The state of Palantir: Inside the American tech giant’s UK takeover

Palantir seemed an obvious contender to implement the government’s digital ID plans, but the company’s UK chief was adamant he didn’t want the job. At the start of October, less than a week after Keir Starmer announced proposals for mandatory ID for UK workers, Louis Mosley told Times Radio his firm wouldn’t be bidding for the contract. In a video of the interview posted online, Mosley, a clean-cut and boyish 42-year-old, appeared earnest as he raised his “personal concerns” about the Labour government’s policy. “But also it’s a problem on a corporate level,” he said. Digital ID had not been tested at the last election. “It wasn’t in the manifesto.”

Opting out of a major government data project was, on the face of it, a surprising move for Palantir. The American data analysis firm has spent the past decade lobbying for and winning UK government contracts, with clients ranging from the Ministry of Defence to the Cabinet Office and the NHS. Days before Starmer’s digital ID plans were set out, the government triumphantly announced that Palantir was entering into a £1.5bn “strategic partnership” with the British state. In a podcast appearance that day, Mosley said: “We’re only just getting started. We’ll look back in five years’ time and we’ll think those were small deals.”

Furthermore, Palantir was seen as a frontrunner to work on digital ID precisely because the proposal was controversial. In the United States, its software has reportedly been used as part of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s deportations program, allowing agents to use mobile phone data to track individuals in real time. For six years, the company worked on a secret program in New Orleans, combining police data with public records and social media analysis to predict future perpetrators of crime. Critics alleged this tool had entrenched racial bias and discrimination, claims Palantir denied. Since the 7 October terror attacks and the start of the Gaza war, Palantir has emerged as a particularly vocal supporter of Israel, entering into an agreement for the country to “harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions”. In 2020, the company’s chief operating officer Shyam Sankar predicted a world in which Palantir’s software will be “inside every missile, inside every drone”.

As Palantir has expanded its influence over the UK public sector, critics have repeatedly pointed to the company’s more morally ambiguous work as evidence that it is unsuitable as a government partner. The Labour MP Clive Lewis, who campaigned against Palantir’s work with the NHS, told me: “Its business is death and destruction. This is not an organisation you want running the democratic jewel of the postwar period.” Faced with such criticisms, Palantir has consistently adopted the argument made by Mosley when he appeared before British MPs in July this year. “We do not – unlike some tech companies, I am afraid – pick and choose which government policies we will support and which ones we will not,” he said. “We are here to support democratically elected governments in delivering the mandate that they have been elected to deliver.”

Speaking on Times Radio, Mosley was unequivocal that digital ID was one government policy Palantir had no interest in delivering. “We’re seeing a wide divergence of views and a lot of controversy around it,” he said. “So, it isn’t one for us.” When pressed as to whether this did, in fact, represent a political position, Mosley insisted Palantir’s stance was consistent with the company’s long-standing policy. Digital ID, he said, was “a programme that needs to be decided at the ballot box, not in the company boardroom”.

Mosley’s own rise to the company boardroom followed a mixed experience at the ballot box. After graduating from Oxford University in 2006, he embarked on a career in politics, perhaps following in the early footsteps of his grandfather Oswald Mosley, who served as both a Conservative and Labour MP before founding the British Union of Fascists in 1932. After a stint as a researcher at the Centre for Global Studies, a thinktank chaired by his grandfather’s biographer Robert Skidelsky, Mosley went to work for Rory Stewart, who had just been elected as a Tory MP. There, he was involved in rolling out broadband internet in Stewart’s rural Cumbria constituency. Libby Bateman, a campaigner who worked with Mosley on the rollout (and who, in October, was selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for mayor of Cumbria), describes him as smart and charismatic. “People like Louis, they have empathy with people from all walks of life,” she says.

In June 2011, aged just 28, Mosley stood successfully for the Conservatives in a Kensington and Chelsea council byelection. Noting Mosley’s youth, the Evening Standard drew comparisons with Oswald, who was once the youngest MP in the House of Commons. “I really don’t know much about my grandfather’s career,” Mosley told the paper. He served as a councillor until 2014 and, for a time, looked on course for the Commons himself after being shortlisted as a Conservative candidate for the 2017 general election. Although party members opted for a different candidate, the local paper described him as “high flying”. Later that year he addressed the Tory conference, warning his colleagues about the stigmatising nature of language such as “the loony left”. Shortly afterwards, his political momentum stalled: in the 2018 local elections, Mosley came 12th out of 13 candidates in the staunchly Labour borough of Hackney. By this time, however, he had begun working in Palantir’s London office, the company having set its sights firmly on UK expansion.

