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Comment by foxes | Hacker News Reader

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No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate. I can get being politically opposed to the conservative politics of some of its founders, but the vast majority of conservative-founded companies don't get nearly as much criticism. A lot of it is seriously borderline Q-anon levels of conspiratorial talk. Just look at the comment in this thread insinuating that Peter Thiel is going to assassinate people with orbital weapons.

The people controlling Palantir are openly anti-democratic. They see technology as a means of controlling and ruling the common folk. They said so, repeatedly, in public, of their own volition.

Can you point to where they have said so? The only one that comes to mind is Thiel's quote from 2009 about democracy being incompatible worth freedom (the populace will vote to remove freedoms, e.g. try to ban AI or other technological advances and whatnot). But pointing out flaws in democracy is a far cry from actual wanting to get rid of democracy.

If he's stated an actual intent to end democracy in the US, it'd be good to cite that.

https://sfl.media/peter-thiel-isnt-anti-democracy-hes-post-d...

His vision of statehood is autocratic in that he emphasises efficiency and progress which can only be achieved via a CEO-like government. Please watch the interview with Joe Rogan.

The only quote from Thiel in that piece is the same "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" I wrote about in my comment.

Alex Karp is a deeply unlikable human who talks about how his software is used to kill people, and that he wants to drop a lot of fentanyl-laced urine across all the negative reporters.

Also he has stated that critics should be sprayed with fentanyl laced urine.

https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/02/17/palantir-piss/

Why should we feel good about him running any company.

Do you think there are zero people on earth who need to be killed?

Certainly we do not need to make those decisions based on fuzzy vector search, probably how the opening salvo of the Iran war ended up killing a hundred school girls

Hating Palantir without having any idea of what they are is the trendy thing to do. Their leaders are toxic which doesn’t help the case, but the core issue really is just that in this political climate, people all over the western world don’t trust their governments, and it’s also trendy to distrust anyone making money, as well as tech companies - especially those involved in data and AI related businesses - so the fact that Palantir makes these distrusted actors more competent while making money doing it, is seen as siding with the devil.

So it’s a trust problem, if the government were seen as effective and worthy then I want them to be effective, which includes using the data they collect effectively. In this climate trendy people would prefer that their corrupt government is also fully incompetent to limit the effect of the corruption.

Their founder is a lunatic giving a lecture tour about the anti-Christ and the need to move beyond national-states. The CEO is on some bizarre PR tour where he comes off like a Bond villain.

It’s obvious all your questions are not authentic and you have a motive and this thread is clearly being astroturfed but I will entertain.

They build immigrant databases and help ICE (a corrupt agency performing illegal, unethical and unamerican agenda) find people to deport.

Hopefully people here can see past this aloof act you’ve got going on.

Responses like these are a big part of what convinces me that the hysteria around Palantir is unfounded. I see broad claims about how the company is violating privacy, going to overthrow democracy, etc. but when pushed for details, most people just fall back on basic partisanship.

Sure bud keep playing dumb

Hope the compensation is worth being a bottom feeder

This reminds of back when DOGE was doing its rounds and all of sudden there were waves of posts with the same tone making the same argument.

Your point is well taken, though it's worth pointing out that literally yesterday Palantir was co-awarded a contract for building orbital weapons systems [0].

The broader point is Palantir's specific confluence of:

- access to granular, non-anonymized data across industry silos

- its chairman's specific pro-authoritarian mission (so pointedly so that the Catholic Church felt the need to make a specific rebuke a few days ago [1])

- a regulatory environment in which its monetary risks are arguably minimized if it takes the broadest possible reading of e.g. HIPAA's law enforcement exceptions that mention "written administrative requests" [2]

- documented concerns about governance [3]

Those concerned with this confluence are far from conspiracy theorists, and may be quite rationally interested in protecting e.g. the public reputation of their hospital networks, and ability to service - to say nothing of their desire to protect the privacy of their patients.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-03-24/and...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/world/europe/peter-thiel-... - https://archive.is/2EOXa

[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/505/what-doe...

[3] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/letter-to-palantir-techn...

Have you considered that a weapons platform like that could be necessary? Or are you just opposed to Palantir being part of it.

