Europe’s mission to distance itself from its reliance on American technology companies has come for the “special relationship” between the US and the UK. A recent report published by the U.K. Parliament’s Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee warned that the country’s ongoing relationships with tech giants will make it hard to ever achieve digital independence, and it highlights Palantir as a particularly risky partner to continue to deal with.
The report broadly deals with the challenges of being locked into agreements with third-party technology vendors for essential governmental services. Enter Palantir as the case in point of what can go wrong, in part due to the risk of ongoing enshittification of the company’s technology eroding government services, and in part because the company’s owners can’t stop talking like wannabe fascist dweebs.
The NHS serves as a cautionary tale
Let’s start with the tech concerns, which are not unique to Palantir, but the committee concluded that of all the companies they have an unfortunate amount of reliance on, “Palantir concerns us most.” Currently, Palantir has a contract with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to build a Federated Data Platform (FDP) to securely store patient health information. The Committee report cited the concerns of Medconfidential, a patient privacy advocacy organzation, which warned that Palantir “followed their commercial self-interests in attempting to burrow so deep into the NHS that they cannot be migrated away from and can name their fee.”
Reality sure seems to be bearing out those concerns. Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported that the NHS was set to allow Palantir contractors “unlimited access” to patient data. Just a year prior, a Chief Digital Information Officer at an NHS Trust told a Parliamentary Committee that the organization was feeling more pressure to “do more with digital,” and rely more on vendors like Palantir to accomplish that. That’s how the country gets stuck with Palantir.
Views of Palantir CEO and founder under a microscope
And then there’s Alex Karp and Peter Thiel’s big mouth. Repeatedly over the course of the report, the Committee raised concerns about things that the company’s CEO and co-founder have said. In 2023, Thiel told the debating society at Oxford Union, “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb, and the NHS makes people sick,” and said the health service should be destroyed. “You just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” he suggested. Not exactly what you want to hear from your biggest data partner.
Karp, meanwhile, has a habit to posting manifestos and talking (when he can string a sentence together) in technoauthoritarian tones. He has said previously, “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.” He’s currently building software for essential services and military use, which seems like the thing a guy who wants to accumulate power would do.
For those reasons, the Committee concluded, “Palantir’s increasing presence across the public sector represents an unacceptable point of weakness.” It recommended the UK government commit to getting out of its contract with Palantir as soon as possible by exercising the break clause that will become available in February 2027, and either build an in-house replacement for the Federated Data Program or tap a UK-owned vendors to pick up the ball. Whatever route they choose, the destination they’re looking for is the same: being as far away from Palantir as possible.
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