Palantir – a predator in the NHS and a threat to the working class
A predator was spotted in the UK during the Covid pandemic. When the world was preoccupied with keeping Covid from spreading, this predatory imperialist company ‘Palantir’ already had its eye on the NHS. Palantir secured a contract for data management of the vaccines system, charging the British government of Boris Johnson just £1, with no consultation or competitive bidding (see Ryan Browne, ‘UK wouldn’t have coped with coronavirus crisis without help of tech giants, health minister says’, CNBC, 20 June 2020). Then Palantir managed to nab the contract for the Federated Data Platform (FDP), a program to merge NHS patient data and digitise it. The contract was awarded in November 2023 and is worth up to £330 million over seven years. The contract was awarded to Palantir by none other than NHS England itself, under the Sunak administration, by the briefly incumbent Health Secretary Victoria Atkins. It is important to note that the FDP is not the issue here – digitising health data is a necessary requirement for efficiency. The issue is who gets to run it: a well-known warmongering spy-tech imperialist company would not seem to most people the best choice!
NHS England claimed at a recent ICB meeting (attended by the author) with unions and people in opposition to Palantir that “it had no idea what Palantir and its CEOs were up to” during the procurement of the contract. Not only is that hard to believe, but you would think they’d do a quick background check on anyone they go into business with, especially when £330 million were at stake. Yet that was the actual answer they gave to people who questioned the ethics of partnering with Palantir. And if you think that’s bad, wait until you hear about the lies they told about your data.
For over a decade, the NHS operated a National Data Opt-Out used by people to prevent their medical data being used beyond direct care. The government has decided this opt-out does not apply to the FDP. Their legal justification, they claim, is Section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 – a power allowing the Secretary of State to ‘direct’ NHS England to process data in specific ways. The ‘Direction’ the government cites (i.e., the NHS England De-Identified Data Analytics and Publication Directions 2023) governs only de-identified (anonymised) data. Yet the National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT – the name of NHS England’s secure central platform for collecting and managing health and care data), by the NHS’s own admission in its own ‘FDP NDIT Privacy Notice’, processes data “in identifiable form” before anonymisation even occurs. Lawyers flagged this legal gap to the FDP programme board in March 2024 (see Lindsay Clark, ‘Key aspects of Palantir’s Federated Data Platform lack legal basis, lawyers tell NHS England’, The Register, 5 September 2024). No new Direction was sought from Parliament. No public explanation was given.
Palantir is a company started up by tech bros from Silicon Valley, part of the ‘PayPal mafia’. They were funded by the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel and that was one of their first contracts. After that, you can easily find the atrocities in which they have been involved with any quick online search.
A summary of Palantir’s great ‘achievements’: its predictive AI is used to generate kill lists that were used in Lebanon, Palestine, Iran and probably elsewhere. Its tech is used in killer drones. Its systems in the US have been proven to mismanage civilian data, and they were found to leak information about citizens to ICE to facilitate unlawful deportations and arrests.
Its CEO Peter Thiel is very well connected to the late but unlamented Jeffrey Epstein (convicted rapist and paedophile, and all-round misanthropic billionaire). Epstein invested in Thiel’s company, and we’ve seen the leaked tapes of him introducing Ehud Barak and Thiel to each other. This company openly boasts of its white supremacist and ‘Western supremacist’ ideologies, often spreading Islamophobia, xenophobia, pro-apartheid, anti-African, and anti-Asian propaganda. So you can see, dear reader, how hard it is to believe the excuse of “we did not know what they did” by NHS England and how deep the concerns run about this company handling identifiable patient data.
