--- title: "Machiavellian spy firm or NHS saviour? The US giant love-bombing Britain" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/286661770.md" description: "Palantir, a US technology firm, is facing criticism in the UK for its involvement in the NHS, with concerns over privacy and surveillance. Critics, including prominent figures and the British Medical Journal, argue that its data handling undermines NHS values. Despite this, Palantir claims to improve healthcare efficiency, with over 120 trusts using its platform. The debate centers on whether Palantir's technology is a solution to bureaucratic issues or a threat to civil liberties and trust in public institutions." datetime: "2026-05-17T05:07:14.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/286661770.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/286661770.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/286661770.md) --- # Machiavellian spy firm or NHS saviour? The US giant love-bombing Britain London’s Soho Square seems oblivious to the thin, wild-haired old man shouting into a loudhailer as his bearded friend in baggy shorts performs a jig beside him. On most Thursdays at 4pm, this is where you will find Piers Corbyn – the 79-year-old elder brother of Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader – and his slightly younger companion, “Bongo Nick”, the Bez to Corbyn’s Shaun Ryder. They take turns holding a sign that reads “Palantir - Control + Kill Business Must Go”. They’re in front of the European headquarters of Palantir, the US technology giant love-bombing Britain. It’s promising a radical transformation of public services in health, defence and policing and has won contracts thought to be worth around £1bn. To its critics, however, Palantir’s handling of vast troves of data and its close ties to military and intelligence operations trigger chilling concerns over privacy and surveillance. “Palantir are an evil privatised military operation that investigates and indulges in everything in your life,” Corbyn barks, confusingly, before breaking into a chant: “Palantir: out!” Four other people join in. The conspiracy theorists have been joined by some wealthy and influential figures on the Left. Jolyon Maugham KC, the activist barrister behind The Good Law Project, invokes Gaza as he calls Palantir the “spy tech firm now at the heart of the NHS”. It’s “divisive and Machiavellian”, he says on his podcast The Shadow Contract. The British Medical Journal (BMJ) – the house journal of one of Britain’s most powerful trade unions, the British Medical Association – wants the firm removed from the health service. Working with Palantir is “blackening the very values that sit at the heart of the creation of the NHS”, wrote one campaigner, calling the health service “our most moral institution”. Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, has also weighed in. Palantir has insisted it is not a “data” company nor a “surveillance” company. It does not collect or “sell” access to data. On social media, Louis Mosley, Palantir’s urbane UK boss, has been acquiring rock star status for his rebuttals. Polanski failed to name Palantir’s chief executive correctly, Mosley pointed out, while he criticised the BMJ for its “sleight of hand” in a recent cover story about the company. Capitalising on its outsider status, Palantir is even trying to become a lifestyle brand. A special online store offers merchandise, including a $239 (£179) jacket that sold out within hours. For patients resigned to a dysfunctional and archaic NHS – three trusts are still using fax machines – the political campaign against Palantir seems self-indulgent. After expensive NHS flops such as the National Programme for IT and care.data, Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) is producing impressive results, according to NHS England. More than 120 hospital trusts are using Palantir’s platform, according to data provided by the quango. Over 110,000 additional patients have undergone procedures thanks to the FDP, while 6.8pc more suspected cancer patients are getting seen within 28 days. Palantir champions, such as the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, say cancer waiting lists have fallen. Could the UK finally have health technology that works? Palantir is apparently doing what the state and atomised services cannot, but this may come at a cost. The Miami-headquartered company wants to be the “operating system of government”. But critics fear this may mean uprooting institutions that people trust in exchange for efficiency. What may look like a bargain today may become an expensive millstone in the future, they say. Something else also troubles civil libertarians: the expansion of state power into new areas of our lives. The King’s Speech has introduced new legislation to combine health and social care records in one place, with GPs and hospitals required to share patient data. Phil Booth, the co-founder of privacy group medConfidential, argues this will change the patient-doctor relationship forever. Today, your health data belong to you – but just as council officers couldn’t resist snooping on your bins, bureaucrats with easy access to multiple databases will find the temptation irresistible, civil