Over the last decade, Palantir Technologies has quietly sunk its claws into Britain. This sinister surveillance company, integrated directly into US imperialism, has been sold near unlimited access to British data, and has become indispensable to the running of the state.
With Palantir’s owners brazenly championing American ‘hard power’; with British MPs attacking them as “supervillains” and urging Starmer to break Palantir’s contracts; and with ‘special’ relations at a nadir, the company and its stranglehold over our data have suddenly come into the spotlight.
So what is Palantir? How did it get in? And how can we kick it out?
Making the world safe for capitalism
Palantir is a private intelligence company that helps businesses and states more efficiently produce, surveil, and kill.
Its AI software analyses disparate datasets to generate ‘insights’ – lists of patients to discharge, military targets, even predicted criminals. For example, its ImmigrationOS app combines passport, tax, and cellphone data to help ICE decide who to kidnap and deport.
Palantir prides itself on its explicit dedication – in the words of CEO Alex Karp – “to the service of the West” and its “superiority in applying organised violence”.
The company recently published a manifesto which called for Silicon Valley to “participate in the defence of the nation”, the reintroduction of conscription, and the remilitarisation of Germany and Japan.
Even more sinister is its anti-Christ-obsessed founder and chair, Peter Thiel – a “great friend” of Jeffrey Epstein – who candidly rejects democracy as a barrier to capital. As he explained in The Education of a Libertarian:
“The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
Founded during the ‘War on Terror’ with the investment of the CIA, Palantir has been optimising America’s ‘kill chain’ for decades. But, as Karp put it, “Bad times mean strong finances internally”: with the world fracturing and militarising, it has grown into one of the most valuable businesses in the world.
Because of Thiel’s extensive ties to the US administration – he was Trump’s biggest Silicon Valley backer in 2016 and bankrolled JD Vance’s rise to VP – Palantir has been adopted by the US Army, the Navy, the CIA, the Pentagon, ICE, etc., with the aim of becoming the ‘operating system’ for all US government data.
Internationally, it is being used in the Gaza genocide, the Ukraine and Iran wars, and by police forces, armies, and intelligence agencies all across the West.
But, besides America, no country has gone further in adopting Palantir than Britain.
“Buying our way in”
For Palantir, Britain is a goldmine. Over and above the usual contracts, the NHS possesses the most valuable medical dataset in the world, which a former trade secretary secretly advertised to the company as a “huge and as yet untapped resource.”
To get its foot in the door, Palantir organised an extensive lobbying campaign. It set up secret meetings with government ministers; wined, dined, and bribed MPs; bought connections to Whitehall by hiring dozens of civil servants; and leveraged elite contacts – like Epstein’s pal Peter Mandelson and a former MI6 chief – to broker introductions.
Typically, it offers its services for trial. As Palantir’s UK head explained in an email entitled “Buying our way in”, “hoovering up” NHS contracts would “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance”. Palantir got into the NHS with a £1 contract to organise Britain’s COVID response.
But that £1 has since spiralled into a £330 million 7-year contract which gives “unlimited access” to patient data. That is because, once on board, it is costly and disorganising to unplug.
As a result, government departments are handing over hundreds of millions in contracts without competition to rent out Palantir’s software, because – as they admit – they are already ‘locked in’.
To date, Palantir has been handed over £900 million in contracts spanning Britain’s Army, Navy, Cabinet Office, NHS, Financial Conduct Authority (which regulates all UK banks), multiple police forces, nuclear programme, and more. And it is growing.
Locked in
In this way, behind all of our backs, Britain’s medical records, police files, and military secrets have been ‘locked in’ to the hands of a private US military contractor. Along with the software comes engineers, who are embedded in these departments to interpret the information.
For one, despite the insane price tag, Palantir’s software is not that good. A leaked NHS briefing described it as “slow,” “clunky”, and a “poor user experience,” and reported that loading times have gone up tenfold.
Worse is the fact that Palantir likely now has, according to MoD officials, “a complete profile on the whole UK population.”
They can use this to make money. But more importantly, this is a company directly integrated into the US state apparatus. It is proud to serve American interests! America already has the right to appropriate the data of its companies wherever they are based and block anyone from using their services.
But Palantir also has its own interests. Its owners make no secret of their designs for Britain. In 2023, Thiel said that he wants to “rip the [NHS] from the ground and start over” using “market mechanisms”.
UK head Louis Mosley – former Tory activist and grandson of Blackshirt leader Oswald Mosley – offered to help Reform build an immigration surveillance database were it to come to power. In the US, Palantir’s immigration surveillance software was built using healthcare data.
It has been caught intervening in politics before: a ‘rogue’ Palantir employee was at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – where voters were psychologically profiled and influenced with targeted ads – and, in 2010, was used by the US Chamber of Commerce to:
“Snoop on the families of progressive activists, create fake identities to infiltrate left-leaning groups, scrape social media with bots, and plant false information with liberal groups to subsequently discredit them.”
This is the company Britain is embedding into its state – during the breakdown of transatlantic relations.
