Alex Karp talked like he had limits. He said Palantir would never track people. He said the company would walk away from contracts that hurt minorities. None of that matters anymore. ICE is using his software to find people faster than anyone thought possible.
For years, Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, had declared the data management company to be “involved in supporting progressive values,” saying he has repeatedly “walked away” from contracts that targeted minorities or that he found otherwise unethical. Even as Palantir took on extensive data management contracts for the federal government, the company said it was not willing to allow its powerful tools to broadly track immigrants across America.
That commitment no longer holds. Palantir’s software is helping U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track undocumented immigrants and deport them faster, according to federal procurement filings and interviews with people who have knowledge of the project and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. The software, Immigration OS, plays a key role in supporting the administration’s mass deportation campaign, which President Donald Trump has stepped up in recent days with such measures as pausing immigration applications from nationals of 19 countries.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/cybersecurity/how-palantir-shifted-course-to-play-key-role-in-ice-deportations/ar-AA1RCuPY
Then Karp says it outright.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp:: “Not only are we on the side of working Americans, we’re closely monitoring their every move”
https://twitter.com/profplum99/status/1996303040488362441
He talks about Palantir like it is a government unto itself. Not a company. A system. A brain. Drones, police departments, military operations, hospitals. The software touches everything. The reach is insane and nobody really pauses to think what it means.
In a recent interview, Alex Karp said that his company Palantir was “the most important software company in America and therefore in the world”. He may well be right. To some, Palantir is also the scariest company in the world, what with its involvement in the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda. The potential end point of Palantir’s tech is an all-powerful government system amalgamating citizens’ tax records, biometric data and other personal information – the ultimate state surveillance tool. No wonder Palantir has been likened to George Orwell’s Big Brother, or Skynet from the Terminator movies.
Does this make Karp the scariest CEO in the world? There is some competition from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel. But 58-year-old Karp could give them all a run for their money in terms of influence, self-belief, ambition and even in this gallery of oddballs sheer eccentricity. In his increasingly frequent media appearances, Karp is a striking presence, with his cloud of unkempt grey hair, his 1.25x speed diction, and his mix of combative conviction and almost childish mannerisms. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, he shook both fists simultaneously as he railed against short sellers betting against Palantir, whose share price has climbed nearly 600% in the past year: “It’s super triggering,” he complained. “Why do they have to go after us?”
Leaving aside for a moment questions about what Palantir actually does, the company seems to be at the heart of many of the world’s pressing issues. In the US alone, its AI-powered data-analysis technology is fueling the deportations being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Pentagon’s unmanned drone programme, police departments’ allegedly racist profiling of potential criminals and much more besides. Its software is being used by the Israel Defense Forces in its assaults on Gaza, by the Ukrainians against Russia and by police forces and corporations throughout the western world. In the UK, Palantir is at the heart of Labour’s plans to “modernise” the armed forces and the NHS: when Keir Starmer visited Washington in February, his first stop after the White House was Palantir’s office, where Karp showed him its latest military kit.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/18/fear-really-drives-him-is-alex-karp-of-palantir-the-worlds-scariest-ceo
This is not a small change. Palantir once promised restraint. That is gone. The company is everywhere, running under the surface, watching, analyzing, controlling. The mask is off.