People seem to forget a healthcare system is an important part of a nations security apparatus. In a time of war, casualty numbers and information is very valuable, and so allowing access to this data to be controlled by a company (palantir) funded by a foreign nations security services (funding by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC fund) is short sighted.
Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.
The U.K. has been stripped and laid bare of its assets since the era of privatisation. The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.
I think the only reason this is done is because we are in an era of exceptional illegal kickbacks. Unethical/illegal behavior has become so normalized that if you aren't actively working for a party who is doing it/doing it yourself you are losing.
From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.
Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.
FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.
Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.
What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.
Palantir provides the software but installs in your cloud or hardware. They rarely exfiltrate the data. So you don’t give Palantir anything (usually).
Edit: I can understand not wanting to use a non-UK company for NHS health. But Palantir isn’t the all seeing bogeyman it’s made out to be. It’s just knowledge graph and AI models which run in your cloud or hardware.
If you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.
Could you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.
There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.
You should also include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, and any tech company that has a defence contract with the US Department of Defence / War and ICE or any government.
Yet the big problem is of course for those being “principled” about this subject are not serious themselves as some either work there and profit from it, continue to use their products including LLMs or will concede to using them due to social inertia.
The only time this is taken seriously is when all these contracts are scrapped. (They won’t be.)
Companies that submit bids for contracts get contracts. You would be surprised at the diversity of size and scale of companies which service defense contracts in particular - very small companies can end up in big supply chains because they're the ones who turn up to make the part.
As a worker in one of the companies above, I can tell you that we aren’t willing to do just “whatever” to win contracts. We have real responsible AI reviews etc. We would not just hand over data to the US government. It doesn’t seem that way at Palantir.
But the issue is, and I am not someone saying we should or can throw everything out, that if the US gov demands it, you have to hand over the data right? If your HQ is in the US? Palantir, for me, is worse because of what they are and their communications as you say, but all of these, when compelled by the courts, have to hand over right?
As cliche is it to cry whataboutism, this clearly is. Incrementalism is better than nothing. Sanctimony is FUD. If even one company is suffers at least it’ll serve as a warning to the others.
They are the only ones who can really do predictions on a policy level. Ever since the post "they will just embrace liberty" ideology disaster that was the iraq-war mining of the cellphones aka palantirs for behavioural data has given some pretty gnarly insights to what mankind can do and cant do. None of this "We shall just degrowth and life in harmony with nature" or "all cultures can equally well form lawfull societies" nonsense. And if you have the knowledge about what a thing can and cant do, you can package it into a simulator and sell predictions to policymakers. Predictions & policies like : "Let refugeewaves in and the idealistic-retarded movements will poison themselves, wither and die".
For all practical purposes this already exists and that's because practically speaking it has to. Obviously a health system can't deploy infinity money to save the life of every person who is sick.
When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.
Hopefully Palantir has the necessary skillset to navigate the political environment which involves developing a platform that:
1. protects patient privacy
2. supports needs of providers (e.g. hospitals, gps, specialists, DoH)
3. allows providers to use data to support their operations
4. allows NHS to use the data to improve patient outcomes and efficiency
I’ve heard Foundry is not only insanely expensive, but to actually accomplish something comparable to the demos in your domain requires a huge amount of integration work to build it out in a way that locks you in.
They have a track record of failed IT projects, because they have a very high bar for handling data properly.
Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.
As somebody born in an NHS hospital whose life has been saved by the NHS on at least 3 occasions, I'm more than happy to defend their record.
Palantir, given what we know that has leaked about what they do and how they do it, considerably less so.
As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting?
The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more hypotheses more efficiently, not generate more hypotheses. You don't need a product like foundry to have reproducibility or share pipeline templates; there are already free, scripting-language-agnostic workflow tools.
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry?
A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning.
Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
They were already contracted by NHS to monitor vaccine distribution and covid data in 2020, that contract was terminated and moved to Mozaic Services after public outcry over data privacy concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...
I don't know if you all know this, but Palantir offers ai/analytics services that are not just for governments. That's how they started out, but don't be surprised seeing random companies using them same as they would elastic, splunk and the like.
I won't comment on Palantir themselves, I doubt I could add anything there, but I think there is a glaring pattern to be observed there. Companies really are not people, if people don't want them, they can cease to exist. If the UK for example is really able to say no to Palantir, can they do it countrywide?
