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One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
The back-and-forth came after federal filings<\/a> showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) \u2014 tasked with carrying out the Trump administration\u2019s aggressive deportation strategy \u2014 is paying Palantir $30 million to create what it\u2019s calling the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System<\/a>, or ImmigrationOS, to help ICE decide who to target for deportation, as well as offering \u201cnear real-time visibility\u201d into self-deportations.<\/p>\n Y Combinator founder Paul Graham shared headlines about Palantir\u2019s contract on X<\/a>, writing, \u201cIt\u2019s a very exciting time in tech right now. If you\u2019re a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state.\u201d<\/p>\n In response, Palantir\u2019s global head of commercial Ted Mabrey wrote<\/a> that he\u2019s \u201clooking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post.\u201d<\/p>\n Mabrey did not discuss the specifics of Palantir\u2019s current work with ICE, but he said the company started working with the Department of Homeland Security (under which ICE operates) \u201cin the immediate response to the murder of Agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas in an effort dubbed Operation Fallen Hero<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen people are alive because of what you built, and others are dead because what you built was not yet good enough, you develop a very different perspective on the meaning of your work,\u201d Mabrey said.<\/p>\n He also compared Graham\u2019s criticism to protests over Google\u2019s Project Maven<\/a> in 2018, which eventually prompted the company to stop its work analyzing drone images for the military. (Google has subsequently signaled that it\u2019s become more open to defense work<\/a> again.)<\/p>\n Mabrey urged anyone interested in working for Palantir to read CEO Alexander Karp\u2019s new book \u201cThe Technological Republic,\u201d which argues that the software industry needs to rebuild its relationship with the government<\/a>. (The company has been recruiting on college campuses<\/a> with signs declaring that \u201ca moment of reckoning has arrived for the West.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u201cWe hire believers,\u201d Mabrey continued. \u201cNot in the sense of homogeneity of belief but in the intrinsic capacity to believe in something bigger than yourself. Belief is required because 1) our work is very, very hard and 2) you should expect to weather attacks like this all the time; from all sides of the political aisle.\u201d<\/p>\n Graham then pressed Mabrey<\/a> to \u201ccommit publicly on behalf of Palantir not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution,\u201d though he acknowledged in another post<\/a> that such a commitment would have \u201cno legal force.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut I\u2019m hoping that if they [make the commitment], and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he\u2019ll say \u2018I didn\u2019t sign up for this\u2019 and refuse,\u201d Graham wrote.<\/p>\n