Microsoft embraces a very specific kind of spyware
Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies.
“This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says.
Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.
The only interesting thing here is that they’re partnering with Microsoft. Palantir has been a government contractor since the very beginning. Maybe - maybe - they’ve got their workflows standardized by now (before every single thing they did was a bespoke engineering effort).
If the article is serious about the TS classification (and not just saying “top secret” to get the idea that it’s classified at some level across to the civilian reader) it means they’re re-engineering something to work in the TS side of Azure Classified Cloud and possibly making it available on JWICS.