Palantir Technologies is a public American company that specializes in big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp in 2003.
The company is known for projects in the area of defence and counter-terrorism, with its projects used by offices in the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense. Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve state and local governments, as well as private companies in the financial and healthcare industries. In the UK, Palantir has been focused on working within the NHS on projects.
Last updated: March 2026
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The drive to remove the US company Palantir from the NHS in the UK ramped up in the last few weeks, with the release of a briefing by the health justice charity Medact. The report, backed by doctors, lawyers, patients and human rights groups from the No Palantir in the NHS campaign, including the Good Law Project, Privacy International, and Corporate Watch, and supported by Amnesty International, was sent to hospital trusts and integrated care boards nationwide.
The report urges NHS trusts and ICBs not to implement the Federated Data Platform (FDP) developed by Palantir and for NHS England to terminate the contract. It notes that partnering with Palantir risks weakening patients’ trust while “driving out locally tailored and trusted data solutions”.
The briefing said the “highly interoperable nature” of Palantir’s software could enable “data-driven state abuses of power”, including US-style ICE raids.
In 2027, the initial three year contract with Palantir is up for review and at this point NHS England could end the contract. An FT article (29th March 2026) noted that the government is coming under increasing pressure to trigger the break clause in 2027 and have sought advice on how to do this.
Strategy
Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook. Some initial funding came from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Palantir’s software programs process vast amounts of data, enabling clients to identify previously undetectable patterns and connections or, as the company puts it, convert “massive amounts of information into knowledge that reflects their world”.
The company has big contracts within the US public sector. Its most controversial contracts in recent years have been with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). It works with an ICE subdivision called Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which focuses on tackling drug smuggling, money laundering and human trafficking. Other US government clients include the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service, the US financial watchdog and the Department for Health and Human Services. It also has a contract with the US army to modernise its battlefield intelligence system and is reportedly working with the Pentagon on Project Maven, its artificial intelligence programme. In early 2024, Palantir signed a deal with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to provide “support for war-related missions”.
Palantir helps several western governments combat terrorism and governments account for more than half of its revenue, with clients including the UK Ministry of Defence.
Thiel is a libertarian billionaire who has used his fortune to support rightwing candidates in the US, including Trump’s successful bid for the presidency in 2016.
The head of Palantir’s London office is Louis Mosley, grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of the late former president of Formula One’s governing body, Max Mosley, who became a privacy campaigner later in life.
Financials
Palantir has reported full year 2024 results. For the year ended December 31, 2024, the company had $2.9 billion in revenue, up 29% on the year ended December 31, 2023, at $2.2 billion in revenue. In 2024, the company's gross profit was $2.3 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2023.
Contracts
Federated data platform contract award
In November 2023, as was widely predicted, NHS England awarded Palantir a contract beginning in November 2023 and finishing in February 2027 to set up and operate the “federated data platform” (FDP). The contract includes support from Accenture, PwC, NECS and Carnall Farrar, according to a press release from NHS England.
The contract published on Contract Finder is worth £182 million to Palantir over the period, however this could reach £330 million. In a press release NHS England said that “In the first contract year, investment is expected to be at least £25.6m. Over the contractual period of seven years, there will be up to £330m investment in the Federated Data Platform and associated services.”
The contract itself was published in late December 2023, but was heavily redacted, with 200 pages completely blacked-out, particularly in sections related to personal data protection and service recipients. This raised once again concerns over transparency and data protection with critics arguing that the move - in both redactions and timing - does not align with NHS England's commitment to learning from transparency issues.
The separate NHS Privacy Enhancing Technology contract was awarded to IQVIA in November 2023.
The contract notice for the platform states that the data platform will be an “essential enabler to transformational improvements” across the NHS and will be an “ecosystem of technologies and services”. The contract notice was published in January 2023 and companies had until 9 February 2023 to submit bids.
In November 2024, the FT reported that the adoption of Palantir’s FDP accelerated across England the previous six months but has fallen behind internal goals for its rollout set by NHS England. A total of 87 acute NHS trusts and 28 integrated care boards (ICBs) have signed up to use the FDP, according to information supplied to the Financial Times by NHS England, which wants all 42 ICBs to sign up.
By the end of February 2026, 123 Hospital Trusts were live on the FDP, according to NHS England. However, many of the country's leading trusts are not using the FDP.
NHS England has pushed for the full use of the FDP by April 2026. Some of the NHS’s biggest acute trusts, however, had not adopted the platform by March 2026, including University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation Trust, Guy’s and St Thomas’ FT, the Northern Care Alliance FT, Nottingham University Hospitals Trust, the Royal Free London group, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals FT, University College London Hospitals FT, and Frimley Health FT.
In addition, there was a number of smaller but highly prestigious specialist acute trusts that were also not using the FDP. They include leading cancer specialist the Royal Marsden FT and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children FT.
