Tech
HHS Is Using AI Tools From Palantir to Target ‘DEI’ and ‘Gender Ideology’ in Grants
Since last March, the Department of Health and Human Services has been using AI tools from Palantir to screen and audit grants, grant applications, and job descriptions for noncompliance with President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting “gender ideology” and anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), according to a recently published inventory of all use cases HHS had for AI in 2025.
Neither Palantir nor HHS has publicly announced that the company’s software was being used for these purposes. During the first year of Trump’s second term, Palantir earned more than $35 million in payments and obligations from HHS alone. None of the descriptions for these transactions mention this work targeting DEI or “gender ideology.”
The audits have been taking place within HHS’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which funds family and child welfare and oversees the foster and adoption systems. Palantir is the sole contractor charged with making a list of “position descriptions that may need to be adjusted for alignment with recent executive orders.”
In addition to Palantir, the startup Credal AI—which was founded by two Palantir alumni—helped ACF audit “existing grants and new grant applications.” The “AI-based” grant review process, the inventory says, “reviews application submission files and generates initial flags and priorities for discussion.” All relevant information is then routed to the ACF Program Office for final review.
ACF staffers ultimately review any job descriptions, grants, and grant applications that are flagged by AI during a “final review” stage, according to the inventory. It also says that these particular AI use cases are currently “deployed” within ACF, meaning that they are actively being used at the agency.
Last year, ACF paid Credal AI about $750,000 to provide the company’s “Tech Enterprise Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) Platform,” but the payment descriptions in the Federal Register do not mention DEI or “gender ideology.”
HHS, ACF, Palantir, and Credal AI did not return WIRED’s requests for comment.
The executive orders—Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” and Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—were both issued on Trump’s first day in office last year.
The first of these orders demands an end to any policies, programs, contracts, grants that mention or concern DEIA, DEI, “equity,” or “environmental justice,” and charges the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management, and the attorney general with leading these efforts.
The second order demands that all “interpretation of and application” of federal laws and policies define “sex” as an “immutable biological classification” and define the only genders as “male” and “female.” It deems “gender ideology” and “gender identity” to be “false” and “disconnected from biological reality.” It also says that no federal funds can be used “to promote gender ideology.”
“Each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology,” it reads.
The consequences of Executive Order 14151, targeting DEI, and Executive Order 14168, targeting “gender ideology,” have been felt deeply throughout the country over the past year.
Early last year, the National Science Foundation started to flag any research that contained terms associated with DEI—including relatively general terms, like “female,” “inclusion,” “systemic,” or “underrepresented”—and place it under official review. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began retracting or pausing research that mentioned terms like “LGBT,” “transsexual,” or “nonbinary,” and stopped processing any data related to transgender people. Last July, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration removed an LGBTQ youth service line offered by the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Peter Thiel—the billionaire venture capitalist, PayPal and Palantir cofounder, and outspoken commentator on all matters relating to the “Antichrist”—appears at least 2,200 times in the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice related to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The tranche of records demonstrate how Epstein managed to cultivate an extensive network of wealthy and influential figures in Silicon Valley. A number of them, including Thiel, continued to interact with Epstein even after his 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution and of procurement of minors to engage in prostitution.
The new files show that Thiel arranged to meet with Epstein several times between 2014 and 2017. “What are you up to on Friday?” Thiel wrote to Epstein on April 5, 2016. “Should we try for lunch?” The bulk of the communications between the two men in the data dump concern scheduling meals, calls, and meetings with one another. Thiel did not immediately return a request for comment from WIRED.
One piece of correspondence stands out for being particularly bizarre. On February 3, 2016, Thiel’s former chief of staff and senior executive assistant, Alisa Bekins, sent an email with the subject line “Meeting – Feb 4 – 9:30 AM – Peter Thiel dietary restrictions – CONFIDENTIAL.” The initial recipient of the email is redacted, but it was later forwarded directly to Epstein.
The contents of the message are also redacted in at least one version of the email chain uploaded by the Justice Department on Friday. However, two other files from what appears to be the same set of messages have less information redacted.
In one email, Bekins listed some two dozen approved kinds of sushi and animal protein, 14 approved vegetables, and 0 approved fruits for Thiel to eat. “Fresh herbs” and “olive oil” were permitted, however, ketchup, mayonnaise, and soy sauce should be avoided. Only one actual meal was explicitly outlined: “egg whites or greens/salad with some form of protein,” such as steak, which Bekins included “in the event they eat breakfast.” It’s unclear if the February 4 meeting ultimately occurred; other emails indicate Thiel got stuck in traffic on his way to meet Epstein that day.
According to a recording of an undated conversation between Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that was also part of the files the DOJ released on Friday, Epstein told Barak that he was hoping to meet Thiel the following week. He added that he was familiar with Thiel’s company Palantir, but proceeded to spell it out loud for Barak as “Pallentier.” Epstein speculated that Thiel may put Barak on the board of Palantir, though there’s no evidence that ever occurred.
“I’ve never met Peter Thiel, and everybody says he sort of jumps around and acts really strange, like he’s on drugs,” Epstein said at one point in the audio recording, referring to Thiel. The former prime minister expressed agreement with Epstein’s assessment.
