Palantir is a major supplier of artificial intelligence, data analytics and database solutions to military and civilian clients globally. Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by Alex Karp, its current CEO and Peter Thiel, a supporter of Donald Trump and former business partner of Elon Musk in the 1990s. Its early investors included the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir operates in a number of sectors. Defence is a major focus: the head of its Defense business told Bloomberg that “we started Palantir in 2004 to help the war fighter and solve difficult problems.” Palantir owes it early success to major contracts with the US military during the height of the second Iraq war.
Palantir posted 2024 revenues of US$ 2.86 billion, US$ 1.90 billion of which was US revenue. Headquartered in the US, Palantir employs close to 4,000 persons across the US and its global offices in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UAE and the UK. It has subsidiaries in those countries and also in Austria, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, New Zealand, and Taiwan.
Palantir in the UK
Palantir has been awarded numerous and varied contracts to supply its AI-based solutions across the UK’s public sector and military. Byline Times calculated that UK£ 244.5 million had been spent on installing Palantir products into numerous public bodies between 2014 and 2023. Agencies with contracts with Palantir included: the Met Police, Ministry of Defence, GCHQ, the NHS, the Department of Health & Social Care, Local Council Authorities, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Levelling Up, Highways England, Crown Commercial Service, and Defra.
The UK government is an enthusiastic AI supporter and partner of Palantir’s. Shortly after US President Trump assumed office for his second term, Prime Minister Kier Starmer met with Palantir during a state visit, a meeting fixed by then-Ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson via his private consulting firm, which also represented Palantir.
Palantir and UK defence
The UK Ministry of Defence is a major Palantir client and Palantir is a major investor in the UK. In 2025, Palantir announced it planned to invest UK£ 1.5 billion in the UK following its successful bid to provide AI software to the Ministry of Defence. It also announced it would make the UK its European defence headquarters. In November 2024, Palantir signed an agreement worth UK£ 20 million with the MoD to provide its AI-powered digital wargaming and Command & Control platforms. Palantir received a UK£ 28 million contract from the MoD in 2018. The full range of Palantir’s services to the UK military is discussed on the company’s website.
Palantir and the NHS
Palantir is also active in the UK health sector, and investigative journalists have drawn attention to the revolving door between the company and the National Health Service (NHS). For example, the NHS head was ‘guest of honour’ at a Palantir investors meeting.
In March 2020, the UK government signed a deal with Palantir and other tech companies including Amazon and Google, to run a ‘temporary’ COVID-19 datastore to assist the government in making pandemic-related decisions; the contract was extended a further two years. Palantir’s largest health contract in the UK was its UK£ 330 million Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract with the NHS, signed in November 2023. Set to run for at least five years, it is reported to be the largest ever single NHS IT contract. The award prompted significant outcry from civil society, made worse by the publication of its highly redacted contract. Legal campaigning group Foxglove, Medact, and other groups have launched campaigns to end Palantir’s involvement in the NHS. The roll-out has also been opposed by large numbers of NHS staff. According to NHS figures, fewer than a quarter of England’s 215 hospital trusts were actively using the FDP by the end of 2024; experts told Democracy for Sale this was due to its inadequate functionalities.
Palantir, social care and the environment
Palantir provides AI solutions for the social care and environmental management sectors, to some controversy. In 2024, Coventry City Council agreed a UK£ 500,000 annual deal with Palantir that would see the company provide AI solutions to summarise social worker notes and enhance its systems for children with special needs. Following widespread protests, the deal was under review as of September 2025. Palantir was awarded a 2023 contract from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), as to supply a “trade analytics solution” with the department worth UK £1.5 million. Concern over Palantir’s access to sensitive personal data has resulted in the withdrawal of a few of its UK social care contracts. Palantir was also tapped to deliver on the UK government’s controversial national digital ID plans, but has pulled out of the programme, according to UK director Louis Mosely in October 2025.
Predictive analytics and AI for military operations
Palantir’s predictive analytics and AI technologies have been adopted by the US Army and many of its allies, including Israel, particularly for the analysis of drone footage. One such programme was to expand the capabilities of the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System, originally a DoD project to accelerate the adoption of AI and data integration across American military intelligence agencies. In 2024, Palantir won a five-year, US$ $99.8 million contract to enhance the system – “software and advanced digital capabilities act as the connective tissue between operators and sensor feeds, platforms (hardware and software), and algorithms.” Google, the DoD’s initial corporate partner for the programme, dropped out in 2019 following pressure from employees that the technologies might lead to automated killing.
Palantir has a strong relationship with the Israeli military and several of its technologies have been used to advance IDF aims. In 2024, the company agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry to provide it technologies, and its CEO Alex Karp is an outspoken supporter of Israel. Palantir has been accused of helping to develop Gospel and Lavender, Israeli military systems for identifying Palestinian targets for assassination. Palantir officially denies the claims, but Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel stated that his “bias is to defer to Israel” and that Israel was “broadly in the right”, in response to questions about the company’s role on the AI-killing programmes in 2024. Karp in his book admitted that the company’s technologies were involved in the Israeli military’s deadly 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon.
Policing
Palantir’s technologies have been applied by police forces, including in the UK, to attempt to ‘predict’ crime. Officially it denies providing “predictive policing” solutions, describing instead that its “software is used by some law enforcement agencies in a limited set of jurisdictions, including in Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, so that they can perform their operational and investigative work more efficiently”.
In 2025, Liberty Investigates revealed that Palantir had landed a contract with UK police in the East of England to develop “a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.”
In the US, various agencies have acquired Palantir’s Gotham platform, which is designed for defence and police clients to integrate databases and quickly cross-reference information. More nefariously, “Gotham’s targeting offering supports soldiers with an Al-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing.” Media reporting in 2020 alleged the platform was used by police forces in major US cities: New York, New Orleans, and Chicago, among others.
Immigration enforcement
Palantir has obtained lucrative contracts with the US’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies, with the Intercept headlining that the company “provides the engine for Donald Trump’s deportation machine”. A US$ 30 million contract with ICE involved Palantir providing services including Self-Deportation Tracking, near real-time visibility into migrants’ movements, and profiling of migrants for deportation. In 2025, 13 former Palantir employees to speak out in an open letter alleging the company’s early ethical had been violated, and were rapidly being dismantled at the company.
