Nadia on... why we should care about Palantir

We should all be paying attention to Palantir Technologies. It’s a powerful tech company whose tools are being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in America to detain migrants. It was reportedly selected to help develop a “mega-database” of Americans’ personal information for the Trump administration – a claim the company denies. It’s also in a “strategic partnership” with Israel, supplying advanced technologies for “war-related missions”. And now, it has secured more than £500 million in UK government contracts.

This company, which is involved in what I would consider to be deeply unethical projects, is embedding itself in our public institutions. I believe we must do everything we can to prevent it from accessing our personal and national data.

In December 2025, the Ministry of Defence awarded Palantir a £241m three-year contract to “boost military AI and innovation” in the armed forces. This contract was awarded without tender, meaning it was given directly to the company without an open competition. There are concerns from campaigners that Peter Mandelson, disgraced Labour peer – over his links to Jeffrey Epstein and the leaking of sensitive national data – may have helped broker this deal. Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel, was employed by Palantir in 2018 to help procure UK government contracts.

In February 2025, Mandelson, the Prime Minister, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, met at Palantir’s showroom in Washington DC, but the visit did not appear in the Prime Minister’s published register of meetings. Campaigners and MPs have since complained that attempts to scrutinise Palantir’s government contracts have been blocked, with freedom of information requests about meetings involving Palantir repeatedly refused.

Palantir’s reach in Britain extends beyond defence – also in February 2025, Palantir won contracts to help develop a surveillance network in the east of England, for police forces to identify people who may be ‘about to commit’ crimes. Numerous critics warn that such predictive systems risk reinforcing existing biases in policing. According to an investigation by Liberty Investigates and The i, journalists found that trade union membership, sexual orientation, and race are among the other types of personal information also being processed.

In 2023, Palantir secured a £330m contract to deliver the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) for NHS England, designed to “connect vital health information across the NHS”. (It’s also relevant to add that Peter Thiel, chairman and founder of Palantir, once said the NHS should be ripped up to “start over”.) The chair of the British Medical Association recently stated that NHS doctors should limit their use of the system due to Palantir’s links to US immigration enforcement. He pointed to reports that, in the US, Palantir’s Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) app has obtained medical records to help immigration officers find people’s home addresses, curating a “confidence score” about whether someone is likely to be at a certain location. It is vital that NHS patients have confidence in who is handling their data – and I share the BMA’s concerns about this contract undermining confidentiality and patient trust. 

While Palantir maintains that it does not store nor sell data, but only processes it for clients, I believe that a company closely tied to Trump’s government playing a central role in British health and defence infrastructure is a potential security risk. As technology journalist, Carole Cadwallah, writes: “We have embedded a notorious US military surveillance company, whose founder is a close ally of President Trump, into the heart of our military at a moment in which the US is threatening to invade our NATO ally, Greenland.”

A recent investigation claims that the Swiss government rejected Palantir contracts over fears that US intelligence might gain access to sensitive data. If this is true, why does our government not share the same concerns?

I am also deeply worried about how the company’s technology is being used in modern warfare. One of its flagship products, Gotham, integrates and analyses vast volumes of data to support military and intelligence operations. The company has described it as enabling an “AI-powered kill chain” that assists intelligence services with target identification and operational decision-making. In other words, it is a system that shortens the distance between data collection and lethal action. But what if the software makes mistakes? In warfare, mistakes cost innocent lives.

In his own book, Karp confirmed the company’s involvement in Israel’s 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon – an operation that UN experts described as a “terrifying” violation of international law. In April 2025, when confronted at a public event with accusations that Palantir’s systems had contributed to deaths in Gaza, Karp responded: “mostly terrorists, that’s true.” Last year, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur, concluded in a report that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Palantir’s AI platform has been used in Israel’s “unlawful use of force,” causing disproportionate loss of civilian life in Gaza. 

Palantir presents itself as a neutral software provider. Yet, its leadership has been explicit about its political and ideological commitments.

Thiel – one of the richest people in the world and a major Republican donor who supported Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the vice president’s office – once wrote that women getting the right to vote was bad for democracy. In his recent off-the-record lectures on Armageddon and biblical prophecy, he suggested that Greta Thunberg may be the antichrist. 

Karp is another billionaire with terrifying views. In 2024, he also said that “the (Palestine) peace activists are war activists” who should be sent to North Korea. More recently, he said that “the West is obviously superior”, and that Palantir is here for “when it’s necessary to scare our enemies, and, on occasion, kill them”.

While not every client uses Palantir Technologie’s technology in harmful ways, the fact that some of the company’s contracts raise serious human rights concerns should have been enough to give the UK government pause before entering into a contractual partnership with them. Handing access to some of the country’s most sensitive health and defence data over to a corporation whose leadership is closely aligned with Donald Trump, and openly espouses far-right political views, is wrong on so many levels. The government must seriously reconsider its relationship with Palantir and the company’s receipt of public contracts. We must ensure that ethics and security are at the heart of government procurement.

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