How tech giant Palantir was recruited by the police, NHS and military

Last November, nine members of a Romanian organised crime gang were convicted of fraud and sentenced to a total of more than 20 years in jail. They had stolen £700,000 from cashpoint machines in 51 locations around the UK, using sophisticated devices to bypass the security systems during thousands of late-night raids.

When detectives went to Romania to investigate, they found a heavily secured property with images from Peaky Blinders pinned to the gates and “Fuck the police” printed on the bottom of the swimming pool. They seized assets including a Lamborghini and a Porsche.

What made the case unusual was that this was one of the first big police investigations enabled by artificial intelligence. Mobile phone data, CCTV footage, number plate records and identity documents were all crosschecked and analysed automatically to spot connections. The system identified more than 120 offences that it believed had taken place, arranged them in order of severity and put the suspects at the scene of the crimes.

One of the gang had a photograph of the money he had stolen on his phone, while another had asked ChatGPT how long he would spend in prison if he got caught. Conversations between the criminals in Romanian – including eastern European gangster slang – were instantly translated into English and transcribed.

Instead of taking months, the investigation took weeks. The evidence was so overwhelming that all the men pleaded guilty. Without AI, said Trevor Rodenhurst, the chief constable of Bedfordshire, who oversaw the investigation: “I’m not sure we’d have even got them all charged.”

Bedfordshire police use Palantir’s Foundry software to extract and synthesise information from dozens of sources. The global data analytics company is controversial, but Rodenhurst said crimes are being solved and lives “undoubtedly” saved by its technology. Previously, investigators would have to search more than 80 different databases, looking for clues. Now, at the click of a mouse, they can see a summary of data from thousands of WhatsApp messages, plus documents and 999 calls.

Over the course of 12 months, the software has helped the police to identify at least 1,000 women whose partners have a history of domestic abuse. They were then warned they could be in danger.

There have been no domestic murders since the new system was introduced by the force; usually, five or six such killings are committed a year. “I can’t prove the correlation, but if you’ve told more than 1,000 people that there may be a risk to them, and it’s one of our most prevalent crime types, this feels like prevention in action at scale,” said the chief constable.

Tasks that would previously take police hours are finished in minutes. Time spent completing subject profiles has been cut by 80% and building out criminal association charts by 75%. Bedfordshire police estimate that the software has given them the equivalent of 54 additional full-time officers. “We’re making some things possible that weren’t possible before,” said Rodenhurst. “It’s enabling me to protect communities in a way that I couldn’t do before, and to make a more cost-efficient use of my resources.”

The experience of Bedfordshire police highlights a dilemma at the highest level in Whitehall. The prime minister is convinced that technology is the only way to square the circle of governing with dwindling resources and rising demand. But there is a tension between the need to drive improvements in public sector productivity and the state’s responsibility to protect citizens and retain a degree of control over the delivery of services.

The government is becoming increasingly reliant on Palantir, a company co-founded by Peter Thiel, a libertarian Donald Trump supporter who once said: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The $360bn tech giant, which is helping the Pentagon to identify targets in Iran, is now integral to the running of the NHS, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the police in this country. Palantir has almost 1,000 employees in the UK – 17% of its global workforce – and is moving next into local government.

Coventry has become the first council to use its software to organise social care and special educational needs provision. The outcomes are impressive but critics fear the state is locked in a Faustian pact that raises questions about data security and creates vulnerabilities for the taxpayer.

A briefing by the health justice charity Medact, circulated to all NHS trust boards earlier this month, warned that the “highly interoperable nature” of Palantir’s software could lead to “data-driven state abuses of power”.

In the US, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) teams use Palantir software for cross-governmental data analysis to track people down. After the fatal shootings in Minneapolis, UK employees expressed their disquiet internally about the ethics of working with ICE. Amnesty International has criticised the company, which has a contract with the Israeli government, for “contributing” to what it describes as “genocide” in Gaza.

Palantir was named by the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories as an enabler of “unlawful use of force”. Alex Karp, the company’s chief executive, has declared that Palantir “is here to disrupt… and when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them”.

