Everyone is watching AI chatbots argue with each other, summarize documents, and hallucinate case law. Nobody is watching the company that has been running the actual data infrastructure of American state power since 2004.

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 with $2 million in seed funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm. That fact appears in Palantir's S-1 filing, submitted when the company went public in September 2020. In that time, Palantir has expanded from a single NSA contract to become the data integration architecture for the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Agriculture, the British National Health Service, and the central infrastructure through which the Department of Government Efficiency now accesses taxpayer data across the federal government.

This expansion did not happen through competitive procurement. It happened through a sequence of no-bid contracts, intelligence-community exemptions from standard acquisition rules, a federal court ruling that made evaluation legally mandatory, and an operational dependency that accumulated year by year until the switching cost exceeded any realistic procurement alternative. The GAO found at least one major Palantir procurement inadequate. Inspector General reports across multiple agencies have flagged oversight as insufficient. Congressional committees were not informed of the data-access arrangements connecting Palantir to the Department of Government Efficiency before those arrangements began operating. The question that auditors in multiple jurisdictions have each asked is the same: how does a private company, founded with intelligence-community seed money, become the operational backbone of state functions that democracies have historically kept inside government?

Palantir's federal contracts totaled $970.5 million in 2025, nearly double the prior year. The growth occurred while DOGE was terminating contracts with other major federal IT vendors. The Treasury Department canceled $21 million in Booz Allen Hamilton contracts over a data security breach. Leidos lost a $1.9 billion IRS modernization deal. The GSA directed agencies to review the top ten consulting firms for potential termination. Booz Allen, Leidos, and SAIC can be fired. Palantir was not. What distinguishes Palantir is the combination that makes separation structurally different from termination: intelligence-community origin, a judicial precedent that made evaluation mandatory, and a cross-agency data integration role that no other contractor holds simultaneously.

How the Lock Was Built

The In-Q-Tel model is straightforward. The CIA identifies a technology need, funds a private company developing a relevant product, and that company gains the intelligence community as its first reference customer before any public market exists. Palantir's founding chairman Peter Thiel held between 7 and 10 percent of the company's private shares at the time of the 2020 IPO, as disclosed in the S-1 filing. His stake, now approximately 4 percent of a company whose government contracts represent more than two-thirds of total annual revenue, creates a direct financial interest in each contract renewal. That interest was not incidental to the founding. It was built into the structure from the first $2 million.

In 2016, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that the Army had acted "willfully and intentionally" in failing to properly evaluate Palantir's commercially available battlefield data system. The ruling established a legal obligation for the government to consider Palantir before developing competing systems in any domain where Palantir can demonstrate relevant capability. The cost and delay of litigation create a structural incentive to include Palantir in every relevant procurement regardless of whether it is the best option. In 2022, the Army awarded Palantir the TITAN battlefield targeting contract worth $823 million. The Army had sued Palantir, lost, and then awarded Palantir the contract in the domain the lawsuit had been about. The switching cost created by the TITAN ruling is not technical. It is judicial.

"The Army acted willfully and intentionally in failing to properly evaluate Palantir's commercially available system before deciding to build a competing system internally.", U.S. Court of Federal Claims, 2016

In 2018, NHS England awarded Palantir a £330 million contract covering 56 million patients. The contract was disclosed not by parliament but by a Freedom of Information request. When the contract came up for renewal in 2024, NHS officials explained why there was no competitive re-tendering: seven years of patient data existed in Palantir-compatible formats. Migration was assessed as operationally prohibitive. The public-tender requirement exists to prevent exactly this outcome. The exemption from public tender produced exactly this outcome.

The pattern repeats across jurisdictions because the mechanism does not depend on any single contract clause. ICE began using Palantir's FALCON system in 2012. By 2020, FALCON integrated data from more than thirty government databases, had been renewed without competitive re-tendering, and had become the operational architecture of immigration enforcement. Each renewal extended the integration. Each extension increased the switching cost. The lock is not written into any contract. It accumulates between them.

Palantir did not win contracts. It accumulated dependencies that made competition structurally inaccessible.

