On 28 February 2026 the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Iran was hit at least twice by American missiles – over 175 people were killed, the majority of them schoolgirls aged between 7 and 12 years old. The school was targeted by an AI-based system called Maven, which is supplied to the US military by a firm called Palantir.
Technology specialist Kevin T Baker has documented the evolution of Maven, which began, surprisingly, with a workers’ revolt. In 2018 over 4000 Google employees signed a letter demanding the company not build AI tools for Pentagon targeting systems. This was accompanied by a walk-out from work and the resignation of some engineers. Google gave up the contract but Palantir (in which the CIA had been an early investor) took up the reins in 2019, creating Maven in close cooperation with the US military, even referring to their own engineers as “forward-deployed”.
The system identifies military targets and the best means of attacking them. How it differs from previous systems is that multiple targets are identified at very high speed through machine-processing of inputted data, and there is almost no pause between target identification and attack. In military jargon, the ‘kill chain’ has been compressed. This means that there is no space to question or second-guess. The information that identified the school in Iran as a military target came from an out-of-date database and a simple glance at Google Maps would have shown that it was clearly a school, but the system does not do such glances – it runs on a sealed decision-making loop in which life or death is determined by “algorithmic computation”.
Automated war and Israel
It is important not to overstate the novelty of this. The US military has long been mass murdering the innocent – by intention or by ‘accident’. AI did not guide the carpet bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, nor the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there is still something deeply macabre in this new, more automated means of waging war and in the companies that develop it, boast of it and profit from it.
Palantir epitomizes this new and sinister model. CEO Alex Karp has said that the company is “here to… scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Karp likens Maven to the swarming of bees and the murmuration of starlings, an instinctive and rapid relay of actionable information that guides behavior without the need for briefings and meetings (and any opportunity for the correction of decisions). The facilitation of death and destruction is, within this grotesque mindset, rendered akin to natural and benign phenomena.
Unsurprisingly, Palantir is also a close ally of the Israeli military, helping identify and destroy human and infrastructural targets during the genocide in Gaza. Again, the emphasis is on generating as many targets as possible in the shortest possible time and then moving automatically to target destruction. Karp is proud of the company’s support to Israel, announcing a new strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) at the company’s first board meeting of 2024, which was held in Tel Aviv. Many other tech companies also work with the IDF, including Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon and Google (its employees’ 2018 anti-war protest notwithstanding).
Karp is dismissive of the fact that some of its own employees have resigned in protest over its partnership with Israel. Palantir co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel is similarly blasé, saying that when it comes to concerns about civilian deaths its “bias is to defer to Israel”. The late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein was a close associate of Thiel and likely introduced Palantir to the Israeli market through another close Epstein friend, Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister and now a private sector security operator. Epstein’s links to the Israeli security service Mossad are a matter of record.
Palantir-Trump overlap
Such elite networking has also served the company well in the US itself. Apart from its contracts with the US military, it is also helping the gestapo-like ICE develop a tracking and surveillance system for migrants to presage their targeting and deportation, part of what one Silicon Valley investor described as “building the infrastructure of the police state”. There has been a massive rise in Palantir’s US business and share value under Trump 2.0 based on links that bridge the worlds of politics and commerce. Vice-President JD Vance previously worked for a Thiel company and was lavishly funded by him when he ran for political office.
Author Seth Harper points out that Palantir is essentially bribing the US government to buy its products, or otherwise advance their sale. Thiel protégés are running Trump’s policy towards AI, which amounts to the abolition of regulation and ethical oversight. Palantir hedges its bets though – Karp has typically supported Democrats, including Kamala Harris in 2024.
Whatever their party political differences, what Karp and Thiel share is a commitment to a Western-dominated world order based on a racism that is not even thinly disguised. Karp asks “Do you believe in the West? Do you believe that the West has created a superior way of living?” (He does not trouble himself with questions of how slavery, colonialism and ongoing exploitation might have helped establish that way of living and at whose expense). A book – The Technological Republic – co-written by Karp in 2025 emphasized the need to secure “the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order”. An April 2026 ‘Palantir manifesto’ (again co-authored by Karp) refers to certain non-Western cultures as “dysfunctional and regressive”.
Thiel believes that democracy and freedom are incompatible, by which he means that democracy potentially allows the majority (he especially fears women voters) to impose limits on the actions of the super-rich. He has embraced ever more extreme views, delivering a series of rambling, incoherent lectures about Armageddon and the Antichrist, whom he thinks might be Greta Thunberg (he really does have a problem with women) or any force that advocates global regulation of business or the limitation of technological advance.
State reliance
And yet Thiel’s claimed commitment to the free market runs counter to his business model. His company depends on contracts from the US government’s expanding military and police state budgets, contracts won through insider networking rather than competitive tendering. He says he is a libertarian but, in reality, he is a crony capitalist.
