Palantir investors cult members spent Friday looking like extras in Saving Private Ryan after Reuters dropped a report claiming the Army’s sexy new battlefield comms system (built by Anduril with help from Palantir and Microsoft) was about as secure as a screen door on a submarine.

Shares got yeeted 7%, making Palantir the worst-performing S&P 500 stock of the day, and even Alex Karp’s “philosopher-warrior” monologues couldn’t spin this one as a win.

So what’s the dealio? Reuters played canary in the coal mine when it surfaced a September Army memo ripping the Next Generation Command and Control prototype (NGC2). The memo flagged “critical deficiencies” like insider threats, outside hacks, and plain old data leaks. Which immediately had analysts picturing a system about as secure as that White House Signal chat where Trump’s crew accidentally texted Yemen war plans to a journalist (still can’t believe that happened).

(Source: Reuters)

Alex Karp and crew wasted no time going on defense. Both Palantir and Anduril called B.S. Palantir’s rep insisted, “No vulnerabilities were found in the Palantir platform.” The Army’s CIO backed that up, saying the issues were caught “early and mitigated immediately.” Translation: “relax guys… it was just a test run, not like we handed Putin the Wi-Fi password."

Lieutenant General Jeth Rey (bless his heart) even tried spinning the vulnerabilities as a “good news story” because hey, finding problems before sending gear to actual war zones is kinda the point.

Still, shareholders didn’t care. After a monster run where Palantir’s stock has soared over 2,000% in the last three years, one bad headline was enough to trigger the 7-8% “sell rule” for all the chart-watchers who treat candlesticks like scripture.

Anduril, meanwhile, strolled out of this mess without a scratch (perk of not being publicly traded… no stock price to tank). Palmer Luckey’s defense unicorn (yes, the Oculus guy Zuckerberg kicked out of the office) still has its $99.6M Army contract for the next NGC2 phase. The company’s also pushing ahead with autonomous weapons (pilotless fighter jets, etc) and even teaming up with SpaceX and Palantir on a satellite defense shield.

Palantir, of course, insists the panic is overblown. Maybe it is. But when the Army starts stamping “very high risk” on your battlefield tech, that doesn’t exactly scream “buy with confidence.” Will Palantir survive this? Sure. It always does. But when you’re trading at one of the loftiest valuations in modern market history, even a whiff of bad news can turn your stock into a hot potato nobody wants to touch. And if we’re keeping it 100… we all know the Palantir diehards will forget all about this by Monday and be back on Reddit writing love letters to Alex Karp’s hair.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Microsoft as mentioned in the article.