Software That Saves and Takes Lives: An HBS Student's Palantir Case, Four Years On

About this section

This post opens Military & AI, a new EXEPERT section. It covers how AI and data software are built, bought and used for defence, intelligence and security, and the questions that come with them: who oversees these systems, who is accountable for how they are used, and who decides where they go. We attribute every claim, and we keep vendors' descriptions apart from independent evidence.

The first three posts look at one product, Palantir Gotham, from three angles. This one starts with a business-school case and checks it against four years of news. The second reads what Palantir tells UK government buyers. The third watches Palantir's own defence demo, paused and explained.

The case

In November 2022 Yannik Dobler, then an MBA student, posted an essay on the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative's student forum. It was written for the course Digital Innovation and Transformation, and its title as published is Palantir: A software that safes and takes lives (Dobler, 2022).

The essay makes seven points:

• What Palantir sells. Not data, but infrastructure that connects an organisation's data, analytics and operations, so that the right people get the right information for a decision.

• Three platforms. Foundry is commercial analytics and machine learning. Gotham is the operating system for defence, intelligence and law-enforcement data. Apollo is the delivery layer that lets both run where the public cloud cannot, such as classified government clouds or a submarine.

• What Gotham does. The essay lists mission planning with live sensor data and AI recommendations, simulation of courses of action, network analysis that links siloed records, and a feedback loop in which every decision is captured and fed back into the models.

• The business model. Long, bespoke government relationships and very large deals. Dobler's example is a recent US defence contract worth $229 million for one year. The essay calls the business extremely sticky, because integrated systems are hard to displace.

• The risk. Dependence on government revenue, with Foundry's commercial growth as the hedge.

• The ethics. Critics argue that predictive policing reinforces racial bias and encourages aggressive tactics, and they question using counter-terrorism tools domestically or selling them abroad.

• The recommendation. Reposition the company, or separate the Gotham unit, and use public communication to build trust for its commercial products.

The comments asked the harder question

Two classmates replied on the day it was posted. One asked why a private company's chief executive should decide who the "bad guys" are, when many conflicts are unclear. The same comment warned that if Palantir keeps adding customers, every side of a war could end up with the same tools.

The other called the technology impressive and concerning. They worried that bias in models and in policing could lead to over-policing of marginalised communities, and shared the first concern about a private company choosing which governments and conflicts get the software.

That question, who decides, is the thread running through this section.

Checking the 2022 facts

• The $229 million contract. This matches a September 2022 announcement: the US Army Research Laboratory extended its work with Palantir, worth up to $229 million over one year. The work supports testing and scaling of AI and machine learning for the armed services, the Joint Staff and special forces (C4ISRNET, 2022).

• The quote behind the title. It comes from Alex Karp's 2022 annual letter to shareholders. Karp wrote that all technology, including Palantir's, is dangerous, that software can be used as a weapon, and that lives have been saved and taken as a result of the products the company has built (Karp, 2022).

• Who Palantir will not work with. Palantir's latest annual report still says it does not work with the Chinese Communist Party and has chosen not to host its platforms in China (Palantir Technologies Inc., 2026b).

• Saudi Arabia. The essay says Palantir turned down Saudi Arabia, but we found no public source naming it. In a 2023 interview, Karp was asked about selling to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He replied that Palantir sells to certain countries in the Middle East and has turned down some big contracts for ethical reasons, without naming them (Palantir, 2023).

Four years on

The case was written just before Palantir's products and contracts changed scale.

• AI joined the product line. In April 2023 Karp announced the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which lets companies and government agencies use large language models on their own private data (Karp, 2023).

• Maven Smart System. In May 2024 the US Army awarded Palantir a $480 million, five-year contract to expand access to the Maven Smart System, an AI tool for military users (Albon, 2024). In May 2025 the Defense Department raised the ceiling by $795 million, to nearly $1.3 billion, citing growing demand (Vincent, 2025). NATO finalised its own purchase, MSS NATO, for Allied Command Operations in March 2025, without disclosing the price (The Defense Post, 2025).

• One Army agreement. In July 2025 the Army announced an enterprise agreement with Palantir worth up to $10 billion over up to ten years. It consolidates 75 existing contracts into one, and the Army stressed that the figure is a ceiling, not an obligation (U.S. Army Public Affairs, 2025).

• The United Kingdom. In November 2023 a Palantir-led group won the NHS Federated Data Platform contract, worth up to £330 million over seven years (Clark, 2023). In September 2025 the Ministry of Defence announced a strategic partnership. Palantir said it would invest up to £1.5 billion in the UK and make it its European defence headquarters. The partnership would identify up to £750 million of defence opportunities over five years, in areas including decision support and targeting (Ministry of Defence, 2025). A £240.6 million contract, directly awarded without competition, followed in December 2025 (Mathieson, 2026).

