I watched the Lord of the Rings for the first time at Christmas. It was great. I enjoyed that the underdogs stayed friends and good triumphed over evil. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir Technologies, preferred the evil, naming his data storage and analytics company after a cursed orb from the series that provided the villains with endless vision across all lengths and breadths on the road to world domination. How creepy can you get?
Thiel is one of the 100 richest people in history and a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle. He led the drive for Silicon Valley to become a Petri dish for far-right politics. And Thiel’s particular industry—surveillance and data analysis utilising artificial intelligence—is the repulsive progeny of capitalist profiteering, militarism and old-fashioned megalomania.
Palantir has always been closely connected to US imperialism. Founded in 2003 as the United States government’s “War on Terror” was gathering steam, and with the mission of “defending the West”, the company received some of its early funding from the CIA.
Palantir’s systems—the most well-known being Gotham and Foundry—take large amounts of data and use it to identify potential patterns. This has been put to use as a huge labour-saving scheme for the repressive parts of the capitalist state, which deploy it for mass surveillance and intelligence gathering. According to technology journalist Tom Knowles, the UK, Ukraine and Israeli militaries are Palantir customers, as are all six branches of the US military. In the words of the company’s chief executive Alex Karp, in a 2020 interview with Axios, Palantir’s technologies “are used, on occasion, to kill people”.
Palantir’s data analysis was part of the military planning underpinning Operation Epic Fury in February 2026, which launched the United States and Israel’s war on Iran. In particular, some Palanatir systems were involved in the targeted attack upon Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in southern Iran, which murdered more than 170 people. As Kevin Baker wrote for the Guardian in March, human decisions, including those of Peter Thiel and Palantir’s scientists and executives, led to the carnage, and “calling it an ‘AI problem’ gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide”.
In 2025, Palantir was among the companies named by the United Nations as profiting from the genocide in Gaza. The deals are secretive, but, according to a July 2025 explainer by Federica Marsi in Al Jazeera, the UN believes that Palantir’s artificial intelligence technology assisted in the design of Israeli military systems such as Lavender, Gospel and Where’s Daddy? that were used to target civilians and, in the last instance, Palestinian children.
Palantir has also partnered with ICE to help carry out its mass deportation regime. The aptly named Elite (Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement) assisted in creating deportation targets to track down immigrants, including the notorious use of tattoos to predict possible gang membership. The company has also been implicated in developing technologies that could be used for “predictive policing”, that is, intensifying the repression of working-class people, especially black people and immigrants.
Some of the faces behind Palantir fancy themselves public intellectuals. Thiel and Karp met at Stanford University, one of the most expensive and exclusive in the world. Peter Thiel wrote a dull 2009 manifesto for the Cato Institute titled “The Enlightened Libertarian”. His main insight was that democracy hasn’t been any good since women won the right to vote. A biography of Alex Karp published in 2025 described him as “The Philosopher in the Valley”.
It might seem ironic that men who constantly bemoan infringements on their individual freedoms run a murderous, brutal spy company. But that’s the modern capitalist class in a nutshell. Who needs integrity when there’s money to be made? Especially when it’s a lot of money. Julia Hornstein wrote for Business Insider in 2025 that Palantir reported a 63 percent bump in revenue in the previous financial year; in the same period, its US commercial revenue was up 121 percent and government revenue 52 percent.
I am no Tolkien expert, but (spoiler alert) it appeared to me that when Frodo threw the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, Lord Sauron, who most used the Palantir, exploded. Something to think about.
