What you need to know about Palantir, the US firm in line for a £480m NHS deal

Controversial US spy-tech firm Palantir is believed to be the front-runner for the NHS’s biggest ever contract, despite warnings from data privacy campaigners.

The £480m contract to provide software joining up patient data between different NHS trusts is set to be announced imminently. The project, known as the “federated data platform”, is NHS England’s latest attempt to consolidate patient data into a centralised system.

The deal has faced criticism from campaigners who argue Palantir’s lack of track record in healthcare and its murky links to US and UK spy agencies make it unfit to take on the job.

Questions have also been raised over NHS England’s procurement process for the contract after openDemocracy revealed Palantir was a shoo-in for a separate multi-million-pound contract months before the deal was signed. The company has picked up five NHS England contracts in a row without tender.

Here’s what you need to know about Palantir.

What is Palantir?

Palantir is a tech company that was founded in 2003 by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Its original funding came from the CIA, the US spy agency, and much of its business has come from providing software to US military, security, intelligence and police agencies.

Palantir has a number of corporate clients including BP, Airbus and Ferrari and has also been used by the Ministry of Defence in the UK since at least 2018.

Thiel took the name for the company from the mystical “seeing stones” in J R R Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which the orbs are known for their potential to corrupt.

The software it sells helps organisations make sense of vast amounts of data. It does this by gathering together different data sources and providing a way for customers to search through it. Palantir has also branched out into artificial intelligence tools that can do things like automatically identify buildings, vehicles and people in video footage.

Palantir is not the only company in the race for the £480m NHS contract. Quantexa, a billion-pound British tech company that recently hired ex-NHS boss Matthew Gould, is also in the running.

Who is Peter Thiel?

Peter Thiel was co-founder of PayPal, the digital payment platform, and the first outside investor in Facebook: enough to make him a multi-billionaire even before he founded Palantir. He also runs three venture-capital firms and has launched a hedge fund.

Thiel describes himself as a libertarian and he was one of the largest donors to Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, donating $35m (around £28.5m).

A report by Insider also alleges he was an FBI informant.

He previously backed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and joined Trump’s transition team after his victory over Hillary Clinton. Earlier this year it was reported that he will not back any candidates in the 2024 US election.

In January, Thiel said that the NHS should embrace privatisation during a talk he was giving at Oxford University. He added that public affection for the health service was akin to “Stockholm syndrome”.

Why is Palantir controversial?

The tech company has faced criticism for its involvement in controversial US government programmes, which human rights groups say have abused poor people, migrants and ethnic minorities.

Palantir’s software aided the US immigration enforcement agency (ICE) to carry out a controversial, hardline deportation policy introduced under then president Donald Trump in 2017.

The company’s technology enabled immigration agents to identify, share information on and track migrants and asylum seekers. It also reportedly helped agents plan immigration raids which led to the arrest of parents and caregivers of unaccompanied migrant children and their subsequent separation and deportation.

At the time, Palantir CEO Alex Karp defended the company’s work for ICE, telling CNBC: “We started this contract under Obama, and obviously there’s a lot of legitimate concern about what happens on our border, how it happens, and what does the enforcement look like?

“It’s a legitimate, complex issue. My personal position is that we acknowledge the complexity. The people protesting, whom I respect, should also acknowledge that complexity.”

Palantir has also reportedly contributed its technology to programmes used by government spy agencies to collect vast amounts of data on their citizens.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the Guardian in 2013 revealed the existence of XKEYSCORE, a programme that allows the US National Security Agency to capture “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”. Palantir involvement was “to facilitate, augment, and accelerate the use of XKEYSCORE”, according to the Intercept.

Palantir’s tech has been accused of creating ‘racist’ feedback loops in US ‘predictive policing’ software. Experts said the technology has led to individuals in already overpoliced neighbourhoods becoming targets for police abuse. Palantir has repeatedly denied past requests to comment on software it has provided US police forces.

The company was also controversially awarded a contract to support the UK government’s Homes for Ukraine programme without competition in March 2022. The government said it suspended procurement rules because of the urgency of the scheme.

After initially providing its IT system free of charge, Palantir secured a further contract in September 2022 – this time for £4.5m.

Does Palantir have my NHS data?

Yes, Palantir is already processing everyone’s NHS records, though it cannot use it for its own purposes and the health service says the records have been safely “de-identified”.

Palantir secured a contract with the NHS at the height of the pandemic without competition. It provided software to create a giant Covid-19 datastore, charging just £1 for the job. At the time, NHSX, the digital transformation arm of the NHS, said the technology would give ministers and officials “real-time information about health services, showing where demand is rising and where critical equipment needs to be deployed”.

Palantir and Faculty, a British artificial intelligence startup that worked with the US company, were not permitted to use the data or share it for their own purposes.

In December 2020, the deal with Palantir was extended, but the contract was neither published nor tendered for – leading openDemocracy to sue the DHSC. After this legal action, the government released its contracts with Palantir and promised to consult the public before making further deals.

But in March 2023, leaked documents revealed that NHS bosses ordered a rollout of Palantir software to hospitals across England, in a seeming breach of that promise.

The new database, called ‘Faster Data Flows’, collects daily information about hospital patients – including their dates of birth, postcodes and detailed medical histories – that was previously held by individual trusts and shared less frequently.

NHS England told openDemocracy it would alter or remove identifiable personal information before it was passed to Palantir – a process referred to by the health service as “pseudonymisation”. Palantir also insisted that it does not have access to any “identifiable medical records”.

Privacy experts have criticised this position. Dr Neil Bhatia, a GP and data protection expert, told openDemocracy: “The data derived from the Covid-19 store remains both personal data and confidential information, given the richness of the data and the relative ease by which re-identification could occur.”