Fines aside (let's be real, they're just taxes at this point since no company goes bankrupt from fines these days), what company is facing meaningful consequence for harming society?
Vote with dollars? Ok...but back to my pessimism earlier, I guess I don't need to vote at the ballot then right? Let's just vote with our wallets instead?
If Palantir really is so evil (and I'm not saying that, I don't know enough , although I've probably used their stuff more than most), at minimum, tell me what sort of a vote will lead to their extinction. if they broke the law, tell me who I can vote for to imprison the law breakers. If they didn't break the law because one didn't exist to prohibit their actions to begin with, then who will pass the laws required so I can vote for them? Why are we not talking about whatever practice Palantir is in the habit of doing, and how to criminalize that? Maybe we can't in the US, but this is Europe, I would hope they'd have better luck.
This sort of thinking and action-taking doesn't seem to exist here in the US. I don't think we're able to function that way anymore.
To friends in Europe and elsewhere: Take heed and be warned. Being able to organize and resist companies and laws, that's something you should fight with all your strength over.
But looking at this site, it isn't very convincing. I know of more serious accusations against Palantir that aren't listed there. Enabling mass deportations and gaza, yeah.. that's Microsoft, Google and Cisco as well. Their CEO, yeah.. Elon says a lot worse things about a lot more things, are his satellites banned in the UK? at least is the UK gov banned from using them? He's been caught aiding Russia with his sats a couple of times now.
My observation is that a more holistic approach and measures are needed. A glaring lack of consequences over all.
Palantir indeed has a lot of clients, but governments - and in particular, US federal agencies - are still the biggest and most lucrative customers. Nor is Palantir blind to what those customers are using the tech for - indeed, their whole point is "deploying" people to customer's premises so that they can work hands on. So when they do that for the ICE contract, say, they know full well what they are optimizing - proudly so. It's way more close and personal than what most of the big tech firms do (although you did list some exceptions).
But no, it's not illegal to provide panopticon-as-a-service to authoritarian governments, unfortunately. Especially not when you ask said governments.
As to what you can do to change this, I honestly don't know, and I say this as someone who resigned from NVIDIA recently because of this: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-palantir-ai-enterp... - but there's no shortage of people willing to work on this stuff. And in US at least I feel big tech enmeshed with the feds have such a strong lobby, neither major party is going to do anything useful about it in terms of passing laws making the business model itself illegal.
Mostly the x is evil crowd are reasoning based on political affiliation. As is the GoodLaw Project and Jolyon Maugham who have a history of doing so.
All media is agitprop now. If the CEO of a company says things that oppose the political chorus of either side, they become subject to witch hunts such as this.
Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
> Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
There isn't a single reason or idea in your previous two paragraphs. Instead it seems to be the worst of cynicism designed to encourage people to give up on reasoning and ideas.
I can't say I understand the Palantir hate. Isn't it just a database analytics SaaS? Why not hate Google as well because government employees who do things you don't like use Google? Is the Palantir hate just manufactured pointless rage or is there an actual reason behind it?
Palantir have the means and at least in the U. S. the call to compile a database combining personal data over many (public) agencies, making a comprehensive surveillance of a population possible: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530212437/https://www.nytim...
Palantir is a spyware company and the CEO Alex Karp has explicitly said that thier goal is to use their tooling to create fear in people and kill people (i.e people deemed enemies of the United States)
You should probably hate Google too, but I think a lot of Palantir hate comes from (well deserved) hatred for Peter Thiel, who has injected himself directly into conservative politics.
Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.
Palantir makes AI to determine if who you are auto droning is a valid target or not. You can imagine why people dislike that, especially given that it's been deployed in Palestine
Perhaps it would be preferable at least to not mix civilian health data or regular business data, with mass surveillance data, and with military industrial complex and kill chain data. It would make sense to have an interest in keeping different kinds of personal data in separate places and not have it thrown around companies with quite different interests or collected together within some company that's involved in quite different industries. So why does it not make sense to apologists of this company?
How capable it is do you think at this moment. I guess we need 30 more years for software to get better, so less than 20 thousand children dies in the Gaza genocide.
That's a "motherhood statement"[1] - you haven't answered the question.
Militaries make targeting decisions with data. That's entirely separate to whether they have been ordered by civilian government to target something, and Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
No it’s not. It’s totally conceivable that the (perceived) quality of targeting data would contribute to the decision of whether to run a mission at all, and if so how extensively.
The companies involved definitely want you to think that part of their noble goal is reducing civilian casualties. As far as I can see, though, that is pure propaganda.
