‘Surveillance State’: NYT Report On Palantir Sparks Backlash From MAGA

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Palantir Technologies became a new target for MAGA supporters when the New York Times (NYT) claimed the Trump administration intended to use the company to collect data on Americans. While Palantir staunchly denies the allegations, pro-Trump voices are urging the president to be wary of the tech giant.

The NYT’s report claims the Trump administration is using Palantir’s “Foundry” system — a data analytics program — to gather hundreds of data points on American citizens, citing anonymous government officials.

Palantir said the company received a letter Tuesday from Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden requesting information in response to the report.

The letter compared Palantir’s work for the U.S. government to collaborating with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, according to the company.

“To be very clear: Palantir is not building a master database, and Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens,” Palantir stated Tuesday, asserting the NYT’s report is speculation “based on fundamental misunderstandings” of its software.

Nonetheless, MAGA acolytes are sparring over the company’s work with the Trump administration. “War Room” host Steve Bannon warned that Palantir’s pervasive work across the federal government amounted to a “surveillance state.” Others flagged Palantir’s past work stopping the “far-right” in Europe and its chief executive’s support of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as potential areas of concern.

Palantir’s Foundry is being used in at least four federal agencies, the NYT’s report alleged. It is a tool that allows engineers to monitor data, according to Palantir’s blog. (RELATED: New York Times Contradicts Itself In Attempted RFK Hit Piece)

President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have prioritized government efficiency and streamlining information sharing.

Trump signed the Eliminating Information Silos executive order in March, which was targeted at enabling agencies to share information with each other. Its purpose is to “[remove] unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter-agency data sharing,” according to the order.

The NYT speculated that Palantir could be integral to that mission.

Additionally, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that passed the House in May included a provision that prohibited U.S. states from regulating AI for the next ten years.

Palantir first blasted the NYT a few days after the report and asserted it does not “unlawfully surveil Americans.”

“The recently published article by the New York Times is blatantly untrue,” Palantir stated on X. “Palantir never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans, and our Foundry platform employs granular security protections. If the facts were on its side, the New York Times would not have needed to twist the truth.”

Palantir also said the NYT sells consumer’s personal data, pointing to the publication’s privacy page.

“They hire technical people to exploit and sell your data. Exactly what Palantir does NOT do,” Palantir claimed on X.

Although Palantir was recently thrust into the spotlight, its work for the federal government goes back decades.

Left-wing activists assailed the company over its role with the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but ICE has used Palantir since at least 2011, according to a DHS award.

The company’s work with ICE appears to be ramping up under the Trump administration, though.

ICE is set to advance a “sole-source contract” to Palantir, according to a 2025 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notice. Palantir is the only vendor capable of enabling ICE to perform its mission, the document said.

Palantir is also working on ICE’s ImmigrationOS, a platform targeted at identifying illegal aliens and tracking self-deportations, according to DHS documents. ICE awarded Palantir a nearly $30 million contract in April to create the platform to streamline deportations.

The company is helping ICE find the “physical location of people who are marked for deportation,” according to Palantir Slacks and internal communications reportedly obtained by 404 media.

CNN and WIRED also published reports in April claiming DOGE is using Palantir to assist in constructing a database to help authorities surveil illegal aliens.

Thirteen former Palantir employees recently signed a letter in protest, lamenting that the tech behemoth has “grown hostile to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 30: (L-R) Jacob Helberg, Co-Founder, Hill & Valley Forum and Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir Technologies speak on stage during The Hill & Valley Forum 2025 at The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for 137 Ventures/Founders Fund/Jacob Helberg )

Palantir also works with the Department of Defense (DOD), which awarded Palantir USG Inc. — a subsidiary — a $795 million contract in May. Additionally, it was one of the sponsors of the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday parade on June 14.

Palantir has received hundreds of millions in federal grants across agencies over the past 12 months, according to data from USA Spending.

Palantir stated in a 2020 blog post that it is not a “data company” but rather a software corporation. “We do not collect, store, or sell personal data,” the post read.

The NYT’s allegations prompted a largely negative reaction from MAGA supporters, including Bannon.

“We’re not for the surveillance state,” he said on his “War Room” show. “We’re free men and women. We believe in liberty and freedom.”

Other critics pointed to an interview that Palantir’s Chief Executive, Alex Karp, did with CNBC.

The outlet interviewed Karp in 2023 in Davos, Switzerland. Karp said one of the company’s platforms, Palantir Gotham (PG), stopped the “far-right” in Europe. (RELATED: Intel Agencies Begin Dismantling DEI In Response To Trump’s Order)

“Look, we built PG which single-handedly stopped the rise of the far-right in Europe,” Karp said. “We built Foundry, which was just, it was used to distribute the COVID vaccine and saved millions of lives globally.”

Like tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Karp has pushed back against wokeness.

He slammed woke ideology in 2024, calling it a “form of a thin pagan religion,” according to footage. He criticized Democrats at the Reagan National Defense Forum in 2024, saying that Americans, “do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology,” according to a clip on X.

Karp is also outspokenly pro-Israel, and he flew the board of his company to the country in January 2024. Moreover, Palantir supplied Israel with tools after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, according to Bloomberg.

Palantir skeptics in MAGA, however, have pointed to Karp’s past statements on Trump.

Karp donated $360,000 to Biden and supported former Vice President Kamala Harris, he told the NYT in a 2024 interview. He told NYT that he pushed back against Theil’s support of Trump during the first presidential campaign.

“Because Peter had supported Mr. Trump, it was actually harder to get things done,” Karp told the outlet.

He previously criticized Trump and his immigration stances in 2015, according to videos obtained by Buzzfeed in 2017. In a 2024 Bloomberg interview, he defended Palantir’s work for ICE and said he supports “a fair but rigorous immigration policy.”

He also told the outlet that he “[agrees] with progressives on most issues.”

Another point of contention was Palantir’s work for the Biden administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Biden administration announced in 2023 that it secured commitments from eight companies, including Palantir, to advance the “trustworthy” development of AI technology, according to a press release.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) awarded Palantir a $443 million “consolidated disease surveillance contract” in 2022, FedScoop reported.

Palantir worked with the federal government in 2021 to help distribute the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a company press release.

It built the platform “Tiberius” for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “track vaccine production, distribution, and administration across the United States,” the release noted.

Biden also deployed Palantir to aid the CDC in “disease tracking” during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) originally reported in 2020.

Palantir has been intertwined with the most secretive parts of the U.S. government since its inception.

It was created in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and was initially funded by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, according to The Financial Times. Palantir’s customers have included the CIA, National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to a 2013 Forbes report.

The NSA’s relationship with Palantir reportedly ended, according to Buzzfeed in 2017.

Palantir’s name is derived from the “palantiri,” or the all-seeing stones that the wizard Saruman used for surveillance in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”

The company was created by billionaire Peter Thiel, who supported both Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the latter of whom has known Thiel since 2011, according to an op-ed Vance wrote in 2020.

The other co-founders include Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Nathan Gettings and Stephen Cohen. (RELATED: Trump 2.0 Takes Chainsaw To The Deep State With Historic Cuts Of Staff, Budgets)

Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp attends a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on May 25, 2022. (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

Karp and Thiel are both members of the Bilderberg Group’s steering committee, according to the organization’s website.

The Bilderberg Group holds annual invite-only meetings with industry and world leaders. Their June 2025 meeting in Sweden highlighted “AI, Deterrence and National Security” as well as “Depopulation and Migration.”

“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them,” Karp said in a quarterly February earnings call, according to Sherwood News.