London mayor speaks out against ‘firms who act contrary to London’s values’.
Sadiq Khan could block the Metropolitan Police from signing a huge AI contract with tech giant Palantir, citing concerns about spending public money on “firms who act contrary to London’s values”.
Palantir, which provides software to ICE and the Israeli military, showcased its systems to Scotland Yard intelligence officers last month, hoping to land a contract worth tens of millions of pounds, the Guardian reported.
While the Met has its own procurement team, the London mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime must sign off any contract worth over £500,000, giving Khan some leverage over the deal.
A spokesperson for the mayor said: “We can’t comment on live procurement processes. However, as a general point the mayor would have concerns about using public money to support firms who act contrary to London’s values.”
Palantir, which was founded by US billionaire Peter Thiel, currently holds more than £600m of contracts with public bodies in the UK. Those include a £240m deal with the Ministry of Defence, a £330m contract with the NHS, and agreements with various city councils and local police forces.
Palantir, a US data analytics company backed in its early years by In-Q-Tel, now plays a central role in the NHS’s £330 million Federated Data Platform. Supporters say it could improve planning and efficiency, while critics have raised questions about governance, transparency and trust. Here’s what you need to know.
1. What is Palantir and what does it do?
Palantir is a large American technology company, specialising in storing large data collections and providing tools to manage the data, in particular artificial intelligence (AI) to ask questions of it. It provides decision-making platforms, such as Foundry, which government organisations and businesses use to uncover patterns, manage operations, and support planning and decision-making.
2. Why is a private American company involved in managing NHS medical records?
That’s not how Palantir views it. It sees itself as providing a platform on which the NHS can store and analyse NHS medical records. And that wouldn’t be exceptional. A large amount of data from across society is stored on cloud platforms provided by American companies.
Some of the discussion is about whether Palantir is really less trustworthy than, say, Microsoft, Google or Amazon.
3. Who gave Palantir this contract, and was it put out to open tender?
Palantir had been lobbying to get access to NHS data for a while when it offered to build a COVID data store for £1 in early 2020; there was no open competition under emergency COVID procurement rules. The data store combined patient-level data from many sources, as well as operational data from hospitals and other sources.
The latest version of this deal, the Federated Data Platform, was awarded competitively in December 2023 to a Palantir-led consortium. Having had the deal previously will have been a big advantage for Palantir – a phenomenon known as “vendor lock-in”.
4. Can Palantir use my data for its own commercial purposes or share it with the US government?
Palantir’s role is as a “data processor”, which means it is not legally allowed to make its own decisions about what to do with the data – only the “data controllers” (NHS organisations) can.
So it is not legally allowed to use NHS data for their own purposes. And although UK regulators, such as the Information Commissioner’s Office, have oversight powers, some critics question how effectively large multinational technology providers can be audited in practice.
Trust plays an important role, particularly at a time when we have seen US government appropriating databases relating, for example, to health, mobile phone location and car number plates, for immigration enforcement. Under the US Cloud Act, American authorities can, under certain legal conditions, request data from US-based companies, which has raised concerns among privacy advocates about potential cross-border access.
5. What is the Federated Data Platform, and what is it supposed to do for the NHS?
There has long been an NHS England ambition to have a central place to store “all” NHS data. The core of this was effectively realised quickly during COVID, under special legislation, in two forms with slightly different targets.
The first was the NHS COVID-19 Data Store, which has grown into the Federated Data Platform, and is targeted more towards planning. The second is OpenSafely, which provides research access to unified NHS datasets using strong privacy protections.
6. Has the system improved NHS care, and is the taxpayer getting value for money?
The UK government has already made claims of significant improvements due to Palantir. But researchers have raised doubts both about the research methods used to quantify such successes and about the personal connections of the people involved in these.
7. What is Palantir’s track record — who else does it work for, and should that concern me?
It works with several other UK government organisations, including the army. The Israeli army reportedly used Palantir for AI-based targeting in the war in Gaza, which is a main reason Amnesty International campaigned against Palantir within the NHS.
8. Can I opt my data out? If so, how?
You can opt out of your GP practice sharing your health data, or separately out of NHS England and others sharing it for research and planning.
