What Is Palantir? How a US Spytech Firm Penetrated the British State

A US spytech firm deeply embedded in the most sensitive areas of the British state is being scrutinised as part of the fallout from the latest tranche of documents related to the financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

Palantir Technologies, co-founded and chaired by billionaire Peter Thiel, holds over £670m in UK government contracts across NHS patient data, defence operations, police intelligence databases and nuclear weapons management. The multibillion-dollar US company has also provided military tech to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the genocide in Gaza, and helped facilitate Donald Trump’s brutal immigration enforcement crackdown across the US.

The most recent dump of Epstein files sheds light on the links between Palantir, Thiel, Epstein and the former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson. 

Thiel cultivated a close business relationship with Epstein after the latter’s 2008 conviction for child sex offences. The pair exchanged over 2,000 messages from 2014 up until Epstein’s final arrest in 2019. During this period, Epstein was a significant limited partner investor in Thiel’s venture capital firm Valar Ventures – to the tune of approximately $40m.

Also in the mix is New Labour grandee Mandelson, who is accused of leaking market-sensitive UK secrets to Epstein when he was the UK business secretary – allegations currently being investigated by police. Mandelson founded lobbying firm Global Counsel, which counts Palantir among its clients. 

Keir Starmer is also facing questions about a visit to Palantir’s offices in Washington DC in 2019, along with then-ambassador Mandelson. The visit was not recorded in his register of interests and there is no record of what was discussed. Downing Street has so far refused to say whether Starmer knew Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s lobbying firm at the time of the visit.   

The Epstein-Mandelson scandal has raged through Westminster, leading to Palantir’s role in UK infrastructure increasingly being questioned. Here’s what you need to know about the firm and how it’s operating in the UK.

What is Palantir?

Palantir Technologies, worth approximately $300bn, is a software company that pulls together and analyses data from different sources. 

Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Palantir describes its software as powering “real-time, AI-driven decisions in critical government and commercial enterprises in the west, from the factory floors to the front lines”. Its products are extensively deployed in military, policing and healthcare contexts. 

The name Palantir is inspired by the crystal balls from JRR Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings. By looking into a palantír, the evil Lord Sauron is able to see in any direction, at any distance.

Built with CIA funding to support the US ‘war on terror’ following the 11 September attacks, Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Jon Lonsdale and Nathan Gettings, but didn’t go public until 2020. 

Much of its work has been shrouded in secrecy, but today its flagship products – Palantir Gotham and Palantir Foundry – connect fragmented stores of information, forming them into big, searchable databases that can then be used for analysis, intelligence-gathering, policing and business analytics. 

Gotham is Palantir’s defence and intelligence platform, marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and primarily used by militaries and counterterrorism analysts. It’s built to handle vast datasets and employed by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and Department of Defense in the US, and across Europe, including by the Ukrainian military. 

In Ukraine, Palantir’s Gotham system is credited with shaping the future of warfare by pulling together images, drone footage and battlefield data to create an operational map to form an “AI-powered kill chain”. 

Gotham supports alerts, geospatial analysis and prediction, with the latter drawing criticism from rights groups over the impact of predictive policing and intrusive mass surveillance. A 2019 predicting policing project between Palantir and the Los Angeles Police Department was cancelled after accusations that it reinforced racism and didn’t reduce crime.

Palantir has also built custom tools for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The agency has reportedly spent more than $200m on Palantir contracts to help it identify targets for deportation by integrating travel histories, visa records, biometrics and social media data. In the past month, immigration enforcement agents in the US have kidnapped children and shot dead citizen observers as part of Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown.

Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement (Elite) is one Palantir product specifically developed for ICE. It populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person and provides a “confidence score” on their address, according to a user manual published last month.

While Gotham was built for law enforcement and the battlefield, Palantir’s Foundry software is pitched at commercial clients. It runs on the same principle of bringing together siloed information for advanced levels of analysis, and allows businesses to centralise, clean and get insights from their data. Foundry has become widely used in US healthcare since the pandemic, and is embedded into at least four federal agencies. 

The wider adoption of Palantir products by the US state under Trump allows more seamless sharing of data between agencies, formalised through the March 2025 executive order on “eliminating information silos”.

Palantir’s other products include AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform) – which incorporates generative AI so organisations can build apps or automate actions with little or no human involvement. This technology is marketed for targeting operations in war zones. 

Palantir also makes a type of mobile command vehicle for military use, equipped with AI and analytics software and known as Titan (Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node), as well as a warfare-ready satellite network supporting AI deployment called MetaConstellation, which sends satellites to view a specific area for target detection. MetaConstellation vastly increases the speed of tracking and targeting operations, and distances humans from the process – which a Palantir engineer described as “not a relevant domain for a human to exist in”. 

Who is Peter Thiel?

Perhaps the best-known face associated with Palantir is Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, the company’s co-founder and chairman. Thiel is also one of Palantir’s biggest shareholders, along with Blackrock and the Vanguard group, and has a personal estimated net worth of $27bn, putting him among the richest individuals in the world. 

