What Does Palantir Actually Do? Plus. . . Political violence becomes background noise. Zohran Mamdani and the terror-linked imam. What happens when the internet breaks. The secret languages AI can’t touch. And much more.
(Illustration by The Free Press; image via Getty.)
It’s Wednesday, October 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: World Trade Center bombing survivors recoil at Zohran Mamdani’s photo op with a terror-linked imam. How political violence became commonplace. And is it possible to actually “break the internet”? But first: Inside Palantir’s enigma machine. Few companies raise as many questions as Palantir does. Did it help kill Osama bin Laden? Is its software being used to watch all of us? Why does it help the feds identify illegal immigrants? The company has become a lightning rod for people across the political spectrum, partly because Palantir is secretive and complex. That only fuels the sense that it must be up to something nefarious. So, in an effort to shed a little light on the secretive firm, I asked Palantir employees a simple question during a visit to their office in Washington, D.C., recently: What do you do for a living? The answers were almost all metaphors. One engineer told me to think of Palantir as capable of finding a moving needle in a haystack the size of a small country. Another began his answer by asking me to imagine a tangle of hoses in the backyard. It’s true that the company’s software is hard to understand, but Palantir’s leaders say their mission is simple. “We’re pro-West,” CEO Alex Karp told me. “For us, the West is led by America, but also includes allies, including Israel.” I spoke to dozens of people inside and outside Palantir to understand the criticisms of the company. Which are fair? Which aren’t? And, to return to the question at the heart of it all: What does Palantir actually do? —Maya Sulkin |