By John P. Ruehl

Author Bio: John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s description of the company’s quarterly earnings in August 2025 as “once in a generation” wasn’t far-fetched. It surpassed $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, after only turning profitable in 2022. Its surge has made it an outlier: still too small by revenue to crack the Fortune 500, its roughly $400 billion market value by December (more than double what it was in January) places it among the 25 most valuable companies in the world.

Palantir’s ascent over the last couple of years comes after two decades of operating largely outside the public spotlight, at least compared to Big Tech giants or Elon Musk’s companies. Founded in 2003, it went public only in 2020 and has fewer than 4,000 employees. It runs no public advertising and sells no consumer-facing products, focusing entirely on developing software platforms for government agencies, companies, and nonprofits.

Part of Palantir’s success stems from what amounts to a monopoly. In his 2014 book Zero to One and follow-up essay “Competition Is for Losers,” co-founder Peter Thiel argued that the most successful companies are “creative monopolies,” and are so good at what they do that no real substitute exists. Citing Google’s search engine, Thiel wrote that monopoly profits let companies invest more in workers, products, and long-term innovation, while disrupting stagnant incumbents.

Understanding Palantir’s business monopoly is difficult because both the firm and many of its clients keep its platforms largely out of view. Named after the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir grew out of PayPal’s fraud detection project. Its operating systems now combine data from communications, supply chains, operations, and other sources to reveal patterns and support faster decision-making. Over time, Palantir has layered these tools into integrated management systems, with advisers often deployed to simplify adoption.

At the center is its “Ontology,” a central brain that links an organization’s data to show how everything fits together, “transforming raw data into valuable knowledge.” Originally a proto-AI system, it has been enhanced since 2023 with Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which uses large language models, generative AI, and coordinated AI agents that work together. This setup reduces scaling constraints and enables a more “plug-and-play” approach that can be managed remotely.

Clients can build comparable systems in-house, but doing so is slow, expensive, and often difficult to maintain. As the first mover, Palantir can deploy advanced, customizable platforms in weeks, and the combination of performance, convenience, and high switching costs tends to lock customers in.

Developing the Domestic Engine

Palantir’s platforms have been used in the U.S. for decades, initially by agencies seeking advanced planning and security tools after 9/11. Early access to unique government datasets trained its systems on everything from modern databases to decades-old legacy software. Its tools can integrate radar, satellite imagery, photographs, communications records, human intelligence, and more. Palantir’s first customer was the CIA, whose venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, bet early on its ability to organize massive datasets for counterterrorism, and is widely believed to have aided U.S. efforts to locate Osama bin Laden.

In 2008, Palantir launched Gotham, one of its flagship platforms. Using police reports, phone records, social media, and other data, Gotham can create detailed personal profiles and relational maps that help uncover hidden networks, patterns, and anomalies. Continuously updating, it can incorporate new layers of data and platforms as they emerge.

ICE, a Palantir customer since at least 2011, uses customized systems like FALCON and Investigative Case Management (ICM), and in April 2025 signed a new $30 million contract to track real-time migrant movements, prioritize targets, and accelerate deportation procedures. The software uses biometrics, travel and visa records, geolocation, and vehicle and phone data to flag individuals and streamline the enforcement process. While the contract prompted protests in multiple U.S. cities, Palantir’s lack of consumer-facing products makes it less vulnerable to public pressure campaigns.

Similar Palantir systems have been used across the country for various forms of predictive policing. Public backlash led some agencies to restrict or scale back their programs, but a few have quietly restarted.

Palantir has long cast itself as a disruptor. During an early 2025 earnings call, the company prepared for expansion into more government sectors, Karp said the company “loves disruption,” while CTO Shyam Sankar derided traditional “forever software projects” as “sacred cows of the deep state.” The language fit neatly with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which, according to WIRED, in April, tapped Palantir to help build a “mega-API” to harmonize data across agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service.

Palantir previously successfully sued the U.S. Army in 2016for shutting “the company’s commercial offering out of the competition.” Its push to break open defense contracting continues with its support for the Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense Act (FoRGED Act), aimed at reducing the dominance of incumbents like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Yet Palantir is increasingly becoming an incumbent itself. It secured a 10-year, $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army in August 2025, its largest ever, and will integrate its Army Vantage platform across the force. Previously, in June, “the U.S. Army created a special unit and swore in senior executives of the top four American AI companies, including Palantir, as senior advisers and lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve,” stated an article in PassBlue.

Palantir’s recent gains have reinforced perceptions of its ties to the political right. However, the company promotes a more bipartisan image. Karp supported Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024, while Thiel backed Trump in 2016 and 2024 and introduced him to J.D. Vance in 2021. Palantir has worked across multiple administrations, and Karp has stated that they are “dedicating our company to the service of the West, and the United States of America.” With years of government contracts lined up, Palantir aims to be unrivaled in its field, no matter who is in power.

