One of Britain’s biggest pension providers has multibillion-pound investments in Palantir, the controversial US technology company founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, a new cross-European investigation reveals.
Legal & General, which runs workplace pension programmes for some of the UK’s largest corporate employers, including Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Boots, had £1.9bn invested in the company at the end of last year, the new analysis shows.
Aviva, another large UK pension provider, held £255.5m worth of shares in Palantir in the same period. Between them, the two companies provide up to one in three UK workplace pensions and the new findings suggest millions of Britons may be unwitting investors in the surveillance technology firm. (Full disclosure: four co-founders of the Nerve have pensions with Legal & General through their ex-employer, the Guardian.)
In the UK, Palantir has become a subject of mounting public concern over its software contracts with the NHS, Ministry of Defence and other government departments – as detailed in a recent Nerve investigation. But analysis of company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, by a consortium of eight European news organisations – including the Nerve – throws a new spotlight on the UK's corporate sector.
In particular, many UK pension holders may not realise that they hold investments in the company. Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, points out that up to one in three UK savers may be funding Palantir’s expansion while it is simultaneously extracting their data.
“The state embeds companies like Palantir at the heart of its infrastructure. Those companies extract value from public data. And millions of people’s pensions are then used to finance their expansion,” Lewis said. “Up to one in three UK savers may now be caught in that loop without knowing it.”
The analysis, led by Dutch news outlet Follow the Money, found from studying US Securities and Exchange Commission filings that at the end of 2025 more than 100 major European banks, asset managers, insurers and pension funds had at least £20bn worth of shares in Palantir. British investment firms accounted for nearly £5.2bn of that, more than any other country in Europe.
A boom in Palantir’s stock market valuation that coincided with Trump’s return to office saw European investors increasing their stakes while the value of their holdings almost quadrupled between 2024 and 2025. During an update to shareholders shortly after Trump returned to office, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, loudly celebrated the record valuation and reminded investors the company was dedicated to the “service of the west and the United States”, adding that it was sometimes necessary “to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them”.
Last year, Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar, joined a new “tech innovation corps” in the US reserves as a lieutenant-colonel.
Palantir’s software is currently being used by the Trump administration in its crackdown on immigrants and by the US and Israeli militaries. According to reports in US media, this includes the latest US war in Iran, where Palantir’s “Maven Smart System” is used in conjunction with Anthropic’s Claude to select bombing targets.
Some of the UK investors are hedge funds such as Marshall Wace, co-founded by the largest shareholder in GB News, Paul Marshall. It has the third biggest UK holding with nearly £303.3m worth of shares – and it increased its holding of shares by 3,391% over the year. Another is Quadrature Capital, a significant Labour party donor.
As private companies, hedge funds face fewer rules and scrutiny, but institutional investors such as Barclays plc (which holds nearly £1.6bn in shares) and Legal & General have public Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies. This includes public statements endorsing OECD guidelines for multinational companies that require “due diligence” when investing in companies associated with human rights violations, especially in conflict areas or in AI applications.
A spokesperson for Barclays said: “As a bank, Barclays trades in shares of listed companies in response to client instruction or demand and that may result in us holding shares. We are not making investments for Barclays and Barclays is not a ‘shareholder’ or ‘investor’ in that sense.”
A spokesperson for Legal & General said: “Holdings in the company referenced are part of broad, global market indices and are components of an investment strategy, chosen to align with the clients’ investment objectives. All of our investments are in line with international laws, regulations and sanctions.”
‘There’s something manipulative and perverse in how we’re being made complicit in this company’s activities’
In Europe, public pressure has seen investment funds divest from Palantir stock. Norwegian asset manager Storebrand sold a £18m stake in Palantir in 2024. It cited concerns about the use of software by the IDF to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Two months later, a Luxembourg-based asset manager, Candriam, followed suit.
Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at Oxford University and the author of Privacy Is Power, pointed out this was another way in which UK citizens were being forced into a compromising relationship with the company.
She said: “Palantir is being given a lot of power in the UK both through data from government contracts, and now this is another way in which citizens are involuntarily being pushed into collaborating. There’s something manipulative and perverse in how we’re being made complicit in this company’s activities.
“Politicians need to be braver and step up on behalf [of citizens]. Corporate culture is missing any sense of responsibility of what it is to be a good citizen.”
The Nerve put a series of questions to Palantir and received this response, attributed to a spokesman who asked for this response to be published in full:
“These claims range from the plainly false to the positively bizarre.
“Since our founding in 2003, Palantir has devoted its efforts to strengthening western democracy by helping its most critical institutions protect national security while preserving civil liberties. And since those early years – back when taking such a position was highly unusual – we have always refused to work with nations we see as adversarial to western democracy, such as Russia and China.
“Over the same period, we are proud that our software has been used to investigate and prevent terrorism, combat human trafficking, identify missing children, roll out the Covid vaccine, support the resettlement of refugees torn from their homes by Russia’s illegal invasion and help the Ukrainian armed forces to repel that same invasion as well as prosecute war crimes.”
Protesters outside the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Paris, where Peter Thiel was invited to deliver a lecture about the Antichrist, January, 2026. Photo: Jerome Gilles / Getty
The company’s co-founder Peter Thiel has caused a mini media storm this week with a series of lectures in Rome on the Antichrist. He foresees an apocalyptic outcome for the world if technological progress is inhibited or thwarted.
Clive Lewis added that the issue with the UK state’s extensive use of Palantir wasn’t just about individual contracts but about an entire system.
“It is a closed system of power and dependency where citizens are governed by technologies they are also forced to fund – and where the question of who is really in control becomes impossible to ignore.”
The Nerve contacted Aviva for comment and did not receive a response.
Please consider joining the Nerve as a paying member to support our work on Palantir. Since our launch in September 2025 we’ve revealed the UK government has at least £670m in currert and past contracts with the copmany, and reported that two senior MOD insiders with intimate knowledge of Palantir’s software say it’s a fundamental threat to UK national security.
Read Dutch platform Follow the Money’s report on their Europe-wide findings here.