Chloe George

Tag: Digital Sovereignty

  • Nothing to See Here: The NHS, Mythos, and the Closing of the Code

    Nothing to See Here: The NHS, Mythos, and the Closing of the Code

    On Monday 11 May 2026, hundreds of NHS computer code projects will go dark. Not deleted. Just hidden. The repositories will still exist, the same engineers will still maintain them, but the public will no longer be able to see them.

    The deadline is in seven days. Teams that want to apply for an exemption have until close of play tomorrow to make their case to the Engineering Board. Most won’t make it.

    The reason given, in an internal memo dated 29 April 2026 and leaked to the former head of open technology at NHSX, is that an artificial intelligence model called Mythos can read code very fast.1 Mythos was announced by an American AI company called Anthropic about a week before the memo was issued.2

    I want to talk about this. Not because I expect you to care about NHS code repositories specifically, but because what this story is actually about is much bigger than that. It’s about whether the public is allowed to see what’s being built with public money. And the timing, which I’ll get to, is suspicious enough that I think it’s worth a few minutes of your day.

    Editorial cartoon of a hospital corridor with a large bank of light switches on the wall labelled NHS REPOS. A figure in a suit is flipping the switches off one by one. Behind them, smaller figures are crowding in to watch through a small window before each light goes out.
    The view from outside.

    What’s actually happening, in plain English

    Open source code is code that anyone can read. The author publishes it on a website like GitHub, and anyone in the world can look at it, copy it, learn from it, or check whether it does what its authors say it does.

    The NHS publishes hundreds of code projects this way. Most of it is genuinely boring: design templates for NHS websites, code that publishes statistics, tools that help with vaccination schedules, the standard way the NHS labels and structures its own data. Some of it is more interesting: research code, tools developed during the pandemic, frontends for patient services. None of it, on the public’s view, is the kind of secret that would let a hacker bring down a hospital.

    For more than a decade, UK government policy has been that code paid for with public money should be available for the public to see. This isn’t an opinion that a couple of tech enthusiasts hold. It’s written into the Technology Code of Practice3, the government Service Manual4, the NHS Service Standard5, and the Department of Health’s Data Saves Lives6 strategy.

    The reasons for this policy are simple. Public money funded the work, so the public has a right to see it. Other NHS teams, other government departments, other countries can reuse the code, which saves money. And, crucially, the code being public is one of the few ways that ordinary people, journalists, and MPs can actually check what the NHS has built and how. Without it, everything is “trust us, it works.”

    Editorial cartoon of a large featureless black box sitting on a desk. There are no buttons, no screen, no labels. A small brass plaque on the front simply reads TRUST US, IT WORKS. Three people stand around the box looking at it: an NHS nurse, a journalist holding a notebook, and a member of the public holding a tax return. They all have identical baffled expressions. Behind the box, partly visible through a small gap, a tangle of colourful wires snakes out of the back of the box and disappears off the edge of the desk.
    The new transparency.

    What was issued on 29 April was an internal memo, formally numbered SDLC-8, telling every NHS England engineering team that all public code repositories must go private by Monday 11 May 2026. Teams must declare any need for an exemption to the Engineering mailbox by close of play 6 May. The memo overrides every one of the policies I just mentioned by internal decree.

    The story they’re telling

    The reason given in the memo is rapid advancements in AI models capable of large-scale code ingestion, inference, and reasoning. The memo specifically names Mythos, an AI model from Anthropic that the company announced in April 2026 with much fanfare and a partner programme called Project Glasswing2.

    Anthropic’s own framing is that Mythos is so good at finding software vulnerabilities that the company isn’t releasing it to the general public. They’re partnering with major tech firms (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, JPMorgan, the Linux Foundation, and around 40 others) to use it defensively, and they’re giving away $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in cash to open source security organisations.

    The press coverage was breathless. The cybersecurity industry obsessed. The American security writer Bruce Schneier, who is generally considered one of the most measured voices in the field, said in his initial commentary7: “This is very much a PR play by Anthropic, and it worked. Lots of reporters are breathlessly repeating Anthropic’s talking points, without engaging with them critically.”

    Whether or not Mythos is genuinely as scary as Anthropic says, this is what NHS England has cited as the reason for closing its repositories.

    Why the Mythos story doesn’t hold up

    I am not a cybersecurity expert. I am, however, capable of reading. So is Terence Eden, the former head of open technology at NHSX, who wrote about this in late April. His first post8 on the Mythos question, written before the SDLC-8 memo dropped, made the points that any honest analysis would make.

    The code has already been read. Anthropic, which trained Mythos, has been hoovering up open source code for years. So has every other AI company. So have hundreds of digital archives and individual hoarders. If Mythos can find vulnerabilities in the NHS code by reading it, Mythos has already read it. Closing the door now does nothing about a horse that left the field years ago.

    Editorial cartoon of a wide open farm gate with a small wooden sign hanging on it that reads NHS REPOS. The field beyond the gate is completely empty. A figure in a smart suit is carefully attaching a brand new heavy-duty padlock to the gate with a slightly proud expression. In the far distance, a horse is grazing happily in someone else's field, wearing a small label that reads ALREADY SCRAPED.
    Closing the gate.

    The code being closed source is not actually safer. The same AI tools work just as well on closed source software. They can analyse the binaries that run on a server. They can probe a live website. The premise that “if our code is private, AI can’t find bugs in it” is, on its face, not how any of this works.

    Neither the UK’s AI Safety Institute9 nor the NCSC10 has recommended that organisations close their open source code in response to Mythos. NHS England has done it on its own initiative, citing a threat that the country’s actual security experts have not endorsed.

    The biggest piece of evidence sits in living memory. The NHS COVID Contact Tracing app, the most scrutinised piece of NHS software in living memory, used by tens of millions of people, the target of every hostile cyber actor on the planet, was open sourced the day it launched. It produced exactly zero security incidents from the code being public. NHS England’s own engineers know this because they made that decision deliberately at the time.

