{"id":920479,"date":"2026-07-17T05:12:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T10:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/17\/palantir-can-anyone-else-do-what-it-does\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T05:12:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T10:12:24","slug":"palantir-can-anyone-else-do-what-it-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/17\/palantir-can-anyone-else-do-what-it-does\/","title":{"rendered":"Palantir: Can anyone else do what it does?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Founded in 2003 with seed funding from the CIA\u2019s venture arm, In-Q-Tel \u2013 a body whose explicit purpose is to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and the US intelligence community \u2013 Palantir Technologies<\/a> now holds contracts with the Metropolitan Police<\/a> and runs the NHS Federated Data Platform<\/a> (FDP), a system that touches the health records of 67 million people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the Met police<\/a>, its Culture Standards and Integrity Ecosystem (CSIE) pilot \u2013 a Palantir Foundry-based platform \u2013 ingested sickness records, complaint histories, custody data and stop-and-search records across more than 50,000 current and former staff.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the NHS Federated Data Platform is a \u00a3480m, seven-year contract to connect data across NHS trusts that aims to track and optimise data points such as patient flows, bed occupancy, theatre utilisation, waiting lists and discharge pathways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This has not been without some pushback, however. Two Parliamentary committees have urged the government to scrap the NHS deal, while the London Mayor\u2019s block on the Met\u2019s deployment will soon be contested in court by Palantir.<\/p>\n

But in both cases, the claim from government buyers and the supplier provides a consistent theme: Palantir delivers capabilities no other can match.<\/p>\n

This article examines what Palantir is, how its technology works at the component level, which UK and European suppliers offer comparable \u2013 and, in some cases, identical \u2013 capabilities, and whether the claim that \u201conly Palantir can do this\u201d survives a detailed comparison.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The answer matters because the UK is now at a decision point: in February 2027, the government can exercise a break clause in the FDP contract \u2013 and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has urged it to do exactly that.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/i>From In-Q-Tel to NHS<\/h2>\n

Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale. Thiel\u2019s vision, articulated across years of essays and interviews, framed technology as a geopolitical weapon \u2013 an instrument of national power, not a neutral utility. In-Q-Tel\u2019s $2m investment in 2004 embedded the company inside the US intelligence community from its first days.<\/p>\n

The original product, Gotham, was built for and deployed by the CIA and special forces. It fused data from signals intelligence, human intelligence and geospatial sources into a single analytical environment to enable analysts to perform link analysis, pattern-of-life surveillance and target identification.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan for counter-IED [improvised explosive device] operations. In 2016, Palantir successfully sued the US Army when it was passed over for contracts. In 2019, it took over Project Maven, the Pentagon\u2019s AI-driven drone targeting programme, when Google withdrew after an employee revolt.<\/p>\n

Today, Palantir\u2019s government footprint spans all six branches of the US military, 36 federal agencies, the Israeli military \u2013 which has used the technology to plan attacks in Gaza and Lebanon \u2013 and police forces in the UK, Germany, Australia and Denmark. In a New York Times<\/em> profile, CEO Alex Karp said: \u201cOur weapons software is in every combat situation I\u2019m aware of.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s financial trajectory reflects this government-first orientation. In FY2025, Palantir reported $4.5bn in revenue \u2013 up from $2.9bn the prior year \u2013 with 54% from government customers. It serves 954 customers, with 74% of revenue from the United States.<\/p>\n

In the prior fiscal year, the top 20 customers generated an average of $64.6m each, while total remaining deal value grew 40% to $5.4bn. The numbers describe a company with extreme customer concentration, overwhelmingly dependent on US government spending, but rapidly diversifying into international and commercial markets.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

<\/i>What Palantir really sells<\/h2>\n

Palantir\u2019s product offer spans four platforms, but the one deployed at the Met and NHS is named Foundry. Understanding what Foundry does \u2013 at the component level \u2013 is essential to evaluating whether it is genuinely unique.<\/p>\n

Pipeline Builder is Foundry\u2019s data integration layer. It ingests structured and unstructured data from databases, application programming interfaces (APIs), spreadsheets, sensor feeds and legacy systems. It transforms, cleans and models that data into a consistent format. This is a well-understood category: Informatica, Fivetran, dbt, Azure Data Factory, AWS Glue, and UK-founded suppliers such as SnapLogic and Matillion all perform the same function.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ontology\u201d is Palantir\u2019s architectural centrepiece and the source of most claims about uniqueness. Unlike a traditional data warehouse \u2013 where data lives in tables defined by schemas \u2013 the Ontology maps digital objects to real-world counterparts: a \u201chospital bed\u201d, a \u201cpolice office\u201d, a \u201cwaiting list\u201d, a \u201ccomplaint.\u201d It defines semantic relationships between these objects. An analyst \u2013 or an AI agent \u2013 does not query table joins, they work with concepts that correspond to how the organisation thinks about its operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Ontology also provides a write layer: applications built on Foundry can trigger transactional updates back to source systems, not merely read data. This read-write semantic model is what Palantir means when it describes Foundry as an \u201coperating system for the enterprise\u201d.<\/p>\n