• Israel. In January 2024 Palantir and Israel's Defense Ministry agreed a strategic partnership to supply technology for the war effort. The terms were not disclosed (Newman, 2024).

• Immigration enforcement. In April 2025 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir $29.8 million for a prototype called ImmigrationOS. It was a modification of an existing contract, to help ICE select and track people for deportation, including self-deportations and visa overstays (Ho, 2025).

The revenue mix, then and now

Sources: Palantir Technologies Inc. (2023, 2026a, 2026b).

What the case got right, and what changed

It was right about stickiness. An Army that folds 75 contracts into a single enterprise agreement is stickiness at national scale.

It was half right about concentration. Commercial revenue did surge, especially in the United States. Government revenue grew almost as fast, though, so the mix barely moved: about 56% government in 2022 and about 54% in 2025. The hedge worked by growing the whole business, not by shrinking the government share.

Its recommendation went the other way. Dobler suggested softening Palantir's government image, or separating Gotham. Instead the company leaned in. Its filings still draw a line at the Chinese Communist Party. Its UK partnership names targeting among its focus areas, and its largest new contracts are military. The ethical debate moved too, from predictive policing to battlefield AI, wartime partnerships and immigration enforcement.

The comment's question is still open. Governments decide what they buy and how they use it. Palantir still decides whom it will sell to, by criteria its leadership sets. Both posts that follow show how much of that is visible from outside, and how much is not.

Also in this series

• What Palantir Tells UK Government Buyers About Gotham: Reading the G-Cloud 14 Service Definition

• Palantir Gotham, Paused and Explained: Cyberfam on Palantir's Notional Defence Demo

References

Albon, C. (2024, May 30). Palantir wins contract to expand access to Project Maven AI tools. Defense News. https://www.defensenews.com/artificial-intelligence/2024/05/30/palantir-wins-contract-to-expand-access-to-project-maven-ai-tools/

C4ISRNET. (2022, September 30). Palantir wins Army Research Lab contract extension worth $229 million. C4ISRNET. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2022/09/30/palantir-wins-army-research-lab-contract-extension-worth-229-million/

Clark, L. (2023, November 22). Palantir bags £330M NHS data bonanza despite privacy fears. The Register. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/22/palantir_wins_nhs_contract/

Dobler, Y. (2022, November 30). Palantir: A software that safes and takes lives [Student submission, Digital Innovation and Transformation]. Digital Initiative, Harvard Business School. https://aiinstitute.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/palantir-a-software-that-safes-and-takes-lives/

Ho, R. (2025, April 17). ICE just ordered $30 million worth of new technology from Palantir to track immigrants. Business Insider (syndicated by Yahoo News). https://www.yahoo.com/news/ice-just-ordered-30-million-212445164.html

Karp, A. (2022, February 14). 2022 annual letter from CEO Alex Karp. Palantir. https://www.palantir.com/newsroom/letters/2022-annual-letter/en/

Karp, A. (2023, April 27). AIP in action: A letter from the CEO. Palantir. https://www.palantir.com/newsroom/letters/aip-in-action/en/

Mathieson, S. A. (2026, January 28). Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir. The Register. https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/28/mod_palantir_deal/

Ministry of Defence. (2025, September 18). New strategic partnership to unlock billions and boost military AI and innovation. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-strategic-partnership-to-unlock-billions-and-boost-military-ai-and-innovation

Newman, M. (2024, January 12). Thiel's Palantir, Israel agree strategic partnership for battle tech. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-12/palantir-israel-agree-to-strategic-partnership-for-battle-tech

Palantir. (2023, March). Interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp in L'Obs. https://www.palantir.com/newsroom/media/lobs3-13-2023/english/

Palantir Technologies Inc. (2023, February 13). Palantir reports Q4 2022 and full-year 2022 results [Exhibit 99.1, Form 8-K]. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165523000005/a2022q4ex991pressrelease.htm

Palantir Technologies Inc. (2026a, February 2). Q4 2025 and full-year 2025 earnings release [Exhibit 99.1, Form 8-K]. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165526000004/a2025q4ex991earningsrelease.htm

Palantir Technologies Inc. (2026b). Annual report (Form 10-K) for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165526000011/pltr-20251231.htm

The Defense Post. (2025, April 16). NATO finalizes rapid procurement of AI warfighting platform. The Defense Post. https://www.thedefensepost.com/2025/04/16/nato-palantir-ai-warfighting-platform

U.S. Army Public Affairs. (2025, July 31). U.S. Army awards enterprise service agreement to enhance military readiness and drive operational efficiency. U.S. Army. https://www.army.mil/article/287506/

Vincent, B. (2025, May 23). "Growing demand" sparks DOD to raise Palantir's Maven contract to more than $1B. DefenseScoop. https://defensescoop.com/2025/05/23/dod-palantir-maven-smart-system-contract-increase/