    Eden has filed a Freedom of Information request11 asking NHSE for the technical reasoning behind SDLC-8. We will see what comes back.

    In the meantime, the simplest version of where we are: the official reason makes no technical sense, contradicts the country’s actual security expertise, and overrides at least five existing pieces of UK government policy on the open web. So the question isn’t “is Mythos really that scary?” The question is what story actually fits the facts.

    The story that actually fits

    On 22 December 2025, Digital Health News reported that NHS England had quietly deleted its open source policy pages12 from its website. No announcement. No consultation. The pages just disappeared. The clinician Marcus Baw, who has been writing about NHS digital policy for years, raised the alarm.

    NHS England’s official line was that the deletion was a routine clean-up exercise from the 2021 reorganisation when NHSX was folded into NHSE. A different NHSE source told the same journalist the real reasons were “security concerns and because NHSE does not believe it has the capacity to maintain” open source software. Note the date: 22 December 2025. Mythos didn’t exist yet. It would be announced four months later.

    Editorial cartoon of a hospital noticeboard. One side is labelled OFFICIAL REASONS and pinned with a small note saying Just a tidy-up. The other side is labelled QUESTIONS NOBODY ASKED and is overflowing with notes pointing in every direction. A cleaner walks past pretending not to notice.
    Just a tidy-up.

    The same week the policy pages came down, three other things happened. The Guardian published an investigation into UK Palantir contracts after MPs raised security concerns. Health Service Journal reported that Palantir’s £330 million NHS Federated Data Platform was reaching only a handful of trusts. And Health Service Journal reported that an AI tool inside that same platform was at the centre of a regulatory row.

    I want to be careful here. I cannot prove these are connected. I have no document showing “we are removing the open source policy because the Palantir contract is in trouble.” That kind of paper trail rarely exists, and when it does, it doesn’t survive long.

    What I can say is that the December 2025 retreat from open source policy preceded Mythos by four months. Mythos is the public justification for what NHS England is doing in May 2026. It is not the reason the direction of travel changed. The direction had already changed, in the same week as a Palantir story.

    And Mythos arrived just in time to provide an excuse that sounded better than “we don’t think we can keep up the policy.”

    Why this connects to Palantir

    I have written a few times about Palantir. The first time was the Seeing Stones piece13, on how a CIA-funded surveillance company ended up running the NHS’s data. The second was Land and Expand14, on how the same company moved from the NHS into the Financial Conduct Authority. The third was The Man Who Sold England’s Data15, on the man doing all the dinners and handshakes that made it happen. If any of this is new to you, those pieces are the background.

    The Federated Data Platform is the thing in the NHS that Palantir runs. It is a £330 million contract, signed in November 2023, designed to pull NHS data from across hospitals and other services into one system that helps with things like waiting lists, theatre scheduling, and discharge planning. The contract is controversial for many reasons: the company’s other clients (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Pentagon, the Israeli Defence Forces, various intelligence agencies), the contract structure (which Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley described in Parliament as “a permanent lock-in” with “no software, not one line”16 remaining with the NHS at the end), and the question of whether NHS data opt-outs even apply to it.

    Palantir’s own code was never on NHS GitHub. It was never going to be. Palantir is a private US company and its software is proprietary. You can’t see it.

    What was on NHS GitHub was the surrounding infrastructure: the data pipelines feeding the FDP, the integration code, the ways the NHS has had to bend its own systems to plug into Palantir’s. That code is what tells you, if you read it carefully, what’s actually being shared, with whom, and how. It’s the wiring diagram.

    Closing the repos doesn’t change the data Palantir gets. It changes what the public can see about how the wiring works.

    The Palantir contract is at its weakest point right now

    This bit matters because it explains why the timing isn’t just suspicious in the abstract. It’s suspicious in a very specific way.

    The Federated Data Platform is in trouble. By February 2025, NHS England was claiming 96 trusts (about 40%) had “signed up” to the platform. When Corporate Watch FOI’d them17, it turned out that only 34 trusts (about 15%) were actually using it. The other 62 had just “signalled their intent.”

    The reason most trusts haven’t adopted it is not technical mystery. The trusts have explained, repeatedly and on the record. Leeds Teaching Hospitals wrote to NHS England saying: “From the descriptions we have of these FDP products we believe we would lose functionality rather than gain it by adopting them.” Greater Manchester’s health authority wrote that there was nothing in the FDP that “exceeds the NHS Greater Manchester local capability.” NHS staff at multiple trusts have refused to use the system on ethical grounds, given Palantir’s other clients.

    The British Medical Association passed a motion against the FDP at its 2025 AGM. In February 202618 it went further and told doctors to limit their engagement with the platform, citing concerns about Palantir’s role in providing software to ICE.

    The Good Law Project’s “Say No to Palantir” campaign has had around 50,000 patients19 write to their local trust boards opposing the platform. A coalition of public interest groups, including the Good Law Project, Privacy International, Just Treatment, Corporate Watch, and Amnesty International, published a briefing through Medact20 in March 2026 urging trust boards not to adopt.

    The Department of Health quietly gave KPMG an £8 million contract to “promote adoption” of the platform. Take a moment with that. Eight million pounds of consultancy money to convince frontline NHS staff to use software the NHS has already paid £330 million for.

    Editorial cartoon of an NHS hospital corridor. On the left, a tired-looking nurse and doctor are leaning against a wall holding cups of tea. In front of them, three smartly dressed consultants in identical suits are standing in a row, holding flipchart easels. Each easel has a different bright marker drawing on it. The first reads ENGAGEMENT, the second reads JOURNEY, and the third just has a smiley face. A briefcase open on the floor between the consultants is overflowing with banknotes. Above the consultants is a small handwritten note pinned to the wall reading EIGHT MILLION POUNDS. The nurse is looking at the doctor with one raised eyebrow. The doctor is staring directly at the viewer.
    Engagement journey.

