Palantir Technologies now holds more than £500 million in UK public sector contracts. The list includes a £330 million deal with the NHS signed in 2023, a three-year £421 million contract with the Ministry of Defence signed in December 2025, and, confirmed this weekend, a three-month paid trial with the Financial Conduct Authority worth more than £30,000 a week.
Under that trial, Palantir’s Foundry platform gains access to the FCA’s “data lake,” a repository that includes case intelligence files marked highly sensitive, information on problem firms, reports from lenders about proven and suspected frauds, recordings of phone calls, emails, and trawls of social media posts across the 42,000 firms the FCA regulates. The FCA’s stated justification is straightforward: financial crime is complex and networked, and advanced data analysis can surface patterns that humans miss.
Thirty-three MPs disagree enough to have signed a parliamentary motion requesting publication of all material related to the December MoD contract award, citing “reports of serious allegations of complicity in human rights violations and the undermining of democratic processes.”
What the FCA Contract Actually Involves
The three-month trial will see Palantir paid more than £30,000 a week to analyse the regulator’s data lake, a repository that includes case files, reports of suspected wrongdoing, and consumer complaints. The FCA has been careful to define Palantir’s role as “data processor” rather than “data controller,” meaning it can only act on the regulator’s instructions, with encryption keys for the most sensitive files retained exclusively by the FCA. Palantir must delete all data at the end of the contract and cannot use it to train its own products. Whether those safeguards are sufficient depends partly on what question you are asking.
Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay, a partner at law firm Hickman and Rose, told the Guardian that the dataset likely involves “hundreds of whole email accounts and full financial records,” including bank account details and contact information for people not suspected of wrongdoing. An anonymous FCA source put the concern differently: “Once Palantir understands how we detect money-laundering threats, how do we know they are ethically reliable enough not to share that information?”
Palantir’s technology is used by the Israeli military and by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Its CEO Alex Karp has said Palantir products help “optimize the kill chain.”
Meanwhile, in Zurich
While the FCA contract was being confirmed in London, the Zurich Commercial Court was hearing a case that tells the other side of Palantir’s European story. In December 2025, Swiss online magazine Republik published a two-part investigation, produced with the WAV research collective, detailing Palantir’s years-long campaign to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign failed comprehensively. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product.
The reporting was based on documents obtained through 59 freedom of information requests filed with Swiss federal agencies. The key document was an internal Swiss Armed Forces report from December 2024 concluding that Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks because sensitive military data could potentially be accessed by U.S. authorities. That finding is not a fringe concern: it is precisely the concern that makes European governments nervous about building dependency on US technology platforms with close ties to the US government and intelligence community.
A UK lawmaker, backbench Labour MP Clive Lewis, cited the Swiss report during a parliamentary debate, telling the House of Commons that “even the Swiss army has rejected Palantir as a platform on national security grounds” and demanding that Britain “pivot away” from the firm.
Palantir’s response to the Republik reporting was not a rebuttal. The company is not claiming the articles are false. It is not seeking damages. Instead, it filed a lawsuit in January invoking a Swiss right of reply statute, alleging that Republik did not give it sufficient opportunity to respond, and asking the court to compel the magazine to publish lengthy counter-statements to each article.
Republik’s managing director Katharina Hemmer said Palantir had wanted the magazine to publish a very lengthy counterstatement to each article, which Republik deemed unfounded and refused. The European Federation of Journalists has classified the action as a SLAPP suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation, designed to use the cost of litigation to intimidate journalists.
EFJ president Maja Sever noted that the investigation was based entirely on documents obtained through Swiss freedom of information law. The Zurich Commercial Court is expected to issue a verdict shortly. Whatever it decides, the Barbra Streisand dynamic is already complete: the lawsuit has generated far more attention for the Republik reporting than the original articles ever could have done alone.
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