IN 2016 PALANTIR, an American software firm, successfully sued the US Army to win a second chance at a contract. Domestic revenue has more than doubled in a year, to $1.6bn in the second quarter of 2026. A decade on, the fortunes of the company seeded by the CIA’s venture arm, and named after an all-seeing stone in J.R.R. Business is booming (see chart). The American government accounts for two-fifths of its global business. Despite concerns that AI might eat its lunch, American firms think its software can provide a layer of protection for their raw data, a privacy shield against frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Tolkien’s fantasy epic “The Lord of the Rings”, have changed.
In Britain, its biggest foreign market, and home to a sixth of its workforce, MPs have urged Andy Burnham, the prime minister, to exercise a break clause in February in a seven-year contract with the National Health Service. Palantir is suing Sir Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, after he blocked a deal with the Metropolitan Police claiming competition processes were circumvented. No one disagrees that a key problem for the British state is its fragmented data. Police spend most of their time on admin rather than investigating crimes, accessing dozens of systems, each with its own login details. Disjointed data cost lives. Trusts in charge of hospitals can use the software both for back-office functions and to run tools on top of it. It can flag when a patient is behind on the steps required for cancer treatment, say, and let staff schedule appointments or update a record. Some trusts and regional health boards, such as Greater Manchester, can already do this, and more, without Palantir. But it is a huge upgrade for less tech-savvy parts of the NHS that have only recently stopped using paper records. Similar marketing hype surfaces in defence. The government has sometimes encouraged the same impression.
Because of poorly integrated tech, and that staff have to write on scraps of paper during emergencies, a recent official report on England’s maternity care found that patients routinely get lost between services.
In July French and German security chiefs announced they would replace a “digital backbone” reliant on Palantir with European alternatives. Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, a recently retired lieutenant general, says that Palantir is “world-leading” at turning a complex military mission into actionable data flows. His concern is the way its marketing can present the firm as a “full-solution AI company rather than one supplier in a much broader supply chain”. A “strategic partnership” with the Ministry of Defence announced last September is less sweeping than it sounds: “a complete fantasy”, says one former official, pushed by government advisers who thought it would “look good”.
