Palantir does not need to own it to own it.In 2017 a city cancelled a contract.
What happened next has not been applied to a £670 million question.
TLDR
The UK government’s defence of its Palantir contracts rests on data ownership. In 2017, Palantir argued in a documented commercial dispute that ownership of data and ownership of what can be inferred from it are two different things. The platforms at the centre of that dispute are the same platforms now running inside the Ministry of Defence. The Swiss army reviewed the same technology and rejected it on national security grounds. The UK signed a £1.5 billion deal four months later.
Contents
The New York dispute
What the MoD signed
The inference problem
The Swiss rejection
What neither response addresses
What the article does not ask
The New York dispute
You have to understand what was actually being claimed in New York in 2017, because the government is counting on you not knowing, or not caring, or assuming that what happened in a police department in America has nothing to do with the platforms now sitting at the centre of British national defence.
The New York Police Department cancelled its Palantir contract. Palantir responded by claiming the analysis produced by its platforms was its own intellectual property. Not the data the city had fed in. The insights derived from it. The platforms at the centre of that dispute were Gotham and Foundry. They are the same platforms now running inside the UK Ministry of Defence, the NHS, and critical national infrastructure under contracts worth at least £670 million.
This is not an allegation. It is a documented commercial dispute reported at the time. It established that Palantir draws a distinction between data and the insights produced from it, and that on prior evidence it considers those insights its own.
The full investigation by Charlie Young and Carole Cadwalladr was published by The Nerve on 13 March 2026. Read it here.
What the MoD signed
Defence minister Luke Pollard told the House of Commons in January:
“All data used and developed in Palantir’s software deployed across the Ministry of Defence will remain under the ownership of the MoD. We have clear contractual controls in place to ensure this.”
It is a statement that assumes the question being asked is about ownership. It is not. It has never been. And the people who built and deployed the technology the minister was describing know that, which is why two senior MoD systems engineers went on record with The Nerve last week and said what ministers apparently could not bring themselves to understand.
“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.”
The MoD’s contractual framework addresses ownership of data. It says nothing about ownership of what can be learned from it. These are not the same protection. They have never been the same protection. The government signed as though they were.
The inference problem
One source gave a concrete example, and it is worth sitting with because it is the kind of example that sounds technical until you understand what it means, and then it does not sound technical at all.
A parcel leaves a defence supplier carrying a NATO part number, an address, and an arrival date. Each piece of information is individually unclassified. Combined, they reveal that a nuclear submarine will be in a specific location on a specific date. That combined inference is classified. The government’s contracts cover the raw data. They say nothing about what can be derived from it. The same source described the government’s position this way:
“Whether or not the UK technically owns the data is almost irrelevant. 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 or take it out of the room.”
A second source, with a background in intelligence, told The Nerve:
“A complete profile on the whole UK population. They have visibility into wildly different focus areas, yet their data is all condensed into one foreign supplier’s control.”
What the article reports but does not calculate is the combined surface area of that access. Defence, health, roads, power networks, major industrial infrastructure. The submarine example is one illustration of what becomes possible when those datasets are combined. It is not the limit of what is possible. That calculation has not been made public by anyone inside government.
The Swiss rejection
The Swiss army reviewed Palantir’s technology. They produced an official report. They named the possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services as a key concern. Palantir’s head of UK operations made numerous approaches, including a personal pitch.
The Swiss army said no.
You are entitled to ask what the Swiss army understood that the UK government did not, and you are entitled to ask why the specific content of the UK procurement review that reached a different conclusion does not appear to be public. The UK defence secretary signed a £1.5 billion deal four months after the Swiss report was published. The photographs of the signing exist. The press release exists. The review that justified a different conclusion from the one the Swiss army reached does not appear to exist in any form the public can examine.
What neither response addresses
The MoD did not respond to The Nerve’s press inquiries. Palantir called the claims entirely false in a single sentence. Neither response addresses New York.
Palantir is currently building the deportation infrastructure for ICE, running data operations for DOGE, and supporting US military operations in multiple theatres. It is a company whose political alignment to the current US administration is public and documented, operating at the centre of UK national infrastructure at a moment when that administration has demonstrated, repeatedly and without apparent embarrassment, that allies and leverage are not always treated as different categories.
Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group told The Nerve:
“If Palantir knows everything, it just gives them huge extra leverage.”
What the article does not ask
The Nerve piece is careful about what it claims directly and what it leaves as inference. It establishes capability and proximity. It does not establish confirmed extraction or transfer of insights to the US government. That distinction matters and the piece is honest about it.
What it does not ask is who in UK procurement reviewed the same technical documentation the Swiss army reviewed, and when, and whether that review addressed the inference problem at all. It does not name anyone inside government who was warned and when. It does not examine whether GCHQ or the National Cyber Security Centre conducted a technical review before the contracts were signed. It does not ask what recourse the UK has if it decides to cancel, and whether the NYPD precedent means that cancellation would trigger a claim over the insights already produced.
Duncan McCann of the Good Law Project told The Nerve:
“A hallmark of almost every Palantir engagement is an attempt at secrecy, obfuscation. We really do not have the legal architecture to defend against this kind of big tech. The regulators are asleep at the wheel.”
The government is using the word sovereign to mean ownership of data. In New York in 2017, Palantir argued in a documented dispute that ownership of data and ownership of what can be learned from it are two different things. That argument was made using Gotham and Foundry. Those platforms are inside British national defence today, and the contract protecting against that argument was written as though the argument had never been made.
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