    And the break clause in the Palantir contract is live. Health Minister Zubir Ahmed has confirmed that the option to terminate the seven-year contract in early 2027 is, as he put it, “being weighed up as a possible option.”21

    So a contract that was sold to the public as transformative is, in fact, being rejected by the people who use it, the people whose data goes into it, and the trusts being told to adopt it. The political pressure is at its highest point ever. The break clause is being seriously considered. And right at this moment, the public’s main tool for scrutinising the NHS data architecture, the open source repositories, is being switched off.

    I am not going to sit here and tell you that’s definitely the reason. I genuinely don’t know what the reason is. What I’d say is: if you wanted to reduce public scrutiny of a specific contract at a specific moment, this is what doing that would look like.

    And there’s the small matter of NHS England being abolished

    Speaking of timing. On 13 March 2025, in a speech in the House of Commons22, the Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced that NHS England, the arms-length body that has run the NHS in England since 2013, would be abolished. The workforce is being halved from around 13,000 to 6,500. Functions are being absorbed back into the Department of Health and Social Care, which Streeting runs directly. The Institute for Government23 has been tracking the chaos of the transition for over a year.

    What this means in practice is that political accountability for NHS data decisions, including everything Palantir does, is shifting from an arms-length body to a politician. Wes Streeting personally, in due course, becomes the joint data controller for everything in the FDP. Decisions that used to sit with NHS England’s board now sit with the Secretary of State.

    This is the institutional context in which a memo overriding fifteen years of open source policy gets issued with seven days’ notice. NHS England is half-shut. Its leadership has been replaced. Its workforce is being cut. The Engineering Board issuing SDLC-8 is doing so during the most disorganised period in NHS England’s existence.

    If you wanted to make a major policy change with as little scrutiny as possible, this is when you’d do it.

    Why this matters even if you don’t care about code

    Most people don’t care about code. Most people shouldn’t have to. The reason this matters to people who don’t write software for a living is that open source is one of the few mechanisms that lets ordinary people see what’s been built with their money.

    If a small charity wants to know how the NHS records something. If a journalist wants to check whether a contract is actually doing what was promised. If an MP’s office wants to understand whether a system exists at all. If a researcher wants to study the digital infrastructure of British healthcare. If another country wants to learn from what works. All of that has, until now, been possible because the code was visible.

    When you turn it off, you don’t just affect developers. You blind everyone who funds the NHS. You also break the mechanism that prevents lock-in to a single supplier, because once nobody outside the NHS knows how the integration works, replacing the supplier becomes an act of archaeology rather than engineering.

    The Palantir contract is the textbook case for why open source matters in public infrastructure. Martin Wrigley made the point in Parliament in April: “All the specially written software and intellectual property rights belong to the supplier. The contract delivers no software, not one line, just a subscribed service; a permanent lock-in; a single point of failure.” The opposite of that, structurally, is open source. NHS open source has been one of the few practical bulwarks against the kind of contract that leaves the NHS owning nothing at the end. That bulwark is what’s being switched off on Monday.

    Editorial cartoon of a low stone wall labelled OPEN SOURCE separating two areas. On one side is a tidy garden with NHS staff working at desks, public visitors strolling around. On the other side is a polished glass tower marked PROPRIETARY with no windows. A figure in a hard hat is removing the wall stone by stone. A small sign next to them reads Temporary.
    Temporary, apparently.

    What’s going right (because there’s quite a lot)

    I always promise to leave readers with something to be hopeful about, and on this one there’s a lot to be hopeful about.

    The trusts have already been refusing the FDP. This is the most important thing in the story and it should be celebrated. Greater Manchester. Leeds. Guy’s and St Thomas’. UCLH. Royal Free. Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. Nottingham. Birmingham. Frimley. The biggest and best-resourced digital teams in the NHS have looked at the platform, looked at the company, looked at the contract, and said no. They are why the contract is in trouble. Their refusal has done more to protect the NHS data architecture than any minister.

    NHS staff are leaking. The SDLC-8 memo got to Eden because multiple people inside NHS England independently sent it to him. That’s not one disgruntled engineer. That’s a workforce. The institution is half-shut down, but the conscience of the people inside it is wide awake.

    The doctors are organising. The BMA’s February 2026 motion telling doctors to limit FDP engagement is a serious institutional act. So is the Medact briefing. So is the open letter. So is the Hansard debate.

    The patients are organising. Fifty thousand letters to trust boards is a real number. The Good Law Project’s “Say No to Palantir” campaign has built a coalition with Foxglove, Privacy International, Just Treatment, Corporate Watch, the United Tech and Allied Workers Union, Amnesty International and Keep Our NHS Public.

    The break clause is live. The Health Minister has confirmed it. Whether the government activates it is up to the political pressure between now and early 2027, and the political pressure is what gets generated by exactly this sort of public attention.

    The code is backed up. Eden and a network of volunteers have already mirrored every NHS open source repository. The licences allow it. If the originals go private on Monday, the public version persists somewhere on the open internet.

    And the petition exists. keepthingsopen.com is the campaign asking NHS England to reverse SDLC-8.

    Useful resources

    What you can do today

    If you have ten minutes:

    Sign the keepthingsopen.com petition. Email your MP through writetothem.com and tell them that you don’t want your NHS code closed off, especially given who’s now sitting inside it. Forward this article, or one of Eden’s two24 on the same subject, to anyone you know who works in tech, government, or healthcare. They will recognise what’s happening.

    If you have an hour, read the Palantir series on this site, beginning with The Seeing Stones13. The pieces about the FCA and Louis Mosley sit alongside it. None of this story is in isolation. It is a piece of a much bigger picture about what’s happened to British public infrastructure in the last few years.