liberties groups fear. So is Palantir providing much-needed answers to Britain’s bureaucratic woes or is it an insidious Silicon Valley force handing ever more power to the state? ## A slow start Mosley isn’t blind to the power Palantir wields. He invites us to find a clue in the company’s name. “The palantíri were the seeing stones \[in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings\] and they are made by the goodies, the elves,” he says. “The technology then falls into the hands of the baddies, who then use the technology to do terrible things. That is Tolkien’s cautionary tale about technology.” Technology can be used for good or ill but “ultimately the agency rests with the individual or the state rather than with the technology itself”, Mosley adds. Created in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, Palantir sought to bring modern methods to data analysis. Years before “big data” or “data warehouse” became IT industry buzzwords, Palantir made a far-sighted judgement call. Thiel appointed a brilliant friend from law school called Alex Karp to run it. The seed money came from Thiel himself and the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. For its first few years, the CIA was its only customer and Palantir’s profile was subterranean. During this period and for some years afterwards, Karp – who has a Jewish father and an African-American mother and is severely dyslexic – identified as an outsider and a strong supporter of progressive causes. Yet Palantir’s low profile wasn’t solely down to its intelligence work. Winning contracts against the established consultancies and giants wasn’t easy. In the UK, it struggled to land a contract for years until it offered logistics support to the Covid vaccine rollout for a symbolic £1. Even after a public flotation in 2020, the company was struggling, falling back from its peak private valuation of $20bn. However, its fortunes turned as the US military sought out its data skills for a giant operations and logistics project called Project Maven. It also sought to widen its data-mining expertise into new civilian markets. As confidence returned, Palantir’s star rose. Today, its market value stands at more than $310bn, with the tech giant included in pension fund trackers. One Londoner invested his entire life savings in 10,000 Palantir shares, which are now worth around $2.2m. For years, Thiel was the only high-profile conservative in Silicon Valley and the only one to back Donald Trump in his first run for the US presidency. His chief executive didn’t seem so keen. Only two years ago, Karp was still backing Kamala Harris for president, having donated to Joe Biden’s campaign. But since the 2024 election, Karp has entered the limelight in a way that is unusual for a chief executive in his position. For decades, defence contractors in what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” were as anonymous as they could be. By contrast, Karp seems to relish controversy. He sees Palantir as a defender of Western values (unusually, it has refused to do business in or with China or Russia). He has publicly fantasised about using a drone to spray the company’s critics with “fentanyl-laced urine”. It was a curiously specific joke. “I eventually came to realise that he \[Karp\] needed enemies,” noted Michael Steinberger, Karp’s biographer, in his book The Philosopher In The Valley. Mosley sighs at the mention of the fentanyl fantasy. It can’t help win the hearts and minds of liberal civil servants. Yet doors that were shut for years have now begun to open. A £240m contract with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) boasted last year of bringing with it £1.5bn of inward investment. London will become Palantir’s European hub, creating 350 jobs, while up to £750m of further work has been promised over the next five years. A number of police forces across the UK are also using Palantir’s technology. The really big win came in late 2023, when a consortium led by Palantir saw off competition from IBM and Oracle to land a major data analytics contract with the NHS. It marked the first time Palantir had won such a large health contract and showed how far the company had come from the dimly lit rooms where CIA and Mossad analysts hunched over laptops. The £330m deal to build and run the FDP for NHS England is expected to be worth more than £1bn during its seven-year lifetime. Palantir’s pitch to politicians is that public services haven’t made the most of modern data analytics and AI. It promises to rectify that. ## Head start with the NHS On the seventh floor of Palantir’s Soho Square offices, it’s possible to get a taste of the dozens of applications being built on the company’s Foundry platform, including FDP apps (looking at synthetic data, rather than information on real people). Palantir taps into multiple databases and pools the information. Once located, the data is mapped on to a bespoke internal dictionary called an “ontology”, allowing a patient, police suspect or physical asset to be tracked. Ben, a former MoD planning official, says Palantir is replacing white boards, pens and transparent overlays with digital products for the first time in his field. The technology certainly has