LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyProtesters wearing hospital gowns and wielding signs gathered outside a UK health care conference on Thursday to object to a deal between the country’s National Health Service and American software company Palantir.
At 8 am local time, the group, around 80 people in total, crowded the entryway to the NHS ConfedExpo in Manchester. They wanted to appeal to NHS leadership to terminate a contract worth up to $440 million over concerns around national security, data privacy, and the company’s political affiliations. The contract, which includes access to Palantir’s data analytics and artificial intelligence services, is intended to run until 2031 but includes a break clause that permits the government to withdraw the agreement next February.
Huddling under a line of trees to shelter from the pelting rain, the protesters held up signs that read, “Patients vs. Palantir.” As conference attendees filtered past, some stopped to speak to the protesters, who chanted to the beat of a drum. “Hands off our NHS, hands off our health data,” they shouted. “Hey hey, ho ho, Palantir has got to go.”
One protester, who gave his name as John and identified himself as an NHS nurse, tells WIRED he worries about sensitive health data falling into the hands of a foreign entity and objects to Palantir’s work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli military. “Palantir should be kicked out of the NHS, forthwith,” he says. “That’s the message we want to send to the government and NHS management.” (Some of the protesters waved Palestinian flags, signaling their objection to Palantir’s ties to Israel.)
The protest was organized by Pull the Plug, an activist group concerned about the societal impact of runaway AI development. It was attended by organizations like Amnesty International and Unison, a trade union that represents health care workers. “It’s not all bad. But there are so many places where it’s being shoved down people’s throats,” says Frieda Lurken, cofounder of Pull the Plug, who led the group in the call-and-response chants. “We want ordinary people to get a say in how AI is used in our lives.”
The UK government first started working with Palantir in 2020, in the early throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, as it sought to track the virus. Since then, the company and its partners have won a slew of contracts with public-sector bodies in the UK, arguing that it can improve efficiency by unearthing patterns in disorderly data. Under its contract with the NHS, Palantir is tasked with aggregating and analyzing information collected across the health service under a “federated data platform,” with the aim of bringing down wait times and ferreting out waste.
However, the relationship between the UK government and Palantir has come under scrutiny. Comments made in 2023 by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel—who said the UK should “rip the whole [NHS] from the ground and start over”—led some to question the company’s suitability as a UK government contractor. A bullet-point manifesto published by Palantir, based on a recent book by CEO Alex Karp, prompted further concerns about political partisanship.
Palantir has repeatedly denied that it is guided by any particular political ideology. “Palantir is not politically monolithic. We don’t represent party politics,” said Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir’s European business, in a recent interview. “We’re neither right-wing nor left-wing. We have the full spectrum of political views within the company.”
Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.
There are also questions over the efficacy of Palantir’s NHS data platform. Though the company claims to have cut wait times and helped to maximize the utilization of operating theaters, the division of the NHS responsible for Greater Manchester has declined to take up Palantir’s platform, claiming that its in-house software achieves significantly better results.
“It's exactly the use case that you don't outsource, and you certainly don't outsource outside the country,” Laura Gilbert, senior director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute, a think tank founded by the former prime minister, tells WIRED. “We should be learning from that data and building a better health service, not allowing an offshore company to learn and build better products they can sell to someone else.”
Ayub Bhayat, the director of data and analytics at the NHS, tells WIRED that the federated data platform is helping patients “while saving money for NHS teams and taxpayers.”
“There is no requirement for its use,” he says.
In early June, members of Parliament published a report warning that the UK’s growing dependence on Palantir represents “an unacceptable point of weakness.” The company is on track to become highly entangled in the public sector, the parliamentary committee argued, giving it immense leverage over the British state. The report also described a “clear mismatch with UK values.”
After the report was published, the UK technology secretary, Liz Kendall, said that the government is conducting a review of “every single aspect” of the NHS contract with Palantir before deciding whether to carry the deal forward.
Responding to the report in an op-ed published by The Telegraph, Mosley accused the MPs of “putting politics above patients” and fearmongering over the possibility that the company might abuse its access to sensitive health data. “Each NHS trust controls its own data; Palantir cannot use it, sell it, or move it,” he wrote.
Whether or not the government decides to carry the NHS contract forward, Palantir has demonstrated a willingness to resist attempts to oust it from the UK public sector. According to The Times, the company is gearing up to sue the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who blocked a $65 million deal with the Metropolitan Police, citing concerns about the procurement process and “values.”
A couple of hours after the demonstrations began, the protesters withdrew to a café at the nearby public library.
The group shared an optimism over a perceived swell in momentum behind calls to eject Palantir from the NHS, particularly in the wake of the parliamentary report. “We have this really big opportunity right now, because of the break clause,” says Lurken, the Pull the Plug cofounder.
But there’s also a world in which renewed public attention to the Palantir question could backfire, some feel, if the government decides to forge ahead with the contract. Another protester, who gave his name as JJ and identified himself as an NHS practitioner, says he worries that Palantir’s notoriety could cause already-skittish patients to think twice before volunteering information to their health care provider, with implications for their care. “We know that people don’t want to tell us everything. People are already distrustful. They’re just going to clam up,” says JJ. “We’re going to get less information, less history to be able to help people.”