    If you have actual power inside the NHS or DHSC and you’re reading this: you can refuse. The trusts already are. The doctors already are. The data analysts already are. You’re allowed to be one of them.

    Closing

    The reason Palantir is called Palantir is that the founders are Lord of the Rings fans. In Tolkien, a palantir is a seeing stone, an object that lets its holder see distant places and watch from afar. The dark joke of the company name has been pointed out for years: a surveillance company named after a magical surveillance object. Their seeing stones watch us.

    What’s been happening, less remarked on, is that the public had its own seeing stone. The open source policy was a way for ordinary people to look back. To see how the systems we paid for actually worked. To check the wiring. To watch the watchers, in a small but real way.

    On Monday, the public seeing stone goes dark. Theirs stays on. That isn’t, in my view, an accident of timing. And it certainly isn’t temporary in any meaningful sense, regardless of what the press release says, because the policies it overrides are not coming back without a fight.

    Editorial cartoon of two crystal-ball-like seeing stones sitting on plinths in a dim, slightly mystical-looking room with stone walls. The stone on the left is labelled OURS on a brass plaque on its plinth. It is dark and unlit, with a small dust sheet half-draped over it and a sign hanging from it that reads OUT OF ORDER. The stone on the right is labelled THEIRS on its plaque. It is glowing brightly with a soft inner light, and faint outlines of NHS hospital buildings, hospital beds, and a person's medical chart can be seen swirling inside it. A figure in a smart suit stands between the two stones, polishing the glowing one with a soft cloth and looking pleased. The dark stone behind them is gathering cobwebs.
    One sees. One doesn’t.

    The fight, fortunately, is already happening. It’s happening in the trusts that refuse to plug in. In the doctors saying no. In the engineers leaking memos. In the patients writing letters. In the MPs reading Hansard speeches. In a former NHS open source lead with an FOI form and a website. In the people who have already mirrored every single repository before the deadline.

    The view from outside might be about to go dark. The people inside aren’t going anywhere.

    References

    1. Terence Eden’s blog: NHS Goes To War Against Open Source, with leaked SDLC-8 memo image, 1 May 2026. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/
    2. Anthropic: Project Glasswing, official launch page, April 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
    3. Gov.uk: Technology Code of Practice, point 3 “Be open and use open source”. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-technology-code-of-practice
    4. Gov.uk Service Manual: Making source code open and reusable. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/making-source-code-open-and-reusable
    5. NHS Service Manual: Service Standard point 12, Make new source code open. https://service-manual.nhs.uk/standards-and-technology/service-standard-points/12-make-new-source-code-open
    6. Department of Health and Social Care: Data Saves Lives strategy, commitment 601. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-saves-lives-reshaping-health-and-social-care-with-data/data-saves-lives-reshaping-health-and-social-care-with-data
    7. Bruce Schneier: On Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and Project Glasswing, 13 April 2026. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/on-anthropics-mythos-preview-and-project-glasswing.html
    8. Terence Eden’s blog: Does Mythos mean you need to shut down your Open Source repositories?, 24 April 2026. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/does-mythos-mean-you-need-to-shut-down-your-open-source-repos/
    9. UK AI Safety Institute: Evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities, April 2026. https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities
    10. NCSC: Why cyber defenders need to be ready for frontier AI, 2026. https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blogs/why-cyber-defenders-need-to-be-ready-for-frontier-ai
    11. WhatDoTheyKnow: Eden FOI request to NHS England re SDLC-8 guidance. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_relating_to_guidance_2
    12. Digital Health News: NHS England quietly removes open source policy web pages, 22 December 2025. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2025/12/nhs-england-quietly-removes-open-source-policy-web-pages/
    13. chloegeorge.co.uk: The Seeing Stones: How a CIA-Funded Surveillance Company Ended Up Running the NHS, March 2026. https://chloegeorge.co.uk/palantir-nhs-seeing-stones/
    14. chloegeorge.co.uk: Land and Expand: How Palantir Swam Into the FCA’s Data Lake, March 2026. https://chloegeorge.co.uk/palantir-fca-data-lake/
    15. chloegeorge.co.uk: The Man Who Sold England’s Data (And Got a Seat on the Board), April 2026. https://chloegeorge.co.uk/louis-mosley-palantir-uk/
    16. Hansard: NHS Federated Data Platform debate, 16 April 2026, including Martin Wrigley MP intervention. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-04-16/debates/2FDCA71C-D0C1-4738-BEE8-A4BDA311DB99/NHSFederatedDataPlatform
    17. Corporate Watch: FOI requests reveal Palantir’s NHS FDP rollout failures, August 2025. https://corporatewatch.org/foi-requests-reveal-palantirs-nhs-fdp-rollout-failures/
    18. Digital Health News: BMA calls for NHS doctors to reject using the FDP, February 2026. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/02/bma-calls-for-nhs-doctors-to-reject-using-the-fdp/
    19. The Lowdown NHS: Palantir, the controversy, the contracts and the campaign, April 2026. https://lowdownnhs.info/topics/accountablility/palantir-the-controversy-the-contracts-and-the-campaign/
    20. Medact: Briefing on Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems, March 2026. https://www.medact.org/2026/resources/briefings/briefing-palantir-fdp/
    21. TechRadar: Palantir could be forced to exit NHS after pushback from staff, MPs, unions and pressure groups, April 2026. https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/nhs-users-report-that-it-is-awful-to-use-palantir-could-be-forced-to-exit-nhs-after-pushback-from-staff-mps-unions-and-pressure-groups-over-federated-data-platform
    22. Gov.uk: NHS England, Health and Social Care Secretary’s statement, 13 March 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nhs-england-health-and-social-care-secretarys-statement
    23. Institute for Government: One year on from the decision to abolish NHS England, 26 March 2026. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/one-year-abolish-nhs-england
    24. Terence Eden’s blog: collected coverage on the NHS open source closure. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/open-source/
  • Land and Expand: How Palantir Swam Into the FCA’s Data Lake

    Land and Expand: How Palantir Swam Into the FCA’s Data Lake

    Four days. I published The Seeing Stones, a 5,000-word investigation into how a CIA-funded surveillance company ended up running the NHS, and four days later the Guardian broke a story that made me need to write another one.

