The Trump administration has selected Palantir Technologies — a firm whose government contracts span immigration enforcement, military operations, and federal employee tracking — to advise the State Department on “digital freedom and freedom of expression.” The arrangement, formalized under a program called the Freedom Tech Excellence Program, has drawn sharp criticism from First Amendment attorneys who question whether either the company or the administration is positioned to lead global conversations about protecting online speech and countering surveillance.
What the Freedom Tech Excellence Program Actually Does
According to the State Department’s own website, the Freedom Tech Excellence Program “brings private sector talent to the Department for limited-term assignments to advance diplomatic efforts on key issues including online freedom of expression, privacy-enhancing technologies, countering digital surveillance, and responsible AI governance.” Palantir employees would go on temporary assignments inside the agency under this framework.
The program is planned to run through the beginning of 2029. While participants may require security clearances and could be placed anywhere within the agency, the State Department told The Intercept that the initiative “is not geared towards bolstering the Department’s internal application or operational use of AI technologies.”
Also listed as a partner in the initiative is Anduril, a military technology firm with direct financial ties to Palantir’s founding network. Anduril’s executive chair Trae Stephens is a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, which has invested approximately $2.6 billion in Anduril. Palantir founder Peter Thiel has also backed Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey’s new banking venture, Erebor. Neither Anduril nor Palantir responded to requests for comment from The Intercept.
Palantir’s Existing Government Surveillance Portfolio
To understand the tension at the center of this arrangement, it is necessary to examine what Palantir actually does for the U.S. government — and how extensively that work has grown.
Palantir is best known for building large-scale data analysis platforms. Its government clients include the U.S. military, the State Department itself, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to reporting from The Intercept, Palantir’s tools have been used by the Los Angeles Police Department and were deployed in immigration enforcement operations that identified relatives of migrant children.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, Palantir reported that revenue derived from U.S. government contracts spiked 66% year-over-year to $570 million, with total sales of $1.41 billion exceeding analyst estimates, according to Reuters. The company has emerged as one of the most prominent AI stocks, with shares gaining approximately 1,700% over the preceding three years, though its valuation has drawn scrutiny from analysts.
The company’s reach has expanded well beyond law enforcement and immigration. In May 2026, Palantir was awarded an initial $3.9 million contract by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop and manage an AI-enabled platform that monitors federal employee attendance and compliance with Return to Office mandates. That contract carries a ceiling value of up to $13.3 million through September 2027 and extends to other agencies including the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs, with potential expansion to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The platform uses badge swipe data and AI analytics to track workforce presence.
Earlier reporting also noted that a March 2025 executive order required all federal agencies and departments to share data on Americans, and that Palantir’s software may be used to combine data drawn from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s Defense
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has publicly defended the company’s surveillance work. In a letter to shareholders accompanying fourth-quarter 2025 earnings, Karp wrote: “It should indeed be uncontroversial that the single most effective means of guarding against incursions into our private lives is to invest in the development of a technical platform that makes possible constraints on government action and investigation through granular permissioning capabilities.” He added that the company’s technology ensures the “state and its agents can see only what ought to be seen, and functional audit logs, to ensnare both external and internal threats.”
In the same post-earnings call, Karp said the company was “supporting in a critical manner, some of the most interesting, intricate, unusual operations that the U.S. government has been involved in,” without specifying which programs he was referencing.
The Conflict Critics Are Pointing To
Legal observers focused on First Amendment issues have not been subtle about their assessment of the arrangement.
“To some extent, this announcement and this program sound like doublespeak,” said Carrie DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “Certainly neither this State Department, nor the partners they have announced so far, are trustworthy leaders in what they identify as online freedom of expression or countering digital surveillance.”
The criticism is grounded in a documented record. Palantir and its key personnel have been involved in multiple lawsuits against journalistic outlets. The Trump administration itself has faced documented challenges over press access and First Amendment conduct — Pete Hegseth restricted journalist access inside the Pentagon, and other incidents involving biometric data collection and deportation of academics with protected speech claims have been reported by The Intercept and tracked by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Peter Thiel, the co-founder whose political and financial network anchors Palantir’s relationship to the current administration, has made his views on democratic governance explicit. According to reporting by the American Friends Service Committee, Thiel has stated: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Palantir’s stock surged following Trump’s 2024 election victory. According to AFSC, Palantir and other Thiel-connected projects have at least 17 current or former employees working at senior levels within the administration, including Vice President JD Vance, who was a former employee of Thiel.
The Deeper Architecture: A Super-Database in Development
The State Department advisory role does not exist in isolation. It sits atop a rapidly expanding architecture of federal data integration in which Palantir plays a central role.
The American Friends Service Committee describes Palantir’s core function this way: the company “vacuums up massive amounts of data collected by governments and corporations,” then combines that data into a single dataset and uses AI to identify patterns. For immigration enforcement, this can include known addresses, phone numbers, driving records, credit history, immigration history, health data, and social media presence — all aggregated in one place. According to AFSC, Palantir’s tools “have fueled some of the largest raids on immigrant communities in ICE’s history.”
Thirteen former Palantir employees signed an open letter urging the corporation to stop its work with the Trump administration. Linda Xia, a former Palantir engineer, told the New York Times that the concern was not the technology itself but the conditions of its use: “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.” Palantir has contested aspects of the New York Times’ reporting on the matter.
Advising the World on What It Cannot Demonstrate at Home
The Freedom Tech Excellence Program is, by the State Department’s own description, a diplomatic initiative. Its purpose is to project American values around digital freedom onto the international stage, advising foreign governments and advancing U.S. positions on internet freedom, surveillance, and AI governance.
The selection of Palantir as an advisor in that effort arrives at a moment when the company holds active contracts to monitor federal workers’ physical movements, integrate data on millions of Americans across government agencies, and support immigration enforcement operations that have generated widespread public protest. Palantir CEO Alex Karp said his company was supporting “some of the most interesting, intricate, unusual operations that the U.S. government has been involved in” — without elaborating on which operations he meant.
What the program asks the world to accept is a framework for digital freedom designed, in part, by a company whose business model is built on the aggregation and analysis of personal data at government scale. Whether that framework reflects a genuine commitment to the principles it names is a question the record raises — but does not yet answer.
This article draws on reporting from The Intercept, Reuters, Govly, The Guardian, and the American Friends Service Committee.
