USA Today has earned itself some headlines, and a lot of people are likely to find them quite skanky.

USA Today has decided to hook up with Palantir.

Why, you may ask.

“… We expect to strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data,” the company says.

With the release of its Q2 2026 earnings, USA Today discussed the hook‑up, explaining that the ways people are discovering content are changing. Readers are increasingly relying on AI.

Meanwhile, search is also changing—and not for the better. Google isn’t driving as much traffic to sites as it has in the past.

And since search engine traffic has been such a major source of revenue, a lot of companies are taking a hit in the pocket.

“While we see a change in search‑driven behavior, we also see entirely new ways to license, distribute, and monetize the trusted content we produce every day.” ~USA Today

USA Today claims it expects Palantir’s AI platform “to drive more effective and faster monetization.”

“We recognize that we have to create and format content for humans and for machines,” said USA Today. “The work our team is doing with Palantir is a direct extension of this strategy.”

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For those who don’t know, Palantir is a controversial surveil‑tech company. It’s controversial for the type of work it does, its connection to the US govt, and because the co‑founder, Peter Thiel, is a contentious topic all by himself.

But USA Today does know all of that and still plans to work with Palantir to turn its customers’ data into a revenue stream.

USA Today is a massive company—“the largest newspaper chain in the country, according to Poynter”—with a lot of data on a lot of people.

“We are applying Palantir’s AI-powered platform to one of the largest opportunities in front of us, converting the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated, first party relationships, because that is what turns our reach into sustainable, higher value revenue,” the company stated.

One way the company plans to profit from this hook‑up is by matching affiliate products and offers to sports, entertainment, dining, and other content categories in real time.

But USA Today admits “the opportunity extends well beyond commerce.”

“We are not working to simply monetize more of our content, but to better understand, engage, and unlock greater value from every audience relationship we create,” the company stated.

At the same time, audiences are increasingly discovering content through AI systems that answer questions directly for consumers. What that means is we are now effectively serving two audiences: human readers, and the AI platforms that surface our work to them. And it isn’t only the consumer platforms that surface our work; a far broader universe of crawlers and scrapers seeks to ingest our content…

“We…were shocked to learn that our company has partnered with Palantir,” USA Today’s NewsGuild‑CWA members said in a statement.

“…We believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers.”

“We call on USA TODAY CO. to immediately end its partnership with Palantir,” their letter states.

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