Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
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.
That's a nice dream.
But the UK government's GDS team is a fantastic example of doing tech right in government. I can see an expanded government involvement in tech for bodies like the NHS that is a clear alternative to the Silicon Valley model.
Problem is that it would require the government to spend money on itself, which successive governments are loathe to do because the press will punish them for it every time.
You mean like water? ... I believe we're the only 'developed' country in the world to have sold off / privatised it's water.
It's all we do. Sell our country down the river for the benefit of a few wankers.
I signed up to the link in the original post, but don't have that much hope. We'll sell our grandma if it'll mean we get a 50p voucher or save 2 more minutes of our day.
I’m working on stuff that I can’t say too much about. But let’s just say there is a way out from this - but it will require the smartest minds and folks starving for change to come together and create the change we want. Sometimes an environment that creates a desperate need for change can be a good thing.
It’s not going to happen via politics. It has to come by being creative from the outside in.
My Christmas wish is for decision makers to do like I was told when I learned how to drive: Keep the eyes far ahead on the road, not right in front of the car.
It could even be revenue generating as, once developed, it could be sold out to the private sector, instead of essentially being taxed by foreign corporations for such basic digital infrastructure as hypervisors and key/value stores.
It could also act as a buffer and wage-stabiliser for people like us, who work in tech, by providing guaranteed employment when the private sector implements layoffs.
I don't know why anyone in our position wouldn't support that.
Choice would be a fine thing ... I understand there is a move in some European countries towards more open source. How successful that'll be is debatable, but at least they're trying ffs.
Make the data public if you want to see progress
Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.
Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.
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.
The edit is naive to an extent that makes one wander if you are writing in good faith.
Because they pay better.
Have you seen research institutions lobbying the governments ?
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...
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.)
Google got their first DoD contract in 2003 from DARPA.
You are saying stopping new coal mine means that everyone need to stop heating now and freeze to death this winter.
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
and screwing us for licenses to run apps in "production"
Oh no!..
Data integration is literally Palantir's business.
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.
What does this mean?
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.
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?
NHs FDP (Foundry) still has the vaccine data last time I checked.
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.
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.
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
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 didn't see anything wrong with his little speech.
Palantir is proud of their work on the ICE contract.
Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.
Not saying Google isn't, but it's at least not as public or blatant, and is much less of what Google does overall.
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?)
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.
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.
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????
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera
They want to establish cities that are exempt from most US law and regulation (or whatever host country they leech on to), giving the company that owns the city basically complete power over everything and everyone that has the misfortune to be there.
The US recently pardoned a major narco-terrorsist in the hopes of propping up the Honduran experiment.
I'll preempt anyone else: Yes I probably exaggerated a bit in how I described the idea. Still, these assholes are working to eliminate wages, labor laws, environmental regs, property ownership, etc.
At best thats wierd, at worst he's an actual fascist
(context: Oswald created and ran the british union of fascists in the UK, married the diana mitford with both Goebbels and Hitler present. )
NHS gives contract for cloud database to US cloud software company. This is not that shocking. I'm not clear what they outcome they're looking for .... Using Databricks instead and getting slightly shittier health outcomes so we can be smug we're not connected to Peter Thiel?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
When it came to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust, IBM also just "did the databases".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Palantir helps Israel with war in Gaza/Palestine.
Friend of any enemy is an enemy. That group is asking for help cause harm to that Friend.