In 2017, Argentine state agencies explored Palantir tools in connection with the archives of the AMIA case. In 2022, the company registered its trademark in Argentina. Three years later, Próspera co-founder Gabriel Delgado Ayau held a nearly two-hour meeting at the Casa Rosada. In 2026, Thiel Macro disclosed a position worth almost $76 million in Vista Energy, while the government announced a Social Digital Twin that, months later, it acknowledged was not even in the design stage.

Taken separately, these are different episodes and they do not prove a common strategy. Together, they make visible the legal, political, energy, and epistemic conditions that precede large-scale technological infrastructure.

On August 28, Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies held a hearing lasting more than five hours. More than thirty people from computing, law, journalism, research, environmental advocacy, and civil society organisations discussed Peter Thiel and Palantir’s presence in Argentina.1 The invited government officials and Thiel himself did not participate. Deputy Juan Marino said earlier requests for information had also gone unanswered. File 1758-D-2026, introduced on April 23, formally asks the Executive Branch a series of questions related to Thiel’s visit.2

One day before the hearing, Revista Anfibia published an investigation by Juan Luis González and Giselle Leclercq, produced with support from Reporters Without Borders. It reconstructs a chronology that begins well before 2026.3

2017. Before AI, there was the archive

During Mauricio Macri’s administration, there were discussions and contacts with Palantir around the digitisation and analysis of documents from the AMIA case. The sources do not agree on the exact sequence. A Perfil report published that year said that on April 13 a Palantir executive travelled to Argentina and gave a demonstration to the UFI-AMIA at the Ministry of Modernization. Mario Cimadevilla, then head of the UEI-AMIA, later confirmed to Anfibia that contacts with Palantir had taken place, but located one meeting and demonstration in London, between January 7 and 12, 2017, with representatives from the Modernization and Justice ministries and a member of his team.3

The accounts differ on date, place, and participants, but they share a relevant core. Argentine state agencies explored Palantir tools in connection with an extraordinarily sensitive public archive. The investigation also recovers documentation from the legal dispute over custody of those records. Chamber I of the Federal Criminal and Correctional Court ruled that the UFI-AMIA had to retain exclusive control over the review, handling, and custody of the documentation.3

An archive is not simply a collection of data. Custody means deciding who can access it, what relationships can be drawn between documents, what categories make it searchable, who interprets its silences, and who has the authority to turn a documentary association into evidence. The 2017 dispute was also a dispute over the custody of state memory.

The next trace appears five years later. On June 6, 2022, during Alberto Fernández’s presidency, Palantir Technologies registered its trademark with Argentina’s National Institute of Industrial Property through the law firm Berton Moreno IP LAW.3 The description recovered by Anfibia included artificial intelligence software, geospatial analysis, mapping, location services, and data processing applied, among other fields, to national security. The services were intended for government, corporate, and institutional clients rather than the consumer market.3

A trademark registration does not prove that Palantir had a contract with the Argentine state, just as the 2017 contacts do not demonstrate operational continuity through 2026. They do show that Palantir’s commercial interest in Argentina predates the current administration. Large infrastructures often begin before any machine appears. They require legal representation, institutional contacts, demonstrations, regulatory compatibility, and accumulated knowledge about a territory.

2025. Próspera enters the conversation

On July 7, 2025, Gabriel Delgado Ayau, co-founder and board member of Próspera, entered the Casa Rosada and held a meeting of nearly two hours with Demian Reidel, then head of the president’s advisory team.3

Próspera matters here as a political and legal precedent, not as evidence that an equivalent project exists for Argentina. There is no public evidence that would justify such a claim. The Honduran project developed under the Zones for Employment and Economic Development regime, which enabled spaces with differentiated tax, commercial, and jurisdictional rules. After that framework was repealed, Próspera and the Honduran state entered an international legal dispute.3

Technology needs more than computing capacity. It needs to know which laws will govern it, what taxes it will pay, what rights affected people will retain, and what happens if a future government changes the agreed conditions. In Argentina, this question intersects with regimes designed to provide long-term stability for large investments. A convergence between regulatory incentives and infrastructural needs does not prove coordination among specific actors, but it does show that jurisdiction is part of infrastructure.

2026. Energy, territory, and the portfolio

On August 14, Thiel Macro LLC filed its Form 13F with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the quarter ending June 30, 2026. It disclosed 1,189,792 ADSs of Vista Energy, valued at $75,908,730.4 The table contains eight positions with a total reported value of $418,666,506. Vista was the second-largest position by value after Amazon, the only non-U.S. company, and represented approximately 18.13% of the reported portfolio.4

This is a financial position in a publicly traded company. The filing does not imply operational control over Vista and does not reveal the purpose of the investment. Anfibia also documents that Thiel met for more than an hour in Buenos Aires with Miguel Galuccio, Vista’s founder and CEO. What they discussed is not public, nor is it known whether the investment preceded or followed that meeting.3

The portfolio’s composition nevertheless provides another way to think about AI’s material foundations. Alongside Vista are Amazon, Vistra, American Electric Power, CMS Energy, DTE Energy, FirstEnergy, and X-Energy.4 Software, energy, data centres, water, and territory, usually described as separate sectors, are increasingly converging within the same infrastructure economy.

AIthropology has already followed this materiality in La nube tiene geografía. The cloud needs land, electricity, water, minerals, cables, cooling, and regulatory frameworks. It also needs relationships capable of holding all of that together.

The announced twin

At the parliamentary hearing, attorney and technology specialist Micaela Mantegna described AI as an “epistemic intermediary.” “Whoever controls those technologies controls how we see the world,” she said.1 The issue is not only who accumulates information, but what representation of the world becomes operational when certain systems mediate between data and decisions.