The IRS, DOGE, and Immigration Operating System

In April 2025, Palantir employees were embedded at the IRS alongside DOGE staff to build what internal communications described as a "mega API": a single access point to all IRS databases, consolidating taxpayer names, Social Security numbers, tax returns, employment records, and bank information into one queryable layer. Ten congressional Democrats wrote formally to Palantir arguing that the project "blatantly violates the notice, transparency, and procedural requirements of the Privacy Act" and likely violates post-Watergate statutes specifically enacted to prevent the weaponization of taxpayer data. The data-access arrangements were not disclosed to Congress before they began.

"The API as designed blatantly violates the notice, transparency, and procedural requirements of the Privacy Act.", Ten congressional Democrats, letter to Palantir, 2025

Peter Thiel donated $1.5 million to a Trump Super PAC in 2019 and was a prominent public supporter of Trump's campaigns in both 2016 and 2024. DOGE has no statutory basis in federal law. It operates as an advisory body, which exempts it from the Federal Advisory Committee Act's transparency and documentation requirements. Its data-access arrangements have not been explained in any public document reviewed as of the time of this writing. The company at the center of those arrangements is the one whose founding chairman funded the campaign that created the body now directing access to its systems.

ICE awarded Palantir $30 million to build the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, ImmigrationOS, designed to track self-deportations, select arrest targets, and process deportation pipelines. The Department of Homeland Security issued a five-year blanket purchase agreement worth up to $1 billion that eliminates standard competitive bidding for CBP, ICE, and potentially FEMA, the TSA, the Secret Service, and CISA. In April 2026, the Department of Agriculture added a $300 million food-security contract and a $75 million no-bid contract to monitor federal workers' return-to-office compliance. The federal government is now Palantir's data architecture for immigration enforcement, military targeting, taxpayer records, health surveillance, agricultural policy, and employee management simultaneously.

The company that cannot be removed without dismantling the federal data infrastructure now provides the infrastructure for the effort to restructure the federal government.

What the Language Conceals

"Data integration." "Predictive analytics." "AI-enabled targeting." "Immigration lifecycle management." Each phrase is technically accurate. None describes what the function is built on, who owns it, or what the outputs determine. Palantir's FALCON system generates risk scores for individuals subject to immigration enforcement. The algorithm is proprietary. The training data is covered by Palantir's commercial usage rights. An individual flagged by FALCON has no legal mechanism to examine the algorithm, challenge the data inputs, or determine whether the algorithm has been audited for bias. ImmigrationOS extends the same architecture to the next generation of enforcement decisions. The New Orleans predictive policing deployment ran for six years without public disclosure before The Verge uncovered it in 2018. The communities being policed had no knowledge of it. The city council had not voted on it.

Inspector General reports across multiple agencies share a common observation: oversight mechanisms have been inadequate. The IRS Inspector General has noted insufficient documentation of Palantir's access to taxpayer data. The DHS Inspector General has flagged oversight gaps in the HMTT contract. The GAO found HHS Protect's procurement inadequate. None of these findings produced corrective actions that altered Palantir's operational role. The audits arrive after the dependency is established. The dependency does not dissolve when the audit identifies it.

The semantic substitution runs in both directions. "Data analytics" replaces "surveillance." "Government efficiency" replaces "private ownership of state decision infrastructure." "Immigration lifecycle management" replaces "algorithmic arrest selection with no public audit mechanism." The language that describes what Palantir does is consistently less precise than the contracts that govern how it does it. The contracts are specific. The language is general. That asymmetry is not accidental.

This is not data analytics. This is the private ownership of the infrastructure that generates government decisions about individuals.

The S-1 filing that Palantir submitted in 2020 described its government clients as the foundation of its business model. Its commercial clients, including BP, Airbus, Ferrari, and Morgan Stanley, purchase a version of the same infrastructure built for and proven by government use. The government built the architecture. The public funded its construction through contracts that Inspector General reports have repeatedly found inadequate in their oversight provisions. Palantir owns the infrastructure. The audits identify the same pattern. The pattern continues.

Everyone is still watching the chatbots. The company running the infrastructure that processes the people watching them does not argue, does not summarize, and does not hallucinate. It integrates. It accumulates. It does not stop when the Inspector General identifies what it has built.

The architecture accounts for every actor in this system. The public is not one of them.

What you just read documents one mechanism. The architecture it belongs to spans three years of forensic research, 261 interconnected pieces, and a cross-referenced evidence trail that makes the pattern increasingly difficult to dismiss. The further in you go, the harder it becomes to look away. The full archive is at themanifestarchive.com.