powerful applications, not least in healthcare. For example, developing a pathway for a cancer patient is an incredibly complicated and bespoke process. Yet the Foundry platform underpinning FDP aggregates several databases that would otherwise have to be accessed individually. Cancer 360, an app built on top of FDP, makes that laborious process much easier. Palantir’s most effective champion in the health service is Tom Bartlett, who built the FDP for NHS England before stepping down earlier this year. Bartlett, who is not paid by Palantir, is concerned that Britain could lose out on the potential of the technology because of political pressure. “The world of apps and the world of big data analysis have been two separate worlds – until now,” he explains. “Palantir collapses those layers into one. No competitor has done that.” Bartlett enthuses over recent events known as “hackathons” during which nurses, clinical doctors and paramedics have been given the opportunity to build apps. Booth, of medConfidential, who recently relaunched the No2ID campaign he successfully founded to fight Tony Blair’s ID cards, agrees that the NHS is doing something it wasn’t before. But he doesn’t think that Palantir has any unique advantage, just a head start. “There’s nothing special going on here,” he says. “Apache Spark is an open source software that has become the cornerstone of data analytics and Databricks is built on top of it,” he explains. “Palantir’s Foundry is just Apache Spark with a lobbying budget. Palantir is not a technology company at all.” It’s an opinion shared by Michael Burry, the American investor immortalised in the movie The Big Short for his unfashionable bet against the health of the US housing market in the mid-2000s. Burry argues that Palantir is a glorified consultancy firm rather than a true tech giant and that its stock is overvalued. He has placed bets of more than $1bn against Palantir and chipmaker Nvidia, another major winner from the AI boom. If their share prices fall, he stands to win big. Booth has another theory about Palantir’s success in the UK. “NHS England has banned competition, in effect,” he says. “If you are a low-performing cancer trust, you’ll be punished if you don’t use Palantir’s FDP.” An NHS spokesman said: “The Federated Data Platform is already joining up care, speeding up cancer diagnosis and ensuring thousands of additional patients can be treated each month, while saving money for NHS teams and taxpayers. “NHS England is working closely with local organisations to support its rollout so more patients can benefit, but there is no legal requirement for its use.” Some NHS teams that have invested heavily in data analytics agree. Manchester’s Integrated Care Board has developed a state-of-the-art system over several years, with input from specialists and the University of Manchester. Matt Hennessey, its chief intelligence and analytics officer, found that its own data analytics “exceeds anything the FDP currently offers” and that Palantir was two or three years away from being able to perform some of the capabilities it already has in use. Unsurprisingly, Mosley disagrees. “The FDP is deployed in Manchester and is operational in every trust in Greater Manchester,” he says. “The chief information officer is one of the biggest Palantir supporters, too.” Palantir’s biggest critic in Parliament is Martin Wrigley, the Liberal Democrat MP for Newton Abbot, who previously worked in software architecture for companies including French telecoms giant Orange. Wrigley, who led a recent Commons debate on Palantir, fears the company will become another IT procurement controversy akin to the Post Office Horizon scandal. “We are paying the supplier to hire Accenture, PwC, NHS experts and consultants to create a solution that we do not own,” he says. “It’s not just an expansion of the state, it’s giving that expansion to a monopoly provider.” Resistance among the trusts has been growing on WhatsApp groups, one well-connected source says. So who owns the system – the NHS or Palantir? And would health bosses find it easy to swap it out? “All of the logic that’s written to transform and harmonise or normalise that data within the FDP belongs to the NHS,” says Mosley. “Think of it as all the pipes and the plumbing, the transformations, all of that is also the NHS’s logic and the NHS’s IP.” Mosley likes to compare Palantir to Microsoft, which doesn’t own your Excel or Word documents. He argues that the NHS switching away from his company would be as seamless as cutting and pasting a spreadsheet, though he later concedes that it would still cause some pain. The firm confirms that it retains ownership of the Cancer 360 app, for example, as well as Optica, the new NHS discharge app. Dr Tito Castillo, of Agile Health Informatics, an author and data architect who has spent more than 35 years working with data and NHS institutions, finds Palantir’s key data dictionary or “ontology” to be quite opaque. Meanwhile, Wrigley has referred the NHS deal to public spending watchdog the National Audit Office. The Government has said it will reevaluate the FDP next spring to see whether it’s getting value for money, and Wrigley favours a slow extraction process. The MP argues that the