How Palantir Leads The Military Industrial Complex.

When the U.S, empire goes to war, Palantir is there to profit.

Recently, there has been a major backlash to the disturbing manifesto put out by the AI surveillance company founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, Palantir.

Much of the manifesto signalled Palantir’s desire to support U.S. wars abroad, writing,

-The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation

- Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

-If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

-American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace.

The manifesto even calls for the return of the draft, writing, “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”

This disturbing manifesto has been put into practice by Palantir through selling their technology to the U.S. and Israel in virtually every recent war.

In this article, I will go over Palantir’s hidden history as one of the most influential war profiteering company’s within the U.S. military industrial complex.

Palantir Profits From Afghanistan And Iraq Wars

Palantir’s first major role within the military industrial complex was during the U.S. war in Afghanistan, where Palantir sold its data collection software to U.S. Special Operations Forces while they were planning assaults.

Bloomberg, in 2011, called Palantir “the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon” and reported that, “In Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations Forces use Palantir to plan assaults.”

Explaining how U.S. special operations forces used the software, the outlet reported:

They type a village’s name into the system and a map of the village appears, detailing the locations of all reported shooting skirmishes and IED, or improvised explosive device, incidents. Using the timeline function, the soldiers can see where the most recent attacks originated and plot their takeover of the village accordingly. The Marines have spent years gathering fingerprint and DNA evidence from IEDs and tried to match that against a database of similar information collected from villagers. By the time the analysis results came back, the bombers would be long gone. Now field operatives are uploading the samples from villagers into Palantir and turning up matches from past attacks on the spot, says Samuel Reading, a former Marine who works in Afghanistan for NEK Advanced Securities Group, a U.S. military contractor.

Palantir used the occupation of Afghanistan to showcase the Orwellian ability of its data-collecting software, hoping it would lead it to be bought for future U.S. wars.

The aforementioned Samuel Reading told Bloomberg, “It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of”.

The Pentagon similarly used Palantir software in the Iraq war. The Guardian reported that , “In Iraq, the Pentagon used Palantir software to track patterns in roadside bomb deployment and worked out garage-door openers were being used as remote detonators by predicting it”

Palantir’s Role In The Ukraine Proxy War.

Palantir also played a major role by providing its technology to the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government during the proxy war in Ukraine.

Time Magazine reported that , “early on the morning of June 1, 2022, Alex Karp, the CEO of the data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies, crossed the border between Poland and Ukraine on foot, with five colleagues in tow” adding, “Karp was escorted into the fortified bunker of the presidential palace, becoming the first leader of a major Western company to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky”.

At the meeting, Karp “told Zelensky that he was ready to open an office in Kyiv and deploy Palantir’s data and artificial-intelligence software to support Ukraine’s defense.”

The report added that “In the year and a half since Karp’s initial meeting with Zelensky, Palantir has embedded itself in the day-to-day work of a wartime foreign government in an unprecedented way. More than half a dozen Ukrainian agencies, including its Ministries of Defense, Economy, and Education, are using the company’s products. Palantir’s software, which uses AI to analyze satellite imagery, open-source data, drone footage, and reports from the ground to present commanders with military options, is ‘responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,’ according to Karp.”

Jacob Helberg, a national security advisor to Alex Karp, referred to the company as “the AI arms dealer of the 21st century” in reference to its role in the Ukraine proxy war.

While “Ukraine has not paid Palantir for its tools and services,” Time Magazine noted that “recent earnings data from the company indicates that partner countries have chipped in tens of millions to offset Palantir’s investment”.

Furthermore, Time noted that Palantir wanted to use the proxy war in Ukraine to “showcase its capabilities” in hopes it would further secure military contracts for it;s software.

“Ukraine is a living laboratory in which some of these AI-enabled systems can reach maturity through live experiments and constant, quick reiteration,” the director of RAIN, a research firm on tech in war, disturbingly said.

Palantir’s Role In The Genocide In Gaza.

When Israel began its genocide in Gaza, it quickly sought to buy Palantir’s software to help it.

The book “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State” about Palantir co-founder Alex Karp documented that after the genocide in Gaza began, in Israel, “The demand for Palantir’s assistance was so great that the company dispatched a team of engineers from London to help get Israeli users online. Palantir ended up having to rent a second floor in the building that housed its Tel Aviv office to accommodate the intelligence analysts who needed tutorial”.

According to the book, “the Mossad had been using Palantir technology,” but once the genocide began, the Shin Bet and IDF “sought to obtain Palantir’s software”.

In 2024, Palantir hosted its first board of directors meeting in Tel-Aviv, where the founders Alex Karp and Peter Thiel met with Israeli president Issac Herzog and “announced that it has agreed a strategic partnership with the Israel Ministry of Defense to ‘supply Palantir technology to help the country’s war effort.’”

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Palestine, has documented Palantir’s major role in facilitating the genocide in Gaza, writing that:

The Israeli military has developed artificial intelligence systems, such as ‘Lavender’, ‘Gospel’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’ to process data and generate lists of targets, reshaping modern warfare and illustrating the dual-use nature of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies Inc., whose tech collaboration with Israel long predates October 2023, expanded its support to the Israeli military post-October 2023. There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making. In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv ‘in solidarity’; in April 2025, Palantir’s Chief Executive Officer responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, ‘mostly terrorists, that’s true’. Both incidents are indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis the unlawful use of force by Israel, and failure to prevent such acts or withdraw involvement.

According to “The Philosopher in the Valley”, Palantir’s “software was used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza”.

Palantir’s Role In The Israeli War On Lebanon.

The aforementioned book “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State” uncovered that Israel used Palantir technology to conduct its terrorist attack using pagers and ensuing war on Lebanon in 2024.

The book uncovered that “the company’s technology was deployed by the Israelis during military operations in Lebanon in 2024 that decimated Hezbollah’s top leadership. It was also used in Operation Grim Beeper, in which hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were injured and maimed when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded (the Israelis had booby-trapped the devices)”

Palantir’s Role In The U.S/Israeli Iran War.

Palantir also played a major role in the U.S./Israeli war on Iran through powering the Pentagon’s project Maven software.

Reuters reported in March of this year that “Maven is a command-and-control software platform that analyzes battlefield ​data and identifies targets. It is already the primary AI operating system for the U.S. military, which has carried out thousands of targeted strikes against Iran over the last three weeks,” and that “Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve ​Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders, a move that locks in long-term use of Palantir’s weapons-targeting technology across ‌the U.S. military” adding that, “Palantir developed its AI system to serve the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which began as a drone-imagery labeling program in 2017. In 2024, the Pentagon awarded Palantir a contract worth up to $480 million. That year, Palantir’s Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar told the House Armed Services Committee, opens new tab that ​Maven had ‘tens of thousands’ of users and urged Congress to provide more funding. In May ​2025, the Pentagon increased the contract ceiling to $1.3 billion.”

Earlier this month, Trump boasted on Truth Social that Palantir’s Maven Project aided the war on Iran, writing, “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war-fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies”.

Through their latest manifesto, Palantir is yet again demonstrating that war is a racket, and Palantir will be there to sell its AI software and profit from it.

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