Front Burner - Palantir’s big data, AI long game

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

Palantir’s technology has been used by everyone from the CIA and Mossad to Airbus and Morgan Stanley. The multi-billion dollar big data software company is at the centre of many of the major issues of our time. Michael Steinberger is a reporter with The New York Times Magazine and the author of a forthcoming book on Palantir’s CEO entitled ‘The Philosopher in the Valley.’ He joins the show to discuss Palantir’s wide-reaching technology, and what it tells us about the future of government and surveillance.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Primary way to create peace in this world is to scare our adversaries when they wake up, when they go to bed, while they're seeing their mistress. Whatever they're doing, they're scared. Palantir is here to disrupt and make our institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. So you're hearing there from the CEO of a company that stands to be one of the most influential of the Donald Trump era. The man in that audio is named Alex Karp.

The company that he leads is called Palantir. Now depending on your interests, it's likely that you'll recognize Palantir for different things. The company co-founded by billionaire Trump donor and democracy skeptic Peter Thiel markets itself as a data analytics company. They're also known for creating systems used at the policing and military level. Technologies like predictive policing, for example, the kind of tech that can use private social media postings, among other things, to forecast crime.

Palantir's technology has been at the center of everything, from ISIS accelerated deportation programs to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and to Elon Musk's Doge project. The New York Times reported recently that the Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work with the federal government to essentially create a master list that would include the private information of Americans. What the Times says could give Trump untold surveillance power. Palantir has denied that reporting. Michael Steinberger is a reporter with the New York Times Magazine, although I should say that he was not involved with the

Times reporting that I just mentioned. He is also the author of a forthcoming book on Palantir's CEO, the philosopher in the valley, and he joins me now to talk about the company quietly at the center of modern American life and what Palantir stands to tell us about the future of government and surveillance. Michael, it's so great to have you. Thanks for coming by. It's a pleasure to be with you. So Palantir has worked with the CIA, the Pentagon,

the Israeli government, the NSA to name a few, but also the likes of the UN World Food Program and companies like Airbus. And how would you describe the work that they do? Palantir produces software that enables organizations to make better use of their data. Software that can pull in huge streams of data, variety, various forms of data, structured like spreadsheets, unstructured like video, text messages, and kind of pull it all together and allow, and basically the software can find patterns, trends, connections that would take human analysts hours, days, weeks, or

sometimes forever to find. Yeah, essentially pattern recognition software in a lot of ways. The company has literally named itself after the Seeing Stone in the Lord of the Rings, which is something I didn't know until this morning. A palantir is a dangerous tool, Salama. Why? Why should we fear to use it? I saw that Bloomberg described the company as kind of like a spy's brain that, as you

mentioned, combs through data sources. So like financial documents, airline reservations, cell phone records, social media postings. It finds all these connections, and then it presents the linkages in these kind of colorful, easy to interpret graphics that look like spider webs. I know you've sat through a bunch of demos, like does that track? Yeah, it does. I mean, you can get the results presented in a variety of ways.

It's important to point out that Palantir does not take custody of the data that an organization has. It simply allows an organization to make better use of its own data. Palantir doesn't store that data. It doesn't sell that data. The software is equipped with pretty rigorous privacy controls that if they are used, limit access to data to people just on a need-to-know basis, on an authorized basis. There are a lot of safeguards built into the software. One of the big questions has always been, well, it's ultimately up to the client to decide how

rigorously they wish to enforce those, to use those guardrails. So that's always been an open question with Palantir. But I think it's important to note that they don't actually control the data. Yeah. I want to get into that with you a little bit more as we go along here. But when did the company first begin to really emerge on the national and international stage? Well, the company can trace its origins back to PayPal, which Peter Thiel had co-founded in the late 1990s. And then basically, PayPal had, in its early years, ran into a very significant problem, fraud. There were lots of fraudsters who were siphoning off

millions and millions of dollars. It basically threatened to put the company out of business. PayPal was generating a lot of data internally. They had human analysts, but sifting through that data was just something that was... There was just no way. There were just not enough eyeballs and not enough hours in the day to sift through all that data to find out, okay, where's the fraud happening, and so forth. And so basically they devised some software

