Microsoft is partnering with secret data analytics firm Palantir, which is accused of (among other misdeeds) allowing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to act as a “domestic surveillance agency.” Bloomberg reports that Palantir will integrate its products with Microsoft’s government cloud tools, including the Azure OpenAI service, “in an effort to sell the software” to US defense agencies. Oh, the joy.
The two will reportedly focus on products for US defense personnel to manage supplies, contracts and operational planning. But given the secretive nature of Palantir’s work, those familiar and seemingly non-threatening names don’t mean much.
Palantir software was used to track and suppress objections. The company was founded by Peter Thiel, who supports and finances far-right causes and whose political philosophy his autobiography describes as “bordering on fascism.” In Thiel’s Stanford classes and his book Zero to one, a Silicon Valley billionaire talked about how corporations work better than governments because they have a single decision maker. “A dictator, basically,” said Thiel’s columnist Time in 2021.
Thiel also wrote these words, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy go hand in hand.”
In 2018, Palantir applied The New York Times that it does not work with ICE’s deportation team, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). This is contrary to the report The Intercept revealing a 2016 Homeland Security disclosure showing ERO used Palantir software “to collect information on both criminal and civil cases against immigrants.”
In 2020, Amnesty International warned about Palantir, “We can close our eyes and pretend that, contrary to all the evidence, Palantir is a company that respects rights or we can call this façade for what it is: another company that makes profit over people, regardless of where they are. human cost.”
Bloomberg reports that Palantir’s new AI software requires a large language model. Now, in decentralized government environments, Palantir will combine its capabilities with those of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, which includes GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, GPT-4, GPT-3.5 and more.
Can it go wrong?
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