PLTR Stock At Record High: CTO Slams Report Of Maven Role In Iran School Strike, Retail Bulls Embrace Wall Street Upgrades

• Goldman Sachs upgraded Palantir to ‘Buy,’ while Barclays initiated coverage with an ‘Overweight’ rating.
• Retail sentiment on Stocktwits surged to extremely bullish over the weekend.
• Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar attributed the Iran school strike to likely human error and said the company has added AI-powered checks to targeting workflows.

Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) CTO Shyam Sankar pushed back against reports that the company’s Maven AI platform played a role in a deadly school strike in Iran, attributing the February incident to likely human error. 

Speaking to CBS News over the weekend, Sankar rejected news reports that military personnel had relied excessively on the Maven platform in a strike on a school in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 123 schoolchildren.

Palantir shares hit a record high on Friday after a 10.8% rally last week, marking their best weekly performance since early August. The stock extended gains in overnight trading ahead of Monday.

“The Bloomberg reporting is wrong,” Sankar said, adding that “the likely cause is human error.” He cautioned that the final investigation should be awaited, but said Palantir responded to the incident by developing additional AI agents to add further checks to targeting workflows.

“Responding to the urgency of the moment, we built additional AI that actually double checks more of the work outside the process that we own,” he said.

Sankar also argued that AI tools help military personnel improve the consistency of safety checks and target verification, rather than autonomously selecting targets. He said tasks that previously required 50 people working for two weeks could now be completed by one person in four hours.

Wall Street Sees Further Upside For Palantir

PLTR’s rally also came amid bullish Wall Street calls last week. On Wednesday, Goldman Sachs upgraded Palantir to ‘Buy’ from ‘Neutral’ with a $230 price target, while Barclays initiated coverage with an ‘Overweight’ rating and a $265 price target.

Barclays analyst Anthony Valentini said the U.S. is in the “early innings of a modern day industrial revolution,” positioning Palantir to benefit from technology adoption across defense, aerospace and other industries.

Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges sees Palantir’s addressable market expanding as governments and businesses increasingly seek sovereign AI solutions that allow them to retain control over their data, according to a report in Barron’s.

Borges also expects demand for customized AI applications to grow as enterprises move beyond generic chatbot tools toward AI-powered software tailored to their operations.

Currently, 22 or 32 recommend ‘Buy’ or higher for PLTR stock, seven rate it ‘Hold,’ and three rate it ‘Sell’ or lower, per Koyfin. The average price target of $209.05 implies an upside of 3% from the stock’s closing price on Friday.

Retail View On PLTR

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for PLTR shifted to ‘extremely bullish’ over the weekend, up from ‘neutral’ during the week. Message volume rose a whopping 271% over the past week, signaling a surge in retail investor interest.

“$PLTR Tomorrow’s price action should be very interesting, but I’m much more interested in where we close on Friday,” said a trader. Another wrote, “$PLTR Burry done yet? must be getting expensive seeing puts melt” – a dig at noted investor Michael Burry and his famous short position on Palantir shares.

Year to date, PLTR stock is up 17.6%.

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