Microsoft and Palantir partner to sell AI to government agencies

Microsoft is teaming up with secretive data analytics company Palantir, which has been accused of (among other wretched acts) enabling the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate “as a domestic surveillance agency.” Bloomberg reports that Palantir will integrate its products with Microsoft’s government cloud tools, including the Azure OpenAI service, “in a bid to sell software” to US defense agencies. Oh, joy.

The pair will reportedly focus on products for US defense workers to handle logistics, contracting and action planning. But given the secretive nature of Palantir’s work, those generic and seemingly non-threatening terms don’t necessarily say much.

Palantir’s software has been used to track and suppress dissent. The company was founded by Peter Thiel, who supports and funds far-right causes and has a political philosophy his biographer described as “bordering on fascism.” In Thiel’s Stanford classes and his book Zero to One, the Silicon Valley billionaire gushed over how much better companies are run than governments because they have a single decision-maker. “A dictator, basically,” Thiel’s biographer told Time in 2021.

Thiel also wrote the words, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

In 2018, Palantir claimed in The New York Times that it doesn’t work with ICE’s deportation squad, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). This contradicted a report from The Intercept revealing a 2016 Homeland Security disclosure showing ERO used Palantir’s software to “gather information for both criminal and civil cases against immigrants.”

In 2020, Amnesty International warned about Palantir, “We could close our eyes and pretend that contrary to all the evidence, Palantir is a rights-respecting company or we can call this façade what it is: another company placing profit over people, no matter the human cost.”

Bloomberg reports that Palantir’s newest AI software requires a large language model. Now, in classified government environments, Palantir will combine its powers with those of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, which includes GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, GPT-4, GPT-3.5 and more.

What could possibly go wrong?