“We did this while also critically supporting some of the most interesting, complex, unusual operations that the U.S. government has been involved in, many of which we can’t comment on, but which were highlights of the last year and hugely inspiring for all of us at Palantir,” CEO Alex Karp said on the investor call.
Palantir’s “inspiration” business with the US government grew 55% year-over-year in 2025. In the last three months of the year, Palantir made $570 million in revenue, a 66% increase year-over-year.
Much of that revenue was driven by the company’s work for the Defense Department, as well as increasing momentum at civilian agencies, said Ryan Taylor, Palantir’s chief revenue officer.
Palantir’s close relationship with at least one of these civilian agencies is at the center of increasing public scrutiny, and that is the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS is relying on Palantir software in its effort to stop the Trump administration’s violent crackdown on immigrants. Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency paid Palantir $60 million to build a monitoring platform called ImmigrationOS to track self-deportations. Just a few months later, an Amnesty International report claimed that Palantir’s AI software was used to target non-citizens who spoke out in favor of Palestine.
ICE also uses Palantir technology to decide which neighborhoods to target for deportation raids. The program is called ELITE (short for Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting), and it was first unveiled in a 404 media report last month and later confirmed in a DHS report on AI use cases at the department.
The same report also said that ICE uses AI to review, summarize and classify tips sent to the agency.
Carp himself has been vocal in favor of Trump’s immigration policy, even saying that he would use his “entire influence to make sure that this country remains skeptical of immigration.”
But Palantir’s partnership with Washington goes far beyond just immigration. Many parts of the government rely on Palantir software, most notably the Pentagon, and most notably through a $480 million deal for an AI-powered target identification system called Maven.
“Our weapons software is ready for every war situation [that] I’m aware of it,” Karp said. In fact, the CEO claims it’s so effective that his chief technology officer Shyam Shankar’s “phone is off all day, and what they want from him is ‘How do I do the same thing across the government?’
Karp’s general response is that while Palantir is assisting the administration in unethical (and some illegal) actions, the company’s software is the only way the public can ensure that the government’s actions remain constitutional. He has used this argument when defending the use of Palantir software in the Caribbean boat attacks, which many experts consider a war crime, and he used it again in an investor call to allay fears of mass surveillance operated by Palantir.
Karp argues that Palantir is building technology that will hold the government accountable to the legal limits of its surveillance, and ensure that “every entity using our product is doing it in a manner consistent with US law and ethics.”
But what happens when those “laws and morals” themselves become questionable? Well, Palantir continues to get paid.
Take Palantir’s work for the Department of Health and Human Services. According to a recently published report on AI use cases at HHS, for almost the last year, Palantir has supplied AI tools to attack government programs, contracts and grants that do not match the Trump administration’s views on gender, the environment and race.
The department is using Palantir AI to ensure that all grants and jobs comply with Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI and “gender ideology.”
Since they were signed a year ago, both executive orders have led to numerous federal layoffs, including targeting some non-DEI-related positions and major cuts in funding for critical research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even had to scrub any mention of terms like “gender,” “LGBT,” or “environmental justice,” withdrew and even put some research submissions on hold, while Trump cut more than 1,600 research grants at the National Science Foundation.
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