In 2012, Palantir quietly embedded itself into the daily operations of the New Orleans Police Department. There were no public announcements. No contracts made available to the city council. Instead, the surveillance company partnered with a local nonprofit to sidestep oversight, gaining access to years of arrest records, licenses, addresses, and phone numbers all to build a shadowy predictive policing program.

Palantir’s software mapped webs of human relationships, assigned residents algorithmic “risk scores,” and helped police generate “target lists” all without public knowledge. “We very much like to not be publicly known,” a Palantir engineer wrote in an internal email later obtained by The Verge.

After years spent quietly powering surveillance systems for police departments and federal agencies, the company has rebranded itself as a frontier AI firm, selling machine learning platforms designed for military dominance and geopolitical control.

"AI is not a toy. It is a weapon,” said CEO Alex Karp. “It will be used to kill people.”

  • CoolThingAboutMe@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    In this video about Lavender AI which is Israel’s Palantir, they talk about the accuracy score that the AI gives targets for how sure it is that they are Hamas. It is used to determine how expensive the weapons to take that person out, and how many innocent bystanders they are willing to take out along with that target.

    https://youtu.be/4RmNJH4UN3s

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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      2 days ago

      Thanks, nice video and seems he has some numbers. Very inhuman that they figured out exact numbers how it has an allowance to take out 15/20 bystanders as well. Or an entire elementary school if it’s an high ranking “target”. I mean war is a bit of a different thing than policing. But a minimum 10% false positives plus collateral murder is quite a lot. And then I’m not sure if there is any substance to those numbers. I suppose they conveniently eliminate all the evidence with the same bomb that kills the people. And they don’t do research, so I wonder how they even figured out a ratio.