Protests, petitions, pipelines and Palantir

Palantir is a prominent supplier to the UK government. It has contracts with the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and NHS England. I’m particularly concerned about Palantir’s role in the NHS. And I’m not alone. Many medical organisations have spoken out against NHS England’s Palantir contract, including The British Medical Association, MedAct and Health Workers for a Free Palestine.

There are a number of different reasons why this US tech company makes people so unhappy. The BMA, MedAct and Health Workers for a Free Palestine all cite its collaboration with the Israeli army in Gaza and ICE in the United States. Organisations like Amnesty International and Global Justice Now (main picture) have condemned Palantir’s alleged international human rights violations.

People are alarmed by the anti-democratic “manifesto” recently published by CEO Alex Karp. And investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr has done extensive research into Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel and his close relationship with Jeffery Epstein and Peter Mandleson. 

Protests and petitions

There have been physical protests outside Palantir’s headquarters in London. And many online petitions urging the government to pull out of one or all of its contracts with Palantir. But alongside numerous grassroots campaigns, there’s a solid and increasingly strong case argued by those actually in government.

A standout example came this month from the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee – a cross-party group of expert MPs, who published their report on digital government, Rewiring The State, on 3 June. Their report concluded that Palantir was “an unacceptable point of weakness” for the UK government. The authors made a number of important points and it’s worth noting the keys ones here. Because this issue is one that the new Prime Minister will need to respond to.

1. Exposure

Palantir is one of just three large digital and technology providers that the public sector is dependent on (the other two are Microsoft and AWS). Palantir is also named as a high-profile powerful supplier to the UK public sector where concerns or controversy have arisen.

2. Trust

The relationship between the public sector and Palantir is described as attracting increasing public attention, partly due to Palantir’s supply of software to the US military and use by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as well as controversial comments about the NHS made by co-founder Peter Thiel. In January 2023 speaking to the Oxford University Union, Thiel said: “The NHS makes people sick,” and said, “The first step is to get out of the Stockholm syndrome.” This concern is key because public trust is a serious issue. If members of the public feel it’s unsafe to use the NHS, then they’ll stay away – creating public health problems further down the line.

3. Right-wing agenda

The report states that Louis Mosley, head of Palantir’s UK and European business, has distanced himself from Thiel’s comments. But the committee notes a contradiction between Mosley claiming the company is apolitical and its published manifesto making explicitly political arguments. The “manifesto” is based on points posted on X (formerly Twitter) by Palantir CEO Alex Karp last month (a summary of his latest book – all about decline of Western Civilization). On X, Karp talks about “regressive” cultures and “hollow” pluralism. This narrative is all part of a wider Trump administration strategy – see “Londonstan” memes and the rise of decline porn on social media.

4. Unethical sales

The committee describes Palantir’s relationship with the NHS beginning during Covid-19, and notes its winning of the contract to deliver the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), valued at £330 million over a maximum seven-year period. Palantir offered its first 3 month contract with the NHS for just £1 – to build a data bank for Covid 19. This can be seen as part of a wider strategy which management consultants call “land and expand”. (This unethical sales approach was the main reason Sadiq Khan broke the Met Police contract with Palantir)

5. Switching costs

The nonprofit company, Medconfidential, has raised concerns about Palantir embedding itself so deeply in NHS systems that switching away becomes impractical. Although Louis Mosley counters that the data belongs to the customer and Palantir derives no economic benefit from it, I think this is a serious concern.

6. Access to patient data

The report states that Palantir was given “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data within a staging environment. Although this claim is disputed by Mosley, I understand that it’s true – staff and contractors working at Palantir are able to access identifiable patient data while working on the platform.

7. Pressure for digital transformation

A Chief Digital Information Officer at an NHS Trust links the pressure to digitalise rapidly with the risk of getting locked into bad contracts with suppliers like Palantir. I think this is a very real concern.