Palantir was founded 15 years earlier, the brainchild of the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. When Thiel sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002, the company had only just become profitable after implementing an automated system to identify credit card fraud. It was the year after 9/11, when civil liberties were being rapidly dismantled in pursuit of the War on Terror. Thiel identified as a libertarian and, as he later told Bloomberg, wanted the US government to have the best surveillance tools available while building in safeguards against abuse. In 2004, he recruited his former Stanford University classmate Alex Karp to run a new company, based on the fraud detection technology developed at PayPal, to mine government data and track down terrorists. Early investors included In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.

Karp was an intriguing choice to lead Palantir. Thiel was a right-wing provocateur who, after leaving Stanford, wrote a book with fellow graduate David O Sacks. The Diversity Myth argued that multiculturalism and political correctness were debilitating academic institutions. Thiel has since gone much further. In 2009 he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In recent months, he has warned that attempts to regulate technology could be the work of the antichrist, who he has suggested could take the form of climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Karp was similarly eccentric but saw himself as a progressive. After graduation, he’d moved to Germany to pursue a doctorate in neoclassical social theory. According to The Contrarian, a biography of Thiel by the journalist Max Chafkin, it was Karp who insisted Palantir adopt safeguards to protect privacy, offering controls over who could access different types of data and keeping a log of searches. Thiel was initially sceptical, but Palantir has referred to these audit functions and access controls repeatedly over the years as evidence of its commitment to privacy and civil liberties; their efficacy as a bulwark against misuse remains unclear. Chafkin spoke to a former Palantir engineer who recalled government clients suggesting the company’s software could be used to look up ex-girlfriends. “They would remind the clients that searches were logged,” he wrote, “and then allow them to look up whoever they wanted.”

Palantir is named after the mystical “seeing stones” in the Lord of the Rings novels: the palantiri allowed users to see into the past and across the world – an immense power that could be used for good or evil. As if to reassure them which side they were on, Palantir employees were told their mission was to “save the Shire”, a reference to the hobbit homeland in Tolkien’s fantasy world. Several of the ex-staffers I spoke to for this article – all of whom requested anonymity – told me Palantir encouraged internal debate and disagreement. Others said the Shire narrative was rarely questioned. “There were a lot of people who bought into this whole hobbit thing,” one says. “That was a bit too much, without any level of reflection.”

Combined with Palantir’s non-hierarchical structure, under which employees were expected to be entrepreneurial, this sometimes led to work that pushed ethical boundaries. In 2011, it emerged that Palantir engineers were considering ways to work with two other intelligence firms to discredit Wikileaks and its supporters, including the journalist Glenn Greenwald. Palantir-branded slides referred to plans for a disinformation campaign and cyber attacks. When the slides were obtained by the hacking group Anonymous, Karp apologised to Greenwald. One of the engineers involved was later appointed Palantir’s head of business operations.

This was not an isolated incident. Through 2013 and 2014, a Palantir employee in London worked with data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to create an app that would harvest the personal data of more than 50m Facebook users, with the aim of influencing American voters. When the scandal broke years later, Palantir blamed an employee “engaged in an entirely personal capacity” and said it would take “appropriate action”. That narrative appeared to be contradicted by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who told British MPs: “There were senior Palantir employees that were also working on the Facebook data.”

These episodes illustrated a tension that would become more pronounced as Palantir sought to expand its UK business. In certain domains, a reputation as a shadowy, CIA-funded corporation staffed by ruthless bastards can really open doors. As Chafkin reports in The Contrarian, Thiel once told a friend: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” But, as Karp had perhaps recognised when making the case for privacy safeguarding features, there were times when that kind of notoriety could be a liability.

Mosley joined Palantir at a pivotal time. The firm had recently opened a new office in central London’s Soho Square and was exploring opportunities beyond defence and intelligence. The people skills Mosley had shown in politics proved an even greater asset at Palantir. “I don’t think I’ve met anyone as well networked as him,” a former colleague says. “He’s very good at understanding the political landscape and power structures, and has a very uncanny ability to know exactly the right person to be going to.” Another ex-colleague remembers Mosley identifying the NHS as a key potential client – albeit one he knew might remain out of reach. Paraphrasing, he recalls Mosley saying: “Our reputation as a ‘scary American data company’ will certainly not make it easier to build the trust we need to work with the cherished NHS.”

