This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 9th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Swedish unions want to stop the tech company Palantir in Sweden. The criticism reeks more of populism than insight – but it points to two far bigger problems.
When Alex Karp buys land in Härjedalen, apparently to hunt and cross-country ski, 20,000 people sign a protest list. “The power expansion of the tech oligarchy” must be stopped, it reads.
Karp is no ordinary land buyer – he is the CEO of the American tech company Palantir. And there are more petitions.
The Swedish unions ST, Kommunal and Vårdförbundet are among those who have now signed on to a demand that Palantir be thrown out of Europe.
The reasons are somewhat sweeping. But one of the arguments is the lack of transparency about how Palantir’s systems are used.
How does Palantir work inside the Police, for example? That is what Pär Renberg, ST’s chair within the Police, tried to find out.
To Expressen, he said that they had “requested information from the employer, but we have not received any.” ST’s national chair, Britta Lejon, said that “we simply know too little” and “we don’t even know which agencies in Sweden use their services today.”
In other words, senior representatives of these organizations seem not to know how Palantir’s software is used, or in some cases whether it exists at all. Yet they write that it must be stopped.
If they applied the same principle to other tech companies, they could soon find themselves without both Google and Microsoft Office.
Palantir has long been a controversial company, but the criticism is rarely very specific.
Its main product, Ontology, is a system that links many different data sources into one, which can then act on a complete picture. The tool itself is not particularly remarkable, but depending on what data is fed into it, it can become sensitive.
Much of the criticism has concerned the company’s work with the American immigration police ICE, or Palantir’s very clear support for Israel. Among other things, it bought a full-page ad in the New York Times reading “Palantir stands with Israel,” so that there would be no doubt where the company stands.
It is an unusual strategy, but they also have an unusual founder.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a colorful character who does not hide his views. He is not the only tech chief to have taken a clear political stand, though. Half of the AI elite of Silicon Valley were at Trump’s place for lunch as recently as a week or so ago. They signed his proposal for a “morally binding” document on AI development, to take just one recent example. And the tech chiefs’ political donations run to many millions of dollars.
Two big problems come into view here.
The first: knowledge of what American tech companies do in Sweden.
The criticism of Palantir falls rather flat if you don’t know what they do. The transparency is probably as limited as it is with many other system suppliers to the security police and the military.
But it goes further than that. Do the unions know that Microsoft, Google and Amazon are all suppliers to the American military? Here, too, the work is often about data handling, but the companies’ founders keep a far lower profile than Karp. ICE – whatever one thinks of them – has many suppliers, including Dell and Thomson Reuters.
The new AI companies also deliver services to the military. Who at the Swedish unions can specify what OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX supply to the Pentagon?
By the same logic, all of these tech companies should presumably be thrown out of Europe too, which would cause quite a few problems for search, email, AI services and document management, to begin with.
The second part is about the tech companies’ crisis of trust. It has gone so far that many now outright hate tech companies. Both the businesses and the people who work there.
How did we end up here? Tech entrepreneurs who see themselves as world improvers have been bad at explaining why what they do is good for anyone but themselves. It is an enormous failure – and at a critical moment, too.
With AI development potentially threatening many jobs, promises of new, hypothetical jobs weigh little. “An age of abundance” was how the billionaire Elon Musk described our shared AI future the other day. But does anyone believe him?
The gap between society and the tech world is a problem for both sides. Nothing suggests that the amount of technology will shrink, whether at work or at home. We prompt AI tools, scroll, shop, chat and search. At the same time, many seem to consider the companies behind these services dubious at best, and evil at worst. It is a trust gap that will be hard to mend.
The responsibility lies primarily with the industry itself. The technical breakthroughs it has contributed have been incredible. But along the way, it forgot to bring everyone else on the journey. Petitions and protest lists show this with great clarity.
Distrust spreads fast and is hard to shake. The tech companies have underestimated this, and in doing so made an enormous – and expensive – mistake.
