‘A map is not the territory.’
-Alfred Korzybski
Milan, 1447. The Duke is dead and has left no clear male heir. In response, citizens and nobles proclaimed The Golden Ambrosian Republic. Under attack from France, Venice and the Swiss, mercenary commander Franceso Sforza is hired to protect the republic. Renewal after renewal, a dependency on military outsourcing deepened, becoming a form of hereditary dictatorship. Three years later, without a coup, Sforza betrayed the Republic and became Duke. He didn’t take the city; the city had already given itself to him.
That was Renaissance Realpolitik, regionally bound and technologically limited. In over one hundred countries, a single company now runs the data layer beneath health systems, defence, and intelligence. The modern condottiere never appears on a ballot. Only on invoices.
“I don’t think in win-lose. I think in domination.”
-Alex Karp, Ceo, Palantir
Renewal by Renewal
Palantir began working with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) data in 2020, under emergency procurement rules – no open tender required. Internal government documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed the company had been lobbying NHS Chiefs since 2019.
The contract to store and analyse NHS medical records was awarded under one prime minister and renewed under the next. It comes up for renewal again in early 2027, and the UK government faces growing pressure to exercise the contract’s pause clause.
Palantir chairman, Peter Thiel, told the Oxford Union in 2023 that the NHS makes people ill and should be privatised. Set aside the merits of the claim. A vendor whose leadership argues for the dismantling of its client institution is, at minimum a conflict the procurement process should have priced in.
The Australian pattern is the same mechanism at a different stage. The Department of Defence has spent an estimated $26 million on Palantir systems, running the Maven Smart System in a sandboxed environment. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has certified the company to handle protected-level classified data. Victoria’s Department of Justice maps prison inmate networks on Palantir-based analytics. Rio Tinto, WesTrac and Coles run it for data integration. The Future Fund – Australia’s sovereign wealth fund – holds an estimated $100 million in Palantir shares. Per reporting in The Guardian, state and federal contracts approach $80 million, with federal investment above $160 million.
Those arrangements aren’t alarming in isolation, in many ways it’s business as usual. Each contract is individually defensible, modest and renewable – and solves a problem. The magnitude of contracts like these globally however, is striking.
Crisis Points
In the United States, Palantir has signed a $10 billion contract with the Army for its “future software and data needs,” alongside large contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, Homeland Security, the IRS, and the Department of Transportation – ICE has reportedly spent more than $200 million integrating travel histories, visa records, biometrics and social media data to identify deportation targets. In Ukraine, Palantir’s Gotham system pulls together images, drone footage and battlefield data into what has been described as an “AI-powered kill chain”. Until recently, France – the company’s third-largest market – also hosted a contested contract with French intelligence services.
The method is consistent: enter through a crisis (pandemic, terrorism, financial, technical), entrench in the workflows that matter most; then convert indispensability into contracts that become progressively harder to terminate, as the local capability that might have replaced them is never built.
Australian senator David Shoebridge summarised the unease:
“We should be deeply concerned when [Palantir] is embedded in institutions across Australia and vacuuming up ever more sensitive datasets.”
A recent UK parliamentary report described the company’s programs as an ‘unacceptable point of weakness.” Switzerland has rejected Palantir use on security grounds; concerned about data sovereignty and capability. The Netherlands and Denmark are pursuing local alternatives and embracing a ‘two-track solution.’
Palantirs response to such criticism is familiar: it only sells the software – what governments do with it is their affair. The last company to lean on that defence was NSO Group, makers of the Pegasus spyware. The comparison should not be overdrawn; NSO built an offensive weapon, while Palantir sells analytics. However, the subsequent court rulings against NSO establish a pattern worth noting, a vendor’s neutrality claim does not survive contact with what its customers actually do.
The Limits of Assurance
When a government signs a contract with Palantir, the deployment sits within a broader software supply chain: subcontractors, update pipelines, privileged engineering access, cloud infrastructure and other dependencies. These risks are managed through procurement, contracts and security assurance.
Australia’s IRAP process, like comparable assurance frameworks, evaluates security controls within a defined scope via documentation, testing and evidence. It provides assurance within that scope; it is not a source-code audit or unrestricted examination of proprietary software.
A US vendor remains subject to American law regardless of where its customers operate. Its legal obligations follow the vendor, not the customer. Governments can manage aspects of that exposure through legal and contractual arrangements, but they do not remove it.
The NHS contract’s pause clause, live in early 2027. is usually discussed as a political option. Assessed as a security control, it is something else: the last layer of defence-in-depth – the capacity to leave. The question the clause poses is not whether the vendor has behaved badly, it is whether exit is still possible.
The Concentration Question
The assessment, stated plainly: over roughly a decade, Western democratic governments have developed a significant concentration of dependency across sensitive functions. Palantir has become embedded across health, defence, policing and intelligence analytics functions in multiple jurisdictions and has been proactively pursuing government contracts.
Milan was a regional dependency. Modern technology dependencies operate globally. History supplies the mechanism – dependency deepening renewal by renewal until exit becomes harder.
The finding is not that Palantir is an adversary; on the evidence, it is a capable vendor doing what vendors do. The finding is that there is a now a layer of infrastructure that spans jurisdictions, fuses the datasets that matter the most, and answers to no defender anywhere. The risk has no owner.
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