    On 22 March 2026, we learned that Palantir has been awarded a contract by the Financial Conduct Authority to analyse the regulator’s internal intelligence data.[1] Case files. Fraud reports. Phone call recordings. Emails. Social media posts. Consumer complaints. The entire investigative toolkit of the body responsible for overseeing 42,000 financial firms, from high street banks to crypto exchanges. Handed to Peter Thiel’s company for a three-month trial at more than £30,000 a week.[2]

    When I added an update to the NHS piece, I thought a paragraph would do it. It didn’t. Because the FCA deal isn’t just another contract. It’s the piece that makes the whole picture visible. Palantir now sits inside the NHS (your health data), the Ministry of Defence (national security), police forces across England (criminal intelligence), and the Financial Conduct Authority (your financial life). That’s not a collection of separate deals. That’s an operating system. And the man running Palantir’s UK operation already told us that’s exactly what he wants.

    What’s actually in the data lake?

    The FCA describes its repository as a “data lake.” It’s a technical term for a large store of raw data, but it’s also accidentally the most honest piece of branding anyone involved in this story has produced. A data lake is murky. Things sink into it and become hard to retrieve. The boundaries are unclear. And once something swims in, it tends to stay.

    Cartoon of a murky lake with a wooden sign reading FCA Data Lake. Filing cabinets, phones, and email envelopes float in the water. A glowing orb sinks in the centre. A figure in a business suit stands calmly on the shore holding a fishing rod. Caption reads Just a trial.

    According to multiple news outlets reporting on the Guardian’s investigation, the data Palantir will access includes: case intelligence files marked as highly sensitive; information on what the FCA calls “problem firms”; reports from banks and lenders about proven and suspected frauds; consumer complaints to the financial ombudsman; recordings of phone calls; swathes of emails; and social media monitoring data.[8][4][5] This isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s the entire investigative brain of the UK’s financial regulator.

    Palantir will apply its Foundry platform, the same software it uses for the NHS and the MoD, to sift through all of this and look for patterns of financial crime: fraud, money laundering, insider trading.[5] The idea, on paper, is straightforward: AI is better at spotting patterns across massive datasets than humans are. The FCA oversees 42,000 firms. It needs better tools. Nobody serious disputes that.

    But here’s the thing. The FCA chose to test this system using real data, not synthetic datasets. That decision raised eyebrows even among people sympathetic to the project, because testing AI systems on dummy data is standard practice precisely to avoid handing your most sensitive information to a contractor before you know whether the arrangement works.[5] The FCA went straight to the real thing. As Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay, a barrister at Hickman and Rose, told the Guardian: the FCA can compel firms to hand over vast quantities of data during investigations. “We could be talking about hundreds of whole email accounts and full financial records. Many innocent people will be caught up in that and the data may contain bank account details, email addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information.”[6]

    The procurement that wasn’t quite

    The FCA says it ran “an open, competitive procurement process.”[7] That phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because according to Yahoo News UK, reporting on the Guardian’s investigation, there was only one other competitor for the contract.[8] One. Unnamed. In a market with dozens of data analytics firms.

    If you’ve read the NHS piece, this will feel familiar. The pattern goes: small entry, prove value, become impossible to remove. Palantir’s NHS involvement started with a £1 contract during Covid, expanded to £60 million without competitive tender, then became a £330 million seven-year deal.[9] The MoD relationship started with a £75 million enterprise agreement in 2022, then grew to a £240 million contract in December 2025, awarded directly by the Defence Secretary with no competitive process.[10] As MPs noted in a February 2026 Hansard debate, the pattern is consistent: “Its £1 Covid contract with the NHS expanded to a £330 million contract under the last Government, and its Ministry of Defence contract tripled in size to £240 million, without due process or competition.”[11]

    The FCA deal is positioned as a three-month trial. Just a trial. Like the £1 NHS contract was just a gesture of pandemic goodwill. Like the MoD enterprise agreement was just a modest partnership. I don’t know about you, but when a company with a documented track record of turning three-month trials into decade-long dependencies tells me this one is just a trial, I find myself checking whether any watermelon cocktails were involved in the decision.

    The common operating system (they told us this was the plan)

    Simple outline map of the UK pinned to a wall with seven glowing dots connected by lines, labelled NHS, MoD, Police, FCA, Children's Services, Nuclear Subs, and Cabinet Office. A hand reaches in from the corner holding a felt-tip pen, about to add another dot. Caption reads Common operating system.

    In his evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, Palantir’s UK chief Louis Mosley urged the government to invest in a “common operating system” that would bring together data from “across local and central government, healthcare and other bodies of national strategic importance.”[12][13] He wasn’t being subtle. He was pitching.

    Let’s map what that operating system looks like today. The NHS Federated Data Platform: health records, waiting lists, patient data across tens of millions of people.[9] The Ministry of Defence: strategic, tactical and live operational decision-making, including services to the navy’s nuclear-powered submarines.[14] Police forces in the East of England, Leicestershire and Bedfordshire: criminal intelligence, including, according to Liberty Investigates, data on political opinions, health records, sexual orientation and trade union membership.[15] Coventry City Council: children’s services and social care data.[6] The Cabinet Office. DEFRA. The Homes for Ukraine scheme. And now the FCA: financial crime intelligence, fraud detection methods, and the personal financial data of anyone caught up in an investigation.

    The Nerve’s investigation in February 2026 found that Palantir’s deals with the UK state total at least £670 million across 34 contracts with ten government departments, police authorities and local councils.[14] And that was before the FCA deal was announced.

