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 On