That template applies outside the US also, and not just in Israel. Palantir has £500 million worth of contracts with the UK government and questions have been asked of how much of that was due to lobbying of Prime Minister Keir Starmer by disgraced former ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson, another Epstein associate. Global Counsel, the lobbying company Mandelson co-founded and part-owned, represented Palantir, and Starmer visited a Washington facility of Palantir when Mandelson was ambassador there – lucrative UK government contracts followed (in at least one case a ‘direct award’ without the work being put out to tender). Starmer’s visit was not registered in his official schedule.
The company’s influence is not confined to the Anglo-American (and Israeli) world. Palantir technology is also used by various European governments and by police departments in some German states (that version is called, in a semi-sinister and semi-comic twist, Gotham) as well as being embedded in the operating system of Europol (the pan-European policing body) and at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Some European politicians have expressed concern at this infiltration – not because of association with war crimes but rather because of worries about data privacy and dependence on non-European actors. Germany’s Digital Minister is calling for a ‘European Palantir’, as if that would make everything OK.
Racism in digital form
It is in the area of migration and border control that the most significant growth opportunities have been opened up in Europe for Palantir and its ilk. As migration becomes increasingly treated as a security issue to be dealt with by coercive-technocratic tools, ever more data (including biometric) on migrants is collected at borders and within Europe itself. The data is culled from migrants’ mobile phones, video surveillance cameras, motion sensors, thermal imaging devices and by a host of other means. Palantir and others then offer their services analyzing this data for purposes such as predicting the sites of migration movements and determining eligibility for asylum, with people’s fates again determined by racially biased and inaccurate information processed through algorithmic calculation.
Anna Charalambidis documents how “discrimination and violent exclusion are… entrenched through the biases embedded in digital infrastructures”. Research carried out by Investigative Journalists for Europe found that Switzerland was among the countries where “Palantir [was]… a key player in AI-powered border surveillance that has facilitated the interception and illegal repatriation of refugees”. (Would those illegally repatriated have been happier if their rights had been violated by a European company, as Germany’s Digital Minister would prefer?)
The Irish connection
The Irish state, through the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, continues to hold approximately €1 million in Palantir company shares, despite protest from opposition parties. This is line with the overall record of the government when it comes to militarism, Palestine and global justice more broadly – rhetorical support for Palestine and even some limited condemnation of the US attack on Iran, but no concrete action. US troops and munitions continue to transit unchecked through Shannon airport (there was a surge after the Iran war started); weapons bound for Israel are routinely trafficked through Irish airspace; more and more licenses are granted for the export of military goods to the US and Germany (in turn the main suppliers of armaments to Israel); and the Occupied Territories Bill is long-fingered to extinction. Successive governments have turned Ireland into a critical link in the global ‘kill chain’.
The state is not alone in its complicity. 2024 saw a newly elected Social Democrat TD, Eoin Hayes, suspended from the party for lying about his ownership of Palantir shares. Hayes worked for the company between 2015 and 2017 and was part-paid in shares – he claimed that he had sold those shares before he entered politics in October 2023 but, in fact, he did not sell them (for almost €200,000) until July 2024, long after Palantir’s support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza was well established. He has since been readmitted to the parliamentary party (and donated a portion of his dubiously acquired gains to charity).
The Ditch has revealed that the Green Party’s candidate for the forthcoming Galway West by-election, Niall Murphy, owns shares (worth over €12,697) in the US company Cisco (for whom he works) – the company services illegal Israeli settlements and supplies technology to the IDF, including a platform specifically designed to support the Israeli military in Gaza. Ordinary people who need to make a living cannot reasonably be asked to give up jobs in IT companies, even those with malevolent records, but it seems fair to ask that neither the state nor representatives of parties claiming to stand for justice and human rights hold shares in such companies.
A palantir was a ‘seeing stone’ in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, a magical instrument capable of revealing information to those who could read and interpret it. It was, in some ways, an appropriate name to adopt for a company wishing to sell its services to the intelligence and surveillance industries. But the company’s enthusiastic embrace of violence towards Gazans, Iranians, migrants and others runs counter to Tolkien’s own world view, one which emphasized the horrors of war and sympathy for the displaced. He had suffered in the trenches of WW1 and seen many of his friends killed.
If Thiel and Karp were being true to the spirit of Tolkien’s work they might have better called their company after the evil warlord Sauron who is dedicated to conquest and annihilation. Indeed one of Sauron’s most famous lines (from the film version of The Return of the King) – “You cannot hide. I see you. There is no life in the void, only death” – would work well enough as Palantir’s corporate mission statement and that of many other such actors in the emergent military-technology complex.
