Thirteen former employees of influential data-mining firm Palantir are condemning the company's work with the Trump administration weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement reached a deal to pay Palantir $30 million to provide the agency with "near real-time visibility" into the movement of migrants in the U.S.
In a letter shared exclusively with NPR, the ex-Palantir workers, former software engineers, managers and an employee who worked in the firm's privacy and civil liberties team, say when they joined the powerful tech company, they believed in its code of conduct stating that its software should protect the vulnerable and ensure the responsible development of artificial intelligence.
"Early Palantirians understood the ethical weight of building these technologies," the thirteen former employees wrote in the letter. "These principles have now been violated, and are rapidly being dismantled at Palantir Technologies and across Silicon Valley."
Palantir and the White House did not return requests for comment.
Palantir, co-founded by Trump ally billionaire Peter Thiel, offers data-analyzing software that uses AI to pull information from a multitude of sources and compiles it into charts, tables and heat maps. Its ability to disentangle complex datasets has made its platforms popular with law enforcement and the military.
Palantir's customers include the Israel Defense Forces, the U.S. Department of Defense and dozens of large corporations. Now, its surveillance tools are being deployed by the Trump administration to help speed up the president's goal of deporting 1 million migrants this year. Since Trump was elected, Palantir's share price has surged more than 200%.
Although about a dozen former workers are just a fraction of a company employing 4,000, the letter is still significant. Much of Palantir's work is secretive and few former workers publicly criticize the company after leaving due to non-disparagement agreements most are asked to sign upon leaving. Many former employees also hold company stock. Palantir's market valuation stands at nearly $300 billion — about the same as Bank of America.
While top brass at Silicon Valley's largest companies have been acquiescing to the Trump administration, studies have found that rank-and-file tech workers tend to oppose Trump and hold liberal views on a host of social issues.
Big Tech employees resisted the first Trump administration's policies, including the attempts to restrict immigration and travel from foreign countries, yet the former Palantir employees say the resistance has been muted among tech workers in Trump's second term.
They wrote: "democracy faces escalating threats: biometric data collection on immigrant children, journalists being targeted, science programs defunded, and key U.S. allies, like Ukraine, sidelined. Trump's administration has sought to greatly expand executive powers while alluding to monarchy," adding that: "Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a 'revolution' led by oligarchs. We must resist this trend."
The signees highlight what they say is Palantir's "increasingly violent rhetoric," a nod to Palantir chief executive Alex Karp, who publicly boasts about how the company's tools are used to kill enemies. He once jokingly said that Wall Street analysts who "tried to screw" the company should be sprayed with "light fentanyl-laced urine."
The letter also zeros in on Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency team, which has hired a number of former Palantir employees to assist in slashing and burning the federal government.
The tech workers admonish the White House for its moves with DOGE and beyond to undo diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, arguing that those principles "remain essential for critiquing power" and ensuring advanced AI is deployed ethically.
"As Musk's DOGE operation dismantles U.S. government institutions under the guise of exposing corruption, opposition remains silent," the workers write. "Government databases are already erasing references to transgender people and gender-affirming care. These injustices could be facilitated by the very software infrastructure we help build."
The ex-Palantirians write that they are issuing a warning in hopes of triggering a "domino effect" in Silicon Valley.
They say that more tech workers should resist what they see as the misuse of AI and other tools in the Trump administration's actions, including its immigration enforcement and deportation policies that courts and critics say have at times ignored due process rights.
Their aim, they write is "to speak out while we still can, and to work against the dangerous path in the history of technology we are currently heading down towards."
Have information you want to share about Palantir? Bobby Allyn is available via the encrypted messaging app Signal at ballyn.77.
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