Palantir Poaching Suit Called ‘Scare’ Tactic by Ex-Employees

Three former Palantir Technologies Inc. employees say the company is trying to use the courts to squash their startup and deny poaching staff and intellectual property from it.

Palantir, the data analytics company whose chairman is Peter Thiel, filed a revised lawsuit against the trio last month and asked a judge to bar Hirsh Jain from working at Percepta, which he co-founded, or for the AI startup’s venture capital backer, General Catalyst, for 12 months.

Palantir included in its complaint an email exchange in which Hirsh Jain said he was “down to pillage the best devs at palantir” just weeks after leaving the company. The November 2024 exchange cited the names of several Palantir employees.

But Jain and the two other Percepta executives sued by Palantir — Radha Jain and Joanna Cohen — said in a court filing that none of the employees named in the email exchange left Thiel’s company to join the new startup.

“Indeed, all but one were never even contacted; the one exception was never offered a job at Percepta and decided to leave Palantir anyway,” according to the filing in Manhattan federal court.

Lawyers for the three also argued in the filing that Palantir’s non-compete clauses are overbroad and unenforceable. The non-competes signed by Radha Jain and Cohen would bar them from working for any company that uses AI to assist customers, according to the filing.

“Palantir is looking to scare others away from leaving and to destroy Percepta before it can grow further,” according to the filing.

When Palantir first sued artificial intelligence engineers Radha Jain and Cohen in October, it claimed they stole documents and information to help launch a “copycat” competitor. Hirsh Jain was added to the case in December.

The three say Percepta is not a Palantir “replica.” In their filing, they describe the 35-person New York-based startup as an “AI-focused consultancy and implementation firm that embeds engineers inside a customer’s environment to stitch together open-source and third-party AI tools.”

Palantir’s lawsuit “seeks to use sweepingly overbroad restrictive covenants, which it forces each of its thousands of employees to sign, to sideline three young professionals at the start of their careers,” according to the court filing.

Palantir representatives didn’t immediately respond outside regular business hours to a request for comment.

General Catalyst has called Palantir’s lawsuit “baseless.”

The case is Palantir v. Jain, 25-cv-08985, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).