Ditch Palantir

NHS England awarded the Federated Data Platform to a consortium led by Palantir in November 2023. The health minister told the Commons that around £210m had already gone out the door by spring 2026 — before the contract has even reached its first break point.

The NHS is not one organisation but many: trusts run their own systems, close to the clinicians and patients who use them. Forcing a central platform on top creates a single point of failure and cuts across the local data systems staff already trust.

The concern is not confined to privacy campaigners. Two MoD officials reportedly told journalists that Palantir’s deepening knowledge of the British state is itself a threat — reframing the company as a strategic vulnerability, not merely a data-protection question.

After President Trump sanctioned ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan by executive order in February 2025, Khan lost access to his Microsoft email and moved to a Swiss provider; reporting indicated the court was warned that either his access would end or the whole organisation’s email would be cut off. Commentators treated it as a demonstration of how dependence on US technology can be switched into leverage for political ends.

Even as ministers say they want a more sovereign technology base, Palantir’s UK public-sector footprint has kept expanding through 2026. Each new deal hands the company a deeper map of the British state, and makes the dependence harder to unwind.

It is worth being precise. Palantir was not founded as a vehicle for strongman politics: it began in 2003 as a post-9/11 data-analytics firm, backed early by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, and Thiel is understood no longer to run it day to day. The argument is about values and trust — the people who own and lead it hold openly anti-democratic views and now advertise a hard-power ideology as their mission. The Health Secretary has himself acknowledged that the founders’ politics are a legitimate concern.

The platform runs on a 3+2+1+1 structure: a three-year initial term ending March 2027, then extensions the Department of Health and Social Care must actively choose to trigger. Do nothing, and the contract simply ends. The minister told the Commons the break clause is the moment to “evaluate it and find out if there are other providers that can do the job better”. This is a real decision, and one that MPs can influence — now, not after it is made.

While attention is on the NHS deal, Palantir’s reach is widening on other fronts, often awarded directly rather than competed. Every new contract is another reason walking away will be harder next year than it is this year:

• The Ministry of Defence signed a £240.6m follow-on enterprise agreement in December 2025, as a direct award with no competition.
• The Financial Conduct Authority ran a £375,000 AI “enterprise search” trial across its entire data lake in early 2026, with a wider rollout still open.
• All 43 police forces in England and Wales moved to a Palantir-run national firearms licensing system under a £9m contract awarded in May 2026.
• The Metropolitan Police’s £50m analytics deal was blocked by the Mayor’s office for lack of competition — and Palantir is now challenging that decision in the High Court.

Waiting is not neutral. Every month the contract continues, more clinical and operational work moves inside a platform it cannot easily be exported from, and every new department deal deepens the dependence. The moment of maximum leverage is now, before the extension is triggered; afterwards, the government negotiates from inside the lock-in.

This is not a hypothetical billionaire. Palantir’s chairman has written that freedom and democracy are incompatible, funds the movement that wants to replace elected government with a CEO-king, and thinks the NHS should not exist. The health records of sixty million people — their diagnoses, their medications, their histories — are exactly the kind of leverage that political project has never had before. At contract award, specialists warned the real danger was “mission creep”: the argument that the job could be done a little better with a little more data. Once that has run its course, the only thing standing between the data and its misuse is his company’s good faith.

The question is not whether he could: the CLOUD Act and FISA 702 give him the reach, and no NHS contract clause can take it away. The question is whether he would hold back — and the current administration has already answered it. It sanctioned the ICC’s chief prosecutor by executive order and cut him off from his own email to make an institution bend. A government willing to do that to an international court will not agonise over a database of foreign medical records, if the day comes when Britain has something it wants.

The difference is an assumption: that America is an ally and will stay one. It used to be a solid assumption. But the past eighteen months have brought things that were inconceivable five years ago — a US president sanctioning the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, an American company switching off his email, Europe openly debating whether its data is safe in American hands. The alliance the contract quietly depends on is being renegotiated in real time. Nobody can say what it will look like in another five years; the data, and the dependence, will still be there.

The exit is the weakest point of all. Palantir’s own terms convey no ownership rights to the customer; the NHS contract leaves it with no software and no intellectual property; and switching off tools already woven into live services — cancer pathways among them — would break those services. In June 2026 a Commons committee called the UK’s growing reliance on Palantir “an unacceptable point of weakness” and warned the country was “seriously exposed” to vendor lock-in. Dependence, once complete, is hard to tell apart from control.