A UK parliamentary committee has called Palantir’s role in the public sector an “unacceptable point of weakness” and urged the government to break its NHS contract with the American company.
The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee singled out Palantir as the technology provider it found most concerning, arguing that the UK was at risk of becoming overly dependent on a single foreign firm for critical health infrastructure.
Its recommendation is concrete: the government should exercise a break clause in the contract to avoid vendor lock-in.The contract at the centre of it is the NHS Federated Data Platform, an AI-enabled system designed to link health data across services in England and support clinical decision-making. It was awarded in 2023 for seven years, under the previous Conservative government, placing Palantir at the centre of how the NHS in England moves and uses patient data.
The committee’s objection is structural rather than a specific allegation of wrongdoing. The concern is concentration: that handing the connective tissue of NHS data to one company, and an American one with roots in defence and intelligence work, creates a dependency that is hard to unwind and risky to rely on.
