The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund does not often pick a fight with a company it owns. When it does, the size of the holder makes the gesture hard to ignore.
Norges Bank Investment Management, which runs Norway’s $2.3 trillion oil fund, will vote in favour of shareholder proposals calling for a human-rights review at Palantir Technologies, the data-analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel.
The fund disclosed it would support motions on human-rights due diligence and impact assessment, and on reporting of political contributions, ahead of Palantir’s annual general meeting on June 3.
The fund publishes its voting intentions in advance, and the disclosure functions as a public signal as much as a ballot.
The central proposal, filed by the Congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph of Peace, asks Palantir to conduct and publish a human-rights impact assessment, the standard due-diligence tool a company uses to identify and account for harms connected to its products.
The filing cites concern over how Palantir’s software is used, pointing to an 84% rise in US immigration detentions and record deaths in custody since the start of 2025.
Palantir sits at the centre of two of the most contested deployments of data software anywhere. Its tools have been supplied to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where critics say they help target people for removal, and its work with the Israeli government has drawn accusations that its systems feed targeting in Gaza. The company has consistently defended its government work as lawful and necessary.
The Norwegian fund is not acting in isolation. The New York City Comptroller pressed Palantir in February to commission an independent human-rights assessment tied to its work with the Department of Homeland Security, and ABP, the largest Dutch pension fund, has divested.
Norway’s own Storebrand, which manages around $109bn, exited the stock over sales to Israel for use in occupied Palestinian territory.
There is a sharper edge to the fund’s position, which is that its ethics machinery has been under strain. Norway moved last year to suspend or rework parts of its wealth-fund ethics rules in ways that critics said were designed to protect holdings in technology firms with ties to Israel, even as the fund kept building positions in companies like Palantir.
Backing the shareholder proposals lets the fund register concern through the ballot rather than the blunter instrument of divestment.
Shareholder votes of this kind are rarely binding, and Palantir’s board can decline to act on the outcome. What the fund’s disclosure changes is the visibility.
When a $2.3 trillion investor says in public that it wants a human-rights review, the question stops being whether activists are uncomfortable with Palantir’s contracts and becomes whether one of the company’s largest owners is.