Workshop is the application layer. It provides a low-code application-building layer for operational applications \u2013 such as \u201chospital operations\u201d for the NHS \u2013 that run on the Ontology. These are workflow tools where users can schedule interventions, flag risks, update records and trigger actions that write back to underlying systems.<\/p>\n

Apollo handles deployment. It delivers Foundry and Gotham to multicloud, hybrid-cloud, on-premise, air-gapped and edge environments \u2013 managing CI\/CD [continuous integration and continuous delivery\/deployment], updates and failover autonomously. This is the infrastructure layer that lets Palantir deploy to environments where internet connectivity is intermittent or prohibited.<\/p>\n

Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) adds LLM-augmented agents and automations on top of the Ontology. Rather than dropping raw data into a language model \u2013 the approach that creates the governance nightmares most enterprises fear \u2013 AIP gives LLMs governed, access-controlled queries to semantic objects. The model asks the Ontology for what it needs, under the same permissions as any human analyst.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

<\/i>How it works in UK practice<\/h2>\n

The Met Police CSIE pilot, which ran from October 2025 to April 2026, brought together data from Centurion \u2013 the force\u2019s system for recording public complaints, conduct allegations, grievances and civil claims \u2013 alongside sickness records, HR data, duty-rostering, custody data and stop-and-search interactions. The target population exceeded 50,000 current and former staff. Foundry ingested this data, built an Ontology mapping officers to behaviours, complaints and organisational units, and surfaced approximately 90 metrics across three tiers of prevention.<\/p>\n

The results were dramatic. Within a week of roll-out, the Met\u2019s Professionalism Directorate identified hundreds of potential misconduct breaches and several alleged criminal offences including abuse of authority for sexual purposes, fraud and sexual assault. Two officers were arrested. Another 98 were assessed for misconduct and 500 received prevention notices after being flagged for abusing the IT duty-rostering system.<\/p>\n

A Met spokesperson told Computer Weekly: \u201cOur pilot with Palantir allows the Met, for the first time, to bring together data it already lawfully holds in one place.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) \u2013 obtained by Computer Weekly in June 2026<\/a> \u2013 revealed significant governance gaps, and the Met\u2019s data protection officer noted it was \u201cnot currently clear\u201d whether Palantir would retain Met Police data after the pilot or use it for its own AI model training.<\/p>\n

The NHS Federated Data Platform contract was awarded in November 2023 to a consortium led by Palantir that includes Accenture, PWC, Carnall Farrar and NECS. The contract was originally reported at \u00a3330m over seven years, later described as \u00a3480m. It is a cloud-based SaaS platform built on Foundry\u2019s Ontology that maps NHS concepts \u2013 patients, beds, appointments, clinicians, Trusts \u2013 as linked objects.<\/p>\n

NHS England estimated the FDP will deliver returns of five times its cost. But Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board reported the FDP \u201cdoes not currently have any system-level products that offer the same or better functionality compared to the custom-built system already in use for NHS GM\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the British Medical Association (BMA) voted to oppose the roll-out at its June 2025 annual meeting. South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust has declined adoption. In July 2026, the Health and Social Care Select Committee urged the government to scrap the contract entirely.<\/p>\n

The future of the FDP contract with Palantir is under scrutiny. Cross-party MPs, including the Health and Social Care Select Committee and the Science and Technology Committee, have pushed for the NHS to invoke a break clause in February 2027 to replace Palantir with UK-based alternatives or an in-house alternative.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

<\/i>The comparison test: who else can do this?<\/h2>\n

Here, we are not looking at the question of whether the company\u2019s platform works \u2013 it does, although MPs have questioned reported outcomes<\/a>. The question is whether it contains unique components \u2013 and whether any UK or European supplier could assemble equivalent capability without the jurisdictional baggage of a US-headquartered company whose CEO describes it as a weapons software provider.<\/p>\n

The answer, broken down by component, is outlined in the table below:<\/p>\n

\n \"Palantir<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The conclusion this table supports is nuanced but clear. Palantir\u2019s individual components \u2013 data integration, warehousing, graph-based semantic modelling, machine learning, workflow applications, deployment automation \u2013 are all available from other suppliers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No single European supplier ships them all pre-integrated in the way Palantir does. But the capability to assemble equivalent platforms from sovereign components exists. Germany\u2019s decision to award ChapsVision a domestic intelligence contract over Palantir is evidence of that.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

<\/i>The lock-in mechanism<\/h2>\n

The Ontology is Palantir\u2019s greatest technical achievement and its most powerful lock-in mechanism. As an organisation feeds more data sources through Foundry\u2019s Pipeline Builder, maps more objects into the Ontology, and builds more operational workflows on top, the cost and complexity of exit increase.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Met\u2019s DPIA warned of \u201crisk of lock-in with multiple data sources routing outside of EDP\u201d. But to transition away from Palantir means unpicking an Ontology-based deployment, reconstructing the semantic model, re-mapping every relationship and re-building every operational application that depended on it.<\/p>\n