Government work has long been Palantir’s foundation, but private contracts are also booming. After its first private contract with J.P. Morgan in 2009, private companies globally accounted for 45 percent of Palantir’s total revenue by the first half of 2025, driven by Palantir’s push to bring its AI tools to the market faster.

Years of government deployments honed Palantir’s problem-solving capabilities for the commercial sector. Foundry, launched in 2015, underpins both its civil government and commercial platforms. It pulls Enterprise Resource Planning systems (covering finance, manufacturing, and supply chain operations) together with Internet of Things (IoT) feeds from sensors embedded in machines, vehicles, and infrastructure, allowing real-time tracking of performance, breakdowns, and bottlenecks inside a single operating system. From there, companies can run analytics, build workflows, predict maintenance, manage risk, optimize supplies, and reduce waste.

When a syrup shortage hit Wendy’s in 2025, for example, executives turned to Foundry’s “digital twin” to “unify fragmented data sources from retail operations,” including supplies, distribution networks, available employees, and store demand. The system produced a working redistribution plan in five minutes, a task that would have taken more than a dozen people a full day of Excel analysis and calls with stores and distribution centers, according to Pete Suerken, CEO of Wendy’s Quality Supply Chain Coop.

Looking Globally

Palantir has also had global ambitions since its inception, and currently holds multiple government and private contracts across Europe. Since 2017, Palantir has partnered with Airbus on Skywise, and utilized flight, engineering, and maintenance data to align spare parts, engineers, hangar space, and aircraft downtime to effectively manage their entire fleet. In 2024, British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto renewed its multi-year contract with Palantir’s Foundry and AIP systems to coordinate autonomous trains and manage its supply chain.

Foundry is also active across the European health care industries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries such as the Netherlands, Greece, and the UK used it to manage vaccine distribution and hospital resources. In 2023, England’s NHS awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to build a “Federated Data Platform,” meant to link real-time data on beds, waiting lists, staff, and supplies to help hospitals coordinate care. Palantir’s tools have already been used in cancer research data integration and disease forecasting, raising privacy and civil liberty concerns.

Nonetheless, security work remains Palantir’s core. The company has played an expanding role in military planning and automated warfare, gaining real-world experience in Ukraine. CEO Alex Karp flew to the country shortly after the Russian invasion, and Palantir became embedded in Ukrainian operations, providing targeting support for Ukrainian strikes. The MetaConstellation satellite program mapped Russian movements and provided a platform for safer and faster demining.

Much of Palantir’s early work in Ukraine was provided for free, allowing the company to showcase its capabilities and refine its systems before landing larger contracts.

In 2023, NATO selected Palantir’s Maven technology as its command-and-control platform, while Europol has used Gotham and other platforms for surveillance and predictive policing since 2012. Partnerships with countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as Palantir’s ongoing work with Israel, have also drawn scrutiny, though Palantir is far from the only U.S. tech company involved in the Gaza War. “Major U.S. tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Palantir have all contributed directly or indirectly to the IDF’s [Israeli Defense Force] AI capabilities. Despite facing internal protests and human rights campaigns against their continued relationships with the IDF, there has been no indication that they will be dissuaded from taking these lucrative contracts,” stated the European Institute of the Mediterranean.

A Growing Monopoly?

Palantir has built arguably the strongest position in centralized managerial AI, unifying data, models, and workflows across massive institutions. Its dominance in the U.S. is complemented by a meaningful foothold in Europe and select other countries, though international growth remains constrained by procurement barriers and cheaper local alternatives. Competitors abroad include Chinese firms like Mininglamp and Deepexi Technology, Ireland’s Siren, and Germany’s open source intelligence tool Maltego.

Domestically, Palantir faces competition from established tech giants whose scalable AI tools typically require fewer advisers. Snowflake, Databricks, Tableau, and C3.ai are cheaper, faster to deploy, and are often more transparent about their operations.

But smaller players often focus on specialized functions rather than end-to-end integration, making them less suitable for massive enterprises. Cloud hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google certainly compete with Palantir, though they treat AI as a feature in their platforms rather than a comprehensive operating system.

Palantir’s unique position has defied traditional valuationmetrics. Some consider it overvalued, while others have attempted to demonstrate how it is far above the usual benchmarks for sustainable growth. CEO Alex Karp has embraced the ambiguity, saying that “It has indeed been difficult for outsiders to appraise our business, either its significance in shaping our current geopolitics or its value in the vulgar, financial sense.”

Alongside leveraging bipartisanship to embed itself in U.S. government institutions, private contracts are securing its future. And its technologies are not completely ominous—Maven has aided disaster response, Foundry has supported health care initiatives, and the World Food Program has used it to streamline aid relief in Iraq.

Yet Palantir sits at the heart of the privatized surveillance state. With its head start and secretive innovations, its influence is difficult to gauge, but its growing dominance is set to define the market, global politics, and economics for years.