And that the people who stand to benefit the most from another war might want to filter/target that data in a way to make that more probable?
I mean, I know it's a stretch. Especially with how benevolent our current class of billionaires are. But just imagine a guy who thinks money is more important than anything else. I know... another stretch. lol.
> > Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
You're not actually suggesting that the company providing the data isn't at all part of that process, are you?
Can you, for a second, imagine a company collecting/forwarding only data that's beneficial to it's core objective? Especially one whose led by a guy who has quite literally benefits off of a war????
Yes, citizen-friend! I have upheld the Prime Directive and participated in our routine civic sports. Next month I will initiate the annual tributary credit transfer so that the oracle may see more clearly.
Palantir might just pretty up the display of the data that is aggregated by other vendors, which source their data from other vendors, who collect their data from "opt-in" services, which technically explain how they work somewhere in a 200 page ToS. But at some point you gotta look at the sum of the incremental issues and say enough is enough.
I don’t get this hysteria about palantir. They’re basically just a consulting company that turns your random excel sheets and old databases into something you can search.
My objection is that Palantir are close to a US regime that if not actually evil is at times indistinguishable from it.
Combine that with people like Peter Thiel (who has publicly stated beliefs that are deeply incompatible with free and democratic society) in positions of power/influence there, and opening up our citizens' and/or government's data to that company feels particularly risky[0].
So yes, I guess it's "political", but at some level everything is. We don't get to "just" make technology.
[0] Honestly, right now I would put most or all large US tech companies in the same bucket (though for now, less vehemently so) as large Chinese or Russian companies when it comes to sharing nationally important data or assets. We have to assume they're potentially compromised by a government that (by its own statements) can no longer be assumed to remain friendly. Palantir just happens to be both very visible and particularly risky in this regard.
I would say, in my opinion, that it's better in the US than in China/Russian hands. The US at least seems most aligned with the UK in terms of political freedom than the two communist states.
I'd also say that the NHS has a proven track record of failed IT projects, so if this company can improve the situation then I can't see the issue. Unless of course the UK gov mess up the contract, which can't be ruled out.
At some point you have to look at this objectively without politics bias.
> In the 2025 book The Technological Republic, Karp and Zamiska argue that American technological dominance requires deeper integration of Silicon Valley and defense interests. Karp contends that China operates with fewer ethical constraints than American defense companies, making technological leadership essential for national security. The authors stress that deterrence through technological dominance could prevent many wars. Bloomberg noted that the atomic bomb the Manhattan Project produced was ultimately used. The New Republic called Karp's formation of Palantir an embrace of techno-militarism to advance American global supremacy through hard power and targeted violence.[44][45][46] The Wall Street Journal said Palantir had a "pro-America ethos" from its inception, highlighting
For the love of God do a modicum of due dilligence before commenting.
You could have at least read Palatir's wiki before commenting.
Here are some hightlights:
> Karp and Zamiska argue that American technological dominance requires deeper integration of Silicon Valley and defense interests.
> Karp contends that China operates with fewer ethical constraints than American defense companies, making technological leadership essential for national security
> According to the Journal, for two years the company continuously revised its technology based on the demands of analysts from the intelligence agencies, introduced to them by In-Q-Tel.[1
so on and so on to gather every single thing you've ever done on the internet, it's very dystopia like and I cannot believe that it's legal outside the US for palantir to even operate in.
> NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza.
Forget politics, not everything has to be framed this way. This is simply something that should be done in-house. What if the UK's relations with the US break down, or there is a cyber attack on the infrastructure?
> One of Palantir’s founders is also openly against the NHS. Peter Thiel claimed it “makes people sick” and said that the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught? Do we have to be politically aligned with absolutely everybody at all times in every part of life in order to be able to function?
> With the government putting NHS trusts under pressure to adopt the software, we need to act right now. If you want to keep Palantir out of our NHS, send an email to your local trust and Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health.
This Wes Streeting guy has a high chance of being the next UK Prime Minister in early 2026.
> Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught?
I think the insinuation is that if someone is explicitly outspoken against something, don't hire/contract the guy/organization for tasks that are meant to help that something get better, the incentives just aren't aligned. Which in my mind, ignoring all the politics, make a ton of sense, I wouldn't want an anti-environmentalist to be "Head of Environmental Impact" or someone anti-education to be "Head of Education" or even involved in anything education.
Billionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting.