There are also concerns about the revolving door between the political and corporate worlds. On a visit to Washington last year, Keir Starmer went straight from meeting Trump in the White House to Palantir’s headquarters. At the time, Peter Mandelson was the UK ambassador to the US, while his lobbying company, Global Counsel, represented Palantir.

Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, said the tech company is part of a “circle of power” involving wealthy men. “We have got to optimise the capability of technology for the public good, but I have concerns about the governance of the data,” she said. “What if Nigel Farage were in charge of data platforms and wanted to use data to aid his deportation plans? When you hear from the chancellor that we should be investing in British businesses, why are we giving hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir?”

The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, who recently joined a protest outside Palantir’s central London headquarters, said: “Palantir is a scandal. How has a company with deep links to the American far right, with Peter Mandelson and with Jeffrey Epstein, ended up with control of our personal health data? How has it infiltrated deep into our national security and defence infrastructure?

“What role did lobbying and personal contacts of those at the heart of this government play in bringing about this state of affairs? These are questions Starmer and [health secretary Wes] Streeting are now refusing to answer. All government contracts with Palantir must be ended.”

But former Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt argued that the public sector must harness the power of AI. “I think worries about big tech use of data are overblown,” he said. “Most of us make that compromise every day with our Gmail accounts. If we stop hospitals sharing data, medical errors will go up and lives will be lost.”

The debate in Whitehall has become increasingly polarised and politicised. While some are keen to capitalise on the cost savings offered by Palantir, others are worried about the financial and political risk of becoming so dependent on a single company to deliver critical services.

There is a conflict between those who want to develop the tech in-house and those who argue that the government should capitalise on the expertise of the private sector.

One senior military figure said: “Whenever you have the conversation in Whitehall, there are the Palantir fans and then there are the massive critics. I think it’s hampering a sensible conversation about data, AI and how does the government embrace this in order to service its own ends?”

The civil service has a long history of failed IT projects. Palantir offers instant solutions and a record of demonstrable benefits.

“They’ve been successful because the tech works and they are ready to go,” said one insider who has worked with the business. “I just want to achieve results and I don’t particularly mind what Peter Thiel says that winds people up.”

Chelsea and Westminster hospital cut its waiting lists by almost a third through using Palantir software. Palantir has signed a £330m seven-year contract with the NHS to deliver its Federated Data Platform. Instead of relying on Excel spreadsheets and Post-it notes, the health service has brought together the information it holds in a single system. In its first 18 months in place, an extra 99,690 patients had operations and an additional 79,321 people were removed from waiting lists.

Becky Taylor, director of continuous improvement for the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire group, which includes Kettering and Northampton general hospitals, said the platform has simultaneously improved patient care and boosted productivity in her region. “Within three or four months of starting using the tool, we had a 13% increase in the average number of patients that we could see in a four-hour theatre session. We saw a 28% reduction in the number of cancellations we were having to make on the day because we didn’t have the staff or kit that we needed.” About 1,400 patients have been given the choice to move between the area’s two hospitals. “On average, they’ve been treated 41 days quicker,” said Taylor. “If you’re a patient in Daventry, we will now be able to make sure you’ve got the same waiting time as if you’re a patient in Corby. A year ago, we wouldn’t have been able to do that. We’re removing the postcode lottery.”

In December, Palantir was also awarded a £240m three-year contract by the MoD to modernise the armed forces and enhance battlefield lethality. The technology has already driven a 6% increase in ship availability in the Royal Navy by making sure all the right equipment and people are in the right place at the right time.

But this deal also takes Palantir into new territory in the UK. As well as cutting through bureaucracy to drive efficiency, as it has done in the NHS and the police, the company will have a central role in military planning and targeting. In one operation to evacuate British nationals from a conflict zone, the software was used to identify a buildup of traffic as a convoy of militia, and so people were diverted on to a different road. “Historically, when I was a military planner, I would have a big paper map in front of me and I would draw a line to show where the woods were and where tanks could drive,” said a former soldier who is now a Palantir software engineer. “That is all now computed automatically. If you bring in all the elevation data, I know that a tank can’t drive up a slope more than14%, so it can immediately tell me where my tank can drive but also which way the enemy is likely to come.”