This comment is written in an interesting way. If it's unnecessary, the OP's comment is fine. If the platform is "necessary" in some abstract sense, you've avoided articulating that argument by putting the burden back on OP to justify their position.

That seems like an interesting discussion though. Why would it be necessary?

There's ample evidence that medium range ballistic missile technology is proliferating, fired from land based systems. It is difficult to intercept these with ground-based launchers. But, if incepting from orbit the probability you score a hit is higher. The catch is that it is a) extremely complex, and b) very expensive to develop and implement a system like this. Enter Palantir and Anduril.

The weight of this argument rests on how much you care about being in range of MRBMs, how likely you think it is that MRBMs will be a decisive factor in a future conflict, and whether or not you want the United States to be victorious in this potential conflict. Many people do not care about this threat, don't think MRBMs will matter, and/or want the United States to lose. I am not one of those people.

I think that three things can simultaneously be true:

(1) missile defense systems based on deep data fusion with cutting-edge espionage systems for launch detection are becoming increasingly useful and necessary

(2) we should be thoughtful that these types of espionage fusion systems could also be used for domestic surveillance, and advocate for close scrutiny and oversight of these systems

(3) a healthcare administrator can make a rational argument that their patient information should not be handled by the same company building those espionage-advised data fusion systems... lest the close relationship with government quietly transform into unauthorized data sharing with other government actors, without clear paths towards legal recourse if this were to occur, and with potentially irrevocable consequences for patients

well, there _is_ this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

"bars states party to the treaty from placing weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit, installing them on the Moon or any other celestial body, or otherwise stationing them in outer space"

but 1. today's sentiment is: to hell with these treaties-schmeaties, and 2. what you mentioned is not yet a weapon of _mass_ destruction, so we're all good!

Claiming a particular weapons system is “necessary” is war brained. There are other ways of survival besides bombing the shit out of each other.

True, I am partial to battle drill 1A.

> The broader point is Palantir's specific confluence of:

> - access to granular, non-anonymized data across industry silos

Do you have evidence that Palantir itself - not customers using Palantir software - has access to this data?

I think you are maybe reading into the initial claim too much and not hearing the follow ups. There are two things here: 1. the overall character, broad charter, and people that compose the company, and 2. the theory that it is a specific agent in illegal or harmful data trafficking. And sure, I think we can take 2 away completely here if we simply must assume good faith from these guys and the contracts that they make, but that still kinda leaves 1 which is pretty big. Like 1 answers your follow up question of why everyone hates them either way, but you still are countering it by trying to ask what it has to do with 2. If that makes sense?

And really, I don't think anyone wants to "oh sweet summer child" you in your doubts here, but it's really extremely hard to not want to just... gesture around the world right now and ask why you still believe in some kind of sanctity or infallibility of something like the legal contract or other various forms of de jure "accountability" when it comes to tech companies, especially one as big as this.

This pattern in which people make claims about Palantir having access to private information, then retreat back to something along the lines of "I don't like the character of the company" is exactly the kind of thing that leads me to believe people don't actually have tangible complaints with the company.

This is true, but Palantir also describes what they do in a way that is going to cause skepticism and confusion. When they talk about the ontology acting as a "digital twin" of the customer environment one could be forgiven for thinking this does actually mean Palantir is exfiltrating customer data and cloning it, which is not what happens.

> When they talk about the ontology acting as a "digital twin" of the customer environment one could be forgiven for thinking this does actually mean Palantir is exfiltrating customer data and cloning it, which is not what happens.

This is basically saying you have the same DB schema on your dev environment as you do on prod. If anyone made that kind leap in logic, I would conclude they have little to no technical know how.

Oh, I agree with you. Perhaps I should've said "one could forgive a journalist ...", who tend to not be familiar with these things.

Saying they have ‘conservative values’ is the death blow to conservativism, given their explicit anti-democratic, and fundamentally extremist leadership

Look into Peter Thiel, the current administration and how it all ties back to Palantir. No conspirations here, just openly known facts.

What are those openly known facts?

>No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate.

Mostly because hating Palantir is a trendy leftist virtue signal. Defund ICE being another one. Defund the police was trendy five years ago, but is no longer popular.

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