The Intercept reported in February 2017 that Palantir “has worked for years to boost the global dragnet of the NSA and its international partners,” including software built to “facilitate, augment, and accelerate the use of XKEYSCORE,” the NSA’s search system for intercepted internet data. A GCHQ document called Palantir’s software “extremely sophisticated and mature.” [1][2]
BuzzFeed had reported a year earlier that Palantir no longer worked with the NSA. [3]
In September 2025 The American Conservative, a right-wing magazine, wrote that Palantir’s Gotham “filtered the National Security Agency’s XKEYSCORE data, vacuuming up the private communications of millions of Americans.” Palantir answered that it never contracted with the NSA and did not build XKEYSCORE. [4][5]
The documents describe Palantir software used to analyze what agencies had already collected. They do not show Palantir collecting data, and they do not settle who paid for the XKEYSCORE tool.
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