The military effectiveness of Palantir’s software has been demonstrated in Ukraine. At the start of the war, CCTV footage from traffic cameras on road gantries was uploaded to the platform to spot advancing columns of Russian tanks. Drone routes are mapped out in three dimensions to dodge electronic interference from enemy jamming devices.

Adm Sir Tony Radakin, the former UK chief of the defence staff, said: “The military data that Ukraine holds is one of the jewels in the crown of the nation – how that is utilised for future warfare and for the refinement of what defence companies offer is an extraordinary resource. “Palantir is currently helping them to mine that data and spot the patterns as part of the current fight. More long-term, others will follow, and Ukraine needs to assess how it unlocks value from its data riches.”

Starmer was impressed by a demonstration of a Palantir program that not only identifies targets but then goes through the legal steps required to sign off a strike and produces an instant battle damage assessment after the attack.

The Maven smart system, built for the US government, is being used heavily in Iran, allowing the Pentagon to hit hundreds of targets a day. The unprecedented speed of the attacks has been driven by the AI tool that sifts through huge amounts of intelligence data from drones and satellites to generate strike options far faster than a human military planner. While chatbot maker Anthropic has been branded a “supply chain risk” by the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, for refusing to give the American military unconstrained access to its Claude AI model, Palantir has been happy to meet the White House’s demands

Last week, Thiel was in Rome, goading the Vatican with a series of lectures on the antichrist. Palantir seems to almost relish its sinister reputation: its London office is hidden behind an unmarked black door. The company’s name is taken from the all-seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings, which were crafted by the elves for intelligence purposes but then fall into the hands of the wizards, becoming dangerous tools.

Louis Mosley, grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and Palantir’s UK boss, insists that fears about the security of the data are unfounded and government contracts would make it illegal for the company to use information for any other purpose, whether in Britain or the US.

But he thinks that privacy is an “obsolete concept” in the modern world. “Everything now is measured and tracked, so the idea that you can go off-grid is as sensible as saying: ‘We’re all going to go back and live in yurts in the forest without electricity.’

“You have to move the argument on from privacy to control. You have to assume the data is being generated; the question is: who gets to control how that information is used?There is, he argues, a “crisis of legitimacy” in the west. “We live in a world where the government collects all this data but seems to know nothing,” he said. “The government institutions that provide public services are no longer seen to be competent, and therefore, if you want to restore faith in the system, you need these organisations to work better.”Mosley said Palantir has “never worked in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea” because it believes in democracy but the company will deliver policies, however controversial, that have been endorsed by the voters.

“There are a lot of people criticising us at the moment about our work with ICE in the US. They think it’s appalling that ICE are tracking down illegal immigrants and deporting them. There was a very clear democratic mandate given to President Trump to issue that policy. It was tested at the ballot box and, whether you agree with it or not, if you believe in democracy, then you have to accept that.”

Palantir refused to back Labour’s plan for digital ID cards because it had not been in its manifesto, but Mosley said that, if Reform won the next general election with a “clear public mandate” to allow NHS data to be used for immigration enforcement, then the company would execute the plan. “Our belief in the importance of abiding by the democratic decision is going to take us into delivering some very controversial things,” he said. “The upside down world we now find ourselves in is where there are a lot of corporations who take extremely political positions that are in effect anti-democratic.”

The question is where the power really lies. JRR Tolkien’s all-seeing Palantir stones are a “cautionary tale that technology itself is a neutral enabler”, Mosley said. “If you’re going to build something extremely powerful, you need to be very mindful about who gets to use it and under what conditions and what for…

“That’s the story of all technology throughout the history of mankind, whether it’s the wheel or fire or gunpowder or central banking – it increases state power and then the question of who’s in charge becomes higher and higher stakes.”

The seven-year deal that Palantir has just signed with the NHS

The number of patients removed from NHS waiting lists since the company’s software was introduced

The number of additional operations that have taken place in the same period

The company’s valuation as of August last year