that could identify suspicious patterns of behavior. And long story short, it ended up saving the business. The software was very effective, really good at identifying the suspicious behavior, which the human analysts would then look more closely at the activities that had been flagged and make a determination whether this was legitimate cause for concern or if the software had led them astray

and so forth. And so basically, it saved PayPal's business, cut to early 2000s, 9-11 has happened, and at some point, Peter Thiel, it occurred to him that perhaps the same pattern recognition software that had saved PayPal's business could be applied to the war on terrorism, could help the US government identify suspicious patterns of behavior that could lead to terrorist

attacks, could help the US government track down and kill terrorists or prevent terrorist attacks. And, you know, he had this idea, he shared it with a couple of colleagues, and this is how Palantir began. Could one do something from a libertarian or civil liberties point of view that would still be tough on terrorism and things like this? If the World Trade Center would erode civil liberties as much as it did in 2001, I didn't even want to think what would happen if you had another terrorist attack.

And so you have to prevent it to stop more erosion. What Palantir does... I know there's this claim that Palantir was instrumental in the assassination of Osama bin Laden and that it was their software that located him for the eventual US strike. What do you make of the reporting around this? I know it's like also this kind of lore that hangs over the company, right? Yeah.

Well, it's been very good for their business, I think. You know, it has not been conclusively established, let's put it that way. But you know, it was something that, you know, when this story came out, you know, they were still fledgling business, and it gave them a lot of cache. And the fact that we're still talking about in 2025, suggests that the the mystique has endured.

Can you tell me a little bit more or a little bit about CEO Alex Karp's role? I know that he and Peter Thiel met as students at Stanford University, right? But you have described them as political opposites. Yes. Well, they were classmates at Stanford Law School. They bonded over their shared unhappiness with law school and of their love of political debate. They went after each other pretty vigorously. Teal was a libertarian, already a somewhat well-known figure.

He'd started a right-wing newspaper as an undergraduate at Stanford. And Karp was considered himself a person of the left. And they spent a lot of time at law school playing chess and interrogating each other's political positions. We've been fighting about politics since we met at Stanford. You know, I always think that these things are a problem if it were like, if there's some kind of surprise or if you're committed to only having friends that agree with you. They formed a friendship there. After law school, Karp had no interest in pursuing a career in the

law. He went to Germany to pursue a doctorate in social theory at the Goethe University Frankfurt. So he spent a number of years in Germany doing that. And while Thiel was trying to get Palantir off the ground, Karp had returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. They reconnected. Thiel was struck by Karp's ability to, he was a very persuasive figure. Karp was doing some fundraising for a Jewish philanthropic organization at the time. And he was really good at getting people to buy into ideas. And Teal was struck by this and asked him

ultimately to join this startup called Palantir. I know Karp has been described as an enigma, but also, you know, in some ways he does sometimes both look and talk like a bit of a super villain in a Marvel film or like a mad scientist or something. He has this kind of messy mop of hair. He often says outlandish things like he dreams of drones striking his business enemies. He often rambles on about the superiority of the Western world and the need to bring quote violence and death to our enemies. People want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke, pagan ideology. They want to know they're safe.

And safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe. I think the West, as a notion and as a principle upon which it is ex- is ex- again, is obviously superior. I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who've tried to screw us. Can you talk to me a little bit more about Alex Karp, his view on the world and Palantir's place? Well, he's very outspoken and very unfiltered, which has made him a very appealing figure,

certainly for television bookers, because he's not a stereotypical CEO. Doesn't look like one, doesn't talk like one. And he has, in the retail investment community, he has a great many fanboys, not maybe quite at the level of Elon Musk, but approaching that, who just adored him for his outspokenness, his bluntness. What he is particularly outspoken and blunt about is the state of the world. He thinks that violence and chaos are the normal state of affairs and that we in the West have enemies who want to destroy us, destroy our way of life. And, you know, this has got a very, very dark view of things and sees Palantir

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The fact that they say that they don't store or sell client data as you got into, that they don't spy on Americans, that they abide by robust privacy controls. How does the company square that position with the work that they've done alongside organizations like the NSA, for example, or as another example, Palantir was implicated somewhat in the Cambridge Analytica scandal when back several years ago, all this data was improperly harvested

from Facebook to target voters. Well, in that case, and the palantir, the former now former palantir employee who was implicated in that admitted that he was freelancing. But you know, I think it's, it was certainly, it certainly called into question if nothing else, the sort of oversight internally, because you know, they work in very sensitive areas and that was a really, really bad scandal, and one that may have had significant implications for the 2016 presidential election. So there have been controversies that have called into question just how ethical Palantir is, how much it adheres to the standards it has set for itself.