On 30 December 2025 the Ministry of Defence signed a £240 million contract with Palantir Technologies UK Ltd. No competitive tender was involved, not even any public announcement. Even the contract number itself is classified. The entire pricing section is redacted under Section 43 of the Freedom of Information Act, as heavily redacted in fact as Palantir’s FDP contract is. This US company has been embedded into UK defence infrastructure for three years, and the public cannot see what we are paying for. The contract even contains a media gagging clause. Palantir is contractually prohibited from speaking to the press about the deal without prior MoD written consent. The contract does not even require Palantir staff on classified sites to be UK nationals: it merely says they “should” be. A CIA-seeded company founded by Peter Thiel, with its largest shareholder base being American, has complete freedom to place operatives wherever they want on UK military intelligence sites. This is how a quarter of a billion pounds of public money gets committed to a single American surveillance company with no public scrutiny whatsoever!
In recent weeks it has emerged that Palantir has been granted unlimited access to patient data. In the past, the blatant lie fed to the public was that the information handled by Palantir employees would be anonymised. Now new information has come to light demonstrating that the data won’t be anonymised and Palantir will have full, unlimited access. That means identifiable data can be accessed by Palantir, including date of birth, address, NHS number, phone number, medical history, religion and race. It is abundantly clear that these decisions have been made well behind closed doors, and that Britain is not a democratic state.
Every layer of this system shares one vulnerability: US-controlled infrastructure is all subject to the CLOUD Act, which allows US authorities to require disclosure of data held by American companies regardless of physical location. Palantir, Epic, TransUnion all US companies, all US cloud, all accessible to US authorities through corporate legal obligations that override UK data protection law. Unanonymised British health records are accessible to US authorities. The American Big Brother is watching YOU!
Essentially, Palantir will be able to do in the UK what it did in the US with people’s data. The ways they will abuse this data will probably come in a couple of forms. It will be used to crush any true anti-imperialist opposition. It will be used to spy on people and create predictive AI lists that they can use to help the government suppress and oppress the working class and crush any dissent. It will for sure cause improper treatment of patients, as it heavily relies on AI. A warmongering imperialist spy tech company training AI – how bad can this turn out, right?
We can already see the valid concerns people have about this company both globally and locally, for good reason. Who wants ‘Big Brother’ in every service in the UK? What it is doing is dangerous, and this company is trying to hoover up every government contract it can.
This also comes at a time where King Charles III recently announced the launch of ‘digital ID’. Does anyone believe that Palantir and the state simply have our best interests at heart? That this is just a coincidence? Nothing to do with a surveillance state that they are pushing? The digital ID architecture is already being built, and Palantir doesn’t even need to construct it itself. Companies House identity verification, mandatory under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2024, is collecting biometric data, using AI facial matching by TransUnion, and storing it all on Amazon Web Services. The ‘Alternative Route’ for non-UK nationals explicitly collects data on children under 13. The Information Commissioners Office (ICO the UK government department responsible for the contract) confirmed it does not even hold the Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) for this system! This is the pilot for universal digital ID. The ‘Brit Card’ proposal would extend this to every adult, making it impossible to rent, work, and eventually access healthcare, benefits or vote without it. Palantir doesn’t need to build the identity database. It needs to query it and link the results to health records, enforcement flags and financial transactions.
The surveillance state
We will see increasing political repression and unlawful arrests as Palantir is not just trying to get its hands on the NHS but has acquired contracts within the police. Palantir had a pilot with the Met police in 2025, processing the personal records of 50,000 police officers and civilian staff including special category data: race, religion, political opinions, trade union membership, health, sex life, sexual orientation and criminal convictions. The Met’s own Data Protection Impact Assessment, signed off in March 2026 and subsequently extended, reads less like a compliance document and more like a confession. The Met wants to use Palantir for more applications, but the DPIA suggests that even within the Met there seems to be some distrust. The Metropolitan Police’s own assessment admits: the data was being used for purposes beyond what was originally specified; operational access logging with user identities and timestamps was merely planned but not yet implemented; there existed no documentation mapping where the data travelled once inside the system; no controls were in place to ensure accuracy or completeness at entry or throughout processing; no process had been established to periodically evaluate and refine the decision-making algorithms for fairness; and no ethical review had been completed by the Met’s own research ethics committee despite the system having already gone live the previous November. The platform runs on American cloud infrastructure, accessible under the US CLOUD Act. The Met’s DPIA admits no assessment was conducted. This is not oversight failure. It is sovereignty transfer by procurement. The document also claims union consultation occurred, with “no issues raised.” Yet the Police Federation told the press they were never informed this was a Palantir/AI project, and the PCS union confirmed “no formal consultation at all…” took place.
