Palantir and the NHS: Why a Military-Tech Giant Has No Place in Our Health Service
Gabriel Huland
It is not every day that you see activists leafleting outside a hospital. When I arrived at King’s College Hospital on a Wednesday morning, one of them approached me and handed me a blue leaflet. It was about the campaign to kick Palantir out of the NHS. I was not the only one who was curious: many passers-by stopped, took a leaflet and listened attentively to what the activists had to say. But what is Palantir, and why are campaigners so determined to keep its technology out of the health service?
Palantir is a US company founded in 2003 to build software to integrate and manage data. Its relationship with the NHS began during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the company was brought in to help build the NHS datastore. Its initial four-month contract in 2020 cost the government just £1, but this quickly expanded to £1.5 million for a further six months and, by December 2020, to a £23.5 million Department of Health contract. The relationship deepened considerably in November 2023, when NHS England awarded a Palantir-led consortium a seven-year contract worth up to £330 million to develop and operate the Federated Data Platform (FDP).
The FDP is intended to connect health data held across different NHS systems and provide applications addressing operational and clinical problems such as reducing surgical waiting lists and accelerating cancer treatment. It should also create an analytical platform through which patterns in health data can be identified. However, feedback from NHS workers has raised serious questions about the effectiveness of the FDP. NHS analysts and clinicians have described the platform as slow, difficult to use and, in some cases, less functional than existing systems. Also, usage data suggests that many NHS trusts that officially signed up to the FDP make little or no use of its applications.
Since its foundation, Palantir has been closely intertwined with the US national-security state and the wider military-industrial complex. Peter Thiel conceived the company as a response to the post-9/11 security environment, marketing its technology as a means of integrating and analysing large quantities of government data to identify terrorist networks. In fact, its first outside investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm, and the CIA became its first customer. Palantir subsequently cultivated extensive connections with the US political, intelligence and defence establishments, employing former government and intelligence officials and promoting its Gotham software for intelligence and security applications.
Palantir has become deeply embedded in key areas of the US federal government, including defence, immigration enforcement and data integration. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the company earned approximately $700 million from US government contracts. The company is also closely connected to Israel’s security apparatus. It has a partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defence for “war-related missions” and reports allegations by human-rights organisations that its software has been integrated into Israeli military targeting systems in Gaza.
Palantir’s leadership openly presents the company as an integral part of the Western defence and security infrastructure. Its CEO, Alex Karp, has become a vocal advocate for the use of artificial intelligence to strengthen US military power, arguing that technological superiority is essential for the United States and its allies to prevail over their geopolitical adversaries. The result is a company whose commercial expansion is deeply connected to state defence, intelligence and security spending. Palantir is at the intersection of Silicon Valley, the national-security state and the contemporary military-industrial complex.
Health data is one of our most valuable public assets and should therefore be entrusted only to organisations that have the confidence of the public. In the wrong hands, such data could become a powerful tool for surveillance, the identification and targeting of vulnerable groups, mass deportations, or private profit.
The future of Palantir’s contract with NHS England could be decided in February 2027, when the government will have the opportunity to exercise a break clause contained in the seven-year agreement. A break clause is a contractual provision that allows one of the parties to terminate an agreement before its scheduled expiry. Pressure on the government to use this provision has been growing. In June 2026, the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee called on the government to exercise the clause, citing concerns about Palantir’s expanding role across the British public sector and what it described as a “clear mismatch with UK values”.
The following month, the Health and Social Care Committee also recommended ending the contract in 2027, pointing to “serious mistrust” of Palantir’s Federated Data Platform among both the public and medical professionals. Against this background, the “No Palantir in Our NHS” campaign is calling on NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Boards to refuse to adopt Palantir’s technology, arguing that the company’s involvement in military and security operations associated with alleged human-rights violations makes it an inappropriate partner for the NHS. It is now in the hands of the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to exercise the break clause and respect the wishes of a considerable section of healthcare workers and the wider public.
The campaign is also building international links to emphasise that Palantir’s role in public services is not simply a UK issue. Palestinian trade unions, for example, have called on the NHS to end its relationship with Palantir because of the company’s involvement with the Israeli military. With enough organising and awareness creation at the local level, we can ensure that NHS England ends its partnership with Palantir. However, this can only be achieved if we strengthen the campaign in our communities.
Further reading: Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin, “‘This Looks Absolutely Rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS,” London Review of Books, 2026.
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