With the faces of the AI company saying it “knows everything about you” and is used “on occasion, to kill” their enemies, what does it do in the first place?

“Isn’t that the thing from Lord of the Rings,” said Benjamin Nichols ‘29. In memes about the end of the earth or the apocalypse, you may have heard of a tech company called Palantir or seen podcast clips of its billionaire co-founder, Peter Thiel, discussing his beliefs on whether the human race should endure or his thoughts on the antichrist. But when co-founders of the company are quoted with statements such as “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion, kill them,” said by Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, and “Palantir knows everything about you,” said by (Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of Palantir), a real concern can arise: a deep unease about what this company actually is. Palantir isn’t just another tech startup. It is a powerful and shadowy company that builds the software that governments and corporations use to watch, track, and make decisions about almost everything. Henry Oesterle ‘27 said, “I know that they were founded by Peter Thiel, who is closely connected with Vice President JD Vance and was a major donor to the Donald Trump presidential campaign. I was also aware that ICE and DHS have begun to partner with Palantir to enforce the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy.”

Palantir was founded in 2003 with funding and help from the CIA. Nowadays, Palantir makes two main products: Gotham and Foundry. Think of them as super-powered search engines that don’t just find websites but connect every piece of information a government or big company has about anyone and everyone, from social media posts to health records, bank transactions and traffic cameras. It was first sold as a tool to stop terrorists, but now it’s used for way more. Police use it to try to predict crime. ICE uses it to find and deport individuals. The military uses it to plan missions. Hospitals and big banks have adopted their services.

On top of these super-powered search engines, Palantir has billion-dollar contracts with the United States military where they make products such as Skykit, an AI satellite computer in a suitcase, Maven, an AI war drone and TITAN, the military’s first AI-defined vehicle, that fire at shoot enemies on its own, to, in Palantir’s own words “enable long range precision fires for the modern battlespace.”

The company sells itself as a neutral tool, providing the map and allowing its clients to chart the course. But the map isn’t neutral. If you feed old, biased police data into a system designed to predict where crime will happen, it just tells the police to go back to the same poor neighborhoods. It fuels old prejudices and calls it “smart.” Meanwhile, the actual formulas that make these decisions are kept secret, protected as corporate property. The public isn’t allowed to see them.

Palantir represents a new kind of power. It takes basic public jobs, like keeping communities safe or managing a health crisis, and turns them into expensive, private software contracts that all too often hurt those they are contracted to protect. Cities and countries get locked in, becoming dependent on a single company whose main goal is to deepen their shareholders’ pockets. The people who run the company, like Thiel, have clear political visions about less democracy and more private control. So when their software runs our public and private institutions, whose values are really in charge? Thiels’ or his AI’s?

So, what does Palantir do? It builds the hidden operating system for the modern world of power. It turns our lives into data points so that corporations can manage society more “efficiently,” often without our knowledge. While the online memes are intended as a joke, they share a vision of a future where the most important systems are controlled by a small group of unaccountable tech giants and their privately owned and trained AI models that track every detail of our lives.