Palantir employees are starting to ask: "Are we the baddies?" 

A new report from Wired went deep into the company to see how employees are faring, but it didn’t have to go far. Co-founded after 9/11 by—you guessed it—Peter Thiel, Palantir has long faced criticisms of technofascism, but those calls are now coming from inside the house, as former employees now contend with the realization that they’re “enabling” civil rights abuses. Shortly after the company became the all-seeing eye within the Trump administration’s crackdown on civil liberties, immigrants, and oil-rich countries it wants to control, former employees began talking about the company’s “descent into fascism.” Meanwhile, those within the company demanding information about Palatir’s relationship with ICE, for example, say their involvement has been “swept under the rug” as the company aims to stifle conversation and debate regarding those contracts. 

The more Palantir said publicly, the more it bristled against employees. After Karp gave an interview to CNBC, in which he claimed AI could undermine Democratic voters, one employee asked on one of Palantir’s Slack channels, “Is it true that AI disruption is going to disproportionately negatively affect women and people who vote Democrat? and if it is, why are we cool with that?” Karp’s manifesto was also poorly received internally, with one employee saying, “It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs. I hope no one who decided to put this out is surprised that we are, in fact, getting kicked.” Another said they had “multiple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post?” 

It’s great to hear that Palantir employees are starting to wake up to the fact that they work for Palantir. However, Palantir has had a partnership with ICE since 2014, worked with Cambridge Analytica to turn Facebook accounts into psychological profiles, and is currently run by a man TIME magazine called one of the 100 most influential people of 2025, who is “an unashamed techno-nationalist who evangelizes Western power.”