Posit and Palantir

We wanted to acknowledge that a recent press release has raised concerns about our relationship with Palantir. In this blog post, we hope to clarify the exact nature of the relationship and allay any concerns that we can. We also acknowledge that the press release was confusing. We know that how we communicate about things matters, and we made a mistake here in not providing clarity to our community from the start. We’re reviewing our processes to ensure future communications are more clear and more responsive.

In particular, the use of the word “partnership” was not clear: a partnership can come in many different flavors and might imply a deeper connection than what actually exists. Our agreement with Palantir is a narrow technical integration that allows Posit professional products (specifically Posit Workbench) to be used within Palantir Foundry: it does not change what our software does, just where it can do it. This agreement does not involve any payments, data sharing, transfer of intellectual property or code, or privileged access to source code.

We collaborated on this work because we want to help our customers use our products in the environments where their data lives. Palantir Foundry is used by many of our customers with specific needs around strong data governance, privacy, and access auditing because it provides fine-grained control over visibility and access to data. This integration is similar to the work that we’ve already done with DataBricks, Amazon SageMaker, and Azure.

– JJ Allaire, Tareef Kawaf, Hadley Wickham