Health officials fear Palantir’s reputation will hinder the delivery of a “vital” £330m NHS contract, according to briefings seen by the Guardian, sparking fresh calls for the deal to be scrapped.
In 2023, ministers selected Palantir, a US surveillance technology company that also works for the Israeli military and Donald Trump’s ICE operation, to build an AI-enabled data platform to connect disparate health information across the NHS.
Now it has emerged that after Keir Starmer demanded faster deployment, Whitehall officials privately warned that the public perception of Palantir would limit its rollout, meaning the contract would not offer value for money.
By last summer less than half of health authorities in England had started using the technology amid opposition from the public and doctors. The British Medical Association has said its members could refuse to use parts of the system citing Palantir’s role in targeting ICE raids in the US.
Palantir was this week called “ghastly” and “a highly questionable organisation” by MPs in the House of Commons.
The fallout over Peter Mandelson’s relationship to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has also affected the image of Palantir, which employed the former US ambassador’s lobbying firm Global Counsel.
Before he was sacked, Mandelson took Starmer to meet Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, at the tech company’s Washington showroom.
MPs last week demanded greater transparency around Palantir’s public sector deals, which also include a £240m contract with the Ministry of Defence and with several police forces.
In a private briefing for Wes Streeting before a meeting with Palantir’s European boss, Louis Mosley, in June 2025, Department of Health officials wrote: “The public perception of the FDP during the procurement, and then in delivery, has been affected by the profile of Palantir.
“We do not know the extent to which this is impacting on delivery. It is, however, likely to make it harder to go further with the FDP, and to encourage the inclusion of GP data locally.”
The briefing was released under the Freedom of Information Act to Foxglove, a tech fairness campaign group. The officials said the rollout had also been affected by debates about patient privacy and concerns that the NHS was being “locked-in” to a single vendor, but added: “Many of these debates are inaccurate and are often as a result of misconceptions.”
Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at Foxglove, said: “The prime minister and the health secretary should listen to the public they serve when they tell them Palantir has no place in the NHS. They should not be scheming with tech billionaires’ staff on how best they can ‘mitigate’ the ‘public perception’ problems these tech giants deservedly face through their own repellent behaviour.”
The British Medical Association, which represents NHS doctors, said it has “long opposed the involvement of Palantir in the delivery of care and the use of patient data in our NHS, and it is concerning to see from this briefing that the government felt public concern about Palantir should be dismissed as ‘misconceptions’.”
The briefing document suggested Streeting could ask Palantir how to speed up the rollout, and say that the government was keen to “remove unnecessary obstacles” including by revisiting “regulations relating to confidential patient information”.
Streeting on Monday sought to show he had “nothing to hide” regarding his relationship with Mandelson by publishing their WhatsApp messages between August 2024 and October 2025. None mentioned Palantir, although in one exchange just over three weeks after Streeting’s meeting with the company, Mandelson encouraged him to visit the US and said: “Need to plan. Lots of tech companies and people to talk to.”
New figures released on Thursday showed that the number of NHS organisations using the Palantir technology has increased since June from 118 to 151, which is still well short of the target of 240 by the end of this year.
Palantir was co-founded by the Donald Trump supporter and billionaire Peter Thiel, who has previously said “the NHS makes people sick”, and described the British public’s affection for the NHS as a case of “Stockholm syndrome” – the term for hostages who feel a bond with their captors.
The former Conservative government minister David Davis said the government now faced a “huge value-for-money issue” over the Palantir contract. He said there had been “naivety in the senior management of the NHS” in awarding a contract to a company with “spectacular baggage in terms of its genesis in the American security state”.
“The government is going to have a problem with many hospital trusts and they are going to have really difficult problems with the GPs,” he said. “My best estimate is they will never get most of the GPs with an organisation like Palantir.”
John Puntis, co-chair of the Keep Our NHS Public campaign, said: “This looks like another example of a hugely wasteful IT contract, and lack of public trust will make it unworkable. They ought to end the contract or not renew it. They should accept that the public is very concerned and it is going to make the use of public data very difficult if people think it’s going to be accessed by a company like Palantir.”
A spokesperson for Palantir said: “Palantir software is helping to deliver better public services in the UK. That includes delivering 99,000 more NHS operations and reducing hospital discharge delays by 15%, as well as helping the Royal Navy keep ships at sea for longer and the police to tackle domestic violence.”
NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care were approached for comment.
