At 7:30 a.m. this morning, the bespectacled, 73-year-old Peter Lippman was in a crowd of activists with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
As he walked around the corner from Cascade Playground to Fairview Market, 400 Fairview Ave. N., Lippman explained he was there for the same reason as everyone else marching with him: To ruin Palantir’s day.
Palantir—a data-mining and analysis firm co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and ironically named for the telephonic Elven scrying crystals Sauron and Sauruman (evil Gandalf, for non-nerds) used for evil ends in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings—is in the surveillance space.
Shuffling past a Caffe Ladro, Lippman turned down a narrow corridor, stopping at an open door with a keycard entrance. Seven other middle-aged and older adults stood with him and locked arms, all wearing black shirts with “DIVEST FROM GENOCIDE” in bolded yellow.
The members of JVP showed up this morning to pressure the state’s investment board to pull public money from the company, which they say used AI technology to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the mass deportations in the US.
According to a UN report released late last month, there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Palantir has provided Israel with predictive policing technology and AI tech to make automated decisions on the battlefield. And earlier this year, WIRED reported Donald Trump’s administration was paying Palantir $30 million to develop “near real-time” tracking on people self-deporting from the US. Palantir is also helping Trump’s government compile the data on me, you and all Americans from various federal agencies. In May, former Palantir workers shared a letter with NPR that condemned the company’s work with Trump. Palantir worked with Israel long before October 2023, and became an ICE contractor in 2011, during the Obama administration.
Palantir’s Seattle office is not secret, but it’s not common knowledge either. JVP says its action Monday kicks off a campaign to convince the state to cut ties with Palantir. According to JVP’s calculations, of the state’s hundreds of billions of investment dollars, $742,000 is in Palantir.
They’re off by two decimal places. The Washington State Investment Board confirmed late this afternoon that it has $73.4 million invested in Palantir as of last December.
“Palantir is included in many major stock indices, and almost all of the WSIB’s investments in Palantir are held in passive equity strategies,” the WISB’s Institutional Relations Director James Aber said in a statement.
They also called out Sen. Patty Murray who, according to OpenSecrets, received more than $26,000 from employees at the company. (The Washington State Investment Board did not provide comment before press time. Sen. Murray did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment.)
Lippman, a Jewish carpenter and author from Seattle, strongly objected to Palantir’s presence here and the state’s investment in it. Nazis killed some of Lippman’s ancestors at Auschwitz, he says. He does not want that “repeated in my name, in our name as Jewish people, and with our tax money.”A white-haired woman standing with Lippman says as a former public school teacher she didn’t want her pension tied up with Palantir.
As Lord of the Rings devotees, Palantir could surely appreciate a principled “you shall not pass” moment? Palantir did not return a request for comment, so I guess we’ll never know, and it’s not their building.
Around 8 a.m., a harried security guard in a grey shirt warned the police had been called and then hurried off to lean on the pastry case at the Caffe Ladro.
For the next hour, people dressed in business casual clothing came to skidding halts in the corridor. One woman asked if there were stairs. She had a business meeting.
One younger activist handed her a flier—it read Jews say CUT TIES WITH PALANTIR—and suggested a virtual meeting instead.
“We might have to,” she said, and left, a little dazed.
One man tried to appeal. He didn’t work for Peter Thiel, he said, as he tried to squeeze through. When he couldn’t, he abandoned diplomacy and told the seniors it would be good when the police arrived. Little did he know, police were parked just a block away, thumbing their vests and walking in circles.
Police didn’t make a bolder appearance until just after 10 a.m. when protesters were already leaving. The Stranger observed an officer telling an activist they intended to “enforce violations of the law” including trespassing and pedestrian interference.
SPD said in a statement that the officer was responding to a call from building management to remove the protesters. Additional police had arrived, SPD says, but they were still “collecting information and developing a plan of action” by the time protesters left. Police had not issued a formal dispersal order, activists say, and they’d planned to leave around 10 a.m. from the start.
JVP didn’t totally shut down the building. Security found a workaround up a flight of stairs to an elevator, one woman with a walkie-talkie explained as she jogged next to a man in khakis and a button up.
At one entrance, activists wearing the same black and yellow shirts sat in a circle, and chanted slogans to a stomp-clap beat. Some wore cardboard hats shaped like surveillance cameras.
Michael Grant, a JVP organizer and public school teacher in Tukwila, jangled a tambourine. He says he was horrified to learn Palantir was not only in Seattle, but its technology was being used for “such horrible, villainous purposes” in Gaza and the US.
“What’s really important and really scary is that these corporations, in partnership with the government, are seeing what they can get away with,” he says. “How far they can train it on, in this case the trapped population of Gaza before they can employ the same tools they’ve refined at home. What’s really important to me is interrupting that cycle.”
Editors note: This story has been updated since publication to include monetary information from the state.
