"110,000 NHS Operations Powered by Palantir’s AI—So Why Does Labour Want to Ban It?"

MOST normal people would surely consider a firm that can zap baddies and terrorists or catch criminals or bent coppers, as well as organise the bafflingly complex NHS IT network, to be a unicorn of the modern age.

Something to be embraced to help turn around our struggling public services with software that strips away delays, waiting lists and vast amounts of paperwork.

Medics have used Palantir software to cut waiting times Credit: Getty The Met Police had a pilot Palantir project Credit: Getty

Technology that can leave bobbies to the beat, nurses to the wards and us all sleeping safer in our beds.

Unless, of course, you’re a virtue-signalling MP.

Then it’s the new face of evil that must be defeated, regardless of how many lives may not be saved or H’s from go undetected.

Welcome to the Left’s new bogeyman: US tech and .

Founded by eccentric billionaire , among others, the firm has more than £600million in defence and contracts in the UK.

But it is locked in a major row with over plans for its work for the .

And PM-in-waiting is under huge pressure from Labour MPs who want the firm booted out of the health service for good, even as medical professionals swear by it for .

In the age of tech trillionaires, an artificial intelligence arms race and declining trust in politicians, institutions, companies and, yes, even the media, technology is advancing at a speed almost beyond comprehension to most of us.

Of course, how private firms, our governments and our enemies handle our data, our money and sometimes, it seems, even our thoughts, is a vital conversation — and frankly one that is decades too late.

But our adversaries are tooling up in an superiority battle that can make look like a school sports day.

Amid this battle, and on the homefront, is a pioneer.

Yet, for right-on, progressive types, it’s a new front in an ideological-fuelled culture war due to the fact the company has helped Israel wipe out and helped the .

Hiding behind excuses such as concerns about data handling, the mask slips when protesters led by the likes of Green leader forget and scream about , and the IDF instead.

Ministers are now looking at a break clause over NHS data access, with incoming reports already bubbling that could try to tear up the contract — yet will patients suffer from that?

Software sold to the Metropolitan Police, which helped them root out corrupt or criminal cops, was meant to be rolled out further but has now been paused by Khan.

But what happens if the next could have been stopped?

PM-in-waiting Andy Burnham is under huge pressure from Labour MPs who want the firm booted out of the health service for good Credit: PA London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has blocked Palantir Credit: PA

And what does this row really show about how ready we all are for the AI world that is coming, with all the trade-offs and national security implications that brings?

Polling shows many people actively distrust tech companies and AI giants as well as the state, but yet they are now also being asked to trust an invisible layer of private technological power underneath it.

Could the noisy critics actually win this debate, or is it, as Palantir says, just “scaremongering”?

Palantir UK and Europe CEO Louis Mosley told The Sun: “Public services are not being delivered in the way that people expect them to be at the level of efficiency and the quantity, and technology has a huge role to play in closing that gap between the expectation and the reality.

“That’s what Palantir was born to help do.”

Coming out swinging against its critics, he holds up Palantir’s work for the NHS as an example: “Imagine you’re trying to book a patient into an operating theatre.

“In the old world, you would find yourself logging in to a series of different IT systems, each of which contained a bit of critical information.

“So, first you needed to see maybe the list of patients waiting, who’s top of that list.

“Then you’d have to go into another system, which would be the staff-rostering system, to find out which doctor, which anaesthetist is on call.

“Then you’d have to log into a third system, which would be the operating theatre schedule, so when is there a slot in the theatre?

“And then you would probably manually figure out what patient to slot in with, which doctor to be available at what time.

“People get booked in for an operation, they turn up at hospital only to discover that the anaesthetist is no longer available, because actually they’re on holiday.

“That kind of thing was happening up and down the NHS every day.”

Now he says it’s a very different story: “With the software that we’ve provided, they now have a single interface where all of that information is brought together seamlessly, and it becomes simple to put patients into the next available slot.

The Ministry of Defence has a contract with Palantir Credit: AFP Founded by eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel, among others, the firm has more than £600million in defence and NHS contracts in the UK Credit: Getty

“Once you have that comprehensive picture, you can begin to layer in also lots of fancy AI, which starts to recommend, ‘Well, given we’ve now got a 45-minute slot that’s turned up here, because so and so has cancelled their operation, who is going to be the right patient to slot in there that makes sure we’re not going to run over time?’.

“It can get more and more sophisticated, and that increases the efficiency.

“And, by the way, that’s why the NHS has managed to do 110,000 operations because of the software, which would not otherwise have happened.”

Yet with founder Thiel a big backer of and , and a global CEO who has championed AI weapons development and called for universal conscription, there is plenty critics can use to ignore those successful numbers.

Mosley says: “Probably the most controversial work we do for the Trump administration in the US is for ICE, the immigration enforcement arm, which has become particularly controversial under Trump.

“I would, though, add that we have worked for that organisation since President Obama.

“He was the first President to award us a contract, and we’ve continued to do that work under him and President Biden.

“So ours is not a partisan support in any way, but it has, I think, made us controversial, and politicians here in the UK, like Zack Polanski, think opposing Trump, or being seen to oppose Trump, is going to be a vote winner.”

But where are the red lines for the firm?

It recently publicly rejected any suggestion it could help the British government roll out digital ID.

Yet that did little to stem concerns that tug on fears our technologies are controlled by a handful of unelected billionaires.

“We sometimes talk about our purpose internally as being helping the West win,” Mosley hits back.

“What I would love our critics to understand is we have never worked in countries that we would consider adversarial to the West, like Russia and China, which is very different to a lot of tech companies.

“The reason for that is because we set out to build very powerful technology.

“We wanted to ensure technology could only be harnessed by countries, and therefore organisations within those countries, that were subject to the rule of law, liberal democracies, where the institutional infrastructure that safeguards Western values was intact.

“And therefore our software could be used to preserve and enhance those organisations.”

And while we hand over our data to Facebook, X, Google and Instagram on a whim, what are the ethical and bigger- picture worries when it comes to technology blending with the state?

Mosley is quick to defend his boss: “Peter Thiel is, without doubt, a capital L libertarian.

“You would struggle to find someone more concerned about privacy and civil liberties than him and, in fact, that is the genesis of Palantir.

“He founded Palantir because he was concerned about the direction of travel, and at this stage it was in the US with the prosecution of what was then called the War on Terror.

“In the early 2000s after 9/11, the agencies that were then charged with protecting Americans were going to infringe people’s civil liberties or invade their privacy in order to keep them safe, which we found out fundamentally they did.

“Peter was of the view that that would compromise the very thing you were trying to safeguard.

“And this idea that you have a trade-off between security and privacy and civil liberties, where if you want a bit more security, you’re going to have to give up some of your privacy or give up some of your civil liberties, was false.

“Also, if you had good technology, you wouldn’t need to make the trade-off at all, and you could end up having an enhanced security and enhanced privacy and civil liberties.”

While the politics continues to dominate the noise around the firm, the results surely speak for themselves.

Just last month a sheepish minister was forced to concede in the face of a barrage of yelling from his own side that, “We are no fan of Palantir’s politics” yet it is “critical to the future of the NHS.”

Whether that will be enough to see the incoming British government stick to its guns or let the screaming mob of Labour MPs get their ideological win remains to be seen.

But with results in crime fighting, public safety, waiting lists and Britain’s already hollowed-out defences already clear to see, there’s a simple question for Andy Burnham to answer.

Is it really worth throwing the baby out with the woke bathwater?