The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
Yes. Billionaires with an authoritarian agenda will cost their businesses and their shareholders billions of dollars in pursuit of ideological goals. Throw a few fascist salutes and people stop buying your cars. Was that salute rational? Is rationality even the right question?
So the US security apparatus will have DNA data on all UK citizens.
Nice...
What could possibly go wrong with giving UK citizen data to ICE, NSA, CIA, Trump, Trumps friends, Trumps friends corporations, Trump's friends foreign political connections, donors to the above etc...
Excuse my delivery of bad news, but the time to say no would have been when the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. The Fox has been in the henhouse for several decades now, asking politely or just mumbling "no" under your breath is not going to do anything at all. You may as well just save yourself the further humiliation of inevitable defeat with that mentality. People are going to say no to the implementation of a system with direct, root ties to the "intelligence" (we really need a better term for that) triad, when the peasants are totally dependent on the centralized, ruling class controlled health services of the NHS???
Hello? Does no one else notice that the peasants are in a a dungeon, in a cage in that dungeon and shackled to the wall in that cage in the dungeon? And they're going to say "no"???? People clearly have either gone insane and are lying to themselves, or they have absolutely no idea what the reality is that they are experiencing all around them out of delusions or stupidity, or both.
Palantir and Anduril both have an altogether creepy fixation on the UK.
I hope Trump lives a long enough and cognitively healthy enough life to witness his own utter humiliating failures, which are inevitable. His coalition is collapsing, his wealthy backers will run away because they have no principles.
Corporate Trumpism itself may never die, though; it is ironic that someone so malevolent, reactive, instinctive and disordered might be the harbinger of that smooth, sleek, white marble, stainless steel and brightly coloured leather sofa corporate governance future that Rollerball promised us.
People seem to forget a healthcare system is an important part of a nations security apparatus. In a time of war, casualty numbers and information is very valuable, and so allowing access to this data to be controlled by a company (palantir) funded by a foreign nations security services (funding by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC fund) is short sighted.
Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.
The U.K. has been stripped and laid bare of its assets since the era of privatisation. The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.
I think the only reason this is done is because we are in an era of exceptional illegal kickbacks. Unethical/illegal behavior has become so normalized that if you aren't actively working for a party who is doing it/doing it yourself you are losing.
My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.
Make the data public if you want to see progress
From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.
Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.
FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.
Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.
What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.
Palantir provides the software but installs in your cloud or hardware. They rarely exfiltrate the data. So you don’t give Palantir anything (usually).
Edit: I can understand not wanting to use a non-UK company for NHS health. But Palantir isn’t the all seeing bogeyman it’s made out to be. It’s just knowledge graph and AI models which run in your cloud or hardware.
This is not a good faith argument
If you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.
I trust Palantir about the same as I trust the Chinese government with my health data.
Could you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.
> My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.
Because they pay better.
Have you seen research institutions lobbying the governments ?
There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.
Everyone should say no to palantir anywhere, especially outside the US.
Palantir is inside Coles supermarkets in Australia. I've stopped going to Coles because of that.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...
I assume "planting" is a typo'ed "palantir", in which case I agree completely. And it's true inside the US as much as outside.
Thanks, fixed.
And inside the US too!
You should also include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, and any tech company that has a defence contract with the US Department of Defence / War and ICE or any government.
Yet the big problem is of course for those being “principled” about this subject are not serious themselves as some either work there and profit from it, continue to use their products including LLMs or will concede to using them due to social inertia.
The only time this is taken seriously is when all these contracts are scrapped. (They won’t be.)
I think the difference is that Palantir is significantly more focused on federal contracts, particularly those related to defense/surveillance.
Large tech companies are defense contractors now.
Is there a time they weren’t?
Google got their first DoD contract in 2003 from DARPA.
Facebook was Life Log, Oracle was Project Oracle. None of the household names in tech are playing straight.
WDYM "now"? Companies that get large enough get contracts. Even apple sold power macs iphones and ipads to us mil.
I'm throwing out my iPhone and moving to Tibet.
China occupied Tibet?
Companies that submit bids for contracts get contracts. You would be surprised at the diversity of size and scale of companies which service defense contracts in particular - very small companies can end up in big supply chains because they're the ones who turn up to make the part.
Of course that's the goal, but stopping new contract is 1 step toward the goal my friend, got to stop whining and take baby step.
You are saying stopping new coal mine means that everyone need to stop heating now and freeze to death this winter.
