No Palantir in NHS – Patient Data in Danger

Palantir, a US AI and tech firm, is set to roll out a platform for amalgamating all patient data in NHS England. In 2021, they were awarded a £300 million contract for the project. And yet four years on, just 15 percent of NHS trusts are using it and there is sizeable pushback from NHS workers and patients. So who is Palantir? How did we get to where we are now?

Corporate bastion of imperialism

Palantir was set up in 2003 by US tech czars Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Early investment came from the CIA’s capital investment wing, In-Q-Tel, which helps firms working with US state intelligence get off the ground. Their rise has been steady, cutting their teeth providing intelligence and AI services for US agencies such as Homeland Security, ICE, state police forces, and the FBI. As an example, Palantir powers deportations through its ‘ImmigrationOS’ tool which is designed to enable ICE agents to identify, track, and deport noncitizens using data from social security, tax declarations, and other state databases.

The company shamelessly chooses clients that advance US imperialism and Western hegemony. This orientation is clearly a reflection of the leadership’s ideology. Karp’s national chauvinism is frequently on display. For example, in a November 2025 letter to shareholders, he write, ‘It is and was a mistake to casually proclaim the equality of all cultures and cultural values. Some have proven to be wondrous and generative. Others destructive and deeply regressive.’ He defends the US, saying it is the centre of western culture from which other junior partners orient, as a falconer to the falcon. Palantir is not simply profit chasing by propping up US interests, they are doing the most to keep Western imperialism afloat through crisis after crisis. 

As an auxiliary force for imperialism, Palantir predictably took their services to Israel where they are now deeply involved with the IDF at an operational level. Details are kept tightly wrapped of course, but a UN report suggested their software is being used in ‘real-time battlefield integration for decision making.’ In other words, Palantir’s AI tools are being used to analyse areas and identify targets for the IDF. Karp’s biography further boasted of Palantir’s role in providing intelligence for the 2024 coordinated pager attacks in Lebanon. The attack was significant not only for its egregious disregard for civilian life and international law, but also for how technically sophisticated its planning and execution was.  

The new front: healthcare

Palantir has also started working in civilian sectors in recent years. During the 2020 pandemic, they secured a contract to build a covid database for a token sum of £1. Regular procurement procedure was abandoned, and the NHS executives rushed the deal through. Having got one foot in the door, Palantir’s remit massively expanded with the deal a year later to build a nationwide platform for all patient data known as the federated data platform (FDP). Up to now, patient data is organised at a trust level, making it clunky to transfer information if patients move trusts, or if someone has to attend A&E while travelling to another part of the country, for example. Palantir being the chosen firm to ‘fix’ this very real issue raises several serious issues.

Privatisation of the NHS

The British government has been selling off bits of the NHS for decades and in the 10 Year Health Plan from July last year they finally owned up to actively seeking ‘partnership’ with private providers. A report by Keep Our NHS Public found private sector outsourcing of NHS clinical care, support staff, and administration has a litany of general consequences including compromised patient safety, wider health inequalities, poorer work conditions for staff, and services cost for everyone. The trend continues in the massive sell off of patient data. 

Geopolitics

Palantir’s profit motive naturally prompts one to ask what they would do with the world’s largest health data set. Pithy assurances from its execs that they will not sell off patient data to third parties do not ease one’s mind. It might not even be their decision. The company is, of course, headquartered in the US and subject to US laws. Recent efforts by the US pharmaceutical giants and the Trump administration to strong arm the UK and other supposed allies into paying eye-watering prices for medicines point to a dangerous situation on the horizon: a Trump-supporting US firm holding all patient records in Britain could be used as leverage in bad faith negotiations to extort revenue for the US capitalist class. 

In late 2025, negotiations between the Swiss Army and Palantir for a potential deal collapsed after the Swiss released a report warning their data would be at risk of foreign access and they would be locked in long term due to administrative dependence on Palantir. The UK government has dismissed similar warnings when challenged on the NHS contract. 

Imperial borders on the wards?

Palantir has developed specialist expertise in intelligence gathering of an enemy in war. Their presence in the health sector is not only morally depraved, it brings the most violent and punitive parts of the British state into the hospitals and GPs around the country. One feature of Palantir’s project is the so-called ‘drag-and-drop’ function between its civilian software and military software (known as Foundry and Gotham, respectively). Integrating the two mean that one person’s health record could be linked, through the FDP, to their other records in the police, immigration, or welfare, for example. It is entirely conceivable that the Home Office could be rapidly notified if someone who has overstayed their visa presents to hospital thus triggering the sequence of events leading to deportation, much like the ImmigrationOS model in the US. 

Fightback

Health workers are organising a fightback. Health Workers for a Free Palestine is working with Corporate Watch, Keep Our NHS Public, and other grassroots groups to prevent the rollout of the Palantir contract. There have been some significant wins along the way. In Manchester, the integrated care board (ICB, the bureaucratic body made up of a few Trusts that is responsible for the deciding on the rollout in local areas) has refused to use the FDP. Instead, they’ve developed a local alternative after staff and patients led a mass campaign in the local area. The BMA passed a motion last year which rejected the FDP which has opened opportunities for rank-and-file members to carry the campaign into their local Trusts. Activists in other unions are following suit. Patient-staff alliances are growing across the country to try and replicate these successes. Such formations will be critical in the broader push to re-nationalise the NHS under the control of workers and users. 

We call for:

• Build patient-staff alliances to fight for the NHS

• Defend the NHS and Palestine from Palantir

• Build the Fight Back

• For a fully comprehensive, integrated, publicly  accountable and publicly provided, free at the point of delivery NHS, based on need without privatised franchises.

• Re-nationalise the NHS and social care under the control of workers and users.

Keep up to date with the campaign at  https://nopalantir.org.uk/

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First published here by International Socialist League (IWL-FI)