And, you know, right now, of course, you're very much involved with Doge, they're very much involved with ICE and with the deportation efforts in the United States. You referenced at the top this report in the New York Times that being used to create essentially a surveillance apparatus in the federal government, which they strongly dispute. It's caused a lot of anger at the company because they say it's just not true. But at the end of the day, it's up to the client how this stuff is used, how rigorously they enforce these things. And in the case of Doge, in the case of ICE, in the case of the work that's being done in government agencies in Washington, the basic problem is here that a lot of Americans don't trust the Trump administration with their personal data. The

reality is that a lot of this data was kept segregated historically for this very reason, because, you know, Americans give a lot of their data to the government. Canadians do the same thing. We give this over because we're required to, but also because we trust that it will be handled cautiously, that, you know, that people who should not see our personal data will not see it. And that trust was violated with Doge. And to the extent that Palantir has been involved with that, it obviously raises concerns

about what the company's doing. Yeah. What do we know, if anything, about how ICE is using the technology? Well, I mean, they have a longstanding relationship with ICE that actually predates the first Trump administration. They were used by, it was started actually during the Obama administration.

It was after a federal drug agent was murdered by a Mexican cartel, as I recall, and Palantir was brought in to help and its software proved very effective at identifying the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. From that relationship developed a contract was signed. And it wasn't very controversial until Trump won the presidency in 2016 and then began his harsh immigration crackdown after taking office. Was there ever a time that you wished you had not done work for ICE? Absolutely. Completely. You wish you'd never done work for ICE. Absolutely.

Completely. You wish you'd never done it. No, no, no. You asked, is there ever a time? Did ICE suffer? Look, everyone in my family thinks voting for Biden is right of center. I've had some of my favorite employees leave.

Over ICE. Over ICE. Again, because Palantir had this relationship with ICE, and I think during the first Trump presidency because, you know, Teal's very strong support for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign had inevitably made Palantir a lightning rod. And it's just suspicion Teal had strong anti-immigration views. So for critics of the first Trump administration's policies, Palantir was an obvious source of concern and target. And right now, do we know how the technology

is being used in the agency's massive deportation efforts that are currently underway. It's being used to facilitate deportations, to implement actions to remove people from the country, to the mechanics of removing people from the country. One of the more controversial endeavors that we haven't talked about yet is the work that they've helped to do in the world of so-called predictive policing. And can you tell me more about how this works and how successful it's been? Well, it hasn't been very successful in the sense that they don't have any relationships

at the moment with any major police departments in the United States. They did. The most notable and long-standing one was the Los Angeles Police Department, which used their software as part of a program that I think could fairly be characterized as predictive policing. Basically, trying to identify areas, neighborhoods, streets, what have you, where crimes were

likely to occur based on past patterns. And the police would use that information to try to prevent future crimes from happening. The controversy with predictive policing, certainly in the United States, is that this algorithmically driven policing, if you will, reflects human biases. That's always been the criticism and policing, if you will, reflects human biases. That's always been the criticism and reinforces,

in the view of critics, racially based policing. So that it's targeting minority communities disproportionately. And also that it was pulling a lot of innocent people into the police dragnet. So for instance, I mean, you know, the software was taking in information from automatic license plate readers. So, you know, if I'm driving down Sunset Boulevard, my car is being photographed and that information is being entered into the system. And even though the system has no reason to have me in there,

