In 2023, the then-Conservative government awarded Palantir with a £330m contract to “build a new NHS data platform”. The move proved controversial because Palantir is a US spy tech firm and its co-founder Peter Thiel is a prominent Trump donor with links to convicted sex offender Jeffry Epstein. Now, a trove of leaked emails have shone further light on Thiel’s connections.
Palantir and the NHS
Canary writer Tom Coburg reported on Palantir while the NHS deal was still going through, noting:
Palantir is named after the all-seeing stones featured in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. It’s owned by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is a board member and major investor of Facebook and was a member of Donald Trump’s transition team.
Palantir has worked with the CIA, the FBI, NSA, the Marine Corps, the US Air Force, Special Operations Command, and West Point (US military academy). Palantir’s technology has been used in a number of surveillance and intelligence-gathering projects. They include predictive policing and tracking of immigrants.
Troublingly, the legal activist group the Good Law Project later:
learned that Palantir was given the contract before negotiations had even concluded. In a letter of 26 February 2024, NHS lawyers said that when the contract was published in late December, 417 of its 586 pages were completely blanked out – including vitally important sections relating to data protection – because they were still “subject to commercial negotiation”.
The Good Law Project further highlighted:
We do not believe it is lawful for a public body to conduct negotiations after the award of a contract. And it is difficult to understand why the NHS might want to – it is unfair to other bidders and involves trying to negotiate after having relinquished its negotiating power.
They added:
Polling commissioned by our friends at Doctors’ Association UK revealed that 48% of people would likely opt out if the data were held by a private company. Opt-outs at this level would damage or destroy the value of the underlying data – which suggests we ought to be especially careful about who we partner with. This raises a serious question: why was Palantir given the multimillion-pound contract to run the NHS federated data platform?
Palantir is almost uniquely ill-equipped to hold that contract. It was established to help governments conduct law enforcement, warfare and policing. Its founder has said he believes the NHS makes people sick. This all makes Palantir, to put it mildly, a surprising choice of partner.
More recently, Lucas Amin and Peter Geoghegan reported on Palantir for Democracy for Sale. Noting that initial criticisms focussed on “privacy and ethics”, they said that:
Now, nearly 18 months after the Palantir NHS contract was signed, Democracy for Sale can reveal that many English hospitals have a different, unexpected objection: Palantir’s software simply isn’t good enough.
According to NHS figures, fewer than a quarter of England’s 215 hospital trusts were actively using Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) by the end of 2024.
In documents seen by Democracy for Sale, Greater Manchester’s health authority wrote: “There are currently no products designed or produced by Palantir Technologies Inc. as part of the FDP programme that exceed the NHS Greater Manchester local capability.”
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was even more blunt, telling NHS England in a private letter that adopting some of the tools on Palantir’s platform would lead it to “lose functionality rather than gain it.” The letter was released in response to a Freedom of Information request by the investigative group Corporate Watch.
Thiel and Epstein
Journalists have reported on Thiel’s links to Epstein for some time. In 2019, journalist Whitney Webb reported on the links between Epstein, Israeli tech company Carbyne, and the American intelligence apparatus. In the piece, she reported:
Not long after Epstein’s arrest, and his relationships and finances came under scrutiny, it was revealed that the Israeli company Carbyne911 had received substantial funding from Jeffrey Epstein as well as Epstein’s close associate and former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist and prominent Trump backer Peter Thiel.
Webb added:
Another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has his own company that, like Carbyne, is set to profit from the Trump administration’s proposed hi-tech solutions to mass shootings. Indeed, after the recent shooting in El Paso, Texas, President Trump — who received political donations from and has been advised by Thiel following his election — asked tech companies to “detect mass shooters before they strike,” a service already perfected by Thiel’s company Palantir, which has developed “pre-crime software” already in use throughout the country. Palantir is also a contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and also has a branch based in Israel.
The latest revelations around Thiel come from the leaked emails of the aforementioned Ehud Barak (former Israeli prime minister). Writing in Reason, Matthew Petti reported:
Epstein invited Barak to come to a meeting with Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and the surveillance contractor Palantir, in May 2014. Although Barak couldn’t make that meeting, Epstein insisted that Barak “spend real time with peter thiel [sic]” and offered to set up a dinner the following month.Epstein
Barak wrote to a different business associate a few days later, without mentioning Epstein’s role, that he and Thiel would have a “first date” and “probably spend it talking just geopolitics” with an unnamed third person. In that email, Barak added that he had met Thiel once before in Davos, Switzerland, but speculated that Thiel “probably doesn’t even recall it.”
Brace Belden of the TrueAnon podcast added that Barak suspected Thiel was “under some drug impact” when they met, according to the emails:
In a separate email to the billionaire Gary Fegel, Ehud Barak says he’s actually met Thiel once at Davos but Thiel likely doesn’t remember as “he was, I guess, under some drug impact”. pic.twitter.com/LHtKespdbM
— TrueAnon (@TrueAnonPod) August 28, 2025
Petti further reported:
It’s not clear exactly what happened in that meeting [between Barak and Thiel]. In February 2016, however, Epstein pitched Reporty to Valar Ventures, a fund co-founded by Thiel and two close partners. “We’d love to hear more about Reporty, are you in NYC in the near term or would a phone call make more sense? Thanks for thinking of us Jeffrey,” Valar Ventures general partner Andrew McCormack wrote back.
After meeting with the Reporty team, McCormack rejected the proposal as premature, adding that “we remain fans of what you are building and hope to re-engage in the future when the story comes into clearer focus.” In 2018, the Founders Fund—another firm cofounded by Thiel—joined a $15 million Series B funding round for the company, which by then had been renamed Carbyne.
Links to Labour
Palantir has significant connections to our current Labour government, as Amin and Geoghegan reported for Democracy for Sale:
Since taking office, Labour’s attitude towards Palantir appears to have warmed even further. The company hired Peter Mandelson’s Global Counsel for lobbying, and when Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Washington, D.C. earlier this year, the prime minister toured Palantir’s offices alongside the UK’s new ambassador to the US.
Mandelson, who currently serves as the UK’s ambassador to America, has his own links to Epstein. Recently, it was revealed that Mandelson once referred to Epstein as his “best pal” in a birthday book. It was previously revealed that Mandelson stayed “at Epstein’s flat while the disgraced financier was in jail” for sex crimes.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore – Flickr / Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department – Wikimedia
