‘It beggars belief’: MoD sources warn Palantir’s role at heart of government is a threat to UK’s security

Senior MoD systems engineers have warned that Palantir, the US AI surveillance firm with over £670m in UK government contracts, poses a national security threat. The insiders argue that government assurances about data sovereignty miss the point: Palantir can extract metadata and aggregate data across departments to build a comprehensive picture of the UK population and infer classified information. A hypothetical example illustrates how combining three unclassified data points could reveal a nuclear submarine's location. The sources also highlight that Palantir previously claimed proprietary rights over insights derived from NYPD data, raising concerns the same could happen with UK government data. Critics, including MPs and civil liberties groups, are calling for parliamentary action, while the Swiss army rejected Palantir over similar data access concerns.