Palantir isn’t his only baby. The German-American billionaire also co-founded PayPal along with X-owner Elon Musk and others, and billion-dollar venture capital Founders Fund. 

Thiel was born in Germany and, like Musk, spent much of his childhood in apartheid-era South Africa. His ideology has been variously characterised as libertarian, authoritarian, post-democratic and conservative. 

In a 2009 essay called The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel wrote that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible”, and named women’s voting rights and the expansion of the welfare state as contributors to the downfall of political optimism in US politics. 

Thiel spent $1.25m on Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, later joining the new president’s transition team. After supporting now-vice president JD Vance’s Senate bid in 2022 to the tune of $15m, Thiel reportedly became disillusioned with politics. However, the billionaire was back to making political donations in February 2025, giving over $850m to Republican fundraising committee Grow The Majority. 

Thiel made disparaging comments about the NHS just months before his company secured a massive NHS data deal in 2023, including claiming that the British public has “Stockholm syndrome” in its affection for the service, and that “the NHS makes people sick”. 

The remarks were downplayed by Thiel’s biographer as controversialism. However, Thiel has appeared to endorse NHS privatisation, saying the service needs a new approach in which “you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over” and embrace “market mechanisms”. 

What is Palantir’s involvement in the Gaza genocide?

Palantir has reportedly played a significant role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed a conservative estimate of 72,000 Palestinians – and wounded over 171,000 – since October 2023. 

Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel for battle technology and “war-related missions” in January 2024 – the same week CEO Alex Karp told Bloomberg Palantir’s products had been in great demand in Israel since 7 October 2023. 

The content of this partnership and the tech it involves remains a secret, but the IDF has widely employed AI programmes in the prolific generation of automated ‘kill lists’ during the genocide. 

These AI systems include ‘Where’s Daddy?’, which tracks targeted individuals to their homes where whole families can then be bombed, ‘Lavender’, which assigns Gaza residents a numerical score on how likely they are to be a member of an armed group and marks them as potential targets, and ‘Habsora’ [the Gospel], which automates the processing of surveillance data and generates lists of assassination targets. 

Palantir has denied involvement in Lavender and Gospel. However, the spytech firm was among the tech giants and multinationals namechecked in a landmark report by UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese as profiting from Israel’s wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. 

The UN report highlights that Palantir’s tech collaboration with the state of Israel “long predates October 2023” and that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Palantir has provided “automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform” to Israel. 

Karp responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying “mostly terrorists, that’s true” at a policy forum in 2025.

How is Palantir operating in the UK?

The UK’s reliance on Palantir for critical national infrastructure has been growing since the pandemic, and December 2025 saw Palantir land its biggest ever UK deal. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) awarded the company a £240m contract for “data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making across classifications”.

There was no competitive tendering process, and the deal was confirmed ten months after Starmer’s secretive visit to the firm’s offices in Washington DC with Mandelson.

Defence secretary John Healey has denied that Mandelson had any influence over the MoD contract, saying “the Palantir decision was mine”. Healey told Bloomberg that Palantir offers “unique capabilities with a unique track record and that’s why we’ve struck the agreement”.

Palantir’s deals with the UK state total a minimum of £670m across at least ten government departments, police authorities and local councils, an investigation by The Nerve found last month. 

With the MoD, Palantir has current and historic deals worth £388m. Palantir’s cloud software is also used within the MoD by a team that delivers services to the navy’s nuclear-powered submarines. 

In January, former Nato adviser Chris Kremidas-Courtney condemned the move to embed Palantir into MoD systems as “risky” because the company is “controlled by Peter Thiel, a billionaire ideologue with far-right affiliations”, adding that Palantir should be considered a “vector of malign influence”. 

With the NHS, Palantir has current and historic deals worth more than £244m. In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a seven-year contract valued at £330m to design and operate a ‘federated data platform’ (FDP) which connects patient data across England. This deal was criticised by doctors for putting NHS independence and patient trust in the health service at risk, with particular concerns around the safety of patient data and whether the NHS remains in control of it. 

The British Medical Association (BMA) has said there must be a “complete break from Palantir technologies in the NHS” and that doctors should reject and limit the usage of the FDP. Palantir’s role in facilitating the activities of ICE is also cited as a factor in damaging patient confidence. 

The spytech firm’s £60m in pandemic NHS contracts were reportedly non-competitive – which means no other companies could bid for the contracts – something Amnesty International flagged as a transparency issue. 

Palantir’s deals with UK police forces have also come under scrutiny. While Bedfordshire police was hailed last year as the “the first county in Britain to be policed by AI” thanks to Palantir’s software, many forces – including the Metropolitan police – have refused to reveal whether they have contracts with the company, citing national security and law enforcement concerns.

Forces across the UK have also been accused of “drawing a veil” over their dealings with Palantir after Leicestershire police removed details of a contract worth over £800,000 for an “intelligence and investigation platform” from the public record. 

The risks around embedding a US spytech firm into the most sensitive and critical areas of the British state include the fact that Palantir’s technology is proprietary, making meaningful transparency around how its software tools work, how they select and process data, virtually impossible.