[8][9] Palantir Foundry is used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

[13] Though usually listed as having been founded in 2004, SEC filings state Palantir's official incorporation to be in May 2003 by Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal), who named the start-up after the "seeing stone" in Tolkien's legendarium.

[13] Thiel saw Palantir as a "mission-oriented company" which could apply software similar to PayPal's fraud recognition systems to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.

"[14] In 2004, Thiel bankrolled the creation of a prototype by PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings and Stanford University students Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen.

According to Karp, Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz doodled through an entire meeting, and a Kleiner Perkins executive lectured the founders about the inevitable failure of their company.

[22] On June 18, 2010, Vice President Joe Biden and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag held a press conference at the White House announcing the success of fighting fraud in the stimulus by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB).

[28] A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Special Operations Command, the United States Military Academy, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

"[33] In December 2014, Forbes reported that Palantir was looking to raise $400 million in an additional round of financing, after the company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission the month before.

[33] As of December 2014, the company continued to have diverse private funders, Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller, In-Q-Tel of the CIA,[34] Tiger Global Management, and Founders Fund, which is a venture firm operated by Peter Thiel, the chairman of Palantir.

[58] to give caseworkers employed by local authorities access to data held by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, some of which is supplied by the UK Home Office.

This product has led Palantir's business model toward providing software as a service and away from developing bespoke solutions for customers as similar to a consulting company.

[66][67] Citing potential risks of generative artificial intelligence, CEO Karp said that the product would not let the AI independently carry out targeting operations, requiring human oversight.

[82][83] The Metropolis team used emails, download activity, browser histories, and GPS locations from JPMorgan owned smartphones and their transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations to search, aggregate, sort, and analyze this information for any specific keywords, phrases, and patterns of behavior.

Other clients as of 2013 included DHS, NSA, FBI, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED Defeat Organization and Allies.

This application has originally been conceived by ICE's office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), allowing its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by other federal and private law enforcement entities.

[102] Palantir took over the Pentagon's Project Maven contract in 2019 after Google decided not to continue developing AI unmanned drones used for bombings and intelligence.

In 2020, it was awarded an emergency non-competitive contract to mine COVID-19 patient data and consolidate government databases to help ministers and officials respond to the pandemic.

Labour peer and former Health Minister Philip Hunt voiced his concern about Palantir's use of data, stating “The current NHS and current government doesn’t have a good track record of getting the details right, and the procurement shows no sign of going better.” [114] In April 2023, it was also reported that eleven NHS trusts had paused or suspended use of the Palantir Foundry software.

[115] In March 2023 it was revealed that NHS hospitals had been 'ordered' to share patient data with Palantir, prompting renewed criticism from civil liberties groups, including for supporting genocide, privacy and security practices, and "buying way in".

[60][116] Campaign groups including the Doctors' Association UK, National Pensioners' Convention, and Just Treatment, subsequently threatened legal action over NHS England's procurement of the FDP contract citing concerns over the use of patient data.

[82] In 2010, Hunton & Williams LLP allegedly asked Berico Technologies, Palantir, and HBGary Federal to draft a response plan to "the WikiLeaks Threat."

"[134] The plan also included slides, allegedly authored by HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, which suggested "[spreading] disinformation" and "disrupting" Glenn Greenwald's support for WikiLeaks.

[134] On September 26, 2016, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Palantir alleging that the company discriminated against Asian job applicants on the basis of their race.

In a statement provided to the New York Times,[141] the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations.

[145] In one internal ICE report[146] Mijente acquired, it was revealed that Palantir's software was critical in an operation to arrest the parents of children residing illegally.

On September 28, 2020, Amnesty International released a report criticizing Palantir failure to conduct human rights due diligence around its contracts with ICE.

[147][148] The COVID-19 pandemic prompted tech companies to respond to growing demand for citizen information from governments in order to conduct contact tracing and to analyze patient data.

Palantir's participation in "HHS Protect Now", a program launched by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of the coronavirus, has attracted criticism from American lawmakers.

[150] Palantir's participation in COVID-19 response projects re-ignited debates over its controversial involvement in tracking illegal immigrants, especially its alleged effects on digital inequality and potential restrictions on online freedoms.

[150] After protests from its employees, Google chose not to renew its contract with the Pentagon to work on Project Maven, a secret artificial intelligence program aimed at the unmanned operation of aerial vehicles.