    Mosley told a parliamentary select committee that each sector operates independently. That what happens in the US doesn’t affect the UK business. That Palantir has worked for administrations “of every colour.”[16] When asked whether the company was buying its way into being an NHS provider, he said he “strongly rejected” the critique.[16] But the map speaks for itself. Health. Defence. Policing. Financial regulation. Children’s services. Nuclear submarines. If this isn’t a common operating system, it’s doing an extremely convincing impression of one.

    Professor Levi’s question (and the one the FCA asked internally)

    Professor Michael Levi is a specialist in financial crime at Cardiff University. He told the Guardian that there has been “serious under-exploitation” of regulatory data, and that AI could genuinely improve how we detect financial crime.[6] He’s not an anti-tech campaigner. He’s a pragmatist. Which makes his question all the more pointed: “What are the protocols agreed between the FCA and Palantir about the onward use of things that they have learned in that process?”[6]

    That’s the question. Not “is AI useful?” (it is) but “what happens to the knowledge?” When Palantir’s engineers learn how the FCA detects money laundering, that knowledge doesn’t vanish when the contract ends. You can delete the data. You can’t delete what people understood.

    An FCA source put it more bluntly. Speaking to the Guardian, as reported by Yahoo News UK, they asked: “Once Palantir understands how we detect money-laundering threats, how do we know that they are ethically reliable enough not to share that information?”[8]

    That’s an FCA employee. Not a campaigner. Not an opposition MP. Someone inside the organisation, asking whether the company they’ve just hired can be trusted with the methods they use to catch financial criminals. It’s the kind of question that, if it doesn’t keep you awake at night, should at least make you put the kettle on and have a think.

    Now add the context. Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, a prominent donor to Donald Trump.[8] Its technology has been used by the Israeli military and by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.[17] According to Byline Times, reporting on the Epstein files, Thiel’s venture capital firm Valar Ventures had Jeffrey Epstein as a limited partner; a claim Thiel’s spokesperson disputed in terms of characterisation but confirmed in substance.[18] Palantir’s lobbying firm in the UK was Global Counsel, co-founded by Peter Mandelson, who while serving as UK ambassador arranged a visit by the Prime Minister to Palantir’s Washington headquarters. No minutes of that meeting have been published.[19][20] At the time, Mandelson held a shareholding of around 28% in Global Counsel, which listed Palantir as a client.[21][22] Mandelson was subsequently fired as ambassador by Starmer in September 2025 following revelations about his relationship with Epstein.[23] In February 2026 he was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and as of March 2026 remains released under investigation.[24][25] He has denied wrongdoing. Global Counsel has since collapsed into administration.[26] Palantir still has all its UK government contracts.

    This is the company that now has access to the FCA’s financial crime detection methods. The contract says the data stays in the UK, that Palantir is merely a “data processor”, that encryption keys are retained by the FCA, that everything gets deleted afterwards.[7] Those are important safeguards. They are also exactly the same type of assurances given for every other Palantir contract.[2] And every other Palantir contract is still running.

    The revolving door (it spins faster than you think)

    Cartoon of a revolving door between buildings labelled Government and Palantir. Five figures walk through in single file, each carrying a different item: a military briefcase, a stethoscope, a police badge, a rolled-up protest placard reading People's Vote, and a civil service lanyard. A sign on the door reads Business appointment rules apply. Please spin gently.

    If you want to understand how Palantir wins contracts, don’t look at the procurement notices. Look at the people.

    OpenDemocracy reported that Palantir hired four former Ministry of Defence officials in 2025, before winning its record £240 million defence contract in December of that year.[10] One of them, Barnaby Kistruck, left his role as the MoD’s director of industrial strategy, prosperity and exports, and joined Palantir as senior counsellor just nine days later. OpenDemocracy reported that Kistruck played a key role in writing the UK’s Strategic Defence Review, which recommended an increased role for AI in defence.[10] The other three hires were two senior civil servants, Laurence Lee and Damian Parmenter, and former Conservative armed forces minister Leo Docherty.[10] OpenDemocracy noted there was no suggestion of wrongdoing on Kistruck’s part, and the MoD placed restrictions on his new role.[10]

    Byline Times documented how Matthew Swindells, former deputy chief executive of NHS England, joined Global Counsel in September 2019, just two months after leaving his NHS role. He then became chair of Palantir’s health advisory board while simultaneously serving as joint chair of NHS hospital trusts, including Chelsea and Westminster, which was the first trust to pilot Palantir technology. The trust said Swindells was excluded from Palantir-related decisions.[18]

    And then there’s Tom Watson. According to Democracy for Sale, the former Labour deputy leader (now Baron Watson of Wyre Forest) was recruited by Palantir; health campaign group Medact has listed him among former government officials “employed or consulted by” the company.[9][36] I’ll be honest, this one stung. I saw Watson in a London pub during one of the big anti-Brexit marches. He was one of the loudest voices for the People’s Vote. He did genuinely important work on the phone-hacking scandal. He felt like someone on the right side. And maybe he still is, in all sorts of ways. People are complicated. But the person you cheered at the march is now advising the surveillance company, and that’s not a contradiction Palantir minds at all. It’s the whole strategy. You don’t build a revolving door that only swings one way. Watson (Labour), Docherty (Conservative), Kistruck (senior civil servant). The point is that every door leads to Palantir.

    I’m not suggesting anything illegal about any of these appointments. Business appointment rules exist. Cooling-off periods are applied. But the cumulative effect is that Palantir builds its client relationships by hiring people who understand those clients from the inside. Four MoD hires in a single year, before the biggest MoD contract in the company’s history, is a pattern that raises legitimate questions about how competitive these procurements really are.

    I haven’t found evidence of a similar revolving door at the FCA. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It means we should be asking the question now, before the three-month trial becomes a three-year contract becomes a permanent dependency.

