Listen to Palantir CEO Alex Karp discuss the threat of a surveillance state

Listen to Palantir CEO Alex Karp explain how ICE uses the company's services

Alex Karp is well-known for being outspoken both about his own beliefs and about the role of Palantir in protecting Western civilization. Karp has said that while supporting government institutions doesn't always mean supporting every policy or decision those institutions make, not allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to access Palantir's services would go against the company's central mission of supporting Western democracy.

Watch a rare early interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp

Prior to Palantir's public listing in 2020, CEO Alex Karp did not give many interviews. In a rare interview from 2009, Karp discussed the dominance of American technology, his academic background, and the founding idea of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as key players in aiding the fight against terrorism.

Listen to a former Palantir employee's take on the company

Among other former Palantir employees who have spoken out against the company's role in aiding surveillance and in the American government, former content strategist Juan Sebastían Pinto is concerned that Palantir is creating a monopoly over artificial intelligence.

Listen to Palantir CEO Alex Karp's outlook for how AI will change the economy

Palantir was an early leader in developing and implementing AI into its technology. When asked about the potential risks of AI (like the threat many say it poses to so-called "knowledge workers"), Karp has said that specialized knowledge or skills will inevitably become more valuable.

Read Palantir CEO Alex Karp's most recent shareholder letter

Alex Karp's latest shareholder letter details both the company's outlook and recent performance, but also provides insight into what leadership finds important more generally. In this letter, Karp addresses Palantir critics and external concerns about the use of Palantir's technology for government surveillance.

Learn about Palantir CEO Alex Karp's background—including his history of social activism

Palantir has been criticized for its close proximity to conservative politics, including the company's partnership with ICE, cofounder Peter Thiel's long track record of large donations to Donald Trump's campaigns, and the company's support for Israel. But its leader, Alex Karp, is a self-proclaimed progressive with a PhD in social theory. For many, Karp's background and leadership are a paradox for Palantir.

Read about how one of Palantir's cofounders explains the company's founding

Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale described the company's driving principle as fighting terrorism in a blog post marking its IPO. Lonsdale also said Palantir's software was developed with a keen focus on privacy, despite many allegations that it enables government surveillance.

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden once leaked documents suggesting Palantir had a role in alleged surveillance

After releasing documents detailing an NSA surveillance scheme named PRISM (which is also the name of a Palantir service), further documents show that Palantir's software enabled the expansion of the NSA's widest-reaching data programs, XKEYSCORE. Palantir has frequently denied claims of supporting government surveillance and has insisted that its software is designed to maintain "civil liberties," such as privacy.

Since its founding, Palantir has refused to sell its software to China or Russia

In line with the founding principle of supporting Western institutions, Palantir has vowed to not share its technology with companies or government agencies in China and Russia—which Palantir frequently calls the West's largest threats.

Palantir's executives have become increasingly involved in American politics in recent years

Palantir's government contracts have steadily increased since Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, moving from intelligence and defense to public health and assisting in Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency efforts.

Palantir's services allow both companies and the government to analyze complex data

There's a common misconception that Palantir buys, sells, and shares data, but Palantir insists it isn't a data broker. Rather, Palantir is more like a data analytics company that allows corporations and government agencies to combine messy, large, and often hard to access datasets to gather insights.

A Palantir executive was named a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Reserve

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves, including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar. The Army says their role in Detachment 201, also known as the Executive Innovation Corps, is to inspire other tech executives to consider how their work can support the US Army—without leaving their careers.

After the October 7 attacks, Palantir took out a full-page New York Times ad supporting Israel

Palantir provides its software to the Israeli Defense Forces. Alex Karp has frequently said that while his company's support for Israel may be controversial, it's critical to support Western allies.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Tech giants like SpaceX and Meta are increasingly behaving like sovereign powers

Companies now make unilateral decisions once reserved for nation-states, such as controlling satellite internet access in active war zones and influencing global information flows. Lawmakers and the international order are struggling to keep up with technological developments, let alone regulate them.

Data privacy advocates worry that Google collects too much personal information

Politicians have also criticized whether the search engine exerts too much control over gatekeeping online information and influencing what is considered fact or fiction, deviating from its original corporate motto of "don't be evil."

Dario Amodei explains what led to his company being designated a supply chain risk

When pressed about the use of Claude in the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Anthropic's CEO acknowledged its contract with the Pentagon. However, he also emphasized that Claude is not to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, in part because the technology is not yet safe or reliable for such uses.

Critics call WeChat a surveillance tool

This report from the Citizen Lab details evidence WeChat, with 1.4 billion users, is a powerful surveillance tool for the Chinese Communist Party. In particular, it finds the government uses non-China accounts to train censorship algorithms for use on domestic communications.

Brain wave-reading earbuds are being used by companies to study workplace performance

Limited safeguards prevent governments from accessing and companies from sharing brain data. Foreign governments may also be developing technology to spy on and potentially disrupt human thoughts.

Are smart cities a dumb idea?

Smart cities require vast troves of data to run, making their systems attractive to hackers. Listen to this one hour podcast to learn about the risks and what is being done to mitigate them.

Governments are arguably very dependent on consulting firms like McKinsey and Deloitte

This podcast episode discusses the consultancy industry’s rise and how these firms make billions of dollars, even amid significant scandals.

Hear Ray Dalio talk about the growth of the Chinese economy

Dalio was an early advocate of US investment in China. While he has previously criticized the authoritarian regime, his criticism of the government has been labeled mild relative to his praise for economic growth and innovation—critics argue that he has minimized human rights violations in the country.

How much power does the Federal Reserve really have?

Although mechanisms for transparency exist, it wouldn’t be difficult for the incredibly powerful institution to go rogue in the wrong hands. In this podcast episode, analysts game out how such a scenario would go.

Tim Cook refused to give the FBI a backdoor into iPhones during a terrorism case

The Apple CEO's refusal to comply with the government's request was viewed as controversial, despite support from privacy advocates. The FBI would later back down, claiming to have gained access to the device without disclosing additional details.

Critic Neil Postman argued modern technology is dystopian

Cultural critic Neil Postman argued in 1985's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that mass media had made the dystopia of Huxley's "Brave New World" a reality. In 1992, he published "Technopoly," a wider critique of the utopian visions of technology or, as Postman calls it, "all of the machinery that takes people out of public arenas and keeps them fixed in their homes."

Explaining how open source systems like Linux can be secure, despite their public source code

While no computer system is immune to all cyberattacks and malware, the transparency of open-source technology means many thousands of developers can review and oversee the underlying code powering the software on an ongoing basis. This increases the likelihood of catching and patching vulnerabilities more quickly than smaller groups of cybercriminals looking to exploit them.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Telehealth demand for GLP-1s for weight loss is booming as consumers seek easier access.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

The rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson centered on federalism—the question of how much power the federal government should hold relative to the states.

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

Watch how deep-sea mining equipment collects and processes polymetallic nodules—metal-rich, potato-shaped rocks—from the ocean floor and creates environmentally damaging plumes of sediments.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Calculate how much of your tax dollars go to each federal program based on your income, filing status, and number of children

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

A pickleball's loud 'pop' sound can reach 120 decibels, which is equivalent to a hammer hitting a nail