From Instagram and TikTok keeping us hooked to our phones to Amazon keeping us consuming, not to mention platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Spotify and WhatsApp. It is safe to say that everyone uses or is subjected to digital platforms. However, one platform that your neighbour probably does not use is Palantir. Palantir provides infrastructure to analyse large amounts of data. Unlike other platforms, Palantir relies on governments as its clients. This makes Palantir unique. But how did Palantir come to be and what does it actually do?
After 9/11, the US government looked for different avenues to strengthen homeland security. In comes Palantir, a software company founded in 2003 by, most notably, Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Palantir’s software offered homeland security a solution to control and organise big data. It received state funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm (Gregg and MacMillan, 2020). Palantir provides intelligence agencies with the infrastructure to do better surveillance. Like other digital platforms, Palantir is a monopoly, has a platform fee, and collects massive amounts of data. All while paying no taxes, all thanks to Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’. Unsurprising, since Peter Thiel is a big donor to both Trump and JD. Vance (Gardner, 2026). Furthermore, Palantir collects rent from a wide range of actors, from companies like Boeing to nation-states, with 23% of the company held by shareholders (Yahoo finance, n.d.). Because of Palantir’s strong alignment with the Trump administration, these companies have no other choice but to become increasingly more dependent on Palantir software. Therefore, owners of these digital platforms are the new emerging ruling class, as data has become a new form of capital that can be converted into political influence (Varoufakis, 2024).
Pieter Thiel was one of the first billionaires to fund Donald Trump’s campaign all the way back in 2016, at a time when Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (all owners of digital platforms) were against Donald Trump (Nayak, 2016). It can be argued that Palantir is a part of the military-industrial complex and works closely with the state like any other defence contractor did in the past (Al Jazeera, 2026). Yet some argue that this goes even beyond (Egbert & Ulbricht, 2024), as seen with the appointment of the Palantir-backed vice-president JD Vance. Being able to summarise big data makes Palantir multifunctional, as it does not need violence to train its algorithms (Srnicek, 2016). It therefore has ties not only to policing sectors in Israel, the United States and Europe but is also entrenched in the European care sector. Having these state actors as clients makes Palantir function as a quasi-state actor (Jeleweska, 2026). Palantir, amongst other digital platforms, has fuelled a broader debate among political economists. Is it simply another highly profitable capitalist corporation, or does it represent a new form of economic power built on controlling digital infrastructure? But first, how does Palantir function in practice?
Palantir in Practice
Palantir has been used many times by the US state apparatus. Sarah Brayne (2020) did research on Los Angeles policing and found that its algorithms are biased against minorities, justifying racist policing. AI having a racist bias has been reported in other instances as well, discriminating against Asian applicants (Levin, 2017). Furthermore, Palantir has been linked to ICE for years. Palantir’s AI is used to track the movement of immigrants (Hubbard, 2025) through an app called ELITE, which determines who and where to raid based on unverifiable data (Verhagen, 2026). Here, the algorithm controls the ICE agent in choosing who to arrest, illustrating the nature of algorithmic behaviour control.
Palantir, by being bound to the United States, is therefore also a close ally of Israel. Palantir’s systems such as Lavender and Where’s Daddy which make real-time kill lists of Palestinians (Abraham, 2024), making Palestine a testing ground for these systems to operate. It also has ties in the war with Iran, whereby the United States uses Palantir’s software to monitor Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. Tellingly, one of Palantir’s co-founders stated that he could not wait to ‘invest in Iran’ (Ahmed, 2026). War serves a dual purpose: it provides a way for Palantir to test its algorithms and an opportunity to further enclose new territory for profit. This way, Palantir can gain more data while also strengthening its capacity for behavioural control through its algorithms.
Furthermore, Palantir’s influence is expanding across Europe. Palantir has had contracts with the Norwegian (Gundhus & Wathne, 2023), Danish (Galis & Karlsson, 2024), and Dutch police (NU.nl, 2025). Furthermore, Palantir is already established in the UK care sector (Booth, 2025), with a Dutch care-sector partnership announced recently (Kepinski, 2026). The relationship runs deeper than that, former prime minister and former head of the AIVD Dick Schoof struck a deal with Palantir as far back as 2011. The AIVD made a database of all Dutch citizens, in an attempt to counter terrorism (BNNVARA, 2025). Further militarisation serves Palantir’s interests, as evidenced by NATO’s 2025 purchase of the MSS NATO system from Palantir (SHAPE Public Affairs Office, 2025). Unlike Boeing or Raytheon, which only produce parts of weapons, Palantir provides entire infrastructures. These weapons become further entangled in Palantir’s infrastructure. The question then arises whether the Dutch military, or any military, can act independently of Palantir’s interests at all. The Dutch military is forced to keep using this software because of high switching costs. The same sunk-cost logic likely applies to other institutions, as seen with the Dutch and British care sector. Monopoly formation has become so severe that foreign countries are dependent on the infrastructure provided by a handful of digital platforms pursuing their own interests.
The point of contention is the extent to which Palantir influences the United States government or vice versa. Palantir received funding from the CIA to get started. This makes sense, as Thiel and Karp serve the American empire; if not, the CIA would fund another tech giant. However, Thiel’s role in the appointment of JD Vance suggests that this influence can run both ways (Klaidman, 2024).
But What is Palantir?
It is clear what Palantir does, but how would a political economist classify Palantir? Two camps have emerged, those who say that the digital platform economy is still a phase within capitalism and those who say it is beyond capitalism.
The first group comprises scholars who argue that digital platforms are a new form of feudalism. Thinkers such as Yanis Varoufakis (2024), Jodi Dean (2024) and Cédric Durand (2024) argue that the central feature of the digital economy is the extraction of rent through control over essential digital infrastructures. Platforms do not compete with each other by producing goods but by owning space in which economic activity takes place. Peter Thiel appears sympathetic to this camp of thinkers through his intellectual influence on Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin, in seeing the failure of Western liberal democracy, argues that society should be a technologically advanced form of neo-feudalism (ECPS, z.d.). However, Thiel’s beliefs do not necessarily demonstrate that Palantir operates outside of capitalism.
A second group of scholars argues that digital platforms remain firmly within capitalism. Writers such as Evgeny Morozov (2022), Kohei Saito (& Sasaki, 2025), Brett Christophers (2020) and Nick Srnicek (2016) argue that platforms represent an intensified form of capitalist accumulation rather than a new economic system. Many of these writers give their own names: ‘surveillance capitalism, final stage of capitalism, rentier capitalism, platform capitalism’, but it all boils down to the same concept: the platform economy. Despite their monopolistic tendencies, platforms still operate through shareholder ownership, profit maximisation and investment (Morozov, 2022). From this perspective, Palantir is not feudalist but an extreme example of platform capitalism; a corporation that accumulates power by controlling essential digital infrastructure.
Palantir, however, complicates this distinction. It is simultaneously a shareholder corporation, a state contractor, a provider of digital infrastructure and a quasi-state actor. It clearly operates according to capitalist logic: it seeks profits, expands through contracts and creates value for shareholders. Yet its control over infrastructures used by governments, militaries and public institutions behind the barriers of rent gives it a form of political power that exceeds that of traditional corporations. Palantir therefore does not represent a simple transition from capitalism to feudalism. Instead, it reveals a new configuration of capitalist power, one that has feudalist tendencies, where ownership and control of digital infrastructure become sources of both economic and political influence.
Lucas Zuidema
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