Jon Tester spent 18 years in the U.S. Senate warning about government surveillance. He voted against extending the USA PATRIOT Act in 2011, telling colleagues it “invades the privacy of law-abiding citizens and it tramples on our constitutional rights.” Now the Big Sandy farmer is taking a paid advisory role with Palantir, the data company whose work for governments has made it one of the most criticized firms in tech.
Tester confirmed the job Monday, Montana Free Press reported, after NPR first reported it. He said he took it because “there’s an opportunity to set the record straight on them.”
“I visited with a lot of people in Palantir to make sure this was the right thing to do, because you don’t want to be affiliated with a company that has different values than you’ve got,” Tester told MTFP. “And I found most of them to be very libertarian in nature and very much about people’s privacy.”
He wouldn’t say what he’s being paid. “If I told you and it was too little, you’d say, ‘God, that guy does not know how to negotiate.’ And if it was too much, you’d say, ‘God, he sold out,'” he said.
From Chouteau County to the Senate and back
For most Montanans, Tester is a familiar figure: the flat-topped farmer and former music teacher from Big Sandy, a town of about 600 northeast of Great Falls, who lost three fingers on his left hand to a meat grinder as a boy. He served in the Montana Senate, including as its president, before winning a U.S. Senate seat in 2006. He won again in 2012 and 2018, often by narrow margins in a state that kept moving to the right, and built a reputation around veterans’ issues, agriculture and a populist streak on privacy and corporate power.
That run ended in 2024, when Republican Tim Sheehy beat him. Since then Tester has stayed close to home and close to politics. He told MTFP he will keep farming at Big Sandy. He has co-hosted the political podcast “Grounded” with journalist Maritsa Georgiou, and this fall he endorsed independent Seth Bodnar, the former University of Montana president, in his unsuccessful U.S. Senate race. Since August 2025, he has also served on an advisory council for Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company.
What he says the job is
Tester described the Palantir role as “consulting as needed” and said he won’t lobby for the company. He was open about what he brings, though. “Let’s just say that they’re pulled in front of a committee. I’m more than happy to talk [to the company] about the different members on the committee that I know,” he said.
That kind of knowledge is worth a lot to big tech companies, especially now. Democrats won majorities in both chambers of Congress in last week’s election, and some tech firms had already been adding prominent Democrats as advisers. Tester said the timing wasn’t about the results; Palantir first approached him in July, he said.
Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and run by CEO Alex Karp, Palantir has seen its value soar on the strength of its AI business. Critics say its software helps governments build surveillance systems, and the company has drawn criticism for work supporting Israel’s military in Gaza and for helping the Trump administration track and deport immigrants, including a $30 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April 2025. Karp has rejected the surveillance charge, saying Palantir is “the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties.”
Tester’s own explanation splits the difference. “I believe Palantir performed a service and it was used in a way that didn’t meet the civil liberties and the Constitution of this country,” he said. He said he would advise the company “to be as forthright and as transparent as possible.”
On AI more broadly, he sounded like a farmer talking about a new piece of equipment. “AI is here, and it’s been here for a while, and it ain’t going away. So we need to utilize it to our best advantage to create jobs and create efficiency and create a more user-friendly government,” he said.
The first cost
The move has already cost him one platform. Georgiou announced Tuesday that Tester will no longer be part of “Grounded.” “I feel that the company’s past actions do not align with the work that we do here at Grounded,” she said during a livestream.
For Tester’s longtime supporters in Montana, many of whom backed him precisely because he sounded like someone who would never take a tech company’s money, the decision is a harder one to square. For Tester, it seems to come down to the same thing he said for years on the Senate floor: technology isn’t the problem so much as who’s watching how it gets used. Whether he can be that check from inside the company is now his to prove.
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