The Social Digital Twin announced by the government turns that issue into a concrete case. There is still no public evidence that Palantir is its provider. In May, the Chamber of Deputies registered a request for information about meetings and possible agreements with Palantir Technologies and Peter Thiel involving personal data, state intelligence, and government technological systems, File 2340-D-2026.5 The following day, File 2374-D-2026 was introduced specifically about the system called the “Social Digital Twin.”6

In July, a decisive contradiction emerged. In response to two freedom-of-information requests filed by Chequeado, the Ministry of Human Capital stated that the Social Digital Twin was not underway and was not in the design stage. It also did not answer questions about budget, potential private contractors — including Palantir — or the databases the system might use.7

An announcement without a technical project under development is not necessarily politically empty. It can install a horizon of what becomes imaginable before the architecture, rules, and responsibilities needed to materialise it exist.

Imagining a “twin” of a society means first producing a simulatable society. People, households, territories, movements, illnesses, incomes, relationships, behaviours, and risks would have to become variables. Someone would have to decide what counts as a family, a threat, a need, or an anomaly, which sources are legitimate, and which parts of reality remain outside the system.

The twin would never be the territory. It would be an operational theory of the territory. If such a representation ever participated in public decision-making, classification would no longer be only descriptive. It could also become a form of governing.

Private infrastructure, public capacity

In its presentation to the Chamber of Deputies, the Center for Legal and Social Studies raised another dimension of the problem. When a private platform integrates data, produces intelligence, and shapes decisions, it can become part of the infrastructure of government itself.8

In that scenario, it matters where the data are stored and who can access them, but also what technical knowledge remains inside the state. If core capacities for integration, classification, and analysis are outsourced for long enough, changing vendors can stop being a simple contractual decision. Public institutions can lose internal knowledge and the ability to reconstruct the processes they have delegated.

Digital sovereignty is not only about keeping data within a border. It also requires preserving the public capacity to understand those data, debate the categories that organise them, and modify the infrastructures that make action on them possible.

The Anfibia investigation does not uncover a single explanation for Thiel’s presence in Argentina. It finds fragments. There is no need to turn them into a conspiracy in order to recognise an infrastructural question. Infrastructure is not only a power plant or a data centre. It is also made of contracts, legal representation, laws, categories, relationships, expectations, investments, silences, and institutional capacity.

Before the model, there are the data. Before the data centre, there are energy and land. Before the digital twin, there is the decision about which world will be represented. And before all of that comes the network that makes those connections possible.

References

Additional journalistic reference

Varsavsky, Julián. “¿A qué viene Peter Thiel a la Argentina?” Página/12, August 29, 2026. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/2026/08/29/a-que-viene-peter-thiel-a-la-argentina/

Editorial continuity at AIthropology

Footnotes

  1. Canal Abierto. “¿A qué viene Peter Thiel a la Argentina?”, August 28, 2026. https://canalabierto.com.ar/2026/08/28/a-que-viene-peter-thiel-a-la-argentina/ ↩ ↩2

  2. Chamber of Deputies of Argentina. File 1758-D-2026, “Pedido de informes al Poder Ejecutivo sobre diversas cuestiones relacionadas con la visita a la República Argentina del empresario Peter Andreas Thiel,” April 23, 2026. https://www.diputados.gov.ar/diputados/jmarino/proyecto.html?exp=1758-D-2026 ↩

  3. González, Juan Luis, and Giselle Leclercq. “Hackear a Peter Thiel.” Revista Anfibia, August 27, 2026. Investigation produced with support from Reporters Without Borders. https://www.revistaanfibia.com/hackear-a-peter-thiel/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  4. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Thiel Macro LLC, Form 13F-HR, reporting period ending June 30, 2026, filed August 14, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1562087/000131586326000593/0001315863-26-000593-index.htm Holdings table: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1562087/000131586326000593/xslForm13F_X02/thiel2q2026.inftbl.xml ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Chamber of Deputies of Argentina. File 2340-D-2026, “Pedido de informes al Poder Ejecutivo sobre diversas cuestiones relacionadas con las reuniones y posibles acuerdos con Palantir Technologies Inc. y Peter Thiel, vinculados al uso de datos personales, inteligencia estatal y sistemas tecnológicos del Estado argentino,” May 21, 2026. https://www.hcdn.gob.ar/comisiones/permanentes/caconstitucionales/proyecto.html?exp=2340-D-2026 ↩

  6. Chamber of Deputies of Argentina. File 2374-D-2026, “Pedido de informes al Poder Ejecutivo sobre diversas cuestiones relacionadas con el sistema denominado ‘Gemelo Digital Social’, anunciado oficialmente como herramienta de inteligencia artificial aplicada a políticas sociales,” May 22, 2026. https://www.hcdn.gob.ar/comisiones/permanentes/caconstitucionales/proyecto.html?exp=2374-D-2026 ↩

  7. Marina, Rosario, and Mariana Leiva. “Gemelo Digital: pese al anuncio oficial, el Gobierno admitió que el proyecto ‘no está en curso ni en etapa de diseño’.” Chequeado, July 13, 2026. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/gemelo-digital-social-pese-al-anuncio-oficial-el-gobierno-admitio-que-el-proyecto-no-esta-en-curso-ni-en-etapa-de-diseno/ ↩

  8. Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS). “¿A qué viene Peter Thiel a la Argentina?” Presentation at the informational hearing of the Chamber of Deputies, August 28, 2026. https://www.cels.org.ar/web/2026/08/a-que-viene-peter-thiel-a-la-argentina/ ↩