History of the FDP contract
In November 2022, NHS England split the £400mn plus data contract into four parts: provision of the platform; privacy enhancing technology; an app store-style marketplace and training; implementation and deployment of the tech. The provision of the platform part of the contract is the most valuable, worth £360mn over five years with the possibility of two 12-month extensions, worth an extra £120mn. Ming Tang, chief data and analytics officer at NHS England, told the FT that the NHS had split up the procurement to “safeguard” the service. She told the FT that "Whoever processes the platform cannot own the privacy enhancing technology so the key transfer [of data] is safe.”
Suppliers learned they would be barred from bidding for all parts of the project in August 2022, according to a document seen by the FT. It is unclear whether splitting up the contract was intended to limit Palantir's role or based on advice from procurement and data security experts. In August 2023, openDemocracy saw leaked emails from 2020 where more than one NHS employee referred to Palantir as if it had already won the contract and was the recipient of the funding.
In March 2023 lawyers acting on behalf of The Doctors’ Association UK, National Pensioners’ Convention, and Just Treatment threatened legal action over NHS England’s procurement of the federated data platform, as questions about patient consultation and compliance with data protection law remain unanswered.
Soon after the contract was awarded, Foxglove, the legal company involved, said it has sent a letter to the Government saying it urgently needs to explain how the FDP will comply with the law, and if it refuses it will go to court.
Earlier association with the NHS
Palantir's association with the NHS began in March 2020 when it was contracted by the NHS to help develop the NHS Covid-19 Data Store for a fee of £1. The aim of the Data Store was to help manage Covid-19 data and shape the government’s response to the virus.
The contract was due to expire in June 2020 but was extended for four months at a cost of £1million.
Then in December 2020, it was revealed that Palantir had been awarded a £23million contract to continue its work on the NHS Covid-19 Data Store. It commenced on 12 December and was due to run until December 2022.
In January 2023, NHS England extended its contract with Palantir for the system the company built at the height of the pandemic to give it time to resolve the twice-delayed procurement of a data platform to support health service reorganisation and tackle the massive care backlog.
This extension of the contract was despite the UK government promise in March 2021 not to expand the roles of Palantir's NHS England database without public consultation under threat of a judicial review from the news website openDemocracy, backed by Foxglove.
In a contract notice NHS England said the contract was extended until September 2023 in a deal worth £11.5 million.
Concerns
There are numerous concerns regarding the UK government doing business with Palantir. A full evaluation can be found in the Medact report, but they can be categorised into four broad areas:
Allegations of complicity in human rights abuses and genocide
Palantir’s software is allegedly being used by states to carry out human rights abuses and other controversial or unethical practices. This includes its use by the US government in military, policing and border enforcement operations, as well as by the Israeli Defence Forces in abuses against Palestinians. In 2025, Palantir was named by the UN Special Rapporteur as an enabler of “unlawful use of force”. Amnesty International named Palantir as one of multiple companies enabling or profiteering from genocide, occupation, and apartheid.
Activity surrounding procurement of government contracts
The award of contracts in the NHS to Palantir has been tainted by accusations of aggressive and widespread lobbying.
Palantir’s approach to gaining contracts in the UK has included meetings with senior government ministers and NHS officials, including Matt Hancock, when he was a government minister, and Matthew Gould, who was CEO of NHSX. The company’s first contracts for the work during Covid-19 were awarded without competitive tenders.
Palantir has also been accused of lobbying of civil servants and a “revolving door” for multiple NHS executives, such as Dr Indra Joshi, who was director of AI for NHSX until 2022, who then took a role as director of health, research and AI with Palantir, and Paul Howells who was the leader of the National Data Programme between 2018 and 2021 for NHS Wales before joining Palantir to work on health and care.
One of the most high profile of these NHS executives is Matthew Swindells, who left his NHS role as Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Operations and Information in 2019 and two months later was working with Palantir through the firm Global Counsel (Peter Mandelson’s firm). Yet from April 2022 until March 2026, Swindells was also in the highly influential position of joint chair for all four acute Trusts in North West London, including Chelsea and Westminster. Despite the Trust board excluding Swindells from decision-making that involved Palantir, he is reported to have privately urged colleagues to add more patient data into a Palantir-built platform at the same time as he was being paid to advise the US technology company.
In January 2024, the Good Law Project (GLP) reported that NHS England is to investigate whether Palantir violated the terms of its contract to run the FDP, after GLP discovered that Palantir had covertly launched an influencer campaign which targeted GLP. The campaign run by PR company Topham Guerin and marketing agency, Disrupt, involved approaching social media influencers to ask them what they would like to be paid to take part in a campaign to “raise awareness about Palantir’s contract with the NHS”. Palantir was not to be mentioned by the influencers and they would be sent tweets and videos to post.
