Palantir earned a record $1.855 billion in revenue from the American government in 2025, the company said in an earnings report that exceeded market expectations.
“We also did this while supporting, in critical manner, some of the most interesting, intricate, unusual operations that the U.S. government has been involved in, many of which we can’t comment on, but were the highlight of last year and were highly motivating to all of us at Palantir,” CEO Alex Karp said on the investor call.
Palantir’s “motivating” business with the U.S. government grew 55% year-over-year in 2025. In just the last three months of the year, Palantir made $570 million in revenue, with 66% growth year-over-year.
Most of that revenue was driven by the company’s work for the Department of Defense, “as well as accelerating momentum in civil agencies,” Palantir’s chief revenue officer Ryan Taylor said.
Palantir’s close relationship with at least one of these civil agencies has been at the heart of growing public scrutiny, and that’s the Department of Homeland Security.
The DHS has been relying on Palantir software in its effort to turbocharge the Trump administration’s violent crackdown on immigrants. Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency paid Palantir $60 million to build a surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS to track self-deportations. Just a few months later, an Amnesty International report claimed that Palantir’s AI software was used to target non-citizens who speak out in favor of Palestine.
ICE also uses Palantir tech to decide which neighborhoods to target for deportation raids. The program is called ELITE (short for Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting), and it was first unveiled in a 404 Media report last month and later corroborated in a DHS report on AI use cases in the Department.
The same report also says that ICE uses Palantir AI to review, summarize, and categorize tips sent to the agency.
Karp himself has been outspoken in favor of Trump’s immigration policy, going so far as to say that he will use his “whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration.”
But Palantir’s partnership with Washington goes far beyond just immigration. Many parts of the government rely on Palantir software, most notably the Pentagon and particularly through a $480 million deal for an AI-powered target identification system called Maven.
“Our weapons software is in every combat situation [that] I’m aware of,” Karp said. In fact, the CEO claims it’s been so effective that his chief technology officer Shyam Sankar’s “phone rings off the hook all day, and what they want from him is ‘how do I do this same thing across government?’”
Karp’s usual retort to accusations that Palantir is aiding the administration in immoral (and some argue illegal) actions is that the company’s software is the only way the public can ensure the government’s actions remain constitutional. He has used this reasoning when defending the use of Palantir software in Caribbean boat strikes that many experts believe to be war crimes, and he used it again in the investor call to ward off fears of Palantir-driven mass surveillance.
Karp argues that Palantir is building technology that will hold the government accountable to the legal limits of its surveillance, and ensure that “every institution that uses our product is doing it within conformity of the law and the ethics of America.”
But what happens when those “laws and ethics” themselves become questionable? Well, Palantir continues to get paid.
Take Palantir’s work for the Department of Health and Human Services. For roughly the past year, Palantir has supplied AI tools to attack government programs, contracts, and grants that don’t fit with the Trump administration’s views on gender, environment, and race, according to a recently published report on AI use cases at HHS.
The Department has been using Palantir AI to make sure that all grants and jobs comply with Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI and “gender ideology.”
Since they were signed a year ago, both executive orders have led to many federal layoffs, including some targeting non-DEI-related positions, and major cuts to funding for crucial research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even had to scrub any mentions of words like “gender,” “LGBT,” or “environmental justice,” retracting and even pausing some research submissions, while Trump cut more than 1,600 research grants at the National Science Foundation.
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