Palantir gets to decide what weapons Britain should buy

UK ministers and generals are using Palantir software to decide which Palantir products to buy. By modelling battles through the far-right tech firm’s Foundry software, officials hope to outsource thinking … then again, thinking has rarely been our governments’ strong suit.

Anyway, the Murdoch-owned Times reported on 1 June: 

The US tech firm Palantir is helping ministers and military chiefs decide what weapons to invest in so they can win a war against the likes of Russia, it is understood.

A senior military source told the paper:

The CIA-backed firm evaluates force mixes — such as the balance of drones versus manned vehicles — and capabilities against a range of scenarios to help determine investment choices.

Palantir founders Alex Karp and Peter Thiel openly espouse far-right ideology.

The UK military, police, NHS and, allegedly, the Telegraph newspaper have started to use Palantir technology. The firm is also involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and maintains a permanent desk in southern Israel. Trump’s paramilitary immigration operations also use the firm’s gear.

Foundry has been described as:

one of the company’s flagship data integration and analytics systems that is marketed more towards civilian pursuits – specifically towards large businesses and public services.

Foundry also transforms:

an organisation’s data, actions, decision rules and security controls into a single structured system that humans and AI can use together to run complex operations. It can model how an organisation works, managing assets, people, processes, and supply chains.

It can support planning, logistics, inventory and forecasting.

The Times said:

The data-driven outcomes have helped inform the long-awaited defence investment plan (DIP), which will not be published before the second week of June. It will set out how billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money will be spent in the department.

Adding that:

Officials in the Ministry of Defence are also using Palantir’s Foundry software as a financial planning tool by “swapping in and out different spending decisions”, a second source familiar with the technology added.

Palantir will be hard to untangle

The process seems to involve officials asking the Palantir software questions. Foundry answers based on whatever has been been loaded into the large language model — presumably by Palantir:

For example, the MoD can ask: if it is to buy a ship, what will the associated costs be over its lifetime?

They said Palantir was being used to integrate data from all the war games the UK has held and “run queries across those to give a sense of future scenarios”.

The Times added:

Palantir’s tech is now so intertwined with all aspects of the British military that it will be hard to untangle in future years, should that ever be deemed necessary.

Not at all weird or chilling.  As the Canary reported on 20 April, Palantir’s ‘manifesto’ is a collection of far-right tropes more suited to a Joe Rogan podcast than a multinational arms firm:

Point 21 reads:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

While Point 22 is a fascist-accented lament for Western imperialism:

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Oh no, inclusion. Boo hoo!

The Times warned the tech giant is so intertwined with UK governance and militarism that it will “be hard to untangle.” Yet it must be. This isn’t just a software firm. Palantir’s founders aren’t simply Incel computer nerds. The company is a Trojan Horse. And the UK is handing greater and greater power to the company’s far-right Trump-aligned CEOs by the day.

Featured image via Carl Court / Getty Images