Tom Bartlett is founder of Bartlett Data and former deputy director of data engineering at NHS England, where he led the approximately 150-person engineering team that built the national FDP products. His argument is that the individual components do not equal the end-to-end provision that Palantir provides. He said alternative suppliers \u201ccannot replicate the Palantir ontology. The ontology stores the data alongside the semantics, in what Palantir calls the object store.\u201d<\/p>\n

Describing the way Palantir packages the entire stack required, Bartlett added: \u201cWithin each object there are not just the data and the semantics, but also predefined rules that encode the write actions that an application or AI sitting on the ontology can take with the data in that object. It contains a security model that is enforced not only in the objects but in any derived object. It contains active link types which mean no query has to run for the objects to be connected. Nothing like this exists in any other software platform and this is what makes Foundry the market leader.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Analyst Tony Lock, director of engagement and distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics, argues the challenges of migrating away from an existing deployment are nearly always the same irrespective of what you are moving away from: \u201cNamely, how do you ensure your new solution, or package of linked tools, delivers what you need today, and expect to need tomorrow, how much effort will building and testing the new solution require, especially in this context ensuring its resilience, availability and security, and do you have the funds and resources available to make the migration in your required timeframe?<\/p>\n

\u201cThen you have to consider the two biggest \u2013 namely, how do you minimise the risk of the migration, and what\u2019s the risk of staying with what you have in place? To make the migration work, you need answers to all of these.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

<\/i>Lock-in and structural risks<\/h2>\n

Four structural risks compound the lock-in concern.<\/p>\n

First, jurisdictional exposure. Palantir is a US-headquartered company subject to the US Cloud Act and FISA Section 702. US agencies can compel disclosure of data \u2013 even data held outside the United States \u2013 without notifying UK authorities. The DPIA\u2019s advice section flagged unresolved questions about data retention and Palantir\u2019s potential role as an independent controller. Computer Weekly separately raised the Cloud Act and FISA jurisdictional exposure with the Met in a second tranche of questions, which the force declined to answer.<\/p>\n

Second, opacity. The NHS FDP contract is 586 pages and heavily redacted. Also, when Computer Weekly submitted questions to the Met covering the absence of competitive tender, the jurisdictional risk assessment and the final disposition of MPS data held by Palantir, the force declined to respond.<\/p>\n

Third, democratic accountability. The Met\u2019s CSIE pilot marked workforce consultation as \u201cConsidered and not required\u201d. The FDP was opposed by the BMA, the Doctors\u2019 Association UK, patients\u2019 groups and privacy campaigners \u2013 but the contract was awarded regardless. The Fable 5 kill switch affair of June 2026 \u2013 a US government emergency directive that forced Anthropic to disable its flagship AI models globally \u2013 demonstrated in real time what happens when a critical service depends on a single foreign supplier subject to emergency directives outside UK control.<\/p>\n

Fourth, there is the question of what alternatives were considered. The Met\u2019s DPIA dismissal of all alternatives in a single unsupported sentence \u2013 \u201cconsidered but not viable\u201d, without naming a single evaluated supplier \u2013 raises uncomfortable questions about the rigour of procurement governance for high-risk data processing in UK policing.<\/p>\n

The SIT Committee\u2019s June report<\/a>, which was published as MPs scrutinised the government\u2019s digital strategy, proposes specific remedies \u2013 a cloud consumption dashboard to publicly track contract awards by supplier, mandatory SME spending targets, mandatory break clauses in foreign supplier contracts, and a requirement for the Procurement Act 2023 to prioritise open-source solutions. The EU\u2019s four-level cloud and AI sovereignty framework<\/a> \u2013 ranging from data residency (Level 1) to full independence from third-country interference (Level 4) \u2013 aims to provide a template for sovereign procurement.<\/p>\n

So, it seems, an honest assessment is this: Palantir sells the tightest pre-integration of data ingestion, ontology-based semantic modelling, analytics, AI agents, operational applications and multicloud deployment on the market. No competitor replicates the full stack exactly \u2013 but no competitor needs to. The individual components are commodity or near-commodity capabilities available from UK and European-headquartered suppliers. The question for the UK public sector is whether the convenience of pre-integration is worth the sovereignty cost.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Marquis Guillemette<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Founded in 2003 with seed funding from the CIA\u2019s venture arm, In-Q-Tel \u2013 a body whose explicit purpose is to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and the US intelligence community \u2013 Palantir Technologies now holds contracts with the Metropolitan Police and runs the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), a system that touches the health<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":920480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22880,38391,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-920479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anyone","category-palantir","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=920479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/920480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=920479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=920479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}