Two senior systems engineers at the Ministry of Defence have broken cover to warn that Palantir, the US AI surveillance firm with at least £670m in UK government contracts, poses “a national security threat to the UK.”
The insiders, speaking to The Nerve, a new investigative outlet founded by former Guardian journalists, say ministerial assurances that data remains under British ownership are “ignorant” and miss the point entirely.
It is believed to be the first time individuals currently working with the ministry have spoken publicly about the risks.
At the heart of their concern is what intelligence professionals call the “mosaic effect.” Individual data points may be innocuous; combined, they become sensitive. One source offered a chilling hypothetical: a defence supplier ships a parcel with a NATO part number, an address, and an arrival date. Each element is unclassified. Together, they reveal a nuclear submarine’s location on a specific day. Palantir’s platforms Gotham and Foundry, now deployed across British government, are designed precisely to identify such patterns.
“Palantir does not need to own the data,” one source told reporter Charlie Young at The Nerve. “They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”
A second source, with an intelligence background, told The Nerve that Palantir likely has “a complete profile on the whole UK population.” The company’s contracts span defence, health, policing, and critical infrastructure.
“When you have that mosaic built from UK sovereign defence, health, roads, power networks, power stations, and our major industrial bases,” one of the insiders warned, “you have a detailed understanding of virtually every aspect of the sovereign United Kingdom. For an adversary, or even a nation with whom we have a special relationship, that picture is worth more than all the fine art on Earth.”
Insights as intellectual property
The government’s defence rests on contractual guarantees. In January, defence minister Luke Pollard assured the Commons that “all data used and developed in Palantir’s software deployed across the Ministry of Defence will remain under the ownership of the MoD.”
But the insiders say this misunderstands how modern analytics works.
“Whether or not the UK technically owns the data is almost irrelevant,” one told The Nerve. “That’s like reading a secret love letter and saying the secrets in it are safe, just because you’ve promised never to copy it word for word.”
There have been warnings.
When New York’s police department cancelled its Palantir contract in 2017, the company claimed insights derived from NYPD data constituted Palantir’s intellectual property. The dispute, as the US news outlet Buzzfeed reported, was “not over the data that the NYPD has fed into Palantir’s software, but over the analysis that the software has produced – all the insights.”
British contracts may differ, but the episode suggests analytical outputs could be claimed as Palantir’s own.
Duncan McCann of the Good Law Project told The Nerve the implications were “potentially explosive.”
The Thiel factor
Palantir’s ownership deepens the concerns. The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel, now among the most influential figures in Donald Trump’s orbit. Since Trump’s return to office, Palantir has become central to American state power: its software underpins ICE immigration enforcement and, through work with the Department of Government Efficiency, helped create what critics call America’s first searchable citizen database.
It also supports US military AI systems that are being used in Venezuela, Gaza, and Iran.
The Swiss army rejected Palantir’s technology despite pitches from the company’s UK head, Louis Mosley. An official Swiss report cited concerns about “the possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”
Britain, by contrast, has embraced the firm. Prime Minister Keir Starmer toured Palantir’s Washington headquarters with CEO Alex Karp in February 2025, and defence secretary John Healey signed a £1.5bn investment deal last September.
Regulators asleep
Palantir dismissed the claims as “entirely false” with “no grounding in fact.” The MoD did not respond to inquiries. But the sources are not fringe critics, they are senior engineers with detailed knowledge of the systems in question, speaking because they believe parliament must act.
Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP on the science and technology select committee, told The Nerve that Britain needs “sovereign capabilities in sovereign hands.”
Duncan McCann, head of tech and data at the Good Law Project, offered a bleaker assessment: “A hallmark of almost every Palantir engagement is an attempt at secrecy, obfuscation – a real difficulty in finding out what is actually going on. We really don’t have the legal architecture to defend against this kind of big tech. The regulators are asleep at the wheel.”
Whether Britain’s politicians will wake them is not year clear.
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