I'm in there. Right now, it seems like the company is involved in war. It's a major defense contract in the United States. Yeah, I wanna talk, I wanna discuss that with you a little bit more, like the technology is on the front lines of wars everywhere from Ukraine to Gaza. You know, what are they doing there? Well, it's a variety of things. In Ukraine, well, they did give the Ukrainian government

their software. Karp in May of 2022, so just after the war started, went to Kiev and met with President Zelensky. You know, quite a brave thing to do. I mean, it was the war, you know, the country was at war and he went, he wanted to signal Palantir's support for Ukraine and they ultimately opened office there and supplied the country with their technology. Hybrid war, meaning software plus low-grade munitions plus heroism, outperforms conventional war, which is one of the big lessons. And we've been in the background on this on the software side. Technology is also used by the U.S. military. It's been used by multiple branches of the military. And it played a part in helping the US military

help the Ukrainians repel the Russian, try to repel the Russian attack. You know, it's, you know, the software pulls in a lot of data. In that case, it was pulling in data from, generated by satellites, by cell phones, all sorts of stuff. It played a significant role, as I understand it, in helping the Ukrainians withstand the initial Russian thrust into Ukraine. Is there a sense that Karp's politics, that the way that he sees the world influences,

the priorities of Palantir, like just listening to him talk, he invokes war often, right? Like he talks about the legacy of the Manhattan Project. He talks about this kind of class, clash of civilizations, like in his framing, about there being a hierarchy of nations of which the United States is at the top. And so, you know, where, where does his politics fit into all of this? You've just written a whole book about him, yeah.

Yeah, well, the first thing to understand is that, I mean, it was a company founded with a very distinct agenda, Where does his politics fit into all of this? You've just written a whole book about him. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the first thing to understand is that, I mean, it was a company founded with a very distinct agenda, a political agenda. It was a company founded. I mean, their idea was they were going to defend the United States, helping defend the United States and the West more broadly. And so from the start, it was Palantir's policy not to sell software to the Chinese government or any Chinese companies, nor to sell to the Russian government or any Russian companies. At least with China,

I mean, that was a pretty bold move back in the early and mid-2000s in the sense that China was a booming market. I think a lot of potential investors looked at Palantir and said, you're going to forsake the world's preeminent emerging market. But I would say now that those decisions have been validated in the sense that the view at Palantir from its inception was that China was an adversary, Russia was an adversary. That was not by any means the consensus, you know, in 2005, say, and I think now it certainly is. So always a political agenda with the company. And as I said before, Karp has a pretty bleak worldview, and this goes back a long, long

time. He just thinks that violence and anarchy are sort of the natural state of affairs. And as he put in one earnings call a couple of years ago, Palantir was built for bad times. The idea here is that this is a company that they're not promising us a utopia. They're just, it's software that can maybe make the world a little less dangerous.

That's their pitch. And certainly his views have hardened. And October 7th, for instance. Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly Palantir has come under sharp criticism for its work with the IDF in Israel, right? And and and Karp has been criticized, like people have confronted him quite a lot about that. How do you feel Palestinians with their AI and technology? Oh.

They're killing my family in Palestine. And you know. How do you sleep at night? Well, if you. He's pushed back pretty aggressively, hey? Well, he has pushed back aggressively. I mean, it's a company that had a relationship with Israel before October 7th. That relationship has deepened. There's also been, it seems, some misreporting or misinformed reporting about what exactly they've been doing. But by the same token,

they're misinformed reporting about what exactly they've been doing. But by the same token, Karp clearly makes no apologies for what they're doing. I'm carrying your AI and your technology from Palantir to kill Palestinians! Mostly terrorists, that's true. No, it's not that... He believes that Israel, the defense of Israel is integral to Palantir's mission of supporting the West. And, you, you know, and something that he also takes very personally, he is Jewish. And, you know, he it's, it's, it's, it's part of the identity that is that he feels very strongly about. And so for both

personal and, I suppose, ideological, political reasons, supporting Israel was supporting it loudly was his inclination from the start. Michael, I don't know if you've seen this, but last week, Task and Purpose, like the outlet Task and Purpose, reported that a number of tech executives, including from Palantir, have been sworn into the US Army as Lieutenant Colonel. Shamsankar, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Palantir and also Bob McGrew, who was an early engineer at Palantir and then went to open AI. Yeah, they were all part of this cohort that was sworn in. Does that not strike you as unusual? Well, there are lots of things about this moment

