Palantir’s Data-Surveillance Spotlight Grows Brighter as Stock Trades at a Discount

Freshly unearthed contract documents have thrust Palantir back into the crosshairs of privacy advocates, just as the data-analytics firm struggles to shake off a prolonged market slump. The watchdog group American Oversight, working alongside the investigative outlet The Intercept, revealed that the US Internal Revenue Service has paid Palantir more than $130 million since 2018 for its “Lead and Case Analytics” platform. The system stitches together tax filings, Affordable Care Act health-insurance records, bank transactions, and FinCEN financial-intelligence data — including cryptocurrency flows in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple — to help the IRS’s criminal-investigation unit detect patterns across millions of records.

Chioma Chukwu, American Oversight’s executive director, warned that concentrating such sensitive data inside a single, opaque system operated by a company whose business model hinges on expanding surveillance capacity poses serious risks. The timing could hardly be worse for Palantir. Across the Atlantic, its contract with Britain’s National Health Service continues to fuel political controversy, while a similar agreement with New York City’s public-hospital network was scrapped last year after public backlash. Each time Palantir touches citizen data, resistance follows.

At the Frankfurt exchange, the stock now trades at roughly €120 — about 16% below its level at the start of 2026 and more than 33% off its 52-week peak of nearly €180. In New York, the shares opened 7% lower on Thursday at $141.57, ignoring the announcement just two days earlier of a $300 million contract with the US Department of Agriculture to modernize its farm-management systems. The disconnect between institutional enthusiasm and market reality is stark.

Wall Street analysts remain largely undeterred. Rosenblatt reiterated its “buy” rating on April 24 with a $200 price target, predicting Palantir will beat first-quarter forecasts with 74% revenue growth and a 123% jump in adjusted operating income year over year. Morgan Stanley’s Sanjit Singh views the company as a potential dominant enterprise platform, underpinned by its AI architecture and the deployment of “forward-deployed engineers.” DZ Bank initiated coverage with a “buy” rating and a €175 target. The consensus average price target sits at roughly $196.

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Palantir?

The fundamentals do provide some ammunition for that optimism. In the fourth quarter of 2025, revenue surged 70% to $1.41 billion, with the US commercial business soaring 137%. The company ended the year debt-free with $7.2 billion in cash. For the full year 2026, management has guided for revenue between $7.18 billion and $7.20 billion. Yet even after the recent pullback, the stock trades at roughly 64 times the free cash flow estimated for 2027 — a valuation that leaves little room for error.

Adding to the pressure, insiders have sold shares worth about $138 million over the past 90 days. CEO Alexander Karp alone offloaded more than 490,000 shares, though those sales were tied to tax obligations from exercising stock options under a pre-arranged trading plan. Separately, activists in Minneapolis have called on the Swiss National Bank to divest its roughly $1 billion stake in Palantir, arguing the company’s role in US immigration enforcement violates the SNB’s human-rights policy. The central bank does not comment on individual holdings.

The next major test arrives on May 4, when Palantir reports first-quarter 2026 results after the US market close. Analysts expect earnings per share of $0.27 on revenue of $1.54 billion — a sequential gain of nearly 9% from the fourth quarter’s $1.41 billion. Whether those numbers can bridge the chasm between analyst bullishness and market skepticism will determine if the stock can finally break out of its technical funk, which has been compounded by a death cross in February and trading well below its 200-day moving average.