Yet Palantir’s work on the coronavirus has also highlighted the mistrust that trails the company. To Palantirians, as some call themselves, these myriad applications are just further proof that many problems are data-integration problems. Ferrari Scuderia uses it to try to make its Formula 1 cars faster. The pharmaceutical company Merck K.G.a.A., in Germany, uses it to expedite the development of new drugs. The investment bank Credit Suisse uses it to guard against money laundering. Army uses it for logistics, among other things. The speed with which Palantir transitioned to pandemic response ostensibly underscores the flexibility of its software, which can be put to any number of tasks. “I believe that Western civilization has rested on our somewhat small shoulders a couple of times in the last 15 years,” he told me in Paris, where he was hosting a conference for Palantir’s corporate clients.Ī few months later, the world was being menaced by a novel coronavirus, and Palantir quickly joined that battle against Covid-19: By April, according to the company, approximately a dozen countries were using its technology to track and contain the virus. Karp claims that Palantir has helped thwart several attacks, including one or two that he says could have had seismic political consequences. French intelligence turned to Palantir following the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris. These days, Palantir is used for counterterrorism by a number of Western governments. Palantir’s technology is rumored to have been used to track down Osama bin Laden - a claim that has never been verified but one that has conferred an enduring mystique on the company. It was seeded in part by In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.’s venture-capital arm, and the C.I.A. The brainchild of Karp’s friend and law-school classmate Peter Thiel, Palantir was founded in 2003. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. In the company’s early days, Palantir employees, invoking Tolkien, described their mission as “saving the shire.” To that end, Palantir says it does not do business in countries that it considers adversarial to the U.S. “We built our company to support the West,” he says. The stated goal of all this “data integration” is to help organizations make better decisions, and many of Palantir’s customers consider its technology to be transformative. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Its two primary software programs, Gotham and Foundry, gather and process vast quantities of data in order to identify connections, patterns and trends that might elude human analysts. The company, Palantir Technologies, is named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Those gendarmes evidently didn’t know that Karp, far from being a public menace, was the chief executive of an American company whose software has been deployed on behalf of public safety in France. “I brought a real sword the last time I was here, but the police stopped me,” he said matter of factly as he began slashing the air with the sword. The case contained a wooden sword, which he needed for the next part of his routine. The cooler held several bottles of the nonalcoholic German beer that Karp drinks (he would crack one open on the way out of the park). After 10 minutes or so, Karp walked to a nearby bench, where one of his bodyguards had placed a cooler and what looked like an instrument case. A group of teenagers watched in amusement. Under a canopy of chestnut trees, Karp executed a series of elegant tai chi and qigong moves, shifting the pebbles and dirt gently under his feet as he twisted and turned. He wore blue Nike sweatpants, a blue polo shirt, orange socks, charcoal-gray sneakers and white-framed sunglasses with red accents that inevitably drew attention to his most distinctive feature, a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair rising skyward from his head. On a bright Tuesday afternoon in Paris last fall, Alex Karp was doing tai chi in the Luxembourg Gardens. The tech giant helps governments and law enforcement decipher vast amounts of data - to mysterious and, some say, dangerous ends.
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