Former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester takes advisory role with Palantir

Former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, confirmed Monday that he has accepted an advisory role with Palantir, a data and technology company. The firm has drawn criticism regarding multiple governments’ use of its advanced surveillance technology and data-tracking capabilities. News of Tester’s hiring was first reported by National Public Radio. Tester told Montana Free Press Monday that he’s joined the company because “there’s an opportunity to set the record straight on them.”

“I visited with a lot of people in Palantir to make sure this was the right thing to do, because you don’t want to be affiliated with a company that has different values than you’ve got,” Tester said. “And I found most of them to be very libertarian in nature and very much about people’s privacy.”

Tester declined to share his compensation.

“If I told you and it was too little, you’d say, ‘God, that guy does not know how to negotiate.’ And if it was too much, you’d say, ‘God, he sold out,’” Tester said. 

Palantir is a publicly traded company that experienced a meteoric rise in value and press attention over the last few years. Tech mogul Peter Thiel, a longtime Republican donor best known for founding PayPal, founded Palantir in 2003. Co-founder and CEO Alex Karp is an eccentric billionaire. The Miami-based company’s valuation grew from $50 billion in May 2024 to almost $300 billion in May 2025, based largely on its commercialization of artificial intelligence. 

Palantir’s critics allege that the company is helping governments build surveillance states. The firm has drawn pushback for assisting Israel Defense Forces operations in Gaza and for helping President Donald Trump’s administration track and deport immigrants.

“It’s a very exciting time in tech right now. If you’re a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state,” Paul Graham, a British-American computer scientist, posted online in response to news of Palantir working alongside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Karp has pushed back against the allegation that his company contributes to mass surveillance.

“We are the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties,” Karp said on the All-In Podcast last year.

Tester regularly advocated for limits on government surveillance during his 18 years in the U.S. Senate. He said his new role doesn’t contradict that ethos. 

“I believe Palantir performed a service and it was used in a way that didn’t meet the civil liberties and the Constitution of this country,” Tester said. 

In 2011, Tester opposed extending the USA PATRIOT Act, legislation introduced after 9/11 that gave U.S. intelligence agencies unprecedented access to Americans’ personal information. 

“The PATRIOT Act invades the privacy of law-abiding citizens and it tramples on our constitutional rights,” Tester told the U.S. Senate 15 years ago. 

In a Monday interview, Tester said he’d “advise them to be as forthright and as transparent as possible, and I think that’s what they’ll do, quite frankly, because they don’t have anything to be ashamed of.” 

In addition to asserting that the company values data privacy, Tester argued that his work will help steer frontier technologies like artificial intelligence in the right direction.  

“AI is here, and it’s been here for a while, and it ain’t going away. So we need to utilize it to our best advantage to create jobs and create efficiency and create a more user-friendly government, if the governments use it, a more user-friendly airline, if an airline is using it, and work so we get maximum benefit,” Tester said. 

Tester said his role entails “consulting as needed,” and that he will not be working as a lobbyist for the company. 

“Let’s just say that they’re pulled in front of a committee. I’m more than happy to talk [to the company] about the different members on the committee that I know,” Tester said. 

Familiarity with members of Congress is a valuable asset for technology behemoths like Palantir, which have at times supported the Trump administration during the last two years. 

Apple’s then-CEO Tim Cook and Meta, led by founder Mark Zuckerberg, each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration in 2025. And Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and Palantir each gave at least $10 million for Trump’s proposed White House ballroom project. In April 2025, Palantir won a $30 million contract with ICE to enhance Trump administration deportation efforts. 

Even before Democrats took a majority of seats in both chambers during last week’s midterm elections, some technology firms had begun recruiting advisers from the left. Apple and Microsoft, for example, have also recruited big-name Democrats in the last few months. 

Tester dismissed the idea that Palantir hired him in response to election results, saying the company first approached him in July. 

Tester lost his bid for a fourth term in the U.S. Senate in 2024 to U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy. 

Since August 2025, Tester has served on an advisory council for Anthropic, one of the world’s leading developers of artificial intelligence. Tester has kept his hand in the political mix by endorsing independent candidate Seth Bodnar’s losing campaign for U.S. Senate. Tester told MTFP on Monday that he will keep farming at his home near Big Sandy, a town of about 600 people northeast of Great Falls. He also plans to continue the political commentary podcast “Grounded,” which he co-hosts with journalist Maritsa Georgiou. 

“It’s something that we’re having a little fun at,” Tester said. “And Maritsa is a very talented journalist, and I’m a mediocre farmer, so it’s a good combination.”