Then the pandemic hit. In March 2020, prime minister Boris Johnson summoned more than 20 tech leaders to Downing Street for an emergency summit, in what was described as a “digital Dunkirk”. Attendees, including representatives from Palantir, were asked how they could support the national effort to tackle Covid-19. According to a Guardian report, Uber proposed free taxi rides for medical workers and Deliveroo offered to help keep hospital workers fed. Palantir, naturally, suggested helping with data analytics.

Here was an opening into Whitehall, though Palantir already had a foot wedged firmly in the door. Documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published by the Intercept in 2017 revealed the company was courting UK government clients as early as 2008, when Palantir invited the UK intelligence agency GCHQ to visit its Palo Alto office “any time”. Just as it had in the US, Palantir cultivated well-connected advisers and admirers. By 2014, former British Army field commander Graeme Lamb had joined the firm and was telling a parliamentary select committee that Palantir’s technology had “saved numerous lives”. The following year, Palantir met twice with Matt Hancock, then a junior Cabinet Office minister, who would go on to become health secretary overseeing the NHS pandemic response. Not long after those meetings, Palantir won its first public UK government contract – with the Cabinet Office. (Hancock tells me he could not remember those early meetings with the company: “What I do remember is that Palantir did amazing work in the pandemic, building dashboards to help manage NHS capacity.”)

While it was no doubt fortuitous that Palantir met Hancock several years before he took charge at the health department, it also points to the company’s shrewd approach to cultivating relationships. Government transparency records indicate that Palantir employees met with UK ministers and senior officials almost 90 times over a 10-year period, a figure that seems likely to be an underestimate. The Guardian recently reported on leaked documents that reveal Johnson and chief aide Dominic Cummings had met Thiel in August 2019, an encounter never officially disclosed via the Number 10 meeting log, for reasons that remain unclear.

It was by fostering government connections that Mosley began making headway with his plans for the NHS. Documents obtained by Politico in 2021 reveal that Mosley and Karp met with then trade secretary Liam Fox at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Fox’s briefing notes indicate he described the NHS as a “huge and as yet untapped resource”. Later that year, the Bureau for Investigative Journalism obtained documents that show Mosley hosting an event attended by the NHS England chair, David Prior. The next day, Prior emailed Mosley: “Thank you for hosting such an interesting dinner and also for the water melon cocktails! If you can see ways where you could help us structure and curate our data so that it helps us deliver better care and provides a more insightful data base for medical research do be in touch.”

Mosley’s efforts meant ministers and NHS officials were well versed in Palantir’s capabilities when the pandemic hit. After Johnson’s digital Dunkirk summit, Palantir was enlisted to build the NHS Covid-19 Data Store, helping to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed. As Mosley later told a parliamentary select committee: “We offered, because it was a national emergency, to provide our support free.” It was both a philanthropic gesture and, as Mosley acknowledged during the select committee, a sales strategy the company had adopted before. Mosley compared the practice to a magazine subscription: “You get the first few issues discounted or free and then, if you like what you read, you sign up for full price.” Gareth Rhys Williams, the government’s chief commercial officer at the time, took a different view of such practices. “It leads to all sorts of future problems,” he told MPs in 2023. “It is tempting at the time, but it is usually a mistake that we repent of later.”

In December 2020, nine months after offering its services to the NHS, free of charge, Palantir landed a two-year £23.5m contract with the service to continue its work on the Covid Data Store. This sparked a backlash, including a lawsuit from legal campaign group Foxglove and independent media organisation openDemocracy, which alleged the contract had been a stitch-up. “No to Palantir in Our NHS”, a campaign backed by Foxglove and dozens of other advocacy groups, warned the public: “Palantir is a US tech and security corporation with a terrible track record. They help governments, intelligence agencies, and border forces to spy on innocent citizens and target minorities and the poor. We don’t trust them with our health data, and we don’t trust them to respect the values of our NHS.”

