In an email sent to all Palantir employees, Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, shared a nearly hour-long pre-recorded video conversation with Karp about Palantir’s involvement with ICE.
“Based on recent events, internal conversations, and calls from many of you, to better understand how executive leadership is grappling with questions central to Palantir’s place in the world today, I first sat down for a lengthy discussion with Dr. Karp,” Bowman wrote in an email seen by WIRED. “To be clear, our intention in this exchange was not to cover every detail of every controversy that graces the company’s liveliest Slack channels, nor to completely assuage every concern each of you had… Above all, Dr. Karp has made clear his commitment to reinvigorating his direct engagement with The Hobbits, and this discussion strives to model the form of rigorous dialogue that is central to Palantir’s prized culture. “Should be in.” (Palantir leadership sometimes refers to employees as “Hobbits”, after the fictional lord of the rings Letter.)
However, the video did not answer specific questions about Palantir’s product capabilities, or how ICE was using Palantir’s products. Instead, the video says employees can sign a non-disclosure agreement if they want more detailed information.
Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For about the first 40 minutes of the conversation, Karp failed to answer questions about the company’s contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), spoofing internal chats weeks earlier. Instead, Karp focused on Palantir’s role in building and maintaining Western power – a topic he frequently raises in public-facing interviews and in his most recent book. The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.
At the end of the video, Karp turned his focus largely to immigration enforcement, saying that Palantir would not have any policies “that differ depending on the president,” and that Democrats had also prioritized these issues under prior administrations. Karp specifically cited former President Barack Obama, who said in a 2014 address that America is both “a nation of immigrants” and “a nation of laws.” Karp also argued that institutions planning to break the law do not purchase Palantir’s products, claiming that the technical capabilities of the products make it difficult to conceal malicious intent.
While Karp declined to go into more detail about what products Palantir offers to enable ICE, he did offer workers the ability to sign an NDA to receive one-on-one briefings. At the end of the email attached to this conversation, Bowman said that this video is the beginning of the company moving forward in its work with ICE. Bowman did not share what additional information workers might expect in the future, but said the Karp video is “a step forward, not a completion” of Palantir leadership’s discussions with workers on its ICE work.
The video came after weeks of internal pressure from activists. Shortly after federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti last month, workers flooded Palantir’s internal Slack questioning the company’s role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, how the products work in concert with ICE’s goals, and whether the company should be involved with the agency. The pre-recorded conversation with Karp provided little information about his questions.
In internal Slack conversations reviewed by WIRED in January, workers complained about a lack of transparency over how many of them sell and make the products that enable ICE enforcement.
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