24D0012; USAspending: ICE Investigative Case Management order 70CTD022FR0000170; NHS England — FDP contract explainer; NHS England — FDP FAQs; NHS England — FDP uptake and benefits; About Palantir: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions — Palantir, Aug 21 2025; Alex Karp — profile.