UK should keep the software but not extend it to GPs and build a potential replacement. Bartlett, the former FDP lead, agrees that Palantir can be replaced. “From a technology perspective, there is no lock-in that you couldn’t get out of,” he says – although he warns it won’t be easy. The Government is too eager to accept inward investment from Silicon Valley and not see the long-term cost, he says, adding: “Palantir has a 20-year \[head\] start.” ## Where to next? So what does the UK want from Palantir? As Castillo argues, this is what should be asked before any big decisions are made. “We can all take the moral high ground about how dastardly Palantir is but it’s an immense distraction,” he says. “A more fundamental challenge is how the NHS approaches contracting with third parties or even decides what it wants.” Castillo adds: “There’s a genuine need for something like the FDP in the NHS. But it was never clearly articulated what problem they were trying to solve.” Critics fear that the 10-year plan for the NHS unveiled by Wes Streeting, who resigned as health secretary this week, already has the Benthamite, utilitarian shadow of the workhouse. Palantir has been winnowing down waiting lists to help meet its targets, with tens of thousands of patients removed. In NHS-speak, this is known as “patient-led validation”. Sometimes the drive to efficiency can seem callous, too. The Telegraph revealed this month that the NHS started informing patients that they have life-changing conditions, such as cancer or Parkinson’s disease, through its app. It’s the proposed changes in patient-doctor relationships that may represent the most lasting impact of Palantir. Today, your GP practice is – in the official jargon – the legally designated “data controller” of your GP health record. New laws outlined in the King’s Speech create a “Single Patient Record” which swallows up this GP record. It means control of your personal medical history will pass to the health department, overseen by James Murray, Streeting’s replacement as health secretary. “GPs preserve a confidential relationship between the patient and doctor that has existed for hundreds of years,” says Booth. “The GP has duties of care, duties of confidence, a knowledge of medicine and a knowledge of you. “Labour’s 10-year plan will replace all that with neighbourhood health centres, which have no relationship between you and a family doctor. You will rock up and a doctor you may never have seen before will use an AI to make your note, and your whole medical history will be under the data controllership of the secretary of state for health.” Critics fear the NHS’s single patient record will soon become the single Palantir record. None of the many Palantir applications visible in its Soho Square offices would be unusual in a typical private enterprise. But they are unusual in public services and the military, where functions have been split across rival services, agencies or bodies. There are hundreds of chief executives in the NHS, for example. Here – and for the first time in some cases – Palantir is offering what the state could not. This creates a powerful centripetal force, pulling the state into one entity. So is a bigger or more intrusive state simply the price for efficient public services? Mosley says that for too long, societal decisions have been made without the public’s consent. He describes a situation in which “technologists, self-appointed, unelected, are deciding what a state can or can’t do”. Palantir, he says, operates within these strict boundaries. As Trump orders US tech companies to cut off access via executive order, allies are now wary of being hit with a “kill switch”. Imagine, for example, British forces defending the Falkland Islands against aggression being cut off from Amazon, Microsoft or Palantir in mid-flight. Bartlett, a powerful and persuasive defender of Palantir against the conspiracy theorists and political opponents, surprisingly agrees. Rather than lashing out at US tech giants, he argues, perhaps we should be finding answers closer to home. “Politicians should stop talking about Palantir and start talking about how we could create a British Silicon Valley to compete against the American giants instead,” he says. ### Related Stocks - [PLTR.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTR.US.md) - [PLOO.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLOO.US.md) - [PLTW.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTW.US.md) - [PLT.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLT.US.md) - [PLTU.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTU.US.md) - [PTIR.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PTIR.US.md) - [PLTG.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTG.US.md) - [PLTD.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTD.US.md) - [PLTZ.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTZ.US.md) ## Related News & Research - [Palantir Stock’s Fog of War Creates an Aggressive Buying Opportunity](https://longbridge.com/en/news/286434504.md) - [Trump’s Palantir investment sparks ethics and market debate](https://longbridge.com/en/news/286793179.md) - [iA Global Asset Management Inc. 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