Palantir’s UK Troubles Expose the Limits of 'Free' Tech Deals

Last week, it was revealed that United States-based spy tech firm Palantir had lost another big-money public contract, following earlier news it had lost its contract with the United Kingdom government for the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

The company’s response? Palantir’s UK boss Louis Mosley says Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who blocked Mosley’s news contract with the Met Police this week, is “putting politics over public safety.”

This is an odd response, because anyone who has paid attention to Palantir’s actions – and the public comments of its leaders – over the last two decades will know that Palantir is a fundamentally political company.

Six years after founding Palantir, Peter Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In 2023, he told Oxford Students’ Union that British affection for the NHS is “Stockholm syndrome.”

Palantir’s choice of partners as a business has demonstrated a consistent political direction. Originally funded by the CIA, Palantir’s 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.

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.

Instead, Palantir lost its contract with the Met because the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) found that Scotland Yard had breached the strict procurement rules that must be met for all contracts funded by taxpayer money.

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 £500k for its previous agreement, to £50m — all without giving any other potential vendor a chance to make a better offer.

That’s not playing politics – it’s 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.

Palantir’s 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’s war in Ukraine – only to jack up the price to over £10m within just two years. 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.

Criticism of Palantir’s anti-competitive tactics isn’t new. In 2023, the Government’s Chief Commercial Officer, Gareth Rhys Williams, called the company out in public, saying the “practice 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.”

Which brings us to Palantir’s £330m contract for the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). Palantir got its start in the NHS via a secret £1 contract to run the NHS Covid-19 Datastore (exposed by Foxglove and openDemocracy in 2020). This was the first time Palantir ran this tactic, which we’ve now seen successfully repeated across the public sector.

Palantir’s rebuttal lines to criticism are almost identical to the Met contract. Mosley says anyone concerned about Palantir in the health service is “putting ideology over patient safety.”

But we are starting to see signs of the same value-for-money questions appearing with the FDP contract, too. Greater Manchester NHS Trust says it has rejected Palantir’s NHS tools not because of political difference but because its tools are “years ahead” of what Mosley’s kit can do. And last month, the British Medical Journal reported that it had seen evidence suggesting the benefits of the FDP pilot at Chelsea and Westminster Foundation Trust, promoted as a Palantir success story, were overstated.

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’s FDP tools, but we’re given no meaningful comparison data against the performance of trusts – like Greater Manchester – who say they’re better off without. Without real, comparable stats, it’s impossible to say whether NHS England’s claims defending Palantir are substance or spin.

For example, the NHS FDP Uptakes and Benefits page says that the two NHS trusts running Palantir’s Cancer 360 tool have increased their rates of early diagnosis – but what it doesn’t say is how that compares to the rate of diagnosis at the 198 or so other trusts in the country that aren’t using these tools or, more importantly, how it compares to trusts that aren’t using the FDP at all, and which may have different, or better-performing cancer diagnosis systems of their own.

On top of that, the FDP benefits page appears to put all credit for the performance increases it boasts about down to Palantir’s tools alone, without taking into account everything else happening at those trusts, whether that be the hard work of NHS staff, other tools or data systems, or anything else being done by hospitals to improve these performance metrics.

Press reports have suggested Ministers are considering triggering the break clause for the FDP, which is set to be renewed this year.

Should that occur, we can imagine Mosley’s response will again likely be some combination of the words “politics,” “ideology,” and "safety.” But it looks more like a lack of evidence to back up Palantir’s lofty claims might be to blame – alongside the UK government belatedly developing an awareness that there’s no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to Palantir’s products.