The controversial and secretive program company, co-founded by Facebook Inc.
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board member and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, created its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission general public Tuesday. The document commences with a letter from Main Executive Alexander Karp that defends Palantir’s get the job done with governments and militaries about the environment and declares its differences with Silicon Valley, which the organization has still left for Denver.

“Our corporation was established in Silicon Valley,” Karp wrote. “But we feel to share much less and fewer of the technological know-how sector’s values and commitments.”

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CEO letters are fairly prevalent in filings for original general public choices and immediate listings, but Palantir took the technique 1 action additional by building Karp’s letter the initial section of its filing. Karp’s letter referred to as out promotion-centered company products these as Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s
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Google for their info techniques even though defending Palantir’s use of facts for surveillance and other functions.

“From the start off, we have repeatedly turned down opportunities to provide, acquire, or mine details. Other technological know-how firms, such as some of the largest in the entire world, have built their total enterprises on carrying out just that,” Karp wrote. “Software initiatives with our nation’s defense and intelligence organizations, whose missions are to retain us safe, have develop into controversial, although firms designed on advertising bucks are commonplace. For several customer internet providers, our views and inclinations, behaviors and searching behavior, are the merchandise for sale. The slogans and advertising of lots of of the Valley’s major technological know-how corporations attempt to obscure this basic point.”

Palantir has faced acrimony and anger much over and above Silicon Valley for its secretive perform with powerful entities. The business has contracts with the Office of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, together with for computer software utilised to observe migrants at the border. Simply because of that, it has been qualified by protesters and activists which include Mijente, an immigration advocacy team.

“This is not just a concern of a single pocket of the state, the protests are taking place nationwide,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign director at Mijente, including that advocacy groups in Colorado experienced previously contacted her about Palantir.

“Palantir is complicit in the surveillance, arrest and deportation of our communities by means of their get the job done with ICE,” Gonzalez reported. “Their S-1 recognizes that these are risky contracts to get on. We’re calling on investors everywhere you go not to invest when the IPO transpires.”

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Personnel at big tech corporations together with Google, Amazon.com Inc.
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, Microsoft Corp.
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and Salesforce.com Inc.
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have protested some of their companies’ contracts with the federal authorities, including ICE. But Karp explained that Palantir personnel “embrace the complexity” of federal operate that features surveilling enemies and creating war plans.

“The development of software platforms that enable extra effective surveillance by the state of its adversaries or that aid troopers in executing attacks raises numerous issues, involving the details of pressure and tradeoffs between our collective safety and particular person privacy, the electric power of machines, and the styles of life we both of those want to and should lead,” Karp wrote. “The ethical difficulties that arise are continuous and unrelenting. We embrace the complexity that arrives from functioning in locations exactly where the stakes are frequently incredibly higher and the decisions may be imperfect.”

Chris Hoofnagle, the college director for UC Berkeley’s Centre for Regulation & Technological innovation and who sits on the Palantir Council on Privacy and Civil Liberties, explained Tuesday that he is “perplexed” by tech companies’ resistance to do the job with the federal authorities, which contributed to the rise of Silicon Valley before the boom in venture-money buyers. He chalked it up to “reaction development or some other juvenile confusion.”

“Silicon Valley wouldn’t even exist devoid of the Section of Protection,” Hoofnagle explained. “Most of the technologies made in this article are twin-use and simply cannot be created without having contributing to military energy.”

Irina Raicu, the director of online ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Middle for Utilized Ethics, instructed MarketWatch on Tuesday that Karp’s letter “includes some incredibly aged (and frequently debunked) Silicon Valley tropes,” and pushed again versus a few unique points the CEO created.

“For example, that ‘[t]he cut price between the public and the engineering sector has for the most aspect been consensual, in that the benefit of the merchandise and services available seemed to outweigh the invasions of privacy that enabled their rise,’” Raicu wrote in an electronic mail, quoting Karp’s letter. “It has come to be quite apparent, more than the previous many yrs, that the public had no comprehending of the privateness-invasive methods powering a lot of of the providers it was available had assumed that regulations ended up in area to avert these types of tactics and has been pushing for new legislation to reduce them.”

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In reaction to Karp’s assert that Individuals will not “remain tolerant of the idiosyncrasies and excesses of the Valley,” Raicu reported that Us citizens have not been tolerant of the Valley’s steps for several years, introducing “Surely Palantir has crunched plenty of info to be knowledgeable of that.”

As to Karp’s assertion that Palantir has “chosen sides” between Silicon Valley and the federal government, Raicu stated Palantir’s “clients in regulation enforcement and intelligence companies do not signify a various ‘side’ from the American public.”