Palantir's Trump bonanza continues with Fannie Mae contract to fight fraud

Yet more juicy data for the all-seeing eye

Trump administration darling Palantir has scored another data-guzzling win by partnering with Fannie Mae to detect mortgage fraud using AI. 

Fannie Mae, a US government-backed outfit that buys mortgages from lenders and bundles them into mortgage-backed securities, will partner with Palantir to create a new "AI-powered Crime Detection Unit," the mortgage giant said in an announcement yesterday. Fannie Mae said using Palantir AI in its new CDU will save the US housing market "millions in future fraud losses." 

According to the announcement, Palantir will deploy technology that can look at mortgage paperwork for "anomalous transactions, activities and behaviors" to help companies detect suspicious activity and trigger an investigation. 

"By integrating this leading AI technology, we will look across millions of datasets to detect patterns that were previously undetectable," wrote Fannie Mae CEO and President Priscilla Almodovar in a canned quote.

The announcement of the deal didn't include many details, and we didn't get responses to questions from either Palantir or Fannie Mae. But Almodovar, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Federal Housing Finance Agency (Fannie Mae's federal government conservator) director Bill Pulte shared a bit more information at a press conference yesterday. 

According to Almodovar, Fannie Mae's prior fraud posture was reactive - it was only able to identify financial crimes if it was clued into an issue. She told reporters that an exercise using the Palantir tech that will be deployed for the new unit was able to review a stack of financial documents and identify fraud in as little as 10 seconds, while human auditors could take months of work to find flaws in the same paperwork. 

Pulte reportedly said that Freddie Mac, another government-sponsored entity that bundles mortgage-backed securities like Fannie Mae, but with a focus on smaller banks and credit unions instead of large commercial banks and lenders, may end up with a similar system if the Fannie Mae partnership proves successful. 

That's a big "if."

As we noted in a story earlier this month, Palantir's deal with the UK National Health Service to help build a new Federated Data Platform has been imperfect, and a number of hospitals in the UK have complained that the system was a step backward in terms of functionality. 

Palantir has seen its fortunes rise considerably under the Trump administration. Karp has come out against "woke" ideology in a similar manner to the current President, and the company's CTO Shyam Sankar has expressed support for DOGE's efforts to slash government spending. 

The Trump administration has so far tapped Palantir to build new software to speed up deportations, while the Pentagon recently upped the ceiling on the controversial Maven Smart System contract, originally worth $480 million, to more than $1 billion. ®