Don't let the best be the enemy of the good.
Absolutely. We should not contract any of these companies and use British companies instead.
As a worker in one of the companies above, I can tell you that we aren’t willing to do just “whatever” to win contracts. We have real responsible AI reviews etc. We would not just hand over data to the US government. It doesn’t seem that way at Palantir.
But the issue is, and I am not someone saying we should or can throw everything out, that if the US gov demands it, you have to hand over the data right? If your HQ is in the US? Palantir, for me, is worse because of what they are and their communications as you say, but all of these, when compelled by the courts, have to hand over right?
best not to do business with any foreign country then. neo-isolationism becomes global and all it took was a second Trump term.
As cliche is it to cry whataboutism, this clearly is. Incrementalism is better than nothing. Sanctimony is FUD. If even one company is suffers at least it’ll serve as a warning to the others.
When one domino falls, it will cause many to fall at once
Why?
We don’t know who else is watching.
Why?
Surveillance Capitalism
They are the only ones who can really do predictions on a policy level. Ever since the post "they will just embrace liberty" ideology disaster that was the iraq-war mining of the cellphones aka palantirs for behavioural data has given some pretty gnarly insights to what mankind can do and cant do. None of this "We shall just degrowth and life in harmony with nature" or "all cultures can equally well form lawfull societies" nonsense. And if you have the knowledge about what a thing can and cant do, you can package it into a simulator and sell predictions to policymakers. Predictions & policies like : "Let refugeewaves in and the idealistic-retarded movements will poison themselves, wither and die".
Wonder if they'll also have an AI kill chain for healthcare. Would be a neat little trick to reduce costs.
For all practical purposes this already exists and that's because practically speaking it has to. Obviously a health system can't deploy infinity money to save the life of every person who is sick.
So what are they using this software for, what's the proposed alternative, and what makes that alternative work better for their use case?
When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.
Hopefully Palantir has the necessary skillset to navigate the political environment which involves developing a platform that: 1. protects patient privacy 2. supports needs of providers (e.g. hospitals, gps, specialists, DoH) 3. allows providers to use data to support their operations 4. allows NHS to use the data to improve patient outcomes and efficiency
This Foundry demo impressed me at the time but its a bit dated now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms
Actual data analyst from a hospital talking about what the platform achieves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps47Azr2Jz0
I’ve heard Foundry is not only insanely expensive, but to actually accomplish something comparable to the demos in your domain requires a huge amount of integration work to build it out in a way that locks you in.
They are currently trying to screw us for a 14% year on year increase (over 4 years)
and screwing us for licenses to run apps in "production"
> requires a huge amount of integration work
Oh no!..
Data integration is literally Palantir's business.
That second video was fascinating, thanks for posting.
It's totally reasonable to be skeptical of palantir without knowing the exact product in question, given their record.
I mean it’s totally reasonable to be skeptical of the NHS given their record
Not really.
They have a track record of failed IT projects, because they have a very high bar for handling data properly.
Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.
As somebody born in an NHS hospital whose life has been saved by the NHS on at least 3 occasions, I'm more than happy to defend their record.
Palantir, given what we know that has leaked about what they do and how they do it, considerably less so.
Healthcare systems often use Foundry for organizing data. It's a complex problem and Foundry has a good toolset for the job.
https://www.palantir.com/offerings/health/
As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting?
The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more hypotheses more efficiently, not generate more hypotheses. You don't need a product like foundry to have reproducibility or share pipeline templates; there are already free, scripting-language-agnostic workflow tools.
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry?
A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning.
Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
They were already contracted by NHS to monitor vaccine distribution and covid data in 2020, that contract was terminated and moved to Mozaic Services after public outcry over data privacy concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...
Did you read the article? Adult social care dashboard not vaccine data. Mozaic just handled migration and is not the host.
NHs FDP (Foundry) still has the vaccine data last time I checked.
Clicking "no thanks" on their cookie banner does absolutely nothing. What a sleazy website.
Clicking anything on the banner does absolutely nothing Hanlon's Razor wins out here I think
Ublock origin zapper kills it perfectly, though clearly it shouldn't be needed.
Not reproduced here, where it dismisses the dialog.
I don't know if you all know this, but Palantir offers ai/analytics services that are not just for governments. That's how they started out, but don't be surprised seeing random companies using them same as they would elastic, splunk and the like.