Unfortunately, this would affect beneficial uses of your health data too, including by making the overall dataset less comprehensive and representative. This is part of why the medical community worries about the Palantir effect.
9. Why are so many doctors, nurses and campaigners opposed to this — and should I be worried too?
There is a wide range of concerns. Palantir’s political positioning, including opposing the NHS in its current form, as well as the more controversial political views expressed by some of its leaders, means many people don’t trust it with their health data.
There is a technological concern over concentrating NHS data processing with a single supplier, possibly replacing working solutions with inferior ones. For some people, Palantir’s activity with ICE and allegedly in Gaza makes them morally unacceptable.
10. Could the government cancel the contract, and what would happen to the data Palantir already holds if it did?
There is a break clause in the current contract coming up, so yes, it can. The contract says Palantir needs to lose all access to the data when the contract ends.
Responding to Conservative MP Wendy Morton’s call for more scrutiny of Palantir’s ability to protect data, Louis Mosley, Palantir UK’s executive vice-chair, told the BBC that he welcomed scrutiny and was confident the firm was delivering value for money for NHS patients.
Mosley went on to say that Palantir has no interest in patient data in the UK. “It’s not our business model,” he said. “It’s not the legal basis on which we operate, in the same way that Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word or email is used in the NHS and again that is NHS data, Microsoft doesn’t have access to it, nor do we to NHS data.”
Defence Secretary John Healey (left) and the CEO of software company Palantir Technologies Alex Karp sign a £1.5 billion investment, at Wellington Conference Room, Horse Guards, Whitehall, London, September 18, 2025
THE “revolving door” between US tech firm Palantir and the British government raises serious questions about public contracts, campaigners warned today.
Dozens of experienced British public officials including the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and NHS’s AI chiefs have joined the controversial US tech firm Palantir since they left their government positions, a new investigation by the Nerve revealed.
At least 32 officials, former ministers, intelligence service chiefs and peers have taken up roles in the company which has been awarded £670 million in government contracts.
This included the former MoD senior official on AI, Laurence Lee, who also co-authored the military’s strategy document on the new technology.
Mr Lee has since become a senior adviser to Palantir CEO Alex Karp on “geostrategy.”
NHS England’s former director of AI, Indra Joshi, became Palantir’s director of health, research and AI in 2022 before leaving in 2024.
Four members of the House of Lords have also been on Palantir’s payroll, including the former chair of the select committee on science and technology.
On top of the previously reported relationship between the disgraced former US ambassador Peter Mandelson and Palantir, other peers who offered their expertise to the US tech firm include former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson and former special adviser to Gordon Brown, John Woodcock.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir Starmer confirms that he doesn’t know anything about democracy.
“Look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece,” writes Hartmann and you will realize our worst nightmares are coming true. (Credit: Armyinform.com.ua, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.
Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.
This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.
That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces… Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”
The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.
Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.
She was 37 years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.
Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.
I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.
Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”
That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.
To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”
Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.
The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.
Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.
And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”
This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.
Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.
ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.
ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.
Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.
Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.
That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.
And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.
The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”
This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.
Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.
Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.
We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”
The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.
With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.
And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.
If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.
Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.
Nigel Farage objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
Alarm caused by posts of Alex Karp, tech firm’s CEO, championing US military dominance and of AI weapons
The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.
“Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” wrote Palantir in a 22-point post on X over the weekend, which also called for an end to the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan.
The post exhorted the US to reinstate a military draft, saying that “free and democratic societies” need “hard power” in order to prevail.
It also predicted a future dominated by autonomous weapons: “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”
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It led to criticism from several MPs, who said that it raised yet more questions about the UK’s portfolio of contracts with the company. Palantir has built up more than £500m in contracts in Britain, including a £330m contract with the NHS, as well as deals with the police and Ministry of Defence. These deals have come in for increasing criticism.
“Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA, is either a parody of a RoboCop film, or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organisation,” said Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the commons science and technology select committee.
“Either way it shows that the company’s ethos is entirely unsuited to working on UK government projects involving citizens’ most sensitive private data.”
Defence Secretary John Healey (left) and the CEO of software company Palantir Technologies Alex Karp sign a £1.5 billion investment, at Wellington Conference Room, Horse Guards, Whitehall, London, September 18, 2025