As the controversy raged on, Mosley continued to work on building the NHS relationship. Documents seen by Bloomberg show that Mosley sent an email to colleagues in September 2021 titled “Buying our way in…!”, suggesting that “hoovering up” existing NHS suppliers could “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance”. (Palantir spokesperson and former Conservative government adviser Ben Mascall told Bloomberg that Mosley’s language was “regrettable” and “not an accurate characterisation of our relationship with the NHS”.) In the end, the strategy wasn’t necessary. In November 2023, the NHS awarded a Palantir-led consortium a contract worth an estimated £330m to build the Federated Data Platform (FDP), linking up data from NHS trusts across the country. Through a combination of relentless networking, astute sales tactics and the fortuitous arrival of a pandemic, Mosley had landed his white whale.

In his bestselling entrepreneurship manifesto Zero to One, written with US venture capitalist Blake Masters, Thiel claimed: “Every great business is built around a secret… A great company is a conspiracy to change the world.” Palantir’s secret was the realisation that governments and corporations were sitting on mountains of poorly organised data, with the potential to unlock enormous value and insights. But the company’s critics fear the secrets and conspiracies may run much deeper.

NHS patient data, spanning more than seven decades and covering most of the UK population, is a trove of potential medical and demographic insights that may be unrivalled anywhere in the world. Opponents of the FDP contract have questioned whether private companies can be trusted with such sensitive personal data and whether it could be used to develop profitable products that benefit Palantir shareholders rather than the British taxpayer. Duncan McCann, head of tech and data at the Good Law Project, believes Palantir’s controversial reputation presents risks for the NHS when it comes to accessing important health data. “The more Palantir gets into our system, the more I think they’ll see people opting out of having their data used and shared,” he says.

Both Palantir and the NHS are at pains to point out that the company has no rights to the data under the contract. Several ex-Palantir staffers draw comparisons with Microsoft, observing that few worry about Bill Gates stealing their spreadsheet data. The analogy came up frequently enough to suggest it was a common refrain among Palantirians frustrated at public perceptions of the company. But the comparison ignores a key element of the Palantir operation, embedding engineers in its client organisations to identify and implement solutions. Microsoft doesn’t tend to send engineers to peer over clients’ shoulders as they operate Excel.

One way in which the analogy does work is to highlight Palantir’s march to ubiquity. According to the procurement analyst Tussell, Palantir was the second largest supplier of AI to the UK’s public sector by contract value between 2018 and 2025, behind only Microsoft. As well as the NHS, it has held contracts with government departments including the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, engaged in discussions about working for the Ministry of Justice, and lobbied for work with the Department for Work and Pensions. It has also worked with local authorities in Barnsley and Coventry and, earlier this year, I revealed how Palantir’s contract with Bedfordshire Police was serving as a pilot for a national rollout of the company’s software to establish a national intelligence database.

While much of the firm’s UK government expansion took place under a Conservative administration, there is little sign that growth is slowing under Labour. As the financial analyst Hargreaves Lansdown has written: “Once customers are ensnared in the Palantir world, it’s very hard to give up the data insights and get out of its web.” Palantir also enjoys strong connections throughout Whitehall, due in part to the number of senior officials the company has hired from the civil service.

Clive Lewis believes the health service should be investing in its own systems. “And I know people will say: ‘The NHS had a terrible history with IT systems’,” he says. “Well, change that.” In Lewis’s view, ministers and civil servants dazzled by Palantir’s technological prowess would do well to remember the way corporations operate: “They’re not investing in us for our benefit, they’re investing in us for their benefit, and that goes against the very founding principles of the NHS.” Lewis makes the same argument about the increasing number of other state functions being handed over to Big Tech. “This is bigger than just Palantir,” he says. “There is no real programme for government other than handing over an ever greater share of our democracy, our national institutions, our data and our economic capabilities to these organisations.”

In the parlance favoured by Silicon Valley and popularised by Thiel, to “steelman” an argument is to construct the strongest possible version of an intellectual position. “We should steelman the people we disagree with,” Thiel told an audience in 2018. “We should try to think about, how can we make their arguments even better than they make them?” To steelman the Palantir position: it is a company that helps organisations unlock unprecedented insights from data, at scale and at speed. Palantir played a crucial role in the UK’s pandemic response, demonstrating how its software can help the government work more efficiently. Just as we want the civil service to function well – to impartially enact government policy swiftly and effectively – we should want public servants to have the best technology at their disposal.

