Palantir Technologies, the U.S.-based data surveillance firm long mired in controversy over its ties to human rights violations in occupied Palestinian territories, has secured more than £670 million in public sector contracts across the United Kingdom’s civilian and defence industries since 2020, triggering fierce debate over both ethical accountability and national security risks from lawmakers and advocacy groups.
The largest of these agreements include a £330 million data platform contract with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), a £240 million military AI deal with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), and a £15 million contract linked to Britain’s national nuclear deterrent programme. Transparency advocates have documented at least 34 additional Palantir contracts across UK public sectors, including law enforcement, child social care, refugee resettlement initiatives, and environmental management, with many details of the agreements undisclosed to the public.
International scrutiny of Palantir’s activities intensified after the company announced a partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defence in January 2024 to deploy its technology for “war-related missions” in Gaza, where Israeli drone strikes using targeted technology have killed hundreds of civilian non-combatants, including journalists and humanitarian aid workers. When confronted with accusations that his company’s tools facilitated the deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza earlier this year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp publicly responded, “mostly terrorists, that’s true”.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese concluded that Karp’s comment confirms the company has “executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-a-vis the unlawful use of force by Israel” in occupied Palestinian territories. Separately, the U.S. Pentagon has launched an investigation into whether Palantir’s AI-powered targeting system Maven was involved in a February U.S. double-tap missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed more than 170 people, the majority of whom were children.
Human rights campaigners have condemned Palantir’s expanding footprint in UK public life. “Palantir’s software has been used to support Israel’s ongoing genocide and apartheid in occupied Gaza… a company profiting from human rights abuses should have no place in British public services, including in our NHS,” said Kristyan Benedict, crisis response manager at Amnesty International UK. “The contracts should be terminated and replaced with providers that are not contributing to genocide, apartheid and other international crimes.”
Beyond its role in the Middle East conflict, Palantir has faced repeated criticism for its extreme ideological positioning. In a 22-point public manifesto outlining the company’s core goals, Palantir was widely condemned for promoting ethnic supremacist rhetoric, claiming that “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive” and asserting “No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than [the US]”. The manifesto also openly embraced the development of AI-powered autonomous weapons.
Founded by right-wing U.S. tech billionaire Peter Thiel, with initial partial funding from the Central Intelligence Agency, Palantir is deeply tied to far-right U.S. political networks. Thiel, who once famously declared “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”, is a top donor to the Republican Party and hosted a lavish celebration for Donald Trump’s 2025 presidential inauguration at his Washington D.C. home, attended by Vice President JD Vance and leading tech CEOs including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Recent leaked documents have also exposed Thiel’s secretive annual “Dialog” retreats for 200 of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful figures, which have hosted panels on cult-building, extreme political preparation for World War III, and exploitative gender dynamics.
Newly unsealed records from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation have also revealed unreported historical ties between Palantir’s leadership and the convicted sex offender. Epstein was the one who first introduced former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Thiel in 2013 and advised Barak to invest in or partner with Palantir. The records also confirm close ties between Epstein and disgraced former British ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, whose lobbying firm Global Counsel has long counted Palantir as a key client. Mandelson accompanied UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on a visit to Palantir’s Washington D.C. headquarters in February 2025, and no meeting minutes have been released to the public, despite repeated Freedom of Information requests from independent media outlets including Middle East Eye.
Just months after the Washington visit, in December 2025, Palantir secured its £240 million no-bid strategic partnership with the MoD to “boost military AI” and develop an integrated battlefield “kill chain” to improve attack lethality, a deal three times larger than a 2022 contract for similar work. When questioned about the non-disclosure of the 2025 Palantir briefing, Starmer described it as a “routine meeting”, while Mandelson called the subsequent US-UK Technology Prosperity Deal that included the Palantir partnership “my personal pride and joy”.
Critics warn that Palantir’s penetration of the UK’s most sensitive national security systems, including its nuclear deterrent programme, creates unacceptable risks for the country, particularly given the UK government’s ongoing intelligence and military support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. “The British government is already deeply complicit in the genocide in Gaza. In making public services dependent on Palantir’s proprietary technology, successive UK governments will be less able to break free from this sordid company, and from its alignment with US foreign policy and militarism more broadly,” said Sam Perlo-Freedman, research coordinator at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT). “The willingness of the British government to embrace Palantir shows their prioritisation of the interests of the arms industry, and of corporate power more generally.”
In a statement to Middle East Eye, an MoD spokesperson defended the contracting process, saying, “There are robust processes in place to ensure government contracts are awarded fairly and transparently, including for the direct award of contracts. Commercial decisions are a matter for individual departments made based on their individual needs.” Palantir UK CEO Louis Mosley has maintained that none of the Israeli military systems publicly reported to be conducting targeting operations in Gaza use Palantir software, though he has acknowledged the company does supply software to the Israeli military.