8. Unexceptional product

Some contributors argue that Palantir’s offering to government is not that unique. Despite NHS England’s then-Director of Transformation reports 69% of trusts have adopted the FDP with measurable benefits, campaigning organisations like Health Workers for a Free Palestine say that only around 30-35% of trusts are actively using Palantir’s FDP.. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Palantir’s software is not particularly special. Greater Manchester ICB have refused to join the FDP saying their own in-house software as better than Palantir’s.

9. Lack of competitive tender

The report notes that since Palantir’s appearance before the committee, it was awarded a £240 million Ministry of Defence contract without a competitive tender.

10. US military connection

The committee concludes that Palantir concerns them most among public sector technology providers, citing its US military and immigration work, Thiel’s NHS comments, and its political manifesto as representing a mismatch with UK values. It’s worth nothing that Germany and Switzerland have refused to sign defense contracts with Palantir, citing national security concerns. And France intelligence service recently announced it was cancelling its Palantir contract. The report clarifies that the committee’s concern about Palantir is not ideologically motivated or about product quality, but about the strategic risk of vendor lock-in in areas of critical national importance.

Not forgetting…the pipeline

One thing the select committee report doesn’t mention is the employee pipeline that exists between Palantir and the UK government. This has been covered by many websites including the Nerve and Novara Media. The Nerve reported in April that Palantir had hired more than 30 senior UK government officials in recent years. Open Democracy reported specifically on the revolving door between Palantir and the Ministry of Defence, directly relating it to Palantir’s acquisition of a £240million contract.

For me, this is all sounding eerily familiar. After the UK government privatised England’s public water companies in the early 1990s, the private-public infrastructure created an ecosystem where opportunism flourished. Many of my interlocutors complained that it was far too easy for people to move from regulator to water company and back again, especially at senior level. This created a cosy environment where valuable insider knowledge was easily bought. 

The same thing is happening now with government AI contracts.

Slow resistance

The ethnographic fieldwork for my recent masters degree involved 6 weeks in Hastings, volunteering alongside local campaigners fighting the UK’s sewage pollution crisis. Many of these campaigners had no prior experience or plan, they were ordinary people appalled at how their rights and communal spaces were being taken away. This project helped me understand how collective action emerges in constrained environments, and how individuals can work effectively together across different spatial geographies to share information, advice and support. Again, the dominant narrative played out by water companies and government agencies was one of inevitability. I’m keen to build on these learnings to see how similar approaches might apply to AI. 

In my dissertation I looked at 3 different types of violence which layer and build on each other: “Infrastructural violence” (Appel), “slow violence” (Nixon) and structural violence (Galtung). And I identified slow resistance as a particularly effective response to these types of violence. Slow resistance works well for women and other oppressed or less well-resourced groups as it demands daily micro-actions, relatively low input and builds incrementally over time. 

Workplace politics

All this is why I’m working with We and AI on a participatory ethnography looking at resistance to Palantir in the NHS. How can we find ways for people, especially those from vulnerable groups who are unwell, under-represented and/ or already sidelined or marginalised, and also those who are restricted by employee contracts, to proactively and effectively “resist, reclaim, refuse and reimagine” (Duarte et al, 2025) the type of AI that’s offered by Palantir?

Academics like Dan McQuillan and Mirca Madianou argue that people need to organise themselves at community level to fight against the worst excesses of AI. I’m exploring how collective approaches can be developed to help individuals and groups raise concerns in ways that are constructive and won’t put them at risk of being ignored or – worse – silenced.

The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz called this type of observation “thick description“. This ethnographic study is part of a wider project from We And AI seeking to share practical and detailed examples to illustrate and provide context, meaning and intention around human behaviours and approaches to resisting, refusing, reclaiming and reimagining AI.

Palantir’s contract with NHS England contains a break clause that the UK government can activate in March 2027. Ideally, if we all campaign effectively enough, we can help make this happen.

Image: Global Justice Now