Palantir grabbed Project Maven defense contract after Google left the program: sources

• Palantir has taken on Project Maven, a US Department of Defense program that Google stopped working on in March, according to people familiar with the project.
• The project, referred to internally at Palantir as "Tron," will train artificial intelligence to analyze aerial drone footage to identify people and objects.
• Google announced it would leave Project Maven in June 2018 in response to employee protests over the company's entry into "the business of war." The contract officially ended in March.
• Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has suggested that Google's decision to walk away from the program was "treasonous."

Secretive data analytics company Palantir is working on Project Maven, the US Department of Defense program that Google dropped in March following protests inside of the company, according to people familiar with the project.

Palantir is working with the Defense Department to build artificial intelligence that can analyze video feeds from aerial drones, one of the people said. Internally at Palantir, where names of clients are kept close to the vest, the project is referred to as "Tron," after the 1982 Steven Lisberger film, the person said.

Palantir declined to comment for the record. The US Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It's unclear how much the contract is worth for Palantir, which had $161 million in business with the federal government in fiscal year 2019, according to the USA Spending database. Google's contract was initially valued at $15 million, with the potential to grow up to $250 million per year, according to emails obtained by The Intercept from September 2017.

Palantir's involvement comes at a contentious time across the tech sector, as lucrative government contracts come into conflict with the political ideals of employees. Earlier this year, the company faced internal pushback over its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir CEO Alex Karp ultimately decided to keep its contract.

The Grace Hopper Celebration, which is the world's largest conference for women in computing, dropped Palantir as a sponsor in August because it gives "direct technology assistance that enables the human rights abuses of asylum seekers and their children at US southern border detention centers," Robert Read, an executive with the conference's parent company, told Business Insider at the time.

Google took the opposite approach and leaned away from controversy, which opened the door for Palantir.

Former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced in June 2018 that the company wouldn't renew its contract for Project Maven after thousands of employees signed a petition opposing the work. Around a dozen employees quit the company over the project.

Critics of the project warned that the technology could one day be used by the military to build autonomous weapons that decide who and what to strike without human input.

Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley's most prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, criticized Google's decision to drop out of Project Maven in August, calling it "seemingly treasonous" for Google to reject the US military while opening an artificial intelligence lab in China. He called for Google to be investigated.

But Google hasn't left the program entirely. In March, The Intercept obtained an email from Google executive Kent Walker in which he said that an unnamed technology company was taking over its work on the program and will use "off-the-shelf Google Cloud Platform (basic compute service, rather than Cloud AI or other Cloud Services) to support some workloads."

A source close to Google told Business Insider that Walker was not refering to Palantir in this email.

A week later, The Intercept reported that Anduril Industries had won its own contract to work on AI-powered virtual reality technology for Project Maven. Anduril Industries' CEO Brian Schimpf is the former director of engineering at Palantir.

Do you have something to share about Palantir? Contact this reporter at bpeterson@businessinsider.com or our tips line via Signal or WhatsApp at (646) 768-4744.

NOW WATCH: Worst tech of the decade