Microsoft and Palantir associate to promote AI to authorities businesses

Microsoft is teaming up with secretive data analytics company Palantir, which has been accused of (amongst different wretched acts) enabling the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to function “as a domestic surveillance agency.” Bloomberg reports that Palantir will combine its merchandise with Microsoft’s authorities cloud instruments, together with the Azure OpenAI service, “in a bid to promote software program” to US protection businesses. Oh, pleasure.

The pair will reportedly deal with merchandise for US protection employees to deal with logistics, contracting and motion planning. However given the secretive nature of Palantir’s work, these generic and seemingly non-threatening phrases don’t essentially say a lot.

Palantir’s software program has been used to trace and suppress dissent. The corporate was based by Peter Thiel, who supports and funds far-right causes and has a political philosophy his biographer described as “bordering on fascism.” In Thiel’s Stanford courses and his e book Zero to One, the Silicon Valley billionaire gushed over how a lot better corporations are run than governments as a result of they’ve a single decision-maker. “A dictator, principally,” Thiel’s biographer told Time in 2021.

Thiel additionally wrote the phrases, “I now not imagine that freedom and democracy are suitable.”

In 2018, Palantir claimed in The New York Occasions that it doesn’t work with ICE’s deportation squad, Enforcement and Elimination Operations (ERO). This contradicted a report from The Intercept revealing a 2016 Homeland Safety disclosure exhibiting ERO used Palantir’s software program to “collect info for each prison and civil circumstances in opposition to immigrants.”

In 2020, Amnesty Worldwide warned about Palantir, “We might shut our eyes and faux that opposite to all of the proof, Palantir is a rights-respecting firm or we will name this façade what it’s: one other firm putting revenue over individuals, irrespective of the human value.”

Bloomberg stories that Palantir’s latest AI software program requires a big language mannequin. Now, in categorized authorities environments, Palantir will mix its powers with these of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, which incorporates GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo with Imaginative and prescient, GPT-4, GPT-3.5 and extra.

What might presumably go fallacious?