More than 200,000 have signed petitions urging the government to break contracts, amid concerns about the company’s ‘supervillain’ manifesto
Over 200,000 people have called on ministers to break contracts with Palantir in an apparent groundswell of public concern about the US tech company’s role in the NHS, police, military and councils.
Two petitions have attracted 229,000 signatures, one calling for the government to end all public contracts with the firm, whose software is used by Donald Trump’s ICE immigration enforcement programme and the Israeli military, and another urging the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to cancel its £330 patient data contract with the NHS.
The signatures come in the week that the Guardian revealed the Metropolitan police is in talks to use the company’s AI to analyse sensitive intelligence, and Palantir published a manifesto described by one MP as the “ramblings of a supervillain”.
But the tech company is pushing back against the multi-pronged campaign challenging its work in the UK by taking issue with claims made widely on social media by the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, and the legal campaigner Jolyon Maugham, who this week launched a podcast investigation into Palantir. The Liberal Democrats are also calling for the NHS contract to be cancelled and new contracts to be halted.
