Others have addressed the first half of your comment, so I'll focus on the astroturfing claim.
While I've talked a lot about Anthropic this week, if I was astroturfing for a positive image, I'd be very bad at it [1][2][3].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47150170
It doesn’t seem like anybody has addressed “If they are the good guys with principles why did they work with Palantir?”
There’s a comment that’s sort of handwaving and saying “because America”, but I would imagine that someone with direct knowledge of the people involved would have something more substantive than “thems the breaks” when it comes to working with Palantir