Palantir partners with Microsoft to sell AI to the government

“This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says.

Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software. 

Despite its large client list, Palantir didn’t post its first annual profit until 2023. But the AI hype cycle has meant that Palantir’s “commercial business is exploding in a way we don’t know how to handle,” the company’s chief executive officer Alex Carp told Bloomberg in February. The majority of its business is from governments, including that of Israel — though the risk factors section of its annual filing notes that it does not and will not work with “the Chinese communist party.”

As of this writing, Palantir’s share price has surged more than 75 percent in 2024.