by Alex Davidson

What do the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, the Zelensky regime in Ukraine and the privatisation of the NHS have in common? One answer is that they all now depend on Palantir Technologies Inc.

Palantir is a United States Information Technology company, founded in 2003 by multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, who was co-founder of PayPal. Its first investor along with Thiel was the CIA owned company, In-Q-Tel, with whom it continues to work closely. Palantir provides the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) with intelligence, surveillance and targeting services as it does Zelensky’s regime in Ukraine. In December 2023 Palantir was awarded the contract for the Federated Data Programme of NHS England with the aim of integrating all health data including patient confidential records.

CONTRACTS:

ISRAEL

In January 2024 Palantir agreed to a strategic partnership with the IDF under which it will provide the IDF with services to assist its "war-related missions". During Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, Palantir held its Board meeting in January 2024 in Tel Aviv in “solidarity with Israel”. During the visit Palantir’s co-founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, and its other co-founder and CEO, Alex Karp, met with Israeli President Herzog and Israel’s top military brass.

Israel’s Defence Ministry, one of the world’s most technologically advanced militaries, struck a deal with the company to “harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.”  Palantir were surprised when the usually discreet Israelis allowed the partnership to be made public.

UKRAINE

Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, was the first representative of a western company to meet Ukrainian President Zelensky. The meeting took place in Zelensky’s bunker in Kiev in July 2022. Also present at the meeting was Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Vice-Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation. In Ukraine Karp says he saw the opportunity to fulfil Palantir’s mission to “defend the West” and to “scare the f-ck out of our enemies.”

NHS

In 2022 Palantir recruited Indra Joshi, formerly Head of the NHS Artificial Intelligence Unit. (1) In March 2023 NHS England 'ordered' hospitals to share patient data with Palantir and in November 2023 NHS England awarded Palantir a 7-year, £330 million contract to create and manage the Federated Data Platform (FDP). NHS England published the contract with Palantir to run the FDP but it is heavily redacted. Of its 586 pages 417 pages are completely blanked out. 

There has been widespread opposition and questions about the awarding of the contract to Palantir including from the Good Law Project, BMA, Doctor’s Association UK and patients’ groups. (2) Tory MP David Davis said, "Patient trust is vital to our NHS, so foreign tech companies such as Palantir, with their history of supporting mass surveillance, assisting in drone strikes, immigration raids and predictive policing, must not be placed at the heart of our NHS”. (3) Labour MP Jon Trickett said, “Hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being siphoned out of the country and the NHS… and personal data about all kinds of health matters is being handled by a company linked to the US state — all without the consent of the patients, whose personal medical data is now in foreign hands”. (4)

England has awarded an £8.5 million contract to consultancy firm KPMG to “promote the adoption” of the Federated Data Platform (FDP) by trusts and integrated care boards (ICBs).

Leaked e-mails have revealed that Palantir has hired Topham Guerin to pay influencers to attack the Good Law Project on social media - but the source of the money is to be kept “confidential”. (5) Topham Guerin were hired by the Tory party for the 2019 General Election. The company changed the name of the Conservative Party’s Twitter account to “factcheckerUK” and used its reports to attack the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn.

Palantir’s UK head, Louis Moseley, was quoted as saying that Palantir's strategy for entry into the British health industry was to "Buy our way in" by hoovering up smaller rival companies with existing relationships with the NHS in order to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.” (6) 

WHAT AND WHO ARE PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES? 

“They are the AI arms dealer of the 21st century,” says Jacob Helberg, who serves as policy adviser to Karp at Palantir. (7)

As previously stated, Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel. He named it Palantir after the mystical seeing stones in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The company’s original funders were Thiel and the CIA backed company In-Q-Tel (IQT). Peter Thiel was an early investor in Pentagon aerospace contractor, Space X, and weapon maker, Anduril. He was the first big investor in Facebook, and he remained on its board until 2022. Palantir built its business providing data-analytics software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, the US Department of Defense, and a host of foreign-intelligence agencies.

IN-Q-TEL 

In-Q-Tel has had one mission for more than 20 years: to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve United States national security interests. IQT explores emerging technology and funds its partners to better anticipate and advance national security in the 21^st century. It funds companies involved in Digital Intelligence, Autonomous systems, Intelligent Connectivity, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.

Trustees on IQT’s Board include George Tenet, 18^th Director of the CIA (1997-2004); Admiral Mike Mullen, 17^th Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (2007) and principal military adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; Stephanie Sullivan, formerly Principal Deputy Director, of National Intelligence; and Jeffrey H. Smith, former General Counsel of the CIA and General Counsel of the US Senate Armed Forces Committee.

Steve Bowsher, CEO of In-Q-Tel, said, “The Ukraine conflict has been an eye-opening experience in terms of the role commercial technology has played. We are very proud of the fact that over 30 IQT portfolio companies have seen their technologies deployed as part of Western efforts to support Ukraine. Everyone’s learning what the future of warfare looks like, with the role of things such as drones and the role commercial technology plays in areas such as communications, sensing, and cyber activities. Everyone knew the world was heading in this direction, but Ukraine’s conflict with Russia has been a manifestation of this and people are seeing it’s happening at a larger scale – and happening more quickly – than was previously expected.” (8) IQT has been investing internationally since 2002 and opened offices in London (2018), Sydney (2019) and Singapore (2023).