But Palantir’s sinister reputation means there will always be those who counter the steelman argument, much to the frustration of some ex-staffers. Recalling the firm’s work during the pandemic, one tells me: “I glow with pride when I think of the incredible work my colleagues did… But I think they’ll always be a pantomime villain, whatever they try and do.” When I suggest that Palantir’s image has not always been helped by its leadership, he laughs. Recalling a 2023 speech at the Oxford Union, when Thiel described the UK’s affection for the NHS as a form of “Stockholm syndrome”, this ex-staffer says: “You have moments like that where you’re like, fuck my life, kill me, did he really have to say that at this moment in time?” Of Karp, who still seems to identify as a “progressive” despite increasingly embracing a muscular brand of nationalism, he says: “He’s a very opinionated guy and he won’t moderate those opinions for anyone. There’s part of me that goes: ‘At least I know you actually mean the things that you say.’” For Lewis, that’s exactly the problem. Quoting the poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, he tells me: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

As Palantir notes in its own code of conduct, “technology is not ethically neutral”, leading the company to acknowledge its “ever-present responsibility to strive to ensure that our software is used for good”. What constitutes “good”, of course, depends entirely on your point of view. In The Technological Republic, his recent book written with Palantir colleague Nicholas W Zamiska, Karp called on Silicon Valley “to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project – what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand”. In a recent letter to investors, he quoted the political scientist Samuel Huntington, who wrote that the rise of the west was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence”. The shape of Donald Trump’s national project, and his willingness to apply organised violence, is becoming increasingly clear. The US president recently warned the country was “under invasion from within” and said American cities should be used as military “training grounds”.

In May this year, the New York Times reported on fears that Trump could use Palantir’s technology to “compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power”. Critics say this could allow the president to weaponise personal data to police immigrants and punish his critics. Palantir responded with a blog post accusing the paper of publishing “falsehoods and misleading statements”, rebutting any assertion that the company has the ability to compile data on US citizens for its own purposes or proactively share it among government agencies. But the fears raised in the New York Times were really about another possibility: that the Trump administration could pursue those policies, enabled by a company whose software is already used to identify migrants, criminal suspects and military targets.

Earlier this year, Mosley joined speakers including Nigel Farage and GB News co-owner Paul Marshall at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London. Speaking as a tech leader, he struck a different tone from his 2017 Tory conference appearance when, as a politician, he called out stigmatising language. This time, Mosley heralded the end of an age of censorship and the freedom to challenge the official narrative on issues such as mass migration. “In the US, we are seeing government reforms that will change the lives of everyone in that country for the better,” Mosley said. “There is no reason we cannot do the same here in Britain and elsewhere across Europe.”

Palantir has said it wants to become the “default operating system for data across the US government”. It appears to be pursuing the same ambition in the UK. In a submission to the UK government’s Covid inquiry, Mosley urged ministers to invest in a “common operating system” that would draw together data from “across the local and central government, healthcare and other bodies of national strategic importance”. A registry of such a wide range of personal data would be a powerful resource, opening up the possibility of improved government efficiency but also fears about the loss of privacy and an age of mass surveillance. Palantir says this operating system would not take the form of a master database and, at any rate, has argued it will be for elected representatives to decide how it should be used. Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who worked in the tech industry for 30 years, questions that assertion. “If they are controlling all of that, and making moral judgements on what they will and will not implement, who’s governing?” he asks. “Them or us?”

When asked to comment in response to this article, Palantir said its work in the UK included helping the NHS schedule 80,000 more operations, working with the police to identify young people at risk of abuse, and allowing Royal Navy ships to stay at sea for longer. “We are proud of its impact in all these settings and many more,” a spokesperson said. “Yet, whatever the context, three immutable facts always hold. Firstly, we have no interest in mining or selling data – we simply provide software that helps organisations better manage the information they already hold. Secondly, as a matter of law, we can only process data strictly in accordance with the instructions of the customer – they are in control. Thirdly, Palantir software is built with extremely granular access controls so that customers using it are able to see the information they need to do their jobs, but only the information they need to do their jobs.”

During his recent appearance on Times Radio, Mosley explained his scepticism over digital ID, doubting the “technical necessity” of the policy. “We have passports, we have driving licences, we have unique tax codes, we have National Insurance numbers… Now, each of these sits in a silo and doesn’t talk to the other, isn’t harmonised,” he said. “There’s no way for government to easily jump from one to another. That could be achieved in the backend with relatively little effort.” The implication was clear: that Palantir was ready to build such a system. Mosley didn’t clarify whether the decision to do so should be made at the ballot box or in the boardroom.

A version of this article was published with Prospect magazine.