I won't comment on Palantir themselves, I doubt I could add anything there, but I think there is a glaring pattern to be observed there. Companies really are not people, if people don't want them, they can cease to exist. If the UK for example is really able to say no to Palantir, can they do it countrywide?
Fines aside (let's be real, they're just taxes at this point since no company goes bankrupt from fines these days), what company is facing meaningful consequence for harming society?
Vote with dollars? Ok...but back to my pessimism earlier, I guess I don't need to vote at the ballot then right? Let's just vote with our wallets instead?
If Palantir really is so evil (and I'm not saying that, I don't know enough , although I've probably used their stuff more than most), at minimum, tell me what sort of a vote will lead to their extinction. if they broke the law, tell me who I can vote for to imprison the law breakers. If they didn't break the law because one didn't exist to prohibit their actions to begin with, then who will pass the laws required so I can vote for them? Why are we not talking about whatever practice Palantir is in the habit of doing, and how to criminalize that? Maybe we can't in the US, but this is Europe, I would hope they'd have better luck.
This sort of thinking and action-taking doesn't seem to exist here in the US. I don't think we're able to function that way anymore.
To friends in Europe and elsewhere: Take heed and be warned. Being able to organize and resist companies and laws, that's something you should fight with all your strength over.
But looking at this site, it isn't very convincing. I know of more serious accusations against Palantir that aren't listed there. Enabling mass deportations and gaza, yeah.. that's Microsoft, Google and Cisco as well. Their CEO, yeah.. Elon says a lot worse things about a lot more things, are his satellites banned in the UK? at least is the UK gov banned from using them? He's been caught aiding Russia with his sats a couple of times now.
My observation is that a more holistic approach and measures are needed. A glaring lack of consequences over all.
Palantir indeed has a lot of clients, but governments - and in particular, US federal agencies - are still the biggest and most lucrative customers. Nor is Palantir blind to what those customers are using the tech for - indeed, their whole point is "deploying" people to customer's premises so that they can work hands on. So when they do that for the ICE contract, say, they know full well what they are optimizing - proudly so. It's way more close and personal than what most of the big tech firms do (although you did list some exceptions).
But no, it's not illegal to provide panopticon-as-a-service to authoritarian governments, unfortunately. Especially not when you ask said governments.
As to what you can do to change this, I honestly don't know, and I say this as someone who resigned from NVIDIA recently because of this: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-palantir-ai-enterp... - but there's no shortage of people willing to work on this stuff. And in US at least I feel big tech enmeshed with the feds have such a strong lobby, neither major party is going to do anything useful about it in terms of passing laws making the business model itself illegal.
Mostly the x is evil crowd are reasoning based on political affiliation. As is the GoodLaw Project and Jolyon Maugham who have a history of doing so.
All media is agitprop now. If the CEO of a company says things that oppose the political chorus of either side, they become subject to witch hunts such as this.
Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
> Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
There isn't a single reason or idea in your previous two paragraphs. Instead it seems to be the worst of cynicism designed to encourage people to give up on reasoning and ideas.
Has he helped Russia? I know he did help Ukraine partly with Starlink and I hadn't heard much beyond that
I can't say I understand the Palantir hate. Isn't it just a database analytics SaaS? Why not hate Google as well because government employees who do things you don't like use Google? Is the Palantir hate just manufactured pointless rage or is there an actual reason behind it?
Palantir have the means and at least in the U. S. the call to compile a database combining personal data over many (public) agencies, making a comprehensive surveillance of a population possible: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530212437/https://www.nytim...
with a CEO that openly boast their product is great at getting data to kill people, what's there not to hate?
Palantir is a spyware company and the CEO Alex Karp has explicitly said that thier goal is to use their tooling to create fear in people and kill people (i.e people deemed enemies of the United States)
Are you talking about the quote where he referred to people brining Fentanyl in that is killing people?
I didn't see anything wrong with his little speech.
I think a fair number of people who hate Palantir do hate Google too.
Because the founders are evil and should in in prison?
Google at least pretends to "not be evil".
Palantir is proud of their work on the ICE contract.
Palantir is more directly involved in the surveillance state and military industrial complex.
Not saying Google isn't, but it's at least not as public or blatant, and is much less of what Google does overall.
You should probably hate Google too, but I think a lot of Palantir hate comes from (well deserved) hatred for Peter Thiel, who has injected himself directly into conservative politics.
Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.
