US tech giant Palantir has wrapped its tentacles around the British state, securing major contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the NHS in the last three years. However, many are questioning the transparency and procurement process of such deals, and asking whether the company’s ties to Peter Mandelson, Israel and Ice could derail the UK.
The company was criticised this week by hedge fund manager Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale in the film “The Big Short”. He claimed that the tech firm had “systematically unreliable” third-party language models.
In a 10,000-word essay on Substack, he said that the company’s $300 billion valuation will fall by more than two thirds once others realise that “Emperor Palantir has no clothes”.
What is Palantir?
Founded in 2003, Palantir is a technology company that sells software that “processes large sets of data” to help clients, including governments, “find patterns and make operational decisions”, said The Times.
Since it launched its “artificial intelligence platform” in 2023, it has recorded a “surge in sales growth”. The platform has allowed the integration of large language models created by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic into customers’ datasets.
Since this pivot three years ago, it has become a “stock market darling”, rising to a valuation of around $300 billion. Last year it “reported annual sales of $4.5 billion, up 56% year-on-year”.
What is its relationship with the UK?
In December, Palantir signed a contract with the MoD worth £240 million to continue its data analytics relationship. The contract is believed to be worth “three times more” than a previous MoD agreement signed in 2022, said the Financial Times. In 2023, Palantir, as leader of a consortium, also won a seven-year £330 million contract to help manage patient data across the NHS.
In briefings to Health Secretary Wes Streeting in June 2025, Department of Health and Social Care officials feared that Palantir’s associations with the Israeli military and Ice’s operations in the US would hinder the roll-out of the company’s Federated Data Platform in the NHS, according to documents seen by The Guardian. This would mean the contract would not offer value for money for the UK government.
This has arguably materialised. According to NHS data, the number of organisations within the health service using Palantir’s technology has increased from 118 to 151 since June last year. However, this is “well short of the target of 240 by the end of this year”.
Doctors are now being actively told “how to limit engagement with the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP)” because of the “controversial” ties with Palantir, said the British Medical Journal. Given the US company’s “track record” with immigration enforcement and “risks to patient trust” and “data security”, there must be a “complete break” between Palantir technologies and the NHS, British Medical Association chair of council Tom Dolphin told the BMJ.
A spokesperson for Palantir said that its software is “helping to deliver better public services in the UK”, including “delivering 99,000 more NHS operations and reducing hospital discharge delays by 15%”.
What are the concerns?
This week, the government came under pressure to review the MoD contract, due to Peter Mandelson’s links to the company, said The Times.
Mandelson co-founded and held shares in the lobbying firm Global Counsel, which worked with Palantir. Mandelson, as the UK’s ambassador to the US at the time, helped arrange a visit by Keir Starmer to Palantir’s showroom while he was in Washington in February last year and accompanied the PM on the visit.
During the visit, Starmer met Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the company’s UK chief Louis Mosley. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the FT that this should be “looked at very, very closely”, as the meetings “were not minuted” and she said that the MoD deal last year was a “direct grant of £240 milllion – not a tender, not a bid”.
Palantir has shown an interest in the British state in other ways, too. Last year it hired four ex-MoD officials, said openDemocracy, as part of its “revolving door” recruitment, where firms “appoint outgoing ministers, senior civil servants and special advisers to lobbying or advisory posts”. Mosley also joined the MoD’s Industrial Joint Council, which the government describes as its “main strategic mechanism for defence sector engagement”.
More broadly, the £240 million MoD contract has “renewed a debate about Britain’s dependence on American technology”, said Politico. Despite promises from the MoD that Palantir’s AI technology would accelerate decision-making and protection, the recent contracts raise “potential risks of technical dependence”, or “lock-in” with the US, especially at a time of “heightened trade and wider geopolitical tensions between the US and its traditional European allies”.
Despite winning a £240m MoD contract, the tech company’s links to Peter Mandelson and the UK’s over-reliance on US tech have caused widespread concern
