Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Palantir's lethal AI weaponry deployed to find chairs for US government staff
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/10/palantir_usda_seating_software/As Department of Agriculture staff come back to the office, it needs "real-time analytics to optimize employee seat assignments"
Musical chairs, for profit. Or, "How fast can we drain the US Treasury to reward our friends."
Wonder what happened to all those Inspectors General...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is using Palantir to figure out where its staff should sit, after deciding only the colorful AI company can do the job.
Like other US government agencies, the Department (USDA) has ordered government employees back to the office. According to a contract notice, the return-to-work mandate has created the need for "advanced data integration capabilities to consolidate information from multiple sources, real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments, and robust security compliance to protect sensitive organizational data"
In a statement to The Register, the USDA ignored our questions about cost and rationale and stated: "This is not a new tool. This tool was deployed last year to support USE IT (building utilization and reporting) and workspace allocation and management."
The contract notice, signed by USDA chief data and artificial intelligence officer Christopher Alvares, acknowledges that other software companies can probably sort out seating plans, but that only Palantir can do the job right.
"While there are several companies that provide data analytics and integration platforms, Databricks, Snowflake, IBM, SAS, Salesforce, and Alteryx, none offer the combination of capabilities, enterprise scale data fusion, real-time analytics, compliance monitoring and integration with existing USDA systems that Palantir provides," Alvares wrote. "Salesforce and similar applications have not demonstrated a product that has advanced data integration capabilities or the agility required to address rapidly changing requirements."
. . .
Like other US government agencies, the Department (USDA) has ordered government employees back to the office. According to a contract notice, the return-to-work mandate has created the need for "advanced data integration capabilities to consolidate information from multiple sources, real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments, and robust security compliance to protect sensitive organizational data"
In a statement to The Register, the USDA ignored our questions about cost and rationale and stated: "This is not a new tool. This tool was deployed last year to support USE IT (building utilization and reporting) and workspace allocation and management."
The contract notice, signed by USDA chief data and artificial intelligence officer Christopher Alvares, acknowledges that other software companies can probably sort out seating plans, but that only Palantir can do the job right.
"While there are several companies that provide data analytics and integration platforms, Databricks, Snowflake, IBM, SAS, Salesforce, and Alteryx, none offer the combination of capabilities, enterprise scale data fusion, real-time analytics, compliance monitoring and integration with existing USDA systems that Palantir provides," Alvares wrote. "Salesforce and similar applications have not demonstrated a product that has advanced data integration capabilities or the agility required to address rapidly changing requirements."
. . .
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
