What Is Palantir? How a US Spytech Firm Penetrated the British State

From Epstein to ICE to the IDF.
A US spytech firm deeply embedded in the most sensitive areas of the British state is being scrutinised as part of the fallout from the latest tranche of documents related to the financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Palantir Technologies, co-founded and chaired by billionaire Peter Thiel, holds over £670m in UK government contracts across NHS patient data, defence operations, police intelligence databases and nuclear weapons management. The multibillion-dollar US company has also provided military tech to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the genocide in Gaza, and helped facilitate Donald Trump’s brutal immigration enforcement crackdown across the US.
The most recent dump of Epstein files sheds light on the links between Palantir, Thiel, Epstein and the former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson.
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What is Palantir?
Palantir Technologies, worth approximately $300bn, is a software company that pulls together and analyses data from different sources.
Headquartered in Miami, Florida after a recent exit from Denver, Colorado, Palantir describes its software as powering “real-time, AI-driven decisions in critical government and commercial enterprises in the west, from the factory floors to the front lines”. Its products are extensively deployed in military, policing and healthcare contexts.
The name Palantir is inspired by the crystal balls from JRR Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings. By looking into a palantír, the evil Lord Sauron is able to see in any direction, at any distance.
Built with CIA funding to support the US ‘war on terror’ following the 11 September attacks, Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Jon Lonsdale and Nathan Gettings, but didn’t go public until 2020.
Much of its work has been shrouded in secrecy, but today its flagship products – Palantir Gotham and Palantir Foundry – connect fragmented stores of information, forming them into big, searchable databases that can then be used for analysis, intelligence-gathering, policing and business analytics.
Gotham is Palantir’s defence and intelligence platform, marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and primarily used by militaries and counterterrorism analysts. It’s built to handle vast datasets and employed by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and Department of Defense in the US, and across Europe, including by the Ukrainian military.
In Ukraine, Palantir’s Gotham system is credited with shaping the future of warfare by pulling together images, drone footage and battlefield data to create an operational map to form an “AI-powered kill chain”.
Gotham supports alerts, geospatial analysis and prediction, with the latter drawing criticism from rights groups over the impact of predictive policing and intrusive mass surveillance. A 2019 predicting policing project between Palantir and the Los Angeles Police Department was cancelled after accusations that it reinforced racism and didn’t reduce crime.
Palantir has also built custom tools for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The agency has reportedly spent more than $200m on Palantir contracts to help it identify targets for deportation by integrating travel histories, visa records, biometrics and social media data. In the past month, immigration enforcement agents in the US have kidnapped children and shot dead citizen observers as part of Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown.

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See the original article at https://novaramedia.com/2026/02/19/what-is-palantir-how-a-us-spytech-firm-penetrated-the-british-state/






