What Does Palantir Actually Do?

Summary

In response to a detailed request for comment from WIRED, Palantir spokesperson Lisa Gordon said in a statement that the company is “proud to support the US government, especially our warfighters,” and that it has never wavered from its founding mission “to support the West and empower the world’s most important institutions.” Gordon added that the open letter criticizing Palantir was only signed by a small portion of the company’s approximately 8,000 employees and alumni.Dawn of Big DataUnderneath the jargon and marketing, Palantir sells tools that its customers—corporations, nonprofits, government agencies—use to sort through data. What makes Palantir different from other tech companies is the scale and scope of its products. Its pitch to potential customers is that they can buy one system and use it to replace perhaps a dozen other dashboards and programs, according to a 2022 analysis of Palantir’s offerings published by blogger and data engineer Ben Rogojan.Crucially, Palantir doesn’t reorganize a company's bins and pipes, so to speak, meaning it doesn’t change how data is collected or how it moves through the guts of an organization. Instead, its software sits on top of a customer’s messy systems and allows them to integrate and analyze data without needing to fix the underlying architecture. In some ways, it’s a technical band-aid. In theory, this makes Palantir particularly well suited for government agencies that may use state-of-the-art software cobbled together with programming languages dating back to the 1960s.Palantir began gaining steam in the 2010s, a decade when corporate business discourse was dominated by the rise of “Big Data.” Hundreds of tech startups popped up promising to disrupt the market by leveraging information that was now readily available thanks to smartphones and internet-connected sensors, including everything from global shipping patterns to the social media habits of college students. The hype around Big Data put pressure on compan...