Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/20/uk_palantir_defense_pact/

by rntn • 10 months ago

207 134 10 months ago

theregister.com

Krasnol• 10 months ago

This Thiel-Verse product is exactly what privacy concerned people always warned about but worse.

We're delivering tools of surveillance to a world where freedom loving countries turn into oppressive regimes.

Really ugly times ahead of us...

exe34• 10 months ago

Hydra won at the last election. This is project insight creeping into everyday life.

ludicrousdispla2• 10 months ago

Our tax dollars hard at work.

Alifatisk• 10 months ago

More and more are feeding the beast, I am starting to get a bit worried

Hikikomori3• 10 months ago

Wait til you find out what Thiel believes about democracy.

sneak• 10 months ago

Probably pretty similarly to how the people who actually run the world superpowers feel about democracy: a nice illusion for those that live under the military dictatorships that are our current systems.

aaa_aaa2• 10 months ago

People should fear Thiel not because his opinion on democracy but because he has no soul. Besides, democracy is overrrated at best, and terrible if large scale.

Lio• 10 months ago

This is a very bad move. Once again the goverment is putting relationships with foreign businesses ahead of domestic firms. It's just more tech we can't independantly rely on.

gms• 10 months ago

That's how the world works. No country produces everything.

jimbohn• 10 months ago

But not everything has a killswitch or other sovereign-threatening features

dazc2• 10 months ago

Is there a UK-based company offering a comparable service?

tremon• 10 months ago

No, and that is unequivocally a good thing.

fidotron3• 10 months ago

The problem is the UK tech business scene positively drips in that particular sort of expensively suited sliminess, as the entire HP Autonomy mess epitomized. Other places have this, but in the UK it's like it has killed almost the whole ecosystem.

It hasn't been a country with a remote chance of producing another Arm for well over a decade, and Arm, successful though it is, is not a huge financial success. Maybe that's what using Prince Andrew as a trade representative achieved.

username3322112• 10 months ago

Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.

I also suspect that your (*) unwillingness to name the actual reasons for the loss of economic capability is the ultimate cause of what you are describing.

(*) And mine, if I'm to be honest.

nickdothutton3• 10 months ago

Once upon a time I worked for a UK firm which could have been a competitor to Palantir, in fact... if Palantir's product could be framed as "next gen" the UK firm had the "previous gen" product(s). They had existing, reliable, but old product, all the right three letter agency customers, revenues in the several 10s of millions of pounds per year back as far as the early 2000s. Zero management interest in making the next gen product or in drastically improving (rather than incrementally improving) the tech underneath. Some of my brighter colleagues were so aggrieved by this that they quit to build something themselves, some just complained and eventually got bored and quit, some are still in the rusting hulk.

Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ. All I'll say is I met Karp once, face to face, in Palantir's very early days. The UK firm didn't have a Karp.

ksec• 10 months ago

Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ.

I wish I am wrong. Unfortunately agrees with you on everything.

Part innovator's dilemma almost certainly happens to all companies. It is the rest of the sentence that are the problems. Ambition, Government, UK/Euro VC situ, and generally culture.

Those who are Ambition moved to the US. Government, both ruling party and cvivl servant aren't interested to making anything better and I have seen this first hand. UK and Euro VC.

skruger• 10 months ago

QinetiQ?

JKCalhoun2• 10 months ago

Fairly ignorant of what Palintir actually does, but my layman's understanding is that it should be a thing easy enough to replicate. Why are they uniquely positioned as they appear to be?

tomComb• 10 months ago

They make trump like you. The best way to get the US state on your side these days is to send money to Oracle, Palintir, or a bitcoin address.

fph• 10 months ago

Palantirs are inherently evil, and they deceive those who use them. Sauron was deceived into thinking Pippin had the ring, and this led to his demise. Denethor saw what he thought was Sauron's army, and was driven to suicide.

bix65• 10 months ago

So why hasn’t someone replicated them?

They’re over 20 years old at this point. That makes them a tech dinosaur.

Sophisticated systems plus powerful connections in government and industry plus so much money. That’s hard to unseat.