While Trump and Vance bully and mock ‘our’ politicians on the world stage, the British state has handed its front-door keys to their billionaire backers. Welcoming Palantir has given America even more leverage to spy on and intervene in Britain.
This ‘sovereignty risk’ has been enough to provoke multiple European states to distance themselves from Palantir and call for a non-American alternative. The Swiss Army, for example, rejected a deal with Palantir as “sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services”.
In Britain, hundreds of thousands have petitioned to kick out Palantir. MPs have branded it an “unacceptable point of weakness” and are calling for the NHS contract to be broken when it comes up for review in 2027.
The British Medical Association voted for a ‘complete break’, and NHS staff are boycotting it en masse.
And in May, London Mayor Sadiq Khan intervened to block a Palantir contract with the Met Police, which would have been the largest deal in British policing history.
And yet, Britain is repeatedly doubling down on signing deals with this company.
Under threat of legal action, Khan backed down. Since then, Palantir has signed a multimillion-pound deal to take over the national firearms database for all of Britain’s police services as well as a £2 million trial contract with the Met. In the NHS, it is being aggressively rolled out against staff resistance. One NHS official was threatened by a senior over the phone:
“If you criticise the FDP [Palantir’s Federated Data Platform] one more time, you are going to lose your job.”
Special crisis, special relationship
This creeping infiltration of Palantir into every corner of the British state is not the product of a secretive conspiracy, however. As myopic as it may seem, adopting Palantir has been in the interests of the British capitalists.
The British state is preparing for imperialist wars abroad, and class war at home. Simultaneously, its public services, after decades of underfunding, are falling apart. AI software like Palantir’s is extremely useful for integrating and economising the machinery of state.
Britain would produce its own alternative platforms, but it can’t. It has already wasted billions trying and failing to build integrated data platforms for the NHS and military. Its AI startups – like DeepMind – have been systematically bought up by US tech, because Britain lacks the capital to do anything with them.
In the absence of a domestic alternative, Palantir was an expedient solution which could streamline antiquated bureaucracy and squeeze more out of austerity budgets. Successive governments and ministers stumbled onto it as the answer to spiralling waiting lists, shrinking recruitment pools, and the shambolic disorganisation of state services.
On top of that, Palantir offered investment – and beggars can’t be choosers.
Moreover, it offered American investment.
Britain’s relationship with America may have gone from ‘special’ to abusive, but the US is still the bedrock of the UK’s defence, its intelligence, its economy, and its place in the world.
Rather than break with America – which would come at a catastrophic cost – the policy of the British capitalists so far has been to try to smooth over its rocky relations with the US. That includes signing massive investment deals with US companies like Palantir – even if that means extending Britain’s vassalage to the day-to-day running of state.
Starmer was (allegedly) hooked up with “celebrated techie” Peter Thiel in an unminuted meeting organised by Britain’s US ambassador, Mandelson, who was also being paid to lobby for Palantir. For all the headaches Mandleson’s connections have caused, they made him a useful bridge to the upper echelons of American capitalism..
Months later, Palantir was made the centrepiece of the 2025 US-UK Tech Prosperity Deal – Mandelson described it in his farewell letter as “my personal pride and joy that will help write the next chapter of the special relationship”.
Starmer travelled directly from the White House to Palantir HQ. He signed off on a $1 billion deal with the MoD – Palantir’s first outside the US – and gave its UK head a seat on the MoD’s Industrial Joint Council (which decides how it spends its money).
In exchange, Palantir agreed to invest £1.5 billion, make Britain its European base, and create a whopping… 350 jobs.
Smash Palantir, smash capitalism
These shortsighted decisions are not made out of malice or stupidity. The personnel of the British state cannot afford to be guided by strategic considerations like privacy, independence, or security. British capitalism is bankrupt and breaking. They take what they can get, even if that exacerbates their problems in the long run.
And even if they had the freedom to choose, what difference would a European or British Palantir make, from the perspective of the working class? It would still be a tool to defend capitalism from the mass of the population – except with a different name.
Palantir is sometimes singled out as the most ‘evil’ and ‘dangerous’ company in the world – it leans into this as part of its brand. But, as Mosley put it:
“We may work in Israel, but so does Amazon, so does Microsoft. We may work with the Trump administration, supporting the immigration enforcement arm of his government. So does Amazon. So does Microsoft. So does every other tech supplier you can think of.”
The other monopolies might be more civil about it, but they all lease their services for murder and spying when the price is right. They all work with Palantir, Thiel, and Trump. At the end of the day, their owners all belong to the same class of exploiters. They will act just as unscrupulously in defence of their property.
As for the revolving door between business and the state; the networks, the bribery, the corruption: this is how business is done under monopoly capitalism. Mask on or off, this is what imperialism looks like.
Palantir may be its most brazen exponent, but it is just another tool for maintaining the exploitation of the vast majority by a parasitic oligarchy.
And so is the British state. It was not duped into the ‘special relationship’ with the US, nor into its dealings with Palantir – it chose both, and it will keep choosing them, in order to uphold the privileges of its class of parasites.
Only a struggle directed at the overthrow of the system itself can bring down Palantir, the state, and the Epstein class they both defend.
