By Victoria Albert
Palantir is expanding its legal campaign against a rival artificial-intelligence company, accusing the CEO and two other employees of engaging in a sprawling effort to poach Palantir's workers and customers.
The data-analysis firm, co-founded by a group including Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, said in a court filing that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain and co-founder Radha Jain aggressively pursued Palantir employees for a "copycat" company, in violation of their nonsolicitation agreements. It accused a third employee, Joanna Cohen, of stealing confidential documents from Palantir before she left for the rival firm.
Percepta said in a statement that it has never used any of Palantir's confidential information and accused the company of cherry-picking out of context information, calling Palantir's case "baseless."
"Percepta's business is fundamentally different from Palantir's. Palantir does not own the AI transformation space, which is massive and constantly evolving," Percepta said in a statement shared by General Catalyst, which launched the company this year. "This is the latest in Palantir's effort to use fear tactics to bully ex-employees out of innovating with applied AI."
Hirsh Jain, Radha Jain and Cohen are all former Palantir employees. The document, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, builds on a lawsuit Palantir filed against Radha Jain and Cohen in October.
"Defendants brazenly disregarded their contractual and legal commitments to Palantir and instead chose a path of deception and unjust competition -- a path they continue trundling down to this day, and that irreparably harms Palantir and their ex-colleagues," the company said in its Thursday filing.
Palantir sells software to centralize, manage and analyze large quantities of data. It dove into the white-hot AI market with a surprise announcement from Karp in 2023 and has since become the mainstay data and AI contractor for the U.S. military, other government agencies and corporate customers. The U.S. Navy earlier this week said it awarded Palantir a contract valued at hundreds of millions of dollars to manage the supply chain of its nuclear submarine fleet.
The legal action is part of a wave of legal battles over trade secrets in the AI sector, with companies such as Elon Musk's xAI suing ex-employees and competitors for alleged infractions. Palantir said Radha Jain and Cohen didn't publicly disclose that they had joined a rival firm until Percepta's launch in early October 2025.
Hirsh Jain recruited Radha Jain after he left Palantir in August 2024, according to the filing. The pair allegedly worked to recruit other Palantir employees, in violation of their nonsolicitation agreements. Radha Jain resigned from Palantir in November of that year.
The company said Percepta's workforce and founding team are now disproportionately composed of ex-Palantir employees. That was Hirsh Jain's intention, the filing said, citing an alleged text to Radha Jain in which he said: "I'm down to pillage the best devs at Palantir when they're at their maximum richness."
The filing also accused Radha Jain of working with Percepta to pitch a potential Palantir customer while still employed at the data-analysis firm. That customer signed with Percepta, the suit said, which has generated millions in revenue for the company.
Cohen, the filing said, sent herself a slate of highly confidential documents around the time of her resignation in March 2025. The filing further alleged she used her personal phone to take photographs of confidential information on her Palantir computer, in what the company called "an obvious effort to evade Palantir's data security systems."
Palantir had previously leveled similar allegations against Cohen and accused Radha Jain of violating her noncompete. Attorneys for the pair said in a November legal filing that they deny the allegations. The pair temporarily agreed to stop work for Percepta while proceedings continue, according to the November filing.
Write to Victoria Albert at victoria.albert@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 11, 2025 11:06 ET (16:06 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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