In 2015 and 2016, Epstein put $40 million in two funds managed by one of Thiel’s investment firms, Valar Ventures, according to The New York Times. Epstein and Thiel continued to communicate and were discussing meeting with one another as recently as January 2019, according to the files released by the DOJ. Epstein committed suicide in his prison cell in August of that year.
Below are Thiel’s dietary restrictions as outlined in the February 2016 email. (The following list has been reformatted slightly for clarity.)
Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company SpaceX is acquiring his AI startup xAI, the centibillionaire announced on Monday. In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions.
“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote. “The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called ‘space’ for a reason.”
The deal, which pulls together two of Musk’s largest private ventures, values the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, making it the most valuable private company in the world, according to a report from Bloomberg.
SpaceX was in the process of preparing to go public later this year before the xAI acquisition was announced. The space firm’s plans for an initial public offering are still on, according to Bloomberg.
In December, SpaceX told employees that it would buy insider shares in a deal that would value the rocket company at $800 billion, according to The New York Times. Last month, xAI announced that it had raised $20 billion from investors, bringing the company’s valuation to roughly $230 billion.
This isn’t the first time Musk has sought to consolidate parts of his vast business empire, which is largely privately owned and includes xAI, SpaceX, the brain interface company Neuralink, and the tunnel transportation firm the Boring Company.
Last year, xAI acquired Musk’s social media platform, X, formerly known as Twitter, in a deal that valued the combined entity at more than $110 billion. Since then, xAI’s core product, Grok, has become further integrated into the social media platform. Grok is featured prominently in various X features, and Musk has claimed the app’s content-recommendation algorithm is powered by xAI’s technology.
A decade ago, Musk also used shares of his electric car company Tesla to purchase SolarCity, a renewable energy firm that was run at the time by cousin Lyndon Rive.
The xAI acquisition demonstrates how Musk can use his expansive network of companies to help power his own often grandiose visions of the future. Elon Musk said in the blog post that SpaceX will immediately focus on launching satellites into space to power AI development on Earth, but eventually, the space-based data centers he envisions building could power civilizations on other planets, such as Mars.
“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” Musk said in the blog post.
“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express,’ but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name,” Musk said in a post on X on Saturday. “I don’t care about that, but what I do care about is that we at least attempt to prosecute those who committed serious crimes with Epstein, especially regarding heinous exploitation of underage girls.” Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
Larry Page (314 Files), Sergey Brin (294 Files)
The Google cofounders appear in the Epstein files roughly the same number of times, and both have been linked to Epstein previously. Page and Brin were both issued subpoenas in 2023 related to a civil lawsuit by the US Virgin Islands against JP Morgan Chase tied to Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes. In court documents related to Virginia Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, which were unsealed in 2024, Epstein victim Sarah Ransome alleged that she had met Brin and his fiancée, Anne Wojcicki, prior to their 2007 wedding, “when they visited the island for the day.”
The recently released DOJ files provide a much fuller picture of their relationships with Epstein, particularly for Brin. An email exchange in April 2003 with Ghislaine Maxwell suggests that Brin had dinner at Epstein’s New York townhouse that month. (“Dinners at Jeffrey’s are always happily casual and relaxed,” Maxwell wrote.) In it, Brin offered to invite “our CEO Eric,” referring to Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt, though he says that Schmidt’s “schedule will probably be a bit more packed,” and there is no indication Schmidt attended.
Page also appears to have dined with Epstein. “David Gergen is asking who was at the lunch or dinner years ago when he came=to your house and the Google guys were there (Larry Page and Sergey Brin),” Groff wrote to Epstein in 2015. There are references in the files, too, to purported business dealings between Page and Epstein. “Larry Page’s chief pilot, Tony contacted Nicolas today and is interested ‘again’ using your Bell 407 for the St. Barts operation,” says an email to Epstein from a redacted address sent on December 23, 2010, followed by a breakdown of the potential associated fees. The Bell 407 is a type of helicopter; emails show that an entity called “Air Ghislaine Inc” purchased one on October 30, 2002. The “St. Barts operation” appears to be a visit; Epstein was notified in an email later that same day that “Larry Page has changed his mind and will use boat to st barts.”
On another occasion, Epstein emailed a link to a news story about Google testing “internet-broadcasting drones” in New Mexico to a redacted address. “You can tell larry page that they can use my runway =s most of this land is my ranch,” he wrote. There’s no indication that this happened. Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Anne Wojcicki did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mark Zuckerberg (282 Files), Jeff Bezos (196 Files), Eric Schmidt (193 Files)
While Epstein appeared to email primarily about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rather than with him, the files do indicate at least one occasion when the two met. They were both on an invite list emailed by Reid Hoffman’s assistant for a dinner on August 2, 2015, with neuroscientist Ed Boyden. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Joi Ito were among the other invitees. Hoffman followed up a few days later with an email to Zuckerberg and Epstein with the subject line “intros.” “Jeffrey, Zuck,” the message reads, “email connections from the Ed Boyden dinner — so that convo can continue.”
There’s no indication that Zuckerberg ever responded. And otherwise, Epstein appears to have spent far more time emailing about Zuckerberg—his marriage to Priscilla Chan, whether he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize—than with him.
Epstein Files Reveal Peter Thiel’s Elaborate Dietary Restrictions
‘Had to really take it serious’
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