Palantir’s Contracts with UK and US Governments

Karp’s views matter because his company has a growing list of UK government contracts. These include the NHS, the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the Financial Conduct Authority, and 11 police forces. Palantir also has multimillion-dollar deals with the US and other powerful governments.

Palantir’s role in public bodies has raised concerns. Some fear the influence of its leaders, given the company’s significant contracts. Professor Shannon Vallor from Edinburgh University said, “Every alarm bell for democracy must ring.”

Palantir’s Technology and Controversies

Palantir describes its work as similar to plumbing—connecting scattered data stores. The firm’s products allow analysis of large, often incompatible data sets, including through commercial AI systems. Consultant Tom Bartlett, who previously worked on the NHS Federated Data Platform, said Palantir is “uniquely suited to the messy NHS data problems that have been accumulating over the last 25 years.”

Palantir is also a major military contractor. Its AI-enabled “war-fighting” technology is used by NATO, Ukraine, and the US in its conflict with Iran. In the UK, the MoD has signed a three-year contract worth £240m for tech supporting the so-called “kill-chain,” which fuses data to produce faster options for attacking an enemy target.

Critics argue that its work with US immigration enforcement and Israel’s military should disqualify it. Palantir employs around 950 people in the UK, making up 17% of its global workforce. Others cite the opinions of Palantir co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel, a libertarian backer of Donald Trump, and Karp, as reasons to exclude it.

Contentious Views and Political Stances

Karp’s politics are complex. He reportedly donated to the presidential campaigns of Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but he proudly calls his company “anti-woke.” His views are unpalatable to many on the left. In his X post, Karp wrote that some cultures have produced “wonders” while others are “regressive and harmful.” He criticized the West for having “resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity.”

Protecting democracies required “hard power,” he said, while “theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications” would see the US lose ground to its adversaries. Karp argued the age of nuclear deterrence is ending, to be replaced with deterrence built on AI. He said defending democracy was a shared obligation, and national service should be “a universal duty.”

Karp criticized the post-war “neutering” of Germany and Japan, calling the “defanging” of Germany “an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price.” He has a doctorate in social theory and is one of several wealthy tech leaders, including Elon Musk, to promote political and ideological theories.

Professor Vallor said “unelected men” like Karp were “imposing their own ‘grand narratives’ of cultural superiority, militarised control, and public power without public accountability.” Dr. Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne of the health campaign group Medact said, “Every day that the NHS continues this contract with Palantir makes our health system complicit in Palantir’s violent operations, such as AI warfare, and deeply alarming ideology.”

Palantir responded in a statement to the BBC, saying it is “deeply proud to be helping the UK government to deliver more NHS operations, speed up cancer diagnosis, keep Royal Navy ships at sea for longer and tackle domestic violence.” The Department of Health pointed to remarks in April by Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who defended the use of their technology but said he was “not a fan” of the people who run Palantir and described some of the things said by them in the US as “abominable.”