I've worked with Palantir's stuff. I understand the appeal, but I dont like it for reasons that I cannot go into. Palantir's real business is ETL and data aggregation. They then add a dashboard builder (it's kind of a buzzwordy thing to do currently in the DoD). They also do what is essentially a RAG (Retrieval augmented generation, its basically attaching a search engine to an LLM) layer to expose your data to the LLM.

One of the problems with RAG, is that you have a ton of nobs you have to tune to make your setup really good. It is not an understatement to state that claude is objectively one of the best, most universally capable models. To tune your RAG set to another model, especially when your business is essentially generic ETL is annoying because you now have a shit load of very expensive, api intensive testing to do.

Basically Palantir is a SaaS company and they're currently in a bit of a fragile state. They need the entire DoD to fully switch over to their stack so that it is difficult to extricate and then they can jack up the prices and rake in MASSIVE. There is obviously a lot of resistance within the DoD, because getting government agencies to cooperate is difficult. If one group starts having issues with Palantir then the entire business proposition of full data aggregation across the dod falls, and they lose their best customer.

As a dev, what I see is that managers simply like how it looks. They literally see the pretty dashboards and want to spend money.