    The AI underneath keeps changing (and that should worry you)

    Here’s something that hasn’t had enough attention. Palantir’s Foundry platform uses large language models, AI systems built by other companies, to power its analysis. Until very recently, the most important of those models in Palantir’s US defence work was Claude, made by Anthropic.[27]

    On 27 February 2026, the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic. The Pentagon designated it a “supply chain risk,” a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei.[28] The reason? Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei refused to remove safeguards that prevented Claude from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Trump called Anthropic staff “leftwing nut jobs” and directed federal agencies to stop using their technology.[28]

    Palantir CEO Alex Karp confirmed that Claude is still running inside Palantir’s tools, even as the company plans to swap to other models. “Our products are integrated with Anthropic, and in the future, it will probably be integrated with other large language models,” he told CNBC.[29] According to Reuters, Palantir’s Maven Smart Systems, used for US military intelligence and targeting, were built using Claude’s coding tools. Rebuilding those workflows will take time and money.[30] The same Foundry platform is being deployed at the FCA.

    So here’s the question nobody has answered: which AI model is powering Palantir’s analysis of the FCA’s data? If it’s Claude, what happens when the model swap takes place? If it’s something else, which something else? And what does it mean for the reliability and consistency of financial crime detection when the intelligence layer underneath your entire system is being ripped out and replaced because of a political dispute between a US president and an AI company over whether machines should be allowed to kill people without human approval?

    I appreciate that’s a long sentence. It’s a long situation.

    The sovereignty contradiction

    The timing of the FCA contract is, to put it diplomatically, interesting. On 20 March 2026, just two days before the Guardian broke the FCA story, Lord Vallance told a parliamentary committee that the government was pursuing “a very different way of doing contracts: putting British companies there and procuring innovation here.”[31] Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley responded that existing contract break points “must be exploited to move to UK solutions, sovereign solutions, otherwise we just continue doing the same stuff.”[31]

    The government has launched a Sovereign AI Unit with £500 million. The Prime Minister says the UK should be “an AI maker, not an AI taker.”[32] A House of Commons Library briefing published in March 2026 documented growing concern about over-reliance on US tech firms.[32] An Early Day Motion in Parliament warned that “government services, democratic functions and critical infrastructure increasingly depend on a small number of external digital suppliers.”[33] A Westminster Hall debate on technology sovereignty was scheduled for the same month.[32]

    And in the middle of all this, the FCA handed another sensitive system to Palantir.

    I keep thinking about Wales. When the rest of the UK went with Palantir for NHS data, Wales said no. It’s building its own system, the National Data Resource, with data staying under public control.[34] That model exists. It’s not theoretical. It’s being built right now, by people who decided that sovereignty isn’t just a word you put in a policy document.

    What you can actually do

    I know how this reads. Overwhelming. Tentacular. Depressing. But there are things that are genuinely happening, and things you can do. The FCA contract is three months. It hasn’t become permanent yet. If enough people raise concerns now, during the trial, it might not.

    Five things you can do right now

    1. Write to your MP about the FCA contract. That sounds like a thing people say when they’ve run out of useful suggestions, but in this case, parliamentary pressure is genuinely building and cross-party. The Hansard debates in February 2026 show MPs from Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all asking the same questions.[11] Your voice adds to that.

    Find and write to your MP via WriteToThem

    2. Support the organisations doing the legal heavy lifting. Foxglove forced the publication of the NHS contract and is campaigning for full transparency on all Palantir deals. The Good Law Project has been pursuing FOI requests and legal challenges for years.

    Support Foxglove’s campaign
    Support the Good Law Project

    3. Back the push for digital sovereignty. The Open Rights Group is campaigning for a UK digital sovereignty strategy that would reduce dependency on a small number of foreign tech vendors across critical public services.[35]

    Open Rights Group

    4. If you work in the NHS, sign the Medact petition. Health workers are campaigning to cancel the NHS Federated Data Platform contract with Palantir when it comes up for review. The break clause exists. It just needs enough pressure to be used.[6]

    Medact: No Palantir in the NHS

    5. Share this article. Not because I want the clicks (although, you know, hello). But because this story only works if enough people can see the pattern. One contract is a procurement decision. Thirty-four contracts across health, defence, policing, financial regulation and children’s services is a strategy. The more people who can see it, the harder it is to keep doing it quietly.

    You can also just pay attention. Because the next contract is always just a trial. The next expansion is always just an extension. The next dataset is always just a pilot. And by the time anyone notices the pattern, the common operating system is already built.

    The seeing-stones keep multiplying

    Cartoon showing a timeline of growing trees. On the left, a tiny seed labelled NHS £1 contract 2020 grows into a medium tree labelled NHS £60m, then an enormous tree with deep roots labelled NHS £330m. In the middle, a seedling labelled MoD £75m grows into a large tree labelled MoD £240m. On the far right, a brand new tiny seed has just been planted, labelled FCA £30k/week, with a watering can beside it and a sign reading Just a trial.

    In my first piece, I wrote that “the seeing-stone serves whoever holds it.” Tolkien’s palantíri were neutral technology. They could be used for good or ill. The danger wasn’t in the stones themselves but in who held them, and what they wanted to see.

    Palantir now holds seeing-stones pointed at your health, your security, your neighbourhood, and your finances. The company says it’s just a data processor. Just providing tools. Just helping catch criminals. And maybe that’s true today. But the question was never about today. It was always about what happens when the contract is permanent, the dependency is total, the revolving door has spun one more time, and someone in Washington, or in a boardroom, or at a dinner with exotic cocktails, decides they’d like to see something different.

    The FCA’s own staff are asking whether this company can be trusted. The least we can do is listen.

    A note on transparency: I’m a tech entrepreneur who builds legal technology. I have no commercial interest in Palantir’s competitors. I do have a strong interest in who gets to see my data, and yours. This article is based on publicly available sources, parliamentary records, and investigative journalism. All sources are cited below. Where claims are contested or attributed to specific outlets, I have noted this. Palantir has consistently maintained that it takes a “rigorous approach” to human rights and that its technology is used within strict contractual safeguards. Mandelson has denied wrongdoing in relation to the police investigation. No suggestion of illegality is made against any individual named in this article unless explicitly stated otherwise.

