GoKawiilUK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Louis Mosley, head of Palantir Technologies UK. Graphic: the Nerve
Palantir, the US AI surveillance and security firm with hundreds of millions of pounds in UK government contracts, poses “a national security threat to the UK”, according to two anonymous high-level sources working with the Ministry of Defence.
The insiders, who are senior systems engineers with knowledge of the Palantir software systems the MoD is using, have come forward to speak after the Nerve published an investigation in January that revealed Palantir had at least £670m worth of contracts across the UK government, including £15m with the UK nuclear weapons agency.
In that investigation, data and security experts claimed that the contracts with the firm, owned by Peter Thiel, are a critical risk to Britain’s national security. At the time, an MoD spokesman told the Nerve that “all data remains sovereign and under the ownership of the MoD”.
However, the MoD insiders, who have detailed knowledge of the underlying technology, say such statements are “ignorant” and/or misleading. It’s believed to be the first time individuals currently working with the ministry have spoken out about the national security risks Palantir poses. They are doing so because they believe that these are matters of the highest public interest and that parliament needs to act.
The first, a senior systems engineer with the MoD who has decades of experience across the defence industry, told the Nerve: “Ministers clearly have a lack of understanding of Palantir’s technology. The statements with respect to sovereign data appear to be missing the point entirely. [They’re] missing the realities of data scraping, of aggregation, and the fact that Palantir is building its own rich picture of our nation that they can use for their own ends.
UK defence secretary John Healey and Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp sign a £1.5 billion investment deal, London, September 2025.
“Allowing a single entity, foreign or domestic, to have such far-reaching, pervasive access is inherently dangerous. How our national cybersecurity centre has allowed this beggars belief.”
At the heart of the claims is that while the underlying data may remain under the MoD’s control, any insights derived from that data do not. The implications of this, the insiders say, are far-reaching, especially because of the vast quantity of personal and other data the company has access to across UK government departments.
One source said: “Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”
... continue reading