The campaign was supposedly to “clear up misinformation" in the UK media. If influencers expressed an interest in the campaign they were sent the briefing document – “TG x Palantir”. The briefing document targets GLP specifically, and describes it as “a not-for-profit campaign organisation” who are “extremely critical of the contract being awarded to Palantir”.
Political profile of leading Palantir executives
Palantir’s senior leadership are open about their right-wing political beliefs. Peter Thiel is a leading figure in the American far-right movement and a supporter of Donald Trump. Thiel contributed to Trump’s election campaigns in both 2016. He has also claimed that the NHS “makes people sick” and British affection for the health service is akin to “Stockholm syndrome.”
Concerns with implementing the FDP designed by Palantir
There are concerns over the FDP designed by Palantir, which include: the reputational risk to the NHS of using Palantir; the lack of staff support for the FDP (due to the Palantir involvement); and the privacy of the data held on the system, due to the product’s design.
The reputational risk to the NHS and lack of support for the FDP are all bound up together due to the involvement of Palantir with contracts for warfare, policing, border enforcement and surveillance. This will affect the success of the FDP in the long-term. In October 2025, a senior source told HSJ that there was a fear that the controversy over Palantir’s involvement would slow the use of data to help improve NHS care.
Good Law Project’s campaign Say No to Palantir has seen more than 50,000 patients writing to local trust boards urging them not to adopt FDP.
The British Medical Association (BMA) passed a motion at its 2025 AGM opposing the roll out of the FDP based on Palantir’s track record. In February 2026, the BMA announced it will tell doctors to limit engagement with the FDP because of its links with Palantir.
Data privacy concerns revolve around whether patient data will be sufficiently protected. Palantir’s technology is known for its ability to move data across systems and link multiple government datasets. There is concern that the FDP technology could enable government departments, such as the Home Office and police departments, to access confidential patient information.
The sharing of data between government departments in this way is not legal at present, but there are concerns that this might change if other politicians are in power.
In a Guardian article it was noted that Reform UK has already put forward the plan, if it got into power, of introducing legislation to enable the automatic sharing of data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police with the view to mass deportations.
Palantir would like such an overarching system for the UK government; in March 2025, in a witness statement provided to the UK covid-19 public inquiry, Palantir’s UK executive vice president Louis Mosley said ministers should invest in a system to “sit on top of, and be able to integrate with, the multitude of source systems across the local and central government, healthcare and other bodies of national strategic importance.”
Opposition to Palantir
Foxglove, a UK legal campaign group that focuses on accountability in the technology industry, MedConfidential, which campaigns for confidentiality in healthcare, the news website OpenDemocracy, and others have all been involved with opposition to Palantir's involvement in the NHS.
Cori Crider, a director at Foxglove, told The Guardian, “A firm like that has no place being the ‘operating system for the NHS’ – period,” adding that the company “makes no secret of its desire to keep profiting from war and surveillance”.
Crider said they have concerns about the Federated Data Platform, including how much confidential patient data is going to be swept in, who is going to have access, and on what terms? Foxglove sent a legal letter seeking answers, and received almost no detail in return.
Phil Booth, founder of medConfidential, says Palantir is the favourite for the contract because it already carries out some of the work envisioned in the FDP. But Booth told The Guardian that Palantir’s work outside the UK should give the NHS pause when it considers awarding the contract. “Is this really a company we want to have at the heart of our NHS? You cannot divorce a piece of software from the company that makes it.”
Concerns over what happens to NHS patient data has continued since Palantir was awarded the contract for the FDP. Wes Streeting, health and care secretary, has said that he wants care records to be held centrally so that medical professionals always have them to hand. The Good Law Project and other campaigners want Streeting to rule out any involvement with Palantir.
In May 2025, the BMA in a formal resolution announced its opposition to Palantir’s involvement in the NHS was a matter of good governance, not ideology. Dr David Wrigley, the deputy chair of the BMA’s general practitioners committee told the Guardian:
“If Palantir’s software is being used to target individuals in immigration enforcement and is being deployed in active conflict zones, then that’s completely incompatible with the values we uphold in the delivery of care.”
The drive to remove the US company Palantir from the NHS in the UK ramped up in March 2026, with the release of a briefing by the health justice charity Medact. The report, backed by doctors, lawyers, patients and human rights groups from the No Palantir in the NHS campaign, including the Good Law Project, Privacy International, and Corporate Watch, and supported by Amnesty International, was sent to hospital trusts and integrated care boards nationwide.
The report urges NHS trusts and ICBs not to implement the Federated Data Platform (FDP) developed by Palantir and for NHS England to terminate the contract. It notes that partnering with Palantir risks weakening patients’ trust while “driving out locally tailored and trusted data solutions”.
The briefing said the “highly interoperable nature” of Palantir’s software could enable “data-driven state abuses of power”, including US-style ICE raids.
In 2027, the initial three year contract with Palantir is up for review and at this point NHS England could end the contract.
