I’ve only had their platforms explained to me by them (palantir) at a conference but the mental model that stuck with me was more of an operating system than a single tool. Think AWS managed services + databricks + whatever library of ready made intelligence software they have already built for others.

They also have “forward deployed engineers” to help organizations actually use the platform. It looked complicated enough to probably be completely useless without these specialists, even in a “self hosted” setup.

The managed hosting also seems like a major selling point so many deployments that probably should be self hosted probably aren’t because muh managed services added value.

And the backdoors of course. There is no way it isn’t full of plausibly deniable “metrics endpoints” that helpfully spew out all the internal data if the right key comes knocking. There’s no way it’s auditable at the level of detail you would need compared to the value of the data and the sophistication of the potential attacker (NSA).