Manuel_D• 10 months ago

Data ingestion and visualization. They ingest data from a variety of different sources and make it easier to correlate data that might previously have been separate. As in, workflows that might have involved analyzing one data set, writing stuff in Excel, and then looking at a different data set, and cross referencing that excel spreadsheet manually can be done much more easily in Palantir's products

Here's an example of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8bwhAW2Mg

It's hard to describe because each customer usually has some set of customization to their workflow. One palantir customer probably uses the tool in a way unrecognizable to the next customer.

The other, perhaps more significant, asset Palantir has is a team that's gotten really good at interfacing with legacy systems and ingesting data into a more modern one.

One thing to note is, Palantir doesn't collect any data. People so often just assume that it does. The data collection is done by the government. Palantir just builds a fancy browser for data that the government already owns. So if people are angry about data being collected, go blame your government not Palantir.

vid• 10 months ago

The way I see it is the web was supposed to transform into the Semantic Web in 2000. What that means is you can give everything an identifier and create any type of relationship, turning the entire web into a database designed for a type of reasoning. On its own this is pretty benign, and I thought it would be a Good Thing because it would engage people past pages, links, and predetermined content. I imagined it becoming interesting for most people to craft meaningful connections. I also thought it would enable people to be more usefully and grounded-ly critical of big orgs, through projects like Sunlight Foundation and eventually Wikipedia (and now Wikidata, which uses the formal Semantic Web).

But the basic idea of "things" and relationships is easy to conceptualize, in fact those physical evidence boards with people and things connected by association have been around for a long time.

But the formal Semantic Web tech proved too complicated, so it's only really used in areas like science and to a limited degree for SEO. However, companies like Google and Facebook saw the value and built their own "knowledge graphs," and eventually companies like Palintir started selling services built on the ability to create knowledge graphs about anything. There are a few companies that do this on a smaller scale, but Palintir has really taken off, and given (and perhaps because of) the personality of the founders and its policing/military focus, and the fact that everyone is incidentally connected one way or another, it has become a very dangerous tool because it ironically does the opposite of what these tools should do on a large scale, enables big orgs to track individuals, starting perhaps legitimately with crooks and terrorists but now expanding into every field and citizen, meaning everyone can be tracked, predicted, and managed (barring good societal rules). If it isn't stopped, it gives absolute control to whoever is on top.

jmclnx• 10 months ago

Crazy, the UK is signing up to what I believe is a scheme to transfer $ from taxpayers to the extreme wealthy in the US. That includes Trump.

I personally believe Palantir provides no real benefit except to enrich the fascist rich in the US.

runlaszlorun2• 10 months ago

If that buggy Java ridden UI thinks it's "enriching the fascist rich", somebody gonna be pissed fr

Lol

espadrine• 10 months ago

Does Palantir fall under the Cloud Act[0]?

I wonder why so many governments sign with a company that, even if the contract says they will not leak information to the US government, is required to yield any information to it if the US requests it, without even being able to notify their client—regardless of the location of the servers themselves.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943...

DoingIsLearning• 10 months ago

Not just governments, Europol as an European wide police. [0]

Palantir is also likely one of the major lobbyists in pushing for Chat Control to the European Commision.

[0] (warning pdf) https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00095...

meowface• 10 months ago

What evidence is there that Palantir is lobbying for Chat Control? I can't find anything online.

I know you said "probably", but is your speculation based on anything? To me that would be considerably worse than just selling surveillance and investigation software to governments.

chvid3• 10 months ago

Usually these laws exclude military and police work. (Meaning the cloud act does not apply here.)

__natty__• 10 months ago

How in practice their products work? For example Palantir Gotham. What for they use it? I wonder if it’s like Tableau for military?

ashtonshears• 10 months ago

The military boots on the group consider it a mapping tool, intelligence like ‘bomb here’.

pests• 10 months ago

There are demo vids of most their software on YouTube.

chvid3• 10 months ago

It is wild that various European countries keep handling Palantir contracts for work that could have been done by local companies.

ludicrousdispla2• 10 months ago

Are there any others besides UK? I have heard from a reliable source that Austria banned Palantir but I haven't confirmed it.

chvid3• 10 months ago

Denmark. Of all places given that we currently are at a cold war with the US over Greenland.

oncallthrow• 10 months ago

This isn’t the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that Palantir is just leagues better than the next best local option. It’s in a completely different category, in fact

qweiopqweiop• 10 months ago

The UK already uses palantir. Clearly they value it to continue and extend the relationship. But what do they know?

