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From left, Commander Clair Haynes, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan meet police officers to discuss operational planning, in London on May 15, 2026. (Peter Nicholls\/Pool Photo via AP)<\/p>\n
Last week, it was revealed that United States-based spy tech firm Palantir had lost another big-money public contract<\/a>, following earlier news it had lost its contract with the United Kingdom government for the Homes for Ukraine<\/a> scheme.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s response? Palantir\u2019s UK boss Louis Mosley says Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who blocked Mosley\u2019s news contract with the Met Police this week, is \u201cputting politics over public safety<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n This is an odd response, because anyone who has paid attention to Palantir\u2019s actions \u2013 and the public comments of its leaders \u2013 over the last two decades will know that Palantir is a fundamentally political company.<\/p>\n Six years after founding Palantir, Peter Thiel wrote: \u201cI no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.\u201d In 2023, he told<\/a> Oxford Students\u2019 Union that British affection for the NHS is \u201cStockholm syndrome.\u201d<\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s choice of partners as a business has demonstrated a consistent political direction. Originally funded by the CIA<\/a>, Palantir\u2019s core business has been providing big data and surveillance support to clients including the US military, the Israeli Defense Forces and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.<\/p>\n But the really interesting thing about Palantir losing both these public contracts is that it doesn’t appear to have been about politics, or at least not primarily.<\/p>\n Instead, Palantir lost its contract with the Met because the Mayor\u2019s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) found that Scotland Yard had breached the strict procurement rules<\/a> that must be met for all contracts funded by taxpayer money.<\/p>\n What Khan actually did was block the signing of a new contract between the Met and Palantir, which would have jacked up the price from less than \u00a3500k for its previous agreement, to \u00a350m<\/a> \u2014 all without giving any other potential vendor a chance to make a better offer.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not playing politics \u2013 it\u2019s stopping the taxpayer, and the Met, from getting left with the bill for a 100-fold mark-up on the old contract with no questions asked.<\/p>\n Our Content delivered to your inbox.<\/p>\n Join our newsletter on issues and ideas at the intersection of tech & democracy<\/p>\n Thank you!<\/p>\n You have successfully joined our subscriber list.<\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s loss of the Homes for Ukraine contract is a similar story. Palantir initially took on the contract for free in 2022 to help house people fleeing Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine \u2013 only to jack up the price to over \u00a310m within just two years<\/a>. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has said that canceling that contract and moving to an in-house model has saved the public purse millions of pounds.<\/p>\n Criticism of Palantir\u2019s anti-competitive tactics isn\u2019t new. In 2023, the Government\u2019s Chief Commercial Officer, Gareth Rhys Williams, called the company out in public<\/a>, saying the \u201cpractice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold [is] contrary to the principles of public procurement, which usually require open competition.\u201d<\/p>\n Which brings us to Palantir\u2019s \u00a3330m contract for the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). Palantir got its start in the NHS via a secret \u00a31 contract to run the NHS Covid-19 Datastore (exposed by Foxglove and openDemocracy in 2020<\/a>). This was the first time Palantir ran this tactic, which we\u2019ve now seen successfully repeated across the public sector.<\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s rebuttal lines to criticism are almost identical to the Met contract. Mosley says anyone concerned about Palantir in the health service is \u201cputting ideology over patient safety<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n But we are starting to see signs<\/a> of the same value-for-money questions appearing with the FDP contract, too. Greater Manchester NHS Trust says it has rejected Palantir\u2019s NHS tools<\/a> not because of political difference but because its tools are \u201cyears ahead\u201d of what Mosley\u2019s kit can do. And last month, the British Medical Journal reported that it had seen evidence<\/a> suggesting the benefits of the FDP pilot at Chelsea and Westminster Foundation Trust, promoted as a Palantir success story, were overstated.<\/p>\n NHS England and Palantir sing a strikingly similar tune to one another when praising the performance of the FDP, citing superficially impressive stats. But questions continue to grow about how those are stood up. Successes are trumpeted at NHS trusts using Palantir\u2019s FDP tools, but we\u2019re given no meaningful comparison data against the performance of trusts \u2013 like Greater Manchester \u2013 who say they\u2019re better off without. Without real, comparable stats, it\u2019s impossible to say whether NHS England\u2019s claims defending Palantir are substance or spin.<\/p>\n