Palantir's Relationship With America's Spies Has Been Worse Than You'd Think by William Alden, BuzzFeed
Palantir Technologies, the Silicon Valley data company co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, has developed an almost mythical reputation for its work building tools for the U.S. intelligence community. But Palantir has had a far rockier relationship with the nation’s top spy agencies than its image would let on, BuzzFeed News has learned.
As of summer 2015, the Central Intelligence Agency, a signature client, was “recalcitrant” and didn’t “like us,” while Palantir’s relationship with the National Security Agency had ended, Palantir CEO Alex Karp told staff in an internal video that was obtained by BuzzFeed News. The private remarks, made during a staff meeting, are at odds with a carefully crafted public image that has helped Palantir secure a $20 billion valuation and win business from a long list of corporations, nonprofits, and governments around the world.
“As many of you know, the SSDA’s recalcitrant,” Karp, using a Palantir codename for the CIA, said in the August 2015 meeting. “And we’ve walked away, or they walked away from us, at the NSA. Either way, I’m happy about that.”
The CIA, he said, “may not like us. Well, when the whole world is using Palantir they can still not like us. They’ll have no choice.” Suggesting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had also had friction with Palantir, he continued, “That’s de facto how we got the FBI, and every other recalcitrant place.”
Palantir’s data-mining software has become ingrained at the CIA, according to people familiar with the company and the agency. But the relationship has also been marked by tension and even hostility, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said. One source of the tension, these people said, has been Palantir’s failure to quash persistent publicity about its CIA business and about its supposed role in helping to track down Osama bin Laden…
Comments
This is an interesting article for one main thing..it goes to the heart of how to create a money empire on the backs of the US taxpayer....
I was around when Palantir first approached the Army at the NTC and gave a presentation of their product which was then competing with another link analysis tool that while clunky had been around for awhile and was widely used inside the Army at that time.
But to be honest both software firms were out to maximize their profit margins by selling into DoD and the IC....the clunky version was tied to dongles as an earning concept which forced virtually multiple purchases to be on multiple machines....driving in the end the profit for the company but at an ever increasing cost to the taxpayer..
Palantir took a different route....and since it looked and felt new and jazzy the military purchased at first a small number of copies WITH Palantir offering free training to go along with it as the hook in so you then had a BCT deploying with two distinct different link analysis tools due to the high cost of Palantir...
Then once their product took off...offered to send to the NTC their coders and tech types to work with the BCTs that were using it all the while integrating every unit wish into the product...a great move to increase the desirability of the product and to hook even more BCTs.
BUT then came the cost crunch.....Palantir never and I repeat never offered to go to a licensing concept that would allow for the purchasing of large numbers of the software....
Their hidden argument was we are new and need to show sales for our "VCs" and that concept has never changed.....
The software should actually have become cheaper under the reverse profit theory that if I was actually increasing the quality of the analysis tool due to the input of the customer and then the customer was field testing those improvements at no cost to my development end THEN I should go to a two tier sells model pricing wise...cheaper for the military and IC more costly for commercial customers since they had not participated in the development and testing cycles.....
Palantir is good but in the world of visualization and that is really what it is there are now a number of newcomers usually start-ups that are showing far more "expertise" in handling say 3D than does Palantir...and we are starting to see freeware tools with open APIs that allows for plugins to be designed for whatever the visualization goal is AND allows one to further code in advancements for the freeware tool...both sides win..the original coder and the enduser
And as we are already seeing the incorporation of the IBM Watson AI algorithm concepts in these tools....it is only time before Palantir fades... BTW let's not get into the sheer number of government bids "won" because the bid was written with only Palantir in mind....
Bluntly stated..Palantir owes the American taxpayer a whole lot of money... as they used the American taxpayer to drive their business model but not for the interest of the taxpayer but for their own individual profits...AND that in a time of war and the urgent need for it..