Revealed: Palantir deals with UK government amount to at least £670m – including £15m contract with nuclear weapons agency

Britain’s reliance on Palantir, the controversial US data surveillance firm, is a “gaping national security vulnerability”, MPs and tech experts have said, as a Nerve investigation reveals how deeply embedded the company is in the UK’s critical national infrastructure. 

The Nerve’s investigation shows the company, co-founded by one of President Trump’s most loyal allies, Peter Thiel, is enmeshed in Britain’s civil and defence structures to a far greater degree than previously realised. The Nerve has found at least 34 current and past state contracts across at least 10 government departments, local councils and police authorities. 

The investigation also reveals previously undisclosed contracts between Palantir and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, the agency that underpins Britain’s nuclear deterrence programme. 

The agency, formerly known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, designs and manufactures the nuclear warheads carried by UK submarines. The Nerve has found £15m worth of contracts for “cloud support” on the Crown Commercial Service dashboard, an agency that works with the Cabinet Office and external suppliers. 

These contracts are not on the government’s official contract finder website and the Ministry of Defence refused to either confirm or deny their existence. Palantir did not acknowledge or respond to the Nerve’s inquiries. 

The Nerve’s research – shown in two infographics here – shows that Palantir has current and historic deals worth £388m with the MOD across at least a dozen contracts and extensions to contracts, and more than £244m with the NHS (12 contracts/extensions). Government agencies and authorities with smaller contracts include Coventry city council, Leicestershire police, DEFRA and the Homes for Ukraine scheme. 

Following a week in which Trump threatened hostilities against Denmark, a Nato ally, as well as tariffs against the UK and other European countries supporting Denmark, tech and national security experts highlighted the danger of entrusting critical UK civil and defence capabilities to the firm, with one saying that Britain needed to understand the company as a “vector of malign influence”. 

Another contract shows a smaller spend of £250,000 on Palantir’s cloud software by the Nuclear Propulsion Integrated Project Team (NP-IPT), a body within the Ministry of Defence “charged with delivering a safe and available Nuclear Propulsion plant to the Royal Navy’s flotilla of nuclear powered submarines”. 

Although Palantir has long attracted critical attention in the UK, in particular for its involvement with the NHS – including its federated data platform, which brings together personal and other data from across the NHS – the threat profile of the company’s involvement in both civil and defence programmes escalated rapidly this week.

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, who is an outspoken critic of the firm, said that parliament was “dangerously behind the curve” in understanding the threat, adding that “after this week’s geopolitical ruptures, it is a gaping national security vulnerability and frankly, scandal”. 

Palantir is explicit about an ideological mission to defend America and “the west”. On an earnings call last year, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Karp, said that “we are dedicating our company to the service of the west and the United States of America”. He added that it was sometimes necessary “to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them”.

Thiel was Donald Trump’s first high-profile supporter in Silicon Valley, has donated to his campaigns and has financially supported Vice-President JD Vance over the years. Palantir’s software has been used by ICE, the US’s federal immigrations enforcement agency, for years, with new reporting revealing how it is being used to target and locate immigrants. Thiel has been publicly supportive of authoritarian government, saying that he “no longer think[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible”.

Chris Kremidas-Courtney, senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre and a former Nato adviser, said that “embedding Palantir into the UK Ministry of Defence's systems is risky not because it’s a foreign company but because it’s a company controlled by Peter Thiel, a billionaire ideologue with far-right affiliations.  

“Instead of seeing Palantir as a vendor, the UK would be wise to instead see them as a vector of malign influence.”

While refusing to confirm or deny the nuclear weapons contracts, an MoD spokesperson said: “All data used and developed in Palantir’s software deployed across the MoD remains sovereign and under the ownership of the MoD. We have put in place extensive data security and protection measures to ensure UK defence information is appropriately managed.”

But national security and tech experts dispute that claim, with one calling it “woefully naive” and “deliberately misleading”. 

Marietje Schaake – a former MEP, a fellow at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and a leading expert in the national security risks of European reliance on US technologies – disputes whether the UK government could retain any control over its data if the US government demanded it. 

She said that the US Cloud Act and Fisa – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – “give law enforcement and intelligence the right to access data anywhere in the world if held by a US company”.

Schaake called US technology companies part of Trump’s “imperialist tool box.” 

Palantir’s biggest customer after the US government is the UK government, a reliance that is set to accelerate since the UK government signed a “strategic partnership” between the MoD and the company last September for £240m. 

The contract was not put out to tender and was shepherded by Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, who was sacked in September last year after new revelations emerged about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. He had temporarily stepped down from his firm, Global Counsel, which counts Palantir as a client. 

One European defence contractor who wished to remain anonymous pointed out that there had been articles about “kill switches” in US-built fighter jets, “but you don’t need a kill switch” in any tech defence product, “you just have to update the software to render it inoperable”.

A US national security expert who also wished to remain anonymous said that “all this BS about ownership of the data is a distraction” and asked: “Would the UK allow Russia that kind of control?”

Critics have also pointed out that Palantir’s executive vice -president for the UK, Louis Mosley, the grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, also has overt political affiliations. Last year, he appeared at the rightwing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, where he joined speakers who included Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson and GB News co-owner (and funder of the forum) Paul Marshall.

Palantir’s “strategic partnership” with the MoD is just one of a slew of US “tech prosperity deals” that were a core component of Keir Starmer’s negotiation with Trump for lower trade tariffs than those imposed on other countries. 

Those deals include other Trump allies and donors such as Larry Ellison’s Oracle (previously covered by the Nerve) and Sam Altman’s OpenAI.  

Schaake points out that Trump has already been weaponising access to US technology companies through sanctions. In December, the US State Department imposed sanctions on two British disinformation researchers. It is illegal for any US company to allow sanctioned individuals to access their services – cutting the researchers off from their Google and WhatsApp accounts, for example, and financial service providers such as Visa and Mastercard.