Palantir’s CEO Finally Addresses ICE Controversy—But Workers Are Far From Satisfied

In a long-awaited response to mounting internal pressure, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has finally addressed the company’s controversial work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—but critics say his “answers” have only raised more questions.

For weeks, Palantir employees—who internally refer to themselves as “hobbits” (a nod to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings characters)—have been flooding the company’s internal Slack channels with urgent questions about Palantir’s role in federal immigration enforcement. The pressure intensified dramatically after federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti last month, prompting workers to demand transparency about how Palantir’s technology enables ICE operations.

On Friday, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, Courtney Bowman, sent an email to all employees sharing a nearly hour-long prerecorded conversation between himself and Karp. The timing was deliberate—workers had been specifically requesting leadership engagement on what many consider the most pressing ethical dilemma facing the company.

“I sat down with Dr. Karp earlier for a longform discussion,” Bowman wrote, acknowledging the “recent events, internal conversations, and calls from many of you.” He positioned the conversation as “a step forward, not a completion” of leadership’s engagement with staff concerns.

Yet what followed was, by most accounts, a masterclass in deflection rather than disclosure.

For the first 40 minutes of the conversation, Karp barely touched on ICE at all. Instead, he delivered a philosophical treatise on Palantir’s role in maintaining “Western power”—a recurring theme in his public appearances and his recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

When Karp finally pivoted to immigration enforcement, his arguments were unlikely to satisfy concerned employees. He claimed Palantir would maintain consistent policies “that’s different depending on the president,” pointing to Democrats’ immigration enforcement under Barack Obama. “We are both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws,” Karp quoted, invoking Obama’s 2014 address.

Perhaps most controversially, Karp suggested that Palantir’s products are somehow self-policing. “Institutions planning to break laws do not buy Palantir’s products,” he claimed, arguing that the technical capabilities make it “difficult to hide malfeasance.”

But Karp refused to explain what those capabilities actually are or how ICE specifically uses them. Instead, he offered a deeply unsatisfying workaround: employees could sign non-disclosure agreements to receive one-on-one briefings with leadership.

This olive branch was met with widespread skepticism. Workers had been demanding transparency, not more secrecy. The NDA requirement felt less like an invitation to understanding and more like a gatekeeping mechanism to control the narrative.

Throughout January, internal Slack conversations reviewed by WIRED revealed deep frustration among employees who build and sell these products. Many expressed feeling deliberately kept in the dark about how their work translates into real-world enforcement actions.

The timing of this controversy is particularly fraught. Palantir, once a darling of Silicon Valley secrecy, has been working to position itself as a more transparent, publicly accountable company as it moves toward a potential public listing. Yet this episode suggests the company’s commitment to transparency may be more rhetorical than real.

Critics within and outside the company point out that Karp’s framing—equating Democratic and Republican immigration enforcement, suggesting technical capabilities prevent abuse, requiring NDAs for basic information—represents a profound failure to engage with legitimate ethical concerns.

The ICE contract has long been Palantir’s most controversial partnership. The company provides data integration and analytics tools that ICE agents use to track and identify individuals for deportation proceedings. For many Palantir employees, the moral implications of this work have become impossible to ignore, especially as immigration enforcement has become increasingly visible and politically charged.

What makes this situation particularly complex is that Palantir’s technology is fundamentally agnostic—it’s a powerful data integration platform that can be used for various purposes, from disaster response to law enforcement. But that same versatility means the company cannot entirely disclaim responsibility for how its tools are deployed.

As one anonymous Palantir employee put it in a Slack conversation: “We can’t claim to be building ‘the architecture of the future’ while refusing to examine how that architecture impacts real people’s lives today.”

The coming weeks will reveal whether Karp’s video represents genuine engagement or merely a public relations maneuver. Bowman’s email suggested this is “just the beginning” of more forthcoming discussions, but offered no specifics about what additional information might be shared or when.

For now, Palantir employees are left with more questions than answers, and a CEO whose philosophical musings about Western power feel increasingly disconnected from the urgent ethical concerns of the workers building his company’s technology.

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