Is your local hospital’s data infrastructure being built by a philosopher-king who believes the post-World War II order was a strategic mistake? If you live in the UK, the answer is increasingly yes.
The real story here isn’t the content of the viral, 22-point manifesto recently posted by Palantir CEO Alex Karp—which has garnered over 30 million views on X—but rather the startling reality that the firm behind this rhetoric has successfully woven itself into the essential nervous system of the British state. While Silicon Valley CEOs often retreat into the safety of "neutral" product announcements, Karp has spent the last week actively engaging in a high-stakes ideological brawl, calling for universal national service and lamenting the "neutering" of Germany and Japan.
To the average user, Palantir’s pitch is mundane: they are "plumbers" of the digital age, connecting disparate, messy datasets to make them functional. To the British public, however, that plumbing is now connected to the NHS, the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the Financial Conduct Authority, and 11 police forces. The tension is palpable. On one hand, consultants like Tom Bartlett, who led the team behind the NHS’s Federated Data Platform, argue that Palantir is "uniquely suited" to solve 25 years of accumulated data decay. On the other, ethicists like Prof Shannon Vallor of Edinburgh University warn that the company’s influence warrants an immediate ringing of alarm bells for democracy.
The contradiction is glaring. While Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has publicly defended the use of Palantir’s technology for speeding up cancer diagnoses and managing operations, he simultaneously characterized the views held by the company's leadership as "abominable." This creates a bizarre paradox: a government body is paying a £300m fee for a platform built by a firm whose own UK boss, Louis Mosley, is currently using social media to attack the British Medical Association (BMA), the very organization representing the doctors who must use the software.
This isn’t just about software; it’s about the "hard power" philosophy that the $400bn (£297bn) firm openly champions. In his 2025 book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska, Karp argues that the survival of the American experiment hinges on the revitalization of the military-industrial complex. This is the same company that holds a £240m contract with the MoD to support the "kill-chain"—a term that, in military parlance, refers to the integration of data to accelerate the targeting of enemies. For critics like Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne of the campaign group Medact, this makes the NHS effectively complicit in the "AI warfare" that the company supports globally, from Ukraine to conflicts involving the US.
Palantir maintains that its UK workforce of approximately 950 people—17% of its total staff—is doing vital work, from maintaining Royal Navy ships to tackling domestic violence. Yet, as these unelected tech leaders shift from passive service providers to vocal architects of "grand narratives," the distance between the boardroom and the bedside is shrinking.
The next reading of the public discourse surrounding the NHS contract, specifically as the BMA and other advocacy groups continue to challenge the platform's integration, will show whether the British government can successfully decouple the utility of the technology from the increasingly polarizing ideology of its creators.
