A bipartisan group of UK politicians is sounding the alarm over the country’s partnership with the data analytics company Palantir.
In a report published Tuesday, the 11 members of Parliament’s Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee warned that the country’s ballooning reliance on Palantir’s technology “represents an unacceptable point of weakness” that could hand the company overwhelming bargaining power in future negotiations.
“We know that with vendor lock-in, over time, we’ll get more expensive and worse services,” Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the committee and member of Parliament, tells WIRED. “It’s a trap that has to be avoided.”
In a worst-case scenario, a deeply entrenched supplier could threaten to withhold service as a way of imposing its will, Onwurah believes. “That could bring public services and our economy to a halt,” she says. “That’s a huge risk.”
Though the committee says that its objections to Palantir are not ideologically motivated, the report also describes a “clear mismatch with UK values.” It points to politically charged comments by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel—who in 2023 described the British public’s affection for the NHS as “Stockholm syndrome”—and a 22-point manifesto based on a recent book by CEO Alex Karp, which advocates for an overriding fealty to the US and its interests.
“We have a key vendor saying they will exercise technology in accordance with their political mission,” Onwurah says. “If what the UK is trying to do in our NHS or our defense does not align with Palantir’s political objectives, we clearly can’t depend upon them as a supplier.”
To minimize the risks, the committee recommended that the National Health Service, one of Palantir’s primary partners in the UK, activates a clause in its contract next February that would terminate the relationship early.
The UK government began to use Palantir’s technology in 2020 as it scrambled to map the spread of the Covid-19 virus and route medical equipment across the country. Since then, Palantir and its partners have won contracts worth a combined $750 million with the NHS and the Ministry of Defense, among others. The company has touted its ability to enable “innovation and fast-paced problem solving” in the UK public sector.
The report outlines similar dependencies on US-based cloud providers Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, and Fujitsu, the Japanese company at the center of the Post Office Horizon scandal. But “Palantir concerns us most,” the committee wrote.
Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The relationship has attracted increased scrutiny of late over the company’s work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as the US and Israeli militaries. The manifesto based on Karp’s book further inflamed concerns about the company’s politics.
“They’re not a company that should be anywhere near British public services,” says Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at Foxglove, a nonprofit that has previously campaigned for the NHS to back out of its contract with Palantir. “Do you want to be giving a company of this kind—with these openly expressed opinions and ideologies—a central role in the UK state that it may get harder and harder to remove them from?”
Appearing before the committee in July last year, Louis Mosley, who heads up Palantir’s European business, distanced the company from Thiel’s comments about the NHS. Palantir’s objective is to “support democratically elected governments in delivering the mandate that they have been elected to deliver,” he said. “We represent a diversity of political views and do not take political positions as a company.”
Some proponents have argued that political grievances risk derailing the UK government’s stated aim to turn the UK into a “truly digital state” and improve the efficiency of a beleaguered NHS.
But any government entrusting sensitive data to a third-party vendor needs to be confident it will not act against its interests, others argue.
“These companies are such a size, we can’t really inspect what they’re doing,” says Eerke Boiten, a professor of cybersecurity at De Montfort University. “If data needs to be operated on, in 99 percent of cases the provider will need to be able to see the data. That means you have to trust them.”
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