Palantir Gave the Government DNA From Every COVID Test
Mon 9:44 am +00:00, 31 Aug 2026Annie Jacobsen has been writing about Palantir for more than a decade, and she has interviewed people all over the company, including its owners. In this clip she lays out a claim most Americans have never heard: during COVID, Palantir received a contract with HHS, and the DNA on all of those COVID tests is now accessible to the US government. In her words, this is espionage at its core. The conversation starts with something as small as a smart ring tracking your heart rate and ends with the question no one at Palantir has answered for her: once all this data is aggregated, who actually receives it, and where are the firewalls?
Jacobsen is the investigative journalist behind books on DARPA, the CIA, and Area 51, and her reporting on Palantir goes back to the Afghanistan war, when the company’s involvement was still secret. She walks Danny through the Defense Department’s “find, fix, finish” program: tethered surveillance blimps, Predator drones with a single lens, Reapers carrying 63, and kill decisions made by people in Washington offices watching the war theater from thousands of miles away, all built on aggregated biometric data with Palantir sitting at the center. Operators told her the government’s own systems were inferior, that soldiers were killing the wrong people, and that Palantir’s information was more accurate. That, she notes, does not square with the company’s cartoon-villain reputation, and she wants to know what the truth behind the veil really is.
The clip closes on the biggest question of all. Total information awareness, the original Cheney-Bush plan to know everything about everyone at all times, only died in name if someone solved the data storage problem. Jacobsen’s suspicion is that HHS and the Defense Department are quietly funding the AI data center boom, with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Palantir servicing the contract, while Danny raises an even darker scenario involving DOGE, IRS records, and digital currency pushed onto a population the government already knows everything about.