One of the most contentious of Palantir’s UK contracts is its 2023 £330 million agreement to build a centralised patient data platform for NHS England, which is up for renewal in 2027. Thiel has a long history of open hostility to the UK’s public health system, once saying the NHS “makes people sick” and describing British public support for the service as “Stockholm syndrome”. In early June 2025, cross-party MPs on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee called on the government to exercise the 2027 break clause in the contract and replace Palantir with an in-house UK-developed alternative, warning that growing public sector reliance on Palantir creates an “unacceptable point of weakness” that could leave critical services “at the mercy” of foreign actors.
Palantir first secured its foothold in the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it offered a struggling, cash-poor NHS an initial £1 contract to test its technology. Then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock used special ministerial powers to bypass national patient confidentiality rules to allow Palantir to process patient data. A 2023 report from the National Audit Office highlighted that the government’s chief commercial officer warned Palantir’s low-cost initial offer to gain a market foothold violated public procurement rules requiring open competition.
Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at UK tech campaign group Foxglove, described this as a deliberate “land and expand” strategy, similar to a free-trial subscription model that locks public bodies into long-term reliance on Palantir’s services and allows the company to raise prices over time. “This might seem like a good deal, but with Big Tech there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Campbell said. The strategy has already been called into question over a lobbying scandal: earlier this year, the Department for Health and Social Care’s permanent secretary Samantha Jones was forced to apologise for failing to declare past consultancy work with a Palantir partner firm while overseeing the awarding of the NHS contract. A DHSC spokesperson said Jones had no involvement in the contracting process and stepped down from all private sector roles before taking her position. NHS England maintains the contract was awarded through a “rigorous, competitive” tender process.
Mosley has accused critics of prioritising “ideology over patient safety”, but multiple NHS hospital trusts have rejected Palantir’s technology, saying it would reduce rather than improve digital functionality. Campbell argues the ideological alignment of the company cannot be separated from the contract. “Ultimately, if Palantir is embedded across our vital public services, and the UK’s defence and security, and one day Trump decides he wants to exert some pressure by threatening to pull the plug, who are they going to listen to?”
Concerns have also been raised over unregulated cross-sector data sharing between Palantir’s civilian and military systems. The company recently signed a $30 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and independent tech outlet 404 Media uncovered that Palantir is developing a tool called “Elite” that pulls data from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services records to locate undocumented people for deportation. The Doctors’ Association UK has warned that Palantir’s NHS data platform Foundry could be linked to Gotham, Palantir’s military-grade targeting software, creating unacceptable risks for patient confidentiality.
Palantir’s growing presence extends to UK local government as well. In May 2025, Labour-run Coventry City Council renewed a £750,000 contract for Palantir to provide AI tools to summarise social worker notes for children’s services, despite opposition from councillors and trade unions who raised “serious ethical questions” about the partnership. A council spokesperson said the decision followed a “comprehensive strategic review” and that “strong safeguards are in place” to protect resident data, with no automated decision-making about individual cases.
Financial questions have also been raised about the cost of Palantir’s contracts to UK taxpayers. Palantir initially provided its services for the UK government’s Homes for Ukraine refugee hosting programme for free for six months, before securing subsequent 12-month contracts that rose from £4.5 million to £5.5 million year-over-year. In 2026, a UK government department confirmed it saved millions of pounds after replacing Palantir’s system with an in-house built alternative. Additionally, Palantir paid an effective tax rate of just 8% on its £25.3 million in pre-tax UK profits in 2024, far below the 25% statutory rate for large businesses.
In law enforcement, London Mayor Sadiq Khan initially blocked a proposed £50 million Metropolitan Police contract with Palantir in May 2025, citing clear, serious violations of procurement rules and noting the deal failed to demonstrate value for money, as well as his own “concerns about using public money to support firms who act contrary to London’s values”. But Khan reversed his decision after Palantir launched legal action against the veto, approving a 12-month pilot project with an option for extension. A 2025 investigation by Liberty Investigates found that a Palantir contract with East of England police forces will build a mass surveillance network that pulls together sensitive personal data including citizens’ political opinions, religious beliefs, health records, trade union membership, sexual orientation, and race. When the Good Law Project, a UK legal advocacy and campaign group, sent freedom of information requests to all 45 UK police forces, three quarters refused to confirm or deny whether they hold a contract with Palantir, deepening transparency concerns.
Multiple human rights and open government advocates warn that Palantir’s expanding UK surveillance operations pose a fundamental threat to civil liberties, particularly amid the rise of far-right political forces in the UK. “A world where all the governments want hyper surveillance is a world where Palantir is super profitable,” said Duncan McCann, head of tech and data at the Good Law Project. McCann noted that the core risk is not that Palantir will sell public data, but that it enables governments to use mass surveillance for authoritarian ends, a dynamic that is particularly dangerous as the far-right Reform Party pushes for mass deportation programmes. “Ultimately, surveillance works well with the new far right, and it works really well for Palantir, and that is why they seem such great bedfellows. This is why it has evolved into a firm which is turbocharging fascism and authoritarianism.”