Palantir CEO Alex Karp Recorded a Video About ICE for His Employees

Palantir employees have spent weeks asking company executives for answers about the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On Friday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp finally seemed to give in, sort of.

In an email sent to all Palantir employees, Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, shared a nearly hour-long pre-recorded video conversation with Karp about Palantir’s involvement in ICE.

“As a result of recent events, internal conversations and calls from many of you to better understand how leaders are grappling with questions central to Palantir’s place in today’s world, I sat down earlier with Dr. Karp for an in-depth discussion,” Bowman wrote in the email, viewed by WIRED. “To be clear, our goal in this exchange was not to cover every detail of every controversy that graces the company’s liveliest Slack channels, nor to fully assuage every concern any of you might have…Importantly, Dr. Karp has made clear his commitment to reinvigorating his direct engagement with the Hobbits and this discussion strives to model the form of rigorous dialogue that should be at the center of Palantir’s prized culture.” (Palantir Executives) sometimes refer to employees as “hobbits”, based on the fictitious term Lord of the Rings characters.)

However, the video did not answer specific questions about the capabilities of Palantir products or how ICE used Palantir products. Instead, the video said workers could sign nondisclosure agreements if they wanted more detailed information.

Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For about the first 40 minutes of the conversation, Karp did not answer questions about the company’s contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that littered internal discussions weeks before. Instead, Karp focused on Palantir’s role in building and maintaining Western power, a topic he frequently addresses in public interviews and in his most recent book, The Technological Republic: hard power, soft belief and the future of the West.

Towards the end of the video, Karp largely turns his attention to immigration enforcement, saying that Palantir will not have a policy that is “different depending on the president” and that Democrats have prioritized these issues under previous administrations as well. Karp specifically cited former President Barack Obama, who said in a 2014 speech that the United States was both a “nation of immigrants” and a “nation of laws.” Karp also argued that institutions considering breaking laws don’t buy Palantir’s products, saying the products’ technical capabilities make it difficult to hide malfeasance.

Although Karp declined to go into further detail about the products Palantir supplies to ICE, he offered workers the opportunity to sign NDAs in order to receive individual briefings. At the end of the email linking to this conversation, Bowman said the video was just the beginning of being more open about its work with ICE. Bowman did not share what additional information workers might expect in the future, but he said Karp’s video was “a step forward, not a completion” of Palantir management’s discussions about its ICE work with staff.

The video came after weeks of internal pressure from workers. Shortly after federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis nurse last month, workers flooded Palantir’s internal Slack, questioning the company’s role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, how the products provided work in tandem with ICE’s goals and whether the company should be involved with the agency. The pre-recorded conversation with Karp gave little insight into their questions.

In internal Slack conversations reviewed by WIRED in January, workers complained about a lack of transparency about how the product many of them sell and build enables ICE.