PROJECT MAVEN  

In 2017 the US military embarked on a project to bring artificial intelligence to warfare. It was called Project Maven. The project entailed the use of Google's artificial intelligence technology by the US military to analyse drone footage and flag images for action. It caused an uproar among Google employees: Thousands petitioned the company to end its partnership with the Pentagon and involvement in war-related activities and some workers left Google over its involvement. A few months after the workers’ protest, Google decided not to renew its contract, which ended in 2019, but, at the same time, said that it would still seek defence contracts.

Google has continued to work with the US military. Its defence portfolio includes a project detecting corrosion on Navy vessels by applying machine learning to drone imagery and another supporting aircraft maintenance for the Air Force. Google also supplies cloud security technology to the Pentagon’s Defence Innovation Unit, set up to help the agency work more closely with tech companies. In 2020 Google won a piece of a large CIA cloud contract, and it jointly won a $1.3 billion deal with Amazon to supply cloud services to the Israeli government, including its defence agencies.

When Google’s contract ended in 2019 Palantir took over Project Maven. US forces in the Middle East continued experimenting with the use of algorithms to identify potential targets using drone or satellite imagery, now working with Palantir, after Google ended its involvement. The US military ramped up its use of artificial intelligence tools after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and started using targeting algorithms in actual operations. US Central Command's chief technology officer told Bloomberg, the news organization, that machine learning algorithms helped the Pentagon identify targets for more than 85 air strikes in the Middle East in February 2024. (9) US bombers and fighter aircraft carried out those air strikes against facilities in Iraq and Syria on February 2. The Pentagon also used AI systems to find rocket launchers in Yemen and surface combatants in the Red Sea.

US PROXY WAR

Since Karp’s initial meeting with Zelensky in Kiev in 2022, Palantir has embedded itself in the day-to-day work of the Ukrainian government. Many Ukrainian agencies including its Ministries of Defence, Economy and Education are using the company’s products. Palantir’s software, which uses AI to analyse satellite imagery, open-source data, drone footage, and reports from the ground to present to commanders with military options, is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine”, according to Karp.

After that initial meeting with Palantir in Kiev, Fedorov and his deputies began marketing the battlefields of Ukraine as laboratories for the latest military technologies. They lobbied governments and companies from European capitals to Silicon Valley. “Our big mission is to make Ukraine the world’s tech R&D lab,” Fedorov said.

Ukrainian officials say that they are using Palantir’s data analytics for projects that go far beyond battlefield intelligence, including collecting evidence of alleged Russian war crimes. Palantir’s AI software will certainly come in handy there! Palantir also played a key role in the re-settlement of over 100,000 refugees from Ukraine to the UK. More than 2000 local authority case workers across all councils in England and Northern Ireland used the platform to manage the process end-to-end to get refugees accommodated with their sponsors and re-settled in the UK.

At the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2023 a panel discussion brought together once again Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, and Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minster of Ukraine. The title of the session was “A New Age of Technology, Welfare and Deterrence: Lessons from the War in Ukraine”. Alex Karp has written, "Those using our platform in the defense and intelligence context, for reconnaissance, targeting, and other purposes, require the best weapons that we can build. And we have never been inclined to wait on the sidelines while others risk their lives...Those on the front lines, and in the arena, will bend the arc of history." (10 

Palantir has made it clear that they see the company at the forefront of warmongering in defence of the West’s interests, whether it be in Ukraine or Gaza, and at the same time they are making billions of dollars. Palantir and their CIA-partners will soon have even more access to a vast amount of private data on the British population via the NHS and we are paying for it.      

(1) “NHS’s AI chief joins CIA-linked US tech firm”. Health Service Journal.

(2)“NHS threatened with legal action over patient data platform”. theregister.com, 31 March 2023.

(3) Daily Mirror, 7 February 2023

(4) “NHS data given to CIA-backed Palantir”. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/

(5) Good Law Project, 22 December 2023.

(6) “Peter Thiel’s Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: Buying Our Way In”. com, 30 September 2022.

(7) Jacob Helberg was previously a policy adviser at Google. He is a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The Wall Street Journal wrote: “Spearheading the effort to create the bi-partisan, bi-coastal alliance of China hawks is Jacob Helberg”.

(7) “Seven Questions About the Future of IQT: Steve Bowsher, President and CEO”. https://www.iqt.org/blog/

(8) “US used AI to Help Find Middle East Targets for Airstrikes”. Bloomberg, 26 February 2024.

(9) “Letter from the CEO”, https://www.palantir.com/uk/

Palantir assisting genocide in Gaza. Photo by Ali Hamad

Palantir stall at the NHS Confederation conference 2022 photo by Rathfelder