Palantir makes AI to determine if who you are auto droning is a valid target or not. You can imagine why people dislike that, especially given that it's been deployed in Palestine
Would you prefer that militaries have less-capable software to make targeting decisions?
Perhaps it would be preferable at least to not mix civilian health data or regular business data, with mass surveillance data, and with military industrial complex and kill chain data. It would make sense to have an interest in keeping different kinds of personal data in separate places and not have it thrown around companies with quite different interests or collected together within some company that's involved in quite different industries. So why does it not make sense to apologists of this company?
How capable it is do you think at this moment. I guess we need 30 more years for software to get better, so less than 20 thousand children dies in the Gaza genocide.
I would prefer that militaries do not deliberately genocide civilians and antagonize non-combatants.
That's a "motherhood statement"[1] - you haven't answered the question.
Militaries make targeting decisions with data. That's entirely separate to whether they have been ordered by civilian government to target something, and Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/motherhood_statement
No it’s not. It’s totally conceivable that the (perceived) quality of targeting data would contribute to the decision of whether to run a mission at all, and if so how extensively.
isn’t that essentially true of any technology that reduces the civilian casualties of a conflict?
The companies involved definitely want you to think that part of their noble goal is reducing civilian casualties. As far as I can see, though, that is pure propaganda.
You can reduce civilian casualties by reducing the number of people considered civilians.
Absolutely.
And that the people who stand to benefit the most from another war might want to filter/target that data in a way to make that more probable?
I mean, I know it's a stretch. Especially with how benevolent our current class of billionaires are. But just imagine a guy who thinks money is more important than anything else. I know... another stretch. lol.
> > Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
You're not actually suggesting that the company providing the data isn't at all part of that process, are you?
Can you, for a second, imagine a company collecting/forwarding only data that's beneficial to it's core objective? Especially one whose led by a guy who has quite literally benefits off of a war????
Oh sorry I mean
Yes, citizen-friend! I have upheld the Prime Directive and participated in our routine civic sports. Next month I will initiate the annual tributary credit transfer so that the oracle may see more clearly.
Palantir might just pretty up the display of the data that is aggregated by other vendors, which source their data from other vendors, who collect their data from "opt-in" services, which technically explain how they work somewhere in a 200 page ToS. But at some point you gotta look at the sum of the incremental issues and say enough is enough.
I don’t get this hysteria about palantir. They’re basically just a consulting company that turns your random excel sheets and old databases into something you can search.
The issue is they don't then fuck off, they instead charge ever increasing rates yearly to maintain that simple port an 18 year old could do.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Companies are lining up to spend millions on appreciating Salesforce contracts too.
Why? Because they are getting support.
I think the real reason is that these companies are experts at selling to management.
It's not about what the company does but about who they are, and the hatred is ancient.
We are what we do.
Nieve, or wilfully in denial?
I know next to nothing about Palantir or the CEO or his mate Peter other than what I've read in this thread and some of the links.
From what I can tell the objections are all political in nature, and whether people like what the company has done previously.
In the context of the NHS contract I've seen little to suggest the software is going to make anything worse... How could it?
My objection is that Palantir are close to a US regime that if not actually evil is at times indistinguishable from it.
Combine that with people like Peter Thiel (who has publicly stated beliefs that are deeply incompatible with free and democratic society) in positions of power/influence there, and opening up our citizens' and/or government's data to that company feels particularly risky[0].
So yes, I guess it's "political", but at some level everything is. We don't get to "just" make technology.
[0] Honestly, right now I would put most or all large US tech companies in the same bucket (though for now, less vehemently so) as large Chinese or Russian companies when it comes to sharing nationally important data or assets. We have to assume they're potentially compromised by a government that (by its own statements) can no longer be assumed to remain friendly. Palantir just happens to be both very visible and particularly risky in this regard.
I would say, in my opinion, that it's better in the US than in China/Russian hands. The US at least seems most aligned with the UK in terms of political freedom than the two communist states.
I'd also say that the NHS has a proven track record of failed IT projects, so if this company can improve the situation then I can't see the issue. Unless of course the UK gov mess up the contract, which can't be ruled out.
At some point you have to look at this objectively without politics bias.
lol
> In the 2025 book The Technological Republic, Karp and Zamiska argue that American technological dominance requires deeper integration of Silicon Valley and defense interests. Karp contends that China operates with fewer ethical constraints than American defense companies, making technological leadership essential for national security. The authors stress that deterrence through technological dominance could prevent many wars. Bloomberg noted that the atomic bomb the Manhattan Project produced was ultimately used. The New Republic called Karp's formation of Palantir an embrace of techno-militarism to advance American global supremacy through hard power and targeted violence.[44][45][46] The Wall Street Journal said Palantir had a "pro-America ethos" from its inception, highlighting
For the love of God do a modicum of due dilligence before commenting.