"Jumps into bed" gives a pretty good idea of what the author wants you to think. But I'm going to give the people signing the deal the benefit of the doubt that they might know a bit more.

notepad0x90• 10 months ago

Before, they were just fooling around on the couch.

moogly2• 10 months ago

I'm already starting to long for the simpler times of the Cold War; it's pretty clear we're not heading for post-scarcity Star Trek or Culture, but rather technofascism into technofeudalism. Some would argue we're already there, but I say it can (and will) still get a lot worse.

Now where did I put that Mutant Chronicles rulebook...

nyc_data_geek2• 10 months ago

Feel like we're doing pretty well on the Star Trek timeline, tbh. Got to get through the Eugenics Wars

libraryatnight• 10 months ago

I have to remind myself Star Trek TNG starts with the crew being put on trial for the crimes of humanity and the terrible fascist court they're in is from the show's vision of a more immediate future than the one we were watching on the rest of the show.

nextworddev• 10 months ago

Were you actually old enough to remember those days? It was a lot scarier

matthewdgreen• 10 months ago

I see no evidence that we won’t go back there. Our grandparents built an entire world order around curtailing the kind of authoritarian competition that leads to wars between major powers, and we’re already watching it break down. Do you really look at this political world as the harbinger of another 75 years free of major global conflict?

dazc2• 10 months ago

I can remember the public information ads that advised families to hide under the stairs or under a table until the nuclear attack has ended.

JKCalhoun2• 10 months ago

I'm old enough. My own sense is this is much worse.

I have a friend that was afraid a nuclear bomb would eventually drop. I wasn't worried a bit about that though. So perhaps perception or state of mind made a difference.

JohnFen• 10 months ago

I'm old enough to remember, and I disagree. I think this is the most frightening period in my lifetime.

teamonkey• 10 months ago

Having caught the end of it, it was certainly scarier at the time, when there was direct threat of imminent, unavoidable death at the whim of some other country. We’re not there yet (well, most of us).

I think what’s scary now is the trajectory we’re on and how so many people seem desperate to keep the accelerator pressed hard to the floor.

moogly2• 10 months ago

I was. It wasn't great, but it was quite static, speaking for myself only. I'm sure it could depend on where you lived at the time.

y-c-o-m-b3• 10 months ago

It will absolutely get worse. We're still in the beginning stages. The amount of information on this plan from Peter Thiel, Vance, Curtis Yarvin, etc is abundant by now. They talk about their "vision" for a technofeudalism society openly, it's not a secret. This deal with the UK is a harbinger for what's to come around the entire globe.

This take will be controversial I'm sure and possibly bring me downvotes, but I predict folks like Gavin Newsom - who currently appear to be rising against this movement - will be joining their ranks in the long run. Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this. It's an oversimplification of course, but I guarantee things will transpire along those lines to convince other powerful folk to join their cause.

ohyoutravel2• 10 months ago

Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this.

I haven’t heard this, and I hope I’m not being given enough rope to hang myself either, but this kind of makes sense. MAGA has pretty completely shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will not vote in their own interests, or even the interests of their county, or anyone (as far as I can tell).

zaik• 10 months ago

ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest

And the oligarchs have the best interest of the citizens in mind? If not, I don't understand the argument.

MomsAVoxell2• 10 months ago

Thiel is the US' Zhang Zhidong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zhidong

He could also be Shen Buhai, incarnate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Buhai

Either one of these figures could provide us clues as to how to head off Thiels' insanity.

mandeepj• 10 months ago

Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest

What gave him that right to conclude it that way? There are plenty of us who think he’s an idiot to decide on other people’s behalf!!

HPsquared• 10 months ago

The transition from Republic to Empire.

JumpCrisscross5• 10 months ago

transition from Republic to Empire

That transition happens after civic exhaustion, usually following violence. If Rome is a model, we’d expect to see tens of millions of Americans die.

nickdothutton3• 10 months ago

The future was always going to be Gattaca not Star Trek.

hollerith• 10 months ago

Are there any signs in the movie Gattaca that the society is militaristic or surveils the population at all?

