Jamie Green
BMA will issue new guidance “in due course” and advise doctors on how to “limit engagement with the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) because of its links with the controversial US tech giant Palantir”, the US defence technology company.
Speaking with The BMJ, BMA chair of council, Tom Dolphin said, “Given Palantir’s track record, including controversies in the US involving immigration enforcement and the risks to patient trust, data security, and NHS independence, we believe there must be a complete break from Palantir technologies in the NHS and no further contracts awarded.”
The Guardian’s Booth (2026) reported that the £330m NHS contract has been called into question with fresh calls for the deal “to be scrapped” after revelations of limited rollout meaning the contract would “not offer value for money”. There are further questions and criticisms arising from the appointment of Palantir within the NHS and the companies connections to disgraced Peter Mandelson in light of his ongoing relationship with convicted child sex offender, Jeffery Epstein. Listed as clients of Global Counsel, a lobbying firm co-founded and co-owned by Mandelson, were both Palantir and Open AI. “OpenAI was also a client of Global Counsel in 2024. Just one year later, when Mandelson was in post as ambassador to the US, they announced a major ‘strategic partnership’ with the British government, to ‘explore adoption across both public services and the private sector’ of their AI tools.” (Booth, 2026).
The company has secured a total of £500 million worth of contracts with the British government, including the contract to manage patient data. SHA has long campaigned against the contracts and infiltration of Palantir into the NHS – in its emergency motion to the Labour Party Conference in 2025 and its review of the NHS “10 Year Plan” (Blanchard, 2025).
“…big tech has been firmly placed at the heart of our government and across other areas of our public services to ‘improve productivity’ while its ‘cloud infrastructure’ has been designed over years to generate and extract enormous amounts of surplus value from the innovations created on it, and the ongoing solutions it helps to provide…But while there are many important reasons to keep big tech out of our healthcare, the same encroachments into our government are even more worrying and threaten society as a whole. The recent requests from the Trump administration for big tech to render the US government ‘more modern and productive’ serve to increased big tech influence and will empower all private interests further at the expense of public institutions in the US and abroad.”
In January, 2025 SHA London Branch passed a motion, “Get Palantir out of the NHS”, primarily authored by Just Treatment, in partnership with Doctors in Unite (DiU), drawing connections of Palantir in the NHS, on racist policing and the ongoing genocide in Gaza stating, “Palantir’s track record is in surveillance and intelligence software, and the company has played a role in enabling family separations and migrant deportations in the US, mass surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ, racist policing in the US and secret Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Palantir’s executives have been vocal in their support for Israel in its ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza, and Palantir products are being used by the Israel Defence Forces to target and kill Palestinians.”
SHA has tracked Palantir as far back as 2020 during the Covid Pandemic, when big firms like Palantir, Serco, Mitie and others made large profits off contracts within the NHS and other forms of “data-mining” (Walsh, 2020). Palantir’s stock has skyrocketed, up 1,700% last September in five years’ time.
SHA would encourage use of the template motion, “Get Palantir out of the NHS” at local trade union branch meetings and CLPs – and support the action from trade unions to resist Palantir in the NHS.