What is Palantir?

Palantir is a huge US technology corporation, headquartered in Colorado. It was founded in 2003 by a Silicon Valley billionaire called Peter Thiel, who spent over $1 million to help elect Donald Trump. Thiel is Palantir’s chairman and thought to be its largest shareholder.  

Six years after founding Palantir, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In 2023, he told Oxford Students’ Union that British affection for the NHS is “Stockholm syndrome”. 

Originally funded by the CIA, Palantir’s core business has been providing big data and surveillance support to military, security, intelligence and police agencies. Its clients include the US military, the Israeli Defence Forces, the US National Security Agency (NSA), the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, and various US police forces.  

Palantir has provided support to the Israel Defence Forces during the war in Gaza. 

During Trump’s first term ICE used Palantir to run workplace deportation raids and seize family members of unaccompanied migrant children. During Trump’s second term, Palantir reportedly became involved in the White House’s mass deportation programme. Palantir was also reportedly contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to build ‘ImmigrationOS’, designed to help ICE identify and select human targets to deport.  

Mass surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ: Palantir has helped the US and UK’s digital spy agencies (NSA and GCHQ) manage mass surveillance programmes. This was one of the systems exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden for tracking millions of innocent people’s movements online. Many US police forces also use Palantir for “predictive policing” – widely criticised for unfair targeting black communities.  

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Palantir had no track record in healthcare. But the NHS, with its global reputation, taxpayer funding, and unusually comprehensive datasets, was a particularly lucrative target. When Covid struck, so did Palantir. 

An alarming record

As you’d expect from a company specialising in security and surveillance, much of Palantir’s work is secret. However, what we do know reveals a pattern of involvement in controversial programmes criticised for abusing poor people, migrants, and minoritised groups: 

• Family separations and migrant deportations: Palantir was a key enabler of Donald Trump’s extreme anti-immigration policies in his first term. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used Palantir to run workplace deportation raids and seize family members of unaccompanied migrant children.
• Mass surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ: Palantir has helped the US and UK’s digital spy agencies (NSA and GCHQ) manage mass surveillance programmes like XKEYSCORE. This was one of the systems exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden for tracking millions of innocent people’s movements online. 
• Racist policing in the US: Many US police forces use Palantir for “predictive policing” - widely criticised for unfair targeting of poor and black communities. In LA, the police used Palantir to build a tool, “LASER”, that claimed it would extract suspected offenders from the community “like a tumor”. 
• Palantir has reportedly supported air strikes in Donald Trump’s war in Iran as well as intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios. 
• Secret Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Palantir provided intelligence software to power the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The exact nature of their involvement remains secret, and the value for money of their services was hotly disputed – Palantir sued the US over it. 

Specialists in harm, not healthcare

Palantir is not a health company. It specialises in supporting government agencies to use surveillance and big data technology to identify and target people in conflict zones, at our borders, or for policing.  

Palantir’s corporate ethos is a strange fit for a universal public health service like our NHS. Palantir is used to working with soldiers, spies and police officers - not doctors, nurses or other health professionals focused on caring for patients. They’ve built their business supporting drone and missile strikes, immigration raids, and arrests - not the delivery of care or medicine. 

Would you trust this company with your health data?

Palantir is not a company that inspires trust. It has a history of treating people as targets or suspects - not as human beings who deserve great healthcare, or whose privacy should be respected. Palantir’s involvement in NHS data projects risks fatally undermining patient participation and confidence. 

Our medical and health records are extremely private and personal. We have a right to expect that any gathering and processing of such data is done to the highest standards of ethics and privacy. Past NHS data proposals have failed because they didn’t pass this trust test. 

This is even more so for poor people, migrants, and minoritised groups. In the US, and increasingly in the UK and across the world, Palantir is notorious in these communities, because it delivers systems that target and harm them.  

A ‘Common Operating System’ for UK government – ‘competition is for losers’ 

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Palantir pounced, gaining a contract for a token £1 fee. Since then its role in the NHS has increased even further. It landed successive contracts worth millions of pounds, and finally a seven-year £330m contract for the NHS Federated Data Platform. Palantir makes no secret of its desire to embed itself in the NHS long term. 

In 2023, the UK Chief Commercial Officer Gareth Rhys Williams warned Palantir about his concerns about the: “practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition.” 

In its submission to the UK’s Covid-19 public inquiry, Palantir said the UK Government should invest in a ‘Common Operating System” for all government work. While Palantir did not say it would run this system, it has said openly that it wants to become the “default operating system for data across the US government” - so it would not be surprisingly if it held a similar ambition for the UK. If it achieves this, it could have an effective monopoly over all UK government data.  

Peter Thiel has spoken against competition and in favour of monopolies, telling the Wall Street Journal in 2014 that: “competition is for losers”. But when one private foreign company gets control over the entire collected data of a country, that becomes an existential threat to its democracy and to the freedom of its citizens.  

Palantir already has many contracts across the UK government, including with the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Justice, the Financial Conduct Authority and more than a dozen police forces. There is now a clear and present threat of “vendor lock in” in government services which would make Palantir effectively impossible to remove from UK public services.  

Martin Wrigley MP told parliament in April 2026 that Palantir's: "contract delivers no software—not one line—just a subscribed service; a permanent lock-in; a single point of failure.” 

But there is still time for the UK to change course if we act now, and demand Palantir is cut out of the NHS once and for all.