I don't remember any.

amelius• 10 months ago

I'm currently more worried about the government taking control over the media, tbh.

gosub1003• 10 months ago

They already have. Look at the coverage of the Epstein case. One of the reporters from a major network was told to shelve it when he was arrested in 2006. Or Julian Assange: hardly covered his release at all, and never said anything about his years of detention without trial.

sschueller• 10 months ago

The only positive is that fascism is an unstable state. It will eventually collapse as it runs out of a scapegoat. Fascism doesn't solve the problems of society so someone needs to be blamed for it to have continued support. Once you have removed all the low hanging fruit people will start infighting and eventually the whole thing falls apart.

grey-area• 10 months ago

An awful lot of people die before it collapses, and even worse, a generation is corrupted.

SteveNuts• 10 months ago

Sure but based on the history of the last 125 years or so, that only happens after tens of millions have died and entire countries are leveled. And that was done with… 125 year old technology.

cess112• 10 months ago

Last time one of the hard problems of fascism was that people weren't willing to do the amount of murder and surveillance required, and this time they're on the verge of murder bots that can do it instead and surveillance is already massively pervasive and penetrating.

While the then newfangled radio was a potent method of disseminating propaganda, today the tool chains for and scientific knowledge about how to efficiently 'manifacture consent', as it is sometimes called, are quite a bit more oppressive.

TrainedMonkey• 10 months ago

Sure the forces that bring down fascist states are still there, but now we also have surveillance technology that can be used to keep control of the populace.

foldr3• 10 months ago

I agree with your overall point of view, but is this defense contract really the best example? If the UK is sliding into technofeudalism it's not because we've only just started forking some of our defense budget over to morally dubious companies.

So I mean, yes, it's fair to describe Thiel as a technofeudalist of some sort, but this contract isn't suddenly going to upend the UK's political, social and economic systems.

brandensilva• 10 months ago

Yeah I'm not excited about the future anymore. I used to have hopes America would try to usher in a better era but the opposite is happening where the shift is towards profits over people. A select few at the top who break laws is accepted while the rest are forced with even less rights. This goes beyond politics now but it is impossible for people to stop the infighting and look up who is causing all the problems.

34ahdgT• 10 months ago

The lineage is interesting:

Robert Maxwell allegedly sold a backdoored version of the PROMIS software to many governments, including the US government.

Christine Maxwell, founder of the Magellan search engine, co-founded the Chiliad data analysis software that was used in the FBI post 9/11.

Her co-founder was Alan Wade, who then went to the CIA in the role of CIO when In-Q-Tel founded Palantir.

Epstein invested in Thiel's Valar fund after 2008.

net012• 10 months ago

some leaked emails show they where quite close https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807

fidotron3• 10 months ago

This whole US investment round in the UK is dreadful, as Nick Clegg is noting.

It's basically we give you money now so you end up paying us back twice and don't develop anything locally either. And we get your data in the mean time.

That said, the UK is clearly desperate, as recent discussions on here attest to.

alephnerd2• 10 months ago

If Nick Clegg really cared about anything, he wouldn't have become the chief lobbyist for Meta.

Now that he's out of the states and no longer at Meta, he's most likely rehabilitating his career to re-enter politics, just like Rishi did after his stint in high finance.

The Tories are in the midst of a tailspin, and a Nick Clegg-style National Dem candidate has an interesting opportunity to peel away higher income Tories and centrists, as Reform peels away lower income or nativist British voter, and this is a shot at the incumbent Labour party.

He's only 57 so he has plenty of time to wait it out and re-enter the scene, as well as the dry powder.

aftergibson• 10 months ago

Yeah, I guess this "transformation" couldn't be more transparent, but I guess most folks have short memories.

net012• 10 months ago

Peter Thiel was very close with Epstein : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807

so it's unsurprising that the UK, which wants to befriend Pres Trump, would also like to befriend the VP (who owes his entire career to Thiel).

bix65• 10 months ago

thiel and sacks have an old book where they try to make date rape (and intolerance for diversity) sound ok

poly2it• 10 months ago

Link?

jacknews• 10 months ago

Not content with having microsoft at the heart of the airforce's logistics, now they want palantir to do the decionmaking and targeting.

runlaszlorun2• 10 months ago

The funny thing is that no one realizes that palantir is shitty java that still need Java 1.1 for AWT, etc

This should scare you immensely more...