that are unusual. Yeah. And, you know, I would say this, Palantir has become a major defense contractor. And, you know, Palantir makes this argument, all these defense tech starters make this argument, but there are also a lot of, you know, defense experts and people in the Pentagon who believe that, you know, the future of war is going to be very different. It's going to be autonomous, semi-autonomous weapons. It's not going to be these heavy armaments that have traditionally been made by the traditional defense contractors. And so there's a real revolution afoot in the defense industry. And Palantir's at the vanguard of that and looking to remain so. And so, you know, you had over the weekend Donald Trump's

army parade in Washington and Palantir is one of the corporate sponsors. weekend Donald Trump's Army parade in Washington and Palantir is one of the corporate sponsors. Special thanks to our sponsor Palantir. What do you make of the argument, really one of the primary concerns here, when it comes to Palantir and those like them, is this idea that the work of government is being outsourced to private industry, to billionaires, to CEOs that are not beholden to the same kinds of checks and balances or Congress. What would you make of that argument when applied to Palantir? Well, I think it's, I think it has to be seen in the context of this moment. You know, I

think most people would agree that anything that can make government operate more efficiently is not a bad thing. You know, if you can make government operate more efficiently and at a less cost to taxpayers, that seems to be a desirable outcome. If Palantir makes software that can make the government operate better, and we've seen examples of this. I mean, Palantir's software was instrumental in helping the United States try to come to grips with COVID-19. They were brought in to help and the people overseeing the federal government response initially were operating sort of just kind of like the fog of war. They just couldn't get good data. They couldn't pull all the data together. We've got this, you know, kind of crazy healthcare system in the United States where, you know, every state has its own things. Every state does things a little differently

and they could not get, you know, sort of that global view and Palantir helped them get it in a matter of weeks. So, you know, you look at something like that and you say, okay, well, you know, this is a pretty good thing and so forth. But, you know, I think it's in the context of this moment that it's problematic. Because again, Doge acted in a way that may have been illegal for one thing. And just to come back to Palantir and to Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, I guess, as well, and Peter Thiel, I guess, as well, because they have a lot of agency in what they choose to do with their technology and how it's used as well.

I'd just be curious, you know, to ask you this straight as someone who has just spent all of this time writing this book, like, what is Palantir's ultimate vision for the future? What version of America or of the West do they want to manifest? Does Karp want to manifest? What kind of world is he working to create here? Or are they working here?

Well, that's a really good question. It's a complicated question. I mean, if you, Peter Thiel has expressed, you know, views about, you know, politics and democracy and, you know, and what his end game, what his end game here is. It's actually not democracy, it sounds like. Well, he's not a, he has made clear that he is not a fan of it, that he thinks it is incompatible with freedom, by which he means economic freedom.

Yeah, there's a lot of speculation about what his endgame is here. He's not running the company. He's not involved in the day-to-day operations. He's the chairman of the board. He and Karp are close friends and Karp very much values his input. I can't speculate about what his angle is here. You can read what he's written and draw your own conclusions. Karp, I think, sees, he thinks that Palantir, he earnestly believes that Palantir can make organizations more efficient and therefore stronger. And this is true

at the government level, it's true at the corporate level. We are in a software defined world, and the nation that leads software is the USA. And then so what does that mean for all institutions? What it means is institutions have to actually live up to their core, their core mandate. So a country has to have a border, the educational institutions have to work live up to their core mandate. So a country has to have a border, the educational institutions have to work, the military actually has to be scary. You actually can have things function in a way where the outputs are much greater than the inputs.

And I believe, and he said this very clearly, that the determining factor on the battlefield is software. And even more so now, it's going to be the country that dominates in AI. And then so he thinks of this. He sees the world. He sees the United States and the West as being challenged by countries that

reject our way of life, that do not want to live the way we do. He thinks it's an existential danger. And he believes that Palantir is playing a critical role in ensuring that the United States and the West are triumphant. And I think what he sees is a new Cold War, if you want, or maybe something that will be tantamount to World War III. I don't know. Michael, this was really interesting. Thank you so much.

Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. All right. That is all for today. I'm JB Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.