Resistance
The recent news about Mayor of London Sadiq Khan blocking the £50 million contract with Palantir and the Met police says it all. Even a social democrat can see how dangerous and destructive this company is. The blocking of the contract was possible because they found out there was a breach in procurement protocol: Palantir was the only company considered. The same thing happened during Covid and with NHS England. This nefarious pattern continues. We can see figures like Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan (London) Police, pushing for Palantir by saying “this tech is required to confront poor behaviour, raise standards of living, fix our foundations and communities.” How awful, then, of all of us to oppose this company, since this is all they want. And by what magical ability can Palantir grant all that this delusional puppet said it would? After all, Palantir is named after a magical seeing-stone from Lord of the Rings. Used by such corporate villains, maybe they do have far-reaching and deeply disturbing powers? In summary, if Mark Rowley is involved in this contract, you know fully well that Palantir has been chosen by the ruling class for its insidious activity in the UK against the working class, and one can only imagine how bad state repression will be if this company achieves its goals.
Apparently some Palantir bosses and allies were not happy with Sadiq Khan’s decision and are asking for his decision to be reviewed in court. Michael Ellis, a former Conservative Attorney General, described his frustration by saying “this may require judicial review” and that Khan’s “decisions are based on political sensitivities and how he views the values and ethics of this American company.” This amounts to saying that this foreigner has values different from the Lords of finance capital! Even Louis Mosley, grandson of the fascist Oswald Mosley, had something to say about this: “that this decision not to use the software will give hostile states and criminals an advantage.” Do you see the irony here? The world’s greatest hostile and criminal state, the state of US imperialism, is to be in charge of the system supposedly designed to prevent the activities of hostile states and criminals!
The Midas Touch
AI like every major innovation born under capitalism, holds tremendous potential for the working class. Properly directed, it could assist our learning and research, take over hazardous tasks that puts workers’ lives at risk, and make vital decisions without the errors that human fatigue and bias introduce.
Yet we know from bitter experience how capitalism corrupts every tool it touches. Under the capitalists and their warmongering governments, this same technology is being turned against us, being used instead to guide missiles onto civilian homes, track innocent people through every street and screen, and throw millions out of work. And in terms of bias, being but an advanced logical algorithm, it tends to reproduce and reinforce the bias of its creators, programmers and wider capitalist society. It has become a weapon pointed squarely at humanity. This will not change while the ruling class remains in power.
Gagging opponents
Palantir is a predatory company that has managed to convince hospital management to pressure staff into silence. We have heard direct reports of employees threatened with the sack for speaking out against this firm, and we have seen workers put through hell simply for campaigning against it.
So what is to be done about this imperialist, poisonous tech beast? First and foremost, we must realise that through our collective organisation as workers, we can kick this Yankee imperialist predator company out of the UK. Under US law all information in its possession is available to the US government, and we can be sure that the US government will happily make it, and the AI analyses generated from that information, available to the forces of repression in this country, and abroad who serve their interests – including, of course, Israel. We can expose what is happening, and we can block it. We need to put forward motions in our trade unions and get them passed (such as the CPGB-ML’s Palantir Model Motion). We need to make the public aware that this is happening with their data, and keep speaking about Palantir non-stop until people understand what is at stake. We need to organise rallies, protests, and strikes to oppose this company. Health workers in the NHS need to refuse to use any system that is part of Palantir’s ‘Foundry’. They need to inform our patients about what is being planned with their information. A blow to this company means a massive blow to the imperialists and brings us closer to the world we deserve to live in.