Palantir, a US data company that works with Israel’s defence ministry, has accused British doctors of choosing “ideology over patient interest” after they attacked the firm’s contract to process NHS data.
Louis Mosley, Palantir’s executive vice-president, hit back at the British Medical Association, which recently said the £330m deal to create a single platform for NHS data – ranging from patient data to bed availability – “threatens to undermine public trust in NHS data systems”.
In a formal resolution the doctors said last month this was because it was unclear how the sensitive data would be processed by Palantir, which was founded by the Trump donor Peter Thiel. They cited the firm’s “track record of creating discriminatory policing software in the US” and its “close links to a US government which shows little regard for international law”.
But Mosley dismissed the attack when he gave evidence to MPs from the Commons science and technology committee on Tuesday. Palantir has also won contracts to handle mass data controlled by the Ministry of Defence, police and local authorities.
Thiel, a libertarian, named the company after the “seeing stones” in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He has previously said the British public’s affection for the NHS is a case of “Stockholm syndrome”, but Mosley said he was not speaking for Palantir.
Palantir also provides artificial intelligence-enabled military targeting systems, as well as software to integrate and analyse data scattered across different systems, such as in the health service.
“I think the accusation that we lack transparency or this is secretive is wrong,” Mosley said. “I think that BMA has, if I may be frank, chosen ideology over patient interest. I think our software is going to make patient lives better by making their treatment quicker, more effective, and ultimately the healthcare system more efficient.”
In 2023 the government awarded Palantir the contract to build a new NHS “federated data platform”, but concerns have been raised by some local NHS trusts that the system was no better than the existing technology and could even reduce functionality, the website Democracy for Sale reported. Palantir was also one of the many technology companies the Guardian revealed last week had recently met the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to discuss ideas to help solve the crisis in prisons and probation, from inserting tracking devices under offenders’ skin to assigning robots to contain prisoners.
During the hearing Mosley was challenged by the chair, Chi Onwurah MP, over whether it was the right company to be involved in the NHS when it was also working for the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, through its military applications.
Mosley declined to give operational details about what Palantir does for the Israeli authorities. Its products include a system called Gotham, which “supports soldiers with an AI-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification”.
Onwurah said cultural change was needed in the NHS in order to drive uptake of the new data systems. She asked Mosley: “Do you really think that Palantir is the organisation to bring together 42 integrated care boards, over 200 NHS Trusts to champion NHS values, to bring them together around one federated data [platform] and, in the future, a single patient record?”
“I think the question of trust should really be about our competence above all,” Mosley said. “Are we delivering [what] we have promised to deliver? Are we making the patient experience quicker, more effective, more efficient? And if we are, then we should be trusted with that.”
The Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley said the interoperability between the data systems Palantir provides for health and defence was “profoundly worrying”. The Conservative MP Kit Malthouse wanted to know if a military could target particular individuals with particular characteristics by using Palantir’s ability to process a large pool of data. Mosley said: “We provide an enormous amount of control and governance to the organisations that use our software for that purpose to manage precisely the kind of risks that you’re talking about.”
Malthouse said: “That sounds like a yes”.
It also emerged during the hearing that Palantir continues to employ Global Counsel, a lobbying firm co-founded by Britain’s current ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson. Mosley denied that a visit to Palantir’s Washington DC office by the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, was arranged by Mandelson, saying “it was done through the proper channels”. Mandelson stepped down from Global Counsel in “early 2025”, the consultancy’s website says.