Palantir’s business is now worth $375bn, and that number is arriving alongside a sharper question about how much influence the US data analytics company should have over public life. Its software is already embedded in places that shape daily decisions, from NHS patient records to US military targeting focused on Iran.
The company has expanded rapidly since the pandemic, using AI-driven tools to make sense of difficult datasets for customers around the world. That growth has turned Palantir into one of the most consequential names in government technology, with a client list that also includes the Israeli military and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. described its systems as powering “real-time, AI-driven decisions,” a phrase that helps explain why the company keeps surfacing in debates over how governments use data.
Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel in the wake of 9/11, but the company’s present scale is what is driving the latest scrutiny. It is now used across government agencies and private companies, and its reach extends from health services to militaries. For supporters, that makes it indispensable. For critics, it means a private firm is sitting inside decisions that used to be made with far less algorithmic help.
The criticism sharpened earlier this year after co-founder and chief executive Alex Karp published a much-maligned manifesto that implied some cultures were inferior to others. That episode gave Palantir’s opponents a new line of attack, but the broader unease is older: the company’s products are widely used, yet its growing power makes some governments and public services look increasingly dependent on one vendor’s view of the world.
That dependence is what makes the next stage hard to ignore. The company’s software is already in the NHS and the US military, and there is no clear sign yet that any major institution is moving to pull back. Instead, the sharper question now is whether the backlash will stay rhetorical or push governments to rethink how much of their most sensitive work they are willing to hand to Palantir.
