More than 800 USA Today Co. employees are calling on the company to dissolve its recently announced partnership with Palantir, according to a joint statement from 31 unionized newsrooms published Monday.
“While USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads, in part. “We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence (A.I.) software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns. Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”
BREAKING: USA Today’s journalists and media workers demand that the media company end its relationship with AI firm Palantir.
— The NewsGuild-CWA (@newsguild.org) August 10, 2026 at 12:01 PM
USA Today Co. — formerly known as Gannett — announced the partnership during its second quarter earnings call on August 6 as a way to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.” Palantir’s software would be used to analyze and monetize customer behavior amid an industry-wide decline in search traffic.
In the statement, unionized employees (most of whom are journalists) write that USA Today Co.’s “commitment to upholding First Amendment principles to serve the democratic process is in direct contrast with a company like Palantir, whose cofounder, Peter Thiel, once said freedom and democracy were not compatible, and whose technologies have been tied to human rights abuses and surveillance activities.”
The company provided “minimal details” about its work with Palantir, the statement says. Employees found out about the partnership in an email about 20 minutes before the earnings call, said Mike Davis, a reporter for the Asbury Park Press and the vice-chair of the NewsGuild of New York.
“Part of the problem is that we know very, very little about how Palantir’s software is going to be used,” Davis said. “It’s pretty surprising that our company would unilaterally decide to bring in such a controversial partner like Palantir without providing a complete explanation to its employees, most of whom are naturally skeptical journalists.”
Reed told investors last week that USA Today Co. would retain ownership of its audience data, and Palantir’s AI software would help the company make the most of it. USA Today Co. owns more than 200 local newspapers in the United States, making it the largest newspaper chain in the country. It also owns Newsquest, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent local news publishers with more than 150 daily and weekly newspapers.
“Our editorial decisions remain independent and are guided by our longstanding journalistic standards and ethics policies,” the company told Nieman Lab in a statement when the Palantir partnership was first announced. But it still raises potential concerns about the safety of journalists’ data in the future, Davis said.
“An investigative reporter who keeps a ton of sensitive notes, source information, and confidential documents on their devices is going to be naturally concerned about protecting that information, and who could blame them?” Davis said. “It’s pretty hard to trust management’s intentions when the goalposts shift so often that there’s always a fear that what’s true today won’t be true in six months. We’ve all seen the years of disinvestment in local news, especially in the name of going all-in on AI.”
USA Today Co. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the full statement here.