This omits the crucial part of which old databases they do this to when working for e.g. the US federal government, and what the result is used for.
When it came to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust, IBM also just "did the databases".
I pray we are entering certified cruelty-free database age /s
lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Karp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
You could have at least read Palatir's wiki before commenting.
Here are some hightlights:
> Karp and Zamiska argue that American technological dominance requires deeper integration of Silicon Valley and defense interests.
> Karp contends that China operates with fewer ethical constraints than American defense companies, making technological leadership essential for national security
> According to the Journal, for two years the company continuously revised its technology based on the demands of analysts from the intelligence agencies, introduced to them by In-Q-Tel.[1
Do you need more? That's a single paragraph.
The more access Palantir gets the more it becomes what I've feared for years, an unified database where they can use any or all of the following:
Location(s) Phone number(s) Ip(s) Email(s) document(s) comment history(ies)
so on and so on to gather every single thing you've ever done on the internet, it's very dystopia like and I cannot believe that it's legal outside the US for palantir to even operate in.
Why would any non US country pay for a dependency anymore on US military products under the current administration...
Because the alternative is even worse?
> NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza.
Forget politics, not everything has to be framed this way. This is simply something that should be done in-house. What if the UK's relations with the US break down, or there is a cyber attack on the infrastructure?
> One of Palantir’s founders is also openly against the NHS. Peter Thiel claimed it “makes people sick” and said that the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught? Do we have to be politically aligned with absolutely everybody at all times in every part of life in order to be able to function?
> With the government putting NHS trusts under pressure to adopt the software, we need to act right now. If you want to keep Palantir out of our NHS, send an email to your local trust and Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health.
This Wes Streeting guy has a high chance of being the next UK Prime Minister in early 2026.
> Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught?
I think the insinuation is that if someone is explicitly outspoken against something, don't hire/contract the guy/organization for tasks that are meant to help that something get better, the incentives just aren't aligned. Which in my mind, ignoring all the politics, make a ton of sense, I wouldn't want an anti-environmentalist to be "Head of Environmental Impact" or someone anti-education to be "Head of Education" or even involved in anything education.
Billionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting.
The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
Yes. Billionaires with an authoritarian agenda will cost their businesses and their shareholders billions of dollars in pursuit of ideological goals. Throw a few fascist salutes and people stop buying your cars. Was that salute rational? Is rationality even the right question?
nothing can stop what is coming
> the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
LOL I've said the same thing! Turns out I do have something in common with Peter Thiel.
The difference is he's speaking in the context of US which makes his comments on the NHS just disgusting hypocrisy.
So the US security apparatus will have DNA data on all UK citizens.
Nice...
What could possibly go wrong with giving UK citizen data to ICE, NSA, CIA, Trump, Trumps friends, Trumps friends corporations, Trump's friends foreign political connections, donors to the above etc...
Excuse my delivery of bad news, but the time to say no would have been when the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. The Fox has been in the henhouse for several decades now, asking politely or just mumbling "no" under your breath is not going to do anything at all. You may as well just save yourself the further humiliation of inevitable defeat with that mentality. People are going to say no to the implementation of a system with direct, root ties to the "intelligence" (we really need a better term for that) triad, when the peasants are totally dependent on the centralized, ruling class controlled health services of the NHS???
Hello? Does no one else notice that the peasants are in a a dungeon, in a cage in that dungeon and shackled to the wall in that cage in the dungeon? And they're going to say "no"???? People clearly have either gone insane and are lying to themselves, or they have absolutely no idea what the reality is that they are experiencing all around them out of delusions or stupidity, or both.
Palantir and Anduril both have an altogether creepy fixation on the UK.
I hope Trump lives a long enough and cognitively healthy enough life to witness his own utter humiliating failures, which are inevitable. His coalition is collapsing, his wealthy backers will run away because they have no principles.
Corporate Trumpism itself may never die, though; it is ironic that someone so malevolent, reactive, instinctive and disordered might be the harbinger of that smooth, sleek, white marble, stainless steel and brightly coloured leather sofa corporate governance future that Rollerball promised us.