Palantir Saved Europe? Now Karp Wants Your Medicaid Records

I watched a video this morning with Alex Karp and it set me off a bit.

Karp is the chief executive of Palantir. He was explaining that without AI systems Russia would have won the war, that Europe would be overrun by terror attacks, and that Europe as we know it exists because these tools are already in use.

I have seen this before.

There was a stretch in the nineties when Bill Gates was asked for his view of everything. Education. Medicine. Poverty. The shape of the coming century. He was treated as a seer, he answered with depth, and a great many intelligent people took notes. By doing this he was helping us sell Windows & Office and the macro view helped us sell enterprise agreements.

The play has not changed. Describe the shape of history in a way that leaves your company standing at the centre of it, then let other people call it wisdom.

Gates had a monopoly and could afford to sound calm. Musk, Thiel and Karp are running the same routine with the volume up, because they need the next quarter to look like the last one. The tell is that the philosophy always terminates in a purchase order. A man who truly believes civilization hangs in the balance does not usually name his product while saying so.

So let’s take his argument apart.

He says that without these systems Russia would have won. Nobody can check this. There is no second war being fought without the software, no control Europe running clean beside ours for comparison. He is describing a catastrophe that did not happen and asking for credit for its absence. Every claim in the post is built this way, which is convenient, because it means he can never be shown to be wrong.

Then he begins with AI in general and finishes with his tools. Ukraine built a great deal of its own battlefield software. Allied intelligence mattered. So did cheap drones and clever engineers working out of workshops. Karp gathers a diffuse achievement, assembled by many hands under fire, and files it under his success (narcissist much?).

But then he tries to be really clever and defines the moral question as whether you stand against Putin and the Chinese Communist Party. Framed that way, every serious criticism of his company vanishes, because nobody was arguing that Putin is good. He answers a question nobody asked and calls it a moral standard.

Enough of the crap Karp (or is it Krap)… your not as good at this as as Gates was in ‘95…

Our real questions are about your domestic record. What does this software do when it is pointed at people who are American citizens...

Before 2025 the answer was already uncomfortable. Seed money from the CIA’s venture arm. A bank that used the software to watch its own employees. Police departments in Los Angeles & New York that acquired it through charitable donations rather than procurement, so the public never got a vote. A predictive policing programme in New Orleans that ran for six years before city council members learned of it from a magazine. An ICE system that worked backward from children who arrived alone to the relatives who came to collect them. Pandemic health data running through the same vendor as immigration enforcement.

I will leave those there. It is what has happened since 2025 that I want Karp to explain, line by line.

In April 2025 his company took a thirty million dollar contract, awarded without competition, to build a deportation targeting system drawing on data from outside ICE. Nobody involved could say what prevents it being pointed at citizens.

The same spring, the White House asked Palantir to merge the files that separate federal agencies hold on Americans into a single searchable place. Those agencies were kept apart on purpose.

By June, lawmakers were warning that a searchable database of tax returns, reachable by other agencies, is an efficient instrument for punishing enemies. The company replied that it is not building a master database.

In October, Citizenship and Immigration Services began paying for a platform to vet marriage based immigration claims. A system now scores whether your marriage looks real.

In January of this year, a tool called ELITE was reported to draw on Medicaid records to map deportation targets and rate how confident it is about your current address. Roughly eighty million people sit in that file, and analysts noted it cannot separate undocumented people from citizens, so everyone in it is exposed. When members of Congress asked what the software actually does, they could not get an answer.

In February, records released under freedom of information showed the IRS using the software to help choose which taxpayers get examined. In April, the volume of taxpayer data inside the system became public only because a watchdog group sued for the paperwork.

Last week, court filings showed that Medicaid data had been passed to ICE improperly and then handed on to Palantir. The official remedy was deleting a file from a Microsoft Teams chat.

Which brings me to the question I really want answered: In September 2020 Palantir told Amnesty International that it had purposefully declined contracts with ICE’s deportation arm and with Customs and Border Protection, because of the risk of disproportionate immigration enforcement inside the United States. Those were its words. In 2025 it took the deportation contract. The New York City Comptroller calls this a stark reversal and has asked the board to commission an independent assessment.

The technology did not change. The law did not change. So what changed?