    Sources and citations

    1. The Guardian, “Palantir extends reach into British state as it gets access to sensitive FCA data,” 22 March 2026. Reported via The Register, City AM, LBC, Yahoo News UK, and others.
    2. The Register, “Palantir trial plugs into UK financial watchdog’s data trove,” 23 March 2026.
    3. Finextra, “FCA criticised over using sensitive data in AI trial with Palantir,” 23 March 2026. Reports data contents, Houssemayne du Boulay privacy concerns, and contract terms.
    4. NewsBytesApp, “AI firm Palantir can now access UK’s financial data,” 23 March 2026.
    5. FStech, “Palantir wins FCA contract to analyse sensitive UK data,” 23 March 2026.
    6. Computing.co.uk, “UK financial watchdog taps Palantir for data analysis,” 23 March 2026. Quotes Prof Michael Levi (Cardiff University), Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay (Hickman and Rose), and notes Zack Polanski break clause call and Coventry Council contract.
    7. LBC, “Palantir to access sensitive UK financial data,” 23 March 2026. FCA spokesperson quoted: “We ran an open, competitive procurement process and have strict controls in place to ensure data is protected.”
    8. Yahoo News UK, “Palantir given access to highly-sensitive UK financial data,” 23 March 2026. Reports one unnamed competitor, FCA source ethics quote, and Peter Thiel as Trump donor. Reporting on the Guardian’s investigation.
    9. Democracy for Sale, “Palantir’s NHS data platform rejected by most hospitals,” May 2025. Documents “land and expand” strategy (quoting Foxglove), £1 to £330m NHS trajectory, and political recruitment.
    10. openDemocracy, “Palantir hired four ex-Ministry of Defence officials before winning record defence contract,” 24 January 2026. Documents Barnaby Kistruck (director of industrial strategy, prosperity and exports), Laurence Lee, Damian Parmenter, Leo Docherty. £240m contract awarded without tender December 2025. “openDemocracy is not suggesting any wrongdoing on Kistruck’s part.”
    11. Hansard, “Ministry of Defence: Palantir Contracts,” 10 February 2026. Cross-party debate. Quote: “Its £1 Covid contract with the NHS expanded to a £330 million contract.” Global Counsel links discussed. 34 contracts figure cited.
    12. Prospect Magazine, “How Palantir infiltrated the state.” Documents Mosley’s “common operating system” pitch.
    13. The Register, “Palantir suggests ‘common operating system’ for UK govt data,” 25 March 2025. Confirms Mosley’s Covid inquiry witness statement.
    14. The Nerve / Carole Cadwalladr, “Revealed: Palantir deals with UK state total at least £670m,” 7 February 2026. Documents £388m MoD, £244m+ NHS, nuclear submarine services, 34 contracts.
    15. Liberty Investigates / i newspaper, “UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network,” June 2025. Documents police data categories including political opinions, health records, sexual orientation, trade union membership.
    16. UK Parliament oral evidence, Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, Louis Mosley testimony. “Strongly rejected” buying-in critique; “administrations of every colour” quote.
    17. Novara Media, “What Is Palantir?,” 19 February 2026. Documents Israeli military use, ICE contracts ($200m+).
    18. Byline Times, 19 February 2026. Reports Valar Ventures / Epstein limited partner status (Thiel spokesperson disputed “co-ownership” characterisation but confirmed Epstein’s role). Documents Swindells revolving door. Notes trust said Swindells excluded from Palantir decisions.
    19. Good Law Project, “Mandelson’s embassy fixed Starmer’s visit to spytech firm,” April 2025.
    20. Hansard, “Lord Mandelson,” 4 February 2026. Documents Washington visit not in PM’s register, no minutes.
    21. Bloomberg, September 2025. Documents Mandelson’s 28% shareholding in Global Counsel.
    22. CIPR, 5 February 2026. Confirms Global Counsel registered with ORCL, lists Palantir as client.
    23. CNN, 23 February 2026. Confirms Mandelson fired as ambassador in September 2025 by Starmer following Epstein email revelations.
    24. Al Jazeera, 24 February 2026. Mandelson arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, released on bail. Also reported by CNN, PBS, NPR.
    25. ITV News, 6 March 2026. Mandelson released under investigation, no longer on bail, passport returned.
    26. Bloomberg, 19 February 2026. Global Counsel entered administration. Also Yahoo Finance / Sky News, 19 February 2026.
    27. CNBC, “Anthropic was the Pentagon’s choice for AI. Now it’s banned,” 9 March 2026.
    28. Axios, “Trump moves to blacklist Anthropic’s Claude from government work,” 27 February 2026.
    29. CNBC, “Palantir is still using Anthropic’s Claude as Pentagon blacklist plays out, CEO Karp says,” 12 March 2026.
    30. Reuters / Marine Corps Times, “Hegseth wants Pentagon to dump Claude, but military users say it’s not so easy,” 19 March 2026.
    31. The Register, “UK promises procurement shift after Palantir deals,” 20 March 2026.
    32. House of Commons Library, “Digital sovereignty,” Research Briefing CBP-10547, March 2026.
    33. UK Parliament Early Day Motion 65087, “UK digital sovereignty strategy.”
    34. Gwallter, “Who is Louis Mosley?” Documents Wales NHS decision to build National Data Resource without Palantir.
    35. The Register, “UK urged to cut out US Big Tech for sake of digi sovereignty,” 6 January 2026.
    36. Medact, “Health workers confront NHS leaders at closed-door Palantir meeting,” March 2026. Lists Lord Tom Watson among “former UK government officials now employed or consulted by Palantir.”