#rewrite_it_in_ada

boxerab• 10 months ago

"jumps into bed" - gotta love that totally unbiased reporting at The Register.

lifeisstillgood• 10 months ago

I used to push / campaign for all government funded software projects to be OSS by default, and to be small enough in size (millions not billions) that the SME market could still compete.

In my view that’s two simple procurement changes …

willswire• 10 months ago

It’s for this reason I joined Defense Unicorns[1] last year - the team behind the airgap Kubernetes tool, Zarf[2] (which is OSS).

[1] https://defenseunicorns.com

[2] https://zarf.dev

jmyeet2• 10 months ago

A lot of Europeans like to (with good cause) laugh at the rapid decline of the US and the rise of fascism, of which they are objectively correct.

But there is one person in the UK who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the now near-inevitable rise in fascism in the UK and that's Keir Starmer.

Keir Starmer rose to power because Brexit split Labor and Jeremy Corbyn failed to have a good position on Brexit, which opened the door to antisemitic slander against Corbyn (who, as an aside, is Jewish). Starmer's Labor got fewer votes than in either of the 2 previous elections. All that happened was the Conservative vote got split by Reform, which made it an accidental Labor landslide that won't be repeated.

Starmer has done nothing to address the cost of living crisis. All he's done is ensure a post-politics career by being Israel's #1 defender and supporter as well as criminalize free speech and protest (as "terrorism") because somebody threw paint on a plane.

So yeah, Britian getting in bed with one of the most evil companies on Earth [1][2] is the least surprising thing I've read all week.

[1] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

[2] https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...

bgnn• 10 months ago

UK had a really good shot at defying fascism if Labour didn't have these right wing group of people who are afraid to even look like left. Corbyn was really really close and the result could have been a UK without a cost of living problem. Alas..

foldr3• 10 months ago

Jeremy Corbyn isn't Jewish in any straightforward sense. He's said that he has some distant Jewish ancestry:

https://www.thejc.com/news/jeremy-corbyn-my-jewish-ancestry-...

It's not my job to decide who's Jewish or not, but I think it's inaccurate to just describe him as 'Jewish' without qualification.

jmyeet2• 10 months ago

That's fair but it's also kind of the point.

There's an awful lot of people declaring themselves and others to be ethnically Jewish or not Jewish when it suits them or suits some political goal. Russian is the third most common spoken language in Israel for a reason: to change demographics from the refuseniks, many of whom were ethnically and religiously Jewish but many who were not.

The character assassination on Corbyn who, in the very least, has Jewish ancestry, was disgusting regardless.

whodidntante• 10 months ago

Jeremy Corbin is as Jewish as Elizabeth Warren is Native American

And besides, not sure what is the point of putting this reference in, as he should be judged by his actions, not his ancestors.

Not too different than justifying many of Clarence Thomas’s decisions by saying, by the way, he is black

brap3• 10 months ago

I don’t know why Palantir is always singled out as some sort of EvilCorp.

There are plenty of companies in the defense sector but those aren’t usually considered “tech” so for some reason they’re out of the discussion.

And besides, these US companies build things that the US and US-approved governments buy, so any criticism should be pointed at the governments.

Personally I don’t even think that criticism is deserved. What do you expect UK to do for example, not sign any defense contracts?

dllthomas2• 10 months ago

I mean, it was named for fictional spying orbs that could break people's minds based on the will of a powerful individual with access to the system. Maybe that's not them telling on themselves, but I am not surprised that some people wind up suspicious.

brap3• 10 months ago

That’s how it is in the defense biz. Just look at how they name fighter jets and missiles.

EasyMark2• 10 months ago

Everything they sell is related to ending privacy, promoting surveillance, and support of slow frog boil fascism to replace democracy in the west and as a means to enriching Thiel and the other owners of Palantir; how can you not single it out as Evil Corp? As least google and facebook aren't directly aimed at bringing fascism to the fore. They're mostly just doing what they can within their realms that causes general chaos without any concern about the social damage they do; Palantir is planned obsolescence of privacy and democracy

Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact

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