The Purge Palantir Campaign
Photo by Cory Doctorow
Palantir Technologies is a software company based in Tampa, Florida that develops big data integration and analytics platforms for government and commercial clients. The company was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. It provides software that powers intelligence agencies, health insurance companies, defense departments systems and private hospitals around the world. It is complicit in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and many other war crime. According to CEO Alex Karp, “Palantir is here to disrupt...and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”
The Purge Palantir Campaign is led by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) alongside a broad coalition of immigrant rights, labor, Palestine solidarity, and community groups including Mijente, National Nurses United, Jewish Voice for Peace, United Methodists for Kairos Response and the Palestine BDS National Committee. The campaign seeks to disrupt the activities of Palantir by public protests in the streets and at their offices to public awareness of Palantir’s actions, encouraging public pension funds and endowments to divest from Palantir, pressuring local governments to not sign contracts with Palantir, and applying pressure to congressional representatives to cut government contracts and not sign new ones.
Palantir War Crimes
In her report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories writes: “Palantir Technology Inc., whose tech collaboration with Israel long predates October 2023, expanded its support to the Israeli military post-October 2023. There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making. In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv “in solidarity”; in April 2025, Palantir’s CEO responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, “mostly terrorists, that’s true.” Both incidents are indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis Israel’s unlawful use of force, and failure to prevent such acts or withdraw involvement.” https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy-of-occupation-to-economy-of-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-palestine-2025/
Despite Israel’s well documented crimes in Gaza, Palantir continues to supply the Israeli military with data and AI services, in violation of its own code of conduct, which says that the company "will not build products that exploit or disenfranchise disadvantaged and/or disempowered populations and/or undermine the rights and livelihoods of workers."
Project Maven is a U.S. Department of Defense artificial intelligence program used to process surveillance data and accelerate target identification in modern military conflicts, drawing intense scrutiny for its application alongside similar AI targeting tools in Gaza and other regional wars. Launched by the Pentagon in 2017 as an algorithmic warfare cross-functional team. Google initially helped build it before employees protested, leading tech firm Palantir to take over development.
On March 2026, 175 civilians, including dozens of elementary-school-aged children were killed in the US bombing of their school, likely chosen through Palantir’s Maven system. Pentagon staff used Maven extensively to identify the targets for the U.S. attacks on Iran. Also on 28 February, Precision Strike Missiles dispersed clouds of tungsten pellets over a sports complex and residential area in the town of Lamerd, killing at least 21 civilians, including seven children, according to local authorities. The UN fact-finding mission's experts said the sports complex was clearly identifiable and that no information indicated it was used for military purposes.
In September 2026, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran published an official report concluding that the U.S. strikes on both the Minab school and the Lamerd sports complex were entirely indiscriminate, finding "reasonable grounds" to classify them as war crimes under international law. [1, 2]
Israel also relied on Palantir in its September 2024 attacks in Lebanon using exploding electronic pagers and radio devices, which killed dozens and wounded thousands of people. While most casualties were members of the armed group Hezbollah, at least a dozen unarmed civilians were also killed. The attacks were condemned by United Nations experts as a “terrifying violation of international law” because of its indiscriminate nature and because their targets posed no imminent threat at the time. The laws of war strictly forbid the use of booby-traps.
Palantir's "ImmigrationOS" and "FALCON" technologies have been widely used by ICE. Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have criticized these systems, stating they facilitate workplace raids, track asylum-seekers, and monitor student activists without adequate human rights due diligence.
Pentagon staff used Palantir’s software to bomb targets during the abduction of the Venezuelan President in January 2026, which caused the deaths of at least two civilians according to international monitors. 19 UN experts condemned the attack as an unprovoked use of armed force on a sovereign territory in clear violation of the UN Charter.
Palantir in Ohio:
The AFSC has a map of the some of the main contracts and stakeholders. The main ones listed in Ohio include the Cleveland Clinic (and many health services throughout the state) and pension fund investments of the Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio and the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio. The Cleveland Clinic uses Palantir software to plan nurse schedules and patient bed assignment. Both pension funds have investments of $159,443,705. AFSC will update the map as they find more information. The map can be accessed here.
What you can do now:
You can sent letters to the CEOs of companies that use Palantir’s tools: https://afsc.org/action/send-letters-ceos-companies-using-palantir.
Call the CEO of HCA Healthcare at 615-344-955. HCA Healthcare operates 189 hospitals in 19 states. Tell him that the National Nurses United union is asking HCA to drop their contract with Palantir. Workers from the NNU union have criticized the software that Palantir has designated for HCA called “Timpani” for creating unsustainable and faulty schedules that ultimately perpetuate the national short-staffing crisis. Urge the CEO to listen to the workers and patients, and please drop the contract with Palantir. Point out that Palantir’s technology is being used by the Israeli military during the Gaza genocide, by ICE to deport our neighbors, and by the US military on its attacks on Iran. Palantir makes the majority of its money on violence and has no place in our healthcare system.
More information:
Website: https://afsc.org/purge-palantir
https://investigate.afsc.org/company/palantir
https://afsc.org/map-palantir-locations
AFSC Fact Sheet: https://afsc.org/sites/default/files/2026-06/palantir-in-healthcare_final.pdf
NYC Hospital system will drop Palantir: https://afsc.org/newsroom/facing-public-outrage-nyc-hospital-ceo-announces-palantir-contract-will-not-be-renewed
JVP Health Advisory Council: Webinar and additional resources - Palantir in Our Hospitals – A List of Resources: https://www.jvphealth.org/palantir-general.
Palantir global week of action: https://bdsmovement.net/news/people-vs-palantir-global-week-action.
Webinar Recordings:
The Power of BDS: Transforming the World, Two new campaigns to continue the transformation. (Purge Palantir and No Room for Genocide.) Presented by United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR) and Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA). The section with Kenny Morris, Campaign strategist for AFSC Action for Corporate Accountability, starts at 4:50 and ends at 21:00. https://www.kairosresponse.org/webinar_15april2026_bdscampaigns.html
Watch the JVP HAC webinar Palantir in Our Hospitals: How the company powering the Gaza genocide and ICE surveillance is expanding into healthcare, with AFSC, No Palantir in the NHS Campaign, and National Nurses United here.
Palantir: Profits, Procurement and Power. Financial Times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ5XRl7PWxM.
Resources on Palantir’s Complicity in Human Rights Violations