For weeks, employees at data analytics firm Palantir have pushed company leadership to answer questions about the firm’s ongoing work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). By Friday, CEO Alex Karp appeared to finally give ground — but only partially.
In a company-wide email to all staff, Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, shared a nearly hour-long pre-recorded video discussion with Karp focused on Palantir’s partnership with ICE. The email, which was reviewed by WIRED, sees Bowman explain the context for the conversation: “On the back of recent events, internal conversations, and calls from many of you to better understand how executive leadership is wrestling with questions central to Palantir’s place in the world today, I sat down with Dr. Karp earlier for a longform discussion.”
She went on to clarify the goals of the exchange: “To be clear, our objective in this exchange was not to cover each detail of every controversy that graces the liveliest of company Slack channels, nor to fully assuage every concern that each of you may carry … Most of all, Dr. Karp has made clear his commitment to reinvigorating his direct engagement with Hobbits and this discussion endeavors to model the form of rigorous dialogue that should be at the center of Palantir’s prized culture.” (Palantir leadership famously refers to employees as “hobbits,” a nod to the fictional Lord of the Rings characters.)
Despite the internal outcry that prompted the discussion, the video did not address specific employee questions about Palantir’s product capabilities, or exactly how ICE leverages the firm’s tools. Instead, the company told workers curious for more detail they would need to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to access additional information. Palantir did not immediately respond to a separate request for comment from WIRED.
| Got a Tip? |
|---|
| Are you a current or former Palantir or government worker who wants to talk about immigration enforcement? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at
makenakelly.32. |For roughly the first 40 minutes of the conversation, Karp avoided addressing the repeated questions about Palantir’s contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that had dominated internal employee chats for weeks. Instead, he focused on a topic he regularly highlights in public interviews and his new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West: Palantir’s role in building and sustaining Western global power.
Near the end of the recording, Karp turned his attention broadly to immigration enforcement, arguing Palantir will not adopt policies “that’s different depending on the president,” noting that previous Democratic administrations also prioritized immigration enforcement work. He specifically cited former President Barack Obama’s 2014 address where Obama described the U.S. as both a “nation of immigrants” and a “nation of laws.” Karp also claimed that organizations planning to break the law do not purchase Palantir’s products, arguing the technical design of the firm’s tools makes it nearly impossible to hide misconduct.
While Karp declined to share more details about what exactly the Palantir products provided to ICE enable the agency to do, he extended an offer of one-on-one briefings for any employee willing to sign an NDA. In the email linking to the video, Bowman noted the discussion was only the first step in Palantir becoming more transparent about its ICE work. She did not specify what additional information staff could expect in the future, but framed Karp’s video as “a step forward, not a completion” of leadership’s ongoing conversations with staff about the agency work.
The video comes after weeks of mounting internal pressure from employees. Last month, after federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti, workers flooded Palantir’s internal Slack with questions about the company’s role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda, how the products Palantir builds align with ICE’s core goals, and whether the company should partner with the agency at all. Karp’s pre-recorded conversation offered almost no new insight to answer these staff questions.
In internal Slack conversations reviewed by WIRED in January, employees repeatedly complained about the lack of transparency around how the products many of them build and sell power ICE’s enforcement operations.
“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” wrote one worker in a Slack channel dedicated to global news coverage. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping to do that?”
That same weekend, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team released an updated internal wiki page with limited details about the work. The update, posted January 24 and first reported by WIRED, confirmed Palantir had recently wrapped up a six-month pilot program supporting ICE’s efforts to identify potential enforcement targets and track people completing self-deportation. It also revealed the company was launching a new pilot with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to assist officials “in identifying fraudulent benefit submissions.” Since December, the Trump administration has used allegations of benefit fraud to justify expanding ICE’s presence in cities including Minneapolis.
“There is no history of Palantir where we’re 100 percent popular,” Karp told workers in Friday’s video. “There is a history of Palantir where we’re unpopular and we do better internally. And yeah, we’re behind the curve internally.”
