New York City police detained six demonstrators on Thursday morning after forming a human chain outside Palantir Technologies’ Manhattan headquarters, snarling access to the lobby.
Planet Over Profit, the climate and privacy collective that organized the demonstration, said activists linked arms on Avenue of the Americas to protest the data mining company for “powering ICE” as they arrest “New Yorkers,” the group wrote on X.
“We’re disrupting Palantir’s business as usual because producing AI that makes fascism stronger and more efficient does not belong in NYC,” protestor Caroline Chouinard told a reporter from The Guardian moments before being arrested along with five others.
Police broke up the blockade after about an hour, with all six arrestees released with summonses before noon, the outlet reported.
Neither the New York Police Department (NYPD) or Palantir responded to requests for comment.
The protest is part of a coast-to-coast campaign against the Peter Thiel-founded company, whose software ingests troves of personal data for mostly government clients. Organizers plan a second rally outside Palantir’s Palo Alto campus later Thursday.
Planet Over Profit likewise did not respond to a request for comment.
Opponents say the firm’s most recent $30 million contract with ICE — awarded in April to build “ImmigrationOS,” a dashboard for real-time tracking of self-deportations — will accelerate arrests and detentions, resurrecting surveillance programs first launched under the Obama administration.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has embraced the company’s growing defense portfolio, telling investors at the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call he is also “exceedingly proud” its engineers are “on the ground” in Israel after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, according to CNBC.
Ten Democratic lawmakers in June warned the firm’s reported work on a “mega-database” aggregating Americans’ records across agencies could violate federal privacy law — a claim Palantir rebutted on X, insisting it neither operates such systems nor decides how data is used.
“The letter disappointingly contains myriad false accusations about Palantir’s work based on unfounded, previously addressed claims by The New York Times, alongside a number of shocking historical comparisons,” the X post reads.
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