MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security

Palantir is dragging a small independent Swiss investigative newspaper to court because they reported[1] about Palantir getting the door slammed in their face in by several Swiss government agencies including the military over the last years. No one wants this turd of a company.

[1] https://www.republik.ch/2026/02/18/how-tenaciously-palantir-...

Related meeting launching today about Palantir and the NHS - https://www.medact.org/event/briefing-launch-the-risks-of-pa...

Obviously, just look at what the Palantir stones did to Saruman and Denethor. They're a corrupting force, both in the middle-earth case and in the our-earth case.

Thiel has made no secret of his intent to use technology to dispense with that pesky democracy problem that billionaires have, and Palantir is pretty obviously his attempt to do just that. It's a reductio-ad-absurdum argument against listening to your citizens:

You put it in the hands of a populist demagogue, the power to apply hyper-targeted pain to their enemies amplifies their darker tendencies, and when evil happens you say: "look, the people can't be trusted." Meanwhile, you use it to direct the pointy end of the state's stick towards people you don't like (because the demagogue is too lazy to actually use those hyper-targeting features themself) so you can interfere with democratic attempts to limit your power without bothering to pay for the pepper spray.

Nobody in their right mind would want their government anywhere near it.

Can someone explain why Palantir are seen as such a threat? My understanding is their product is a PowerBI++ and they don't host any user data themselves. Are people scared of backdoors?

I feel like there’s a lesson to be learnt by reading Lord of the Rings and seeing what happens to Saruman and Denethor.

Why do the worst companies have the best names.

We're not a serious country anymore. We build very little. We control very little. Three years ago the war in Ukraine broke out causing the energy price crisis and the short term solution was the government paying a portion of everyone's bills. Three years later we're in the same situation again thanks to the US and Israel's warmongering. Are we prepared? No. What's the solution? Freezing the price caps and paying a portion of peoples bills.

The history of Palantir:

Christine Maxwell and Alan Wade found Chiliad, a database surveillance application that was used in the FBI. Then Alan Wade became CIO at the CIA. Then In-Q-Tel (CIA) co-founded Palantir with Thiel.

Karp, who was at Haverford college with Epstein's neighbor Lutnick, became the philosophical ideologue for Palantir.

With these overt and easily verifiable connections it is beyond belief that any European state would even consider using Palantir. The governments do not even work any better with all that surveillance software, they work worse than 20 years ago. So even the "we need it" argument is a fallacy.

I see the UK government hasn't been on a good run lately. Google recently released the Cloud Threat Horizons H1 2026 report. A vulnerability in the OIDC trust policy can be exploited to gain admin access to AWS. The UK Government Digital Service was one of the affected organizations. Datadog found their IAM role misconfigured the same way.

The fact Alex Karp has any security clearance at all boggles the mind.

Honestly it's really weird that it was ever allowed to get this stage. Their leadership has been pretty "mask off" for a good while now.

Can anyone familiar with the technology help disillusion naive people like me as to why on earth palantir needs to exist? It feels like a big pile of nothing. But tbf that's how I feel about Salesforce and Jira too. Big fat database schemas with big fat CRUD atop and layers of snazzy sparklines to make PMs and clients feel nurtured and fuzzy that they've done something material.

Note that "UK Security" and "safety of people in the UK" are very distinct things. But - exposure to whatever Palantir does is very likely bad for the second regardless of whether or not it's bad for the first.

It is a complete no-brainer that Thiel and his minions shouldn't be let anywhere near anything health or security related.

TIL that the head of Palantir's UK arm is the grandson of Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.

Also, LBC exclusive about £250 million contact that came about because of Mandelson breaking today.

I mean if it wasn't obvious from the get go they're, well, dubious, given the grandson of Owsald Mosley is the UK CEO.

It is insanity that any country would give an iota of data, much less any sort of control, to an org like Palantir. Any government representative for countries outside of the US or Israel that recommends such a vile trojan horse needs to be outed as the traitorous plant that they are. Every element of their personal life needs to be scrutinized, because the only scenario where they would come to such a recommendation is corruption.

Quite aside from that fact that Palantir is basically an arm of the US government -- which has proven to be an enemy to the West and a thoroughly busted idiocracy -- just look at the sociopaths that lead that company. Alex Karp's public appearances are dystopian, and the guy comes across as a vile, self-involved crackhead that has no comprehension how reprehensible he is to 99% of the planet. Thiel is utterly deranged, and that goblin shouldn't come within a parsec of any influence or power.

“Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”

Sorry, but this is full on into conspiracy theory here. Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?

The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure, but nobody does because they would quite rightly be called out as conspiracy theorists.