The Company They Keep

On 27 November 2019, Jeremy Corbyn published the 451-page dossier that proved that the Conservatives were putting the National Health Service up for sale to the Americans. If you have forgotten the reaction, then you can no doubt imagine it. But today, the party of Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan is back in office, so that even in the FT, Laura Hughes writes:

A senior NHS official privately urged colleagues to add more patient data into a Palantir-built platform at the same time as he was being paid to advise the US technology company.

Matthew Swindells has been joint chair of four major hospital trusts in north-west London since April 2022 and has also since then acted as an adviser to Palantir through the now-defunct lobbying firm Global Counsel, which was co-founded by Lord Peter Mandelson.

Board papers for one of the trusts, Chelsea and Westminster, from the year when Swindells was appointed joint chair stated that he was “to be excluded from any decision-making in relation to Palantir”.

But in May 2024 Swindells told other senior NHS executives in an email that patient data from GPs in north-west London should be added to a platform Palantir has developed for the NHS.

“We should plan to flow patient level data in order to be able to drive automated workflows through the FDP,” he said. FDP is a reference to the Federated Data Platform, which has been developed by Palantir.

The company was awarded a £330mn contract in 2023 to create the FDP, which collates NHS operational data such as waiting lists, staffing, patient health, care and treatment information, and operating theatre schedules.

NHS England has said the FDP will not combine GP records from across the country. Such records, which contain the most complete picture of a patient’s long-term health, would turn the FDP from a hospital logistics tool into a more all-encompassing population health database.

NHS staff and medical trade unions have voiced concerns in recent years about Palantir’s suitability for providing data tools in national health systems, given it is best known for its ties to the security, defence and intelligence sectors.

Swindells’ email to senior NHS leaders in north west London suggested that the trusts “start by flowing aggregate metrics” from GP patient databases into the FDP before moving on to individual patient data.

He said officials had previously made other changes to a data platform used in north-west London, known as Whole Systems Integrated Care (WSIC), “without having to renegotiate all the data sharing agreements”.

Swindells said the GP patient data would allow “population health and quality research within WSIC and when we wanted to deploy it into a live operational environment, we would be able to drop it into the FDP”.

The recipients of the email included Penny Dash, now chair of NHS England, the body with overall responsibility for the health service in England.

NHS and GP patient information is stored across many different databases, with access to the data both locally within a certain region or on a national level strictly controlled by formal contracts.

The data agreements limit which medical records can be shared and for what purposes, as well as who they can be shared with. The contracts are intended to protect patient privacy.

Swindells told the FT: “The point I was making was about GP data being used in our local federated data platform which is under local data controllership, not about the national federated data platform.”

“The consideration was whether we could include GP data already in our local secure data environment for use only by local clinicians and managers for agreed operational purposes,” he said.

He added that “none of this has been actioned”.. NHS England said: “NHS organisations cannot upload confidential GP patient information to the [FDP] without first securing appropriate data sharing agreements from GP practices, NHS trusts and integrated care boards — and all data always remains under NHS control.”

Swindells was deputy chief executive and chief operating officer for NHS England until July 2019. He joined Global Counsel as a senior adviser in September of that year to “support its clients in health, health tech, life sciences and pharmaceuticals and advise clients in adjacent sectors”.

The 51-year-old was also a member of Palantir’s health advisory board from September 2019 until April 2022, when Swindells was appointed to the part-time role of joint chair for four north-west London hospital trusts.

He remained a senior adviser at Global Counsel until last month, according to his register of interests, when the company collapsed into administration in the wake of fresh revelations about Mandelson’s relationship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Swindells said that in 2022 he had “also stopped supporting the GC [Global Counsel] contract with Palantir when I took on this role for the duration of the FDP procurement”.

He added that he returned to advising Palantir through Global Counsel after the NHS contract was awarded “and there was no risk of a commercial conflict, my declaration of interests reflects this, until I reduced my work with GC in August 2025”.

Swindells’ email was followed up the same day by Dash, who before her promotion to NHS England chair was serving as chair of the NHS North West London Integrated Care Board.

Dash said that she “had a chat with Matthew about this yesterday”, adding that then NHS England’s chief digital officer Ming Tang was “offering money” for Palantir and healthcare consultancy Carnall Farrar to “develop a popn [population] health tool within FDP”.

In his register of interests, Swindells declared that from February 2022 he was also an “internal adviser to Carnall-Farrar Healthcare strategy consultancy”, and in his latest register he states he is chair of the firm, a role he took on in April 2025. Some of the recipients of the emails pushed back against Swindells’ suggestions, saying they did not have the bandwidth and that information governance issues would need to be resolved if GP data were to flow into FDP, and that this would take a substantial amount of time to deliver. 

One wrote: “We are currently committed — as are the rest of London — to WSIC. To change that, we’d need substantial assurance that the FDP route will get there faster . . . at present, we don’t believe that is true.”

David Rowland, director of the Centre for Health and Public Interest think-tank, said: “The idea that the public interest can be protected simply by officials declaring and managing these conflicts behind closed doors is a nonsense.”

“The rules in this area need to be massively strengthened,” he added. “In the light of the Mandelson scandal, parliament needs to get a grip on the relationship between senior officials, lobbyists and private companies.”

Entrance to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital with people walking in front, including a man pushing a stroller and a child on his shoulders.

Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesperson, said the revelations “will do little to build trust in a platform which has raised real concern in the health service about patient trust, data security, and NHS independence.”

Swindells told the FT: “I have been very open about my business interests outside of the NHS, and followed the NHS’s robust governance requirements carefully.

“I have also been very clear about my commitment to making sure our local communities, patients and staff get the maximum benefit from digital technology and data. That necessarily includes getting the most from the federated data platform which was procured nationally by NHS England.”

Palantir said: “Matthew Swindells has rightly made a clear public commitment to recuse himself from any commercial decision making in relation to the FDP, on account of other roles. The comments recorded in these exchanges are perfectly consistent with that commitment.”

Carnall-Farrar Healthcare did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Not that it ends there, as Nafeez Ahmed writes:

A Byline Times investigation has found that the three most prominent figures in Palantir Technologies, the AI data analytics firm at the heart of the intelligence used to justify US-Israeli strikes on Iran, have each publicly advocated for exactly the military confrontation that followed, with one describing it as an investment opportunity.

Palantir’s co-founders, Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, have both publicly argued that conflict with Iran is inevitable, with Lonsdale saying he was hoping to “invest in Iran” after a regime change.

Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, predicted war with Iran would prove the worth of the company’s autonomous weapons system.

This corporate position represents a profound conflict of interest. Palantir both informed the formal assessments that precipitated Israeli and US strikes in 2025, and is now profiting from the conflict as it provides real-time AI targeting to military operations by integrating classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence.

Palantir’s Intelligence Platform

Palantir’s MOSAIC platform has served as the analytical backbone of the IAEA’s Iran monitoring operation since 2015. The $50 million AI system processed approximately 400 million data objects, including satellite imagery, trade logs, metadata and social media feeds from inside Iran. It operated chiefly by making predictive inferences based on pattern analysis – a method critics have described as “Minority Report for uranium” and as “pretext fuel” for sanctions and strikes against Iran.

MOSAIC was derived from an older Palantir system already sold to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) for its operations against Iranian-backed groups in Gaza and Lebanon – a lineage that raises further questions about the platform’s independence as a verification tool.

When MOSAIC flagged an apparent surge of enriched uranium at Iranian facilities between 6 and 12 June 2025, the platform’s assessment — that Iran was potentially weeks from producing multiple nuclear weapons — reportedly formed the basis of Israel’s intelligence against Iran.

The IAEA Board of Governors passed a non-compliance resolution on 12 June. Israel struck the following day. Trump then authorised strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, after which he claimed Iran’s capabilities had been “obliterated.”

However, when Tulsi Gabbard — Trump’s Director of National Intelligence – first testified to Congress three months earlier, she had confirmed that the consensus assessment of the US intelligence community was that Iran had not pursued a nuclear weapon since 2003. Trump rejected that assessment.

Instead, according to The National Interest, no one in the US intelligence community was given the opportunity to probe the sourcing or verify the new intelligence presented to the Trump administration by Israel. By June, Gabbard had abruptly reversed her position, echoing Trump’s claim that Iran could build a nuclear bomb “within weeks”.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said that inspectors have lacked access to key Iranian facilities for over eight months, preventing them from verifying whether nuclear material is being diverted for military purposes.

However, he said that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons programme: “We don’t see a structured programme to manufacture nuclear weapons.”

On Wednesday, a classified Iran briefing was delivered by White House officials to key Congressional and Senate representatives. According to Congressman Seth Magaziner, who attended the briefing, it showed that there was “no intelligence that Iran was planning to attack the United States”, and the administration has “no plan” for the war’s aftermath.

The war “was launched without any imminent threat to our nation”, said Senator Elizabeth Warren about information disclosed at the briefing.

The Case for Regime Change

Palantir’s dual role — as the analytical engine powering nuclear verification and, simultaneously, a strategic military partner of the US and Israeli Governments — represents a fundamental conflict of interest at the heart of the global non-proliferation architecture.

Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir with its largest co-founding shareholder, Peter Thiel, in 2004, has been the most explicit advocate for military action against Iran.

In a CNBC interview in June 2025 during the 12-day war between Israel, the US and Iran, Lonsdale urged pre-emptive strikes against Iranian nuclear infrastructure. He expressed confidence in American bunker-buster munitions, saying he had been told “they work” and that “you can always hit things multiple times just to be sure”.

Lonsdale described the country as one that “could be a prosperous republic if not run by crazy people”, and said he could not wait to “invest in Iran” after the anticipated regime change.

Palantir signed a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry in January 2024, committing the firm to providing technology for “war-related missions”.

Later that year, in an interview, Peter Thiel argued that every historical instance of nuclear acquisition by an adversary had produced a regional war, framing an Iranian nuclear weapon as a “catastrophe” requiring preventive action.

Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, has long framed the confrontation as part of a wider inevitability.

In an August 2024 interview with the New York Times, Karp said the US would “very likely” face a three-front war against Russia, China and Iran simultaneously – essentially a world war scenario involving the great powers. He argued that autonomous weapons systems, the kind Palantir builds, would prove decisive.

Commercial Incentives

Palantir’s stock has surged since the Trump administration took office, and its valuation now exceeds $300 billion.

The revelations in the Department of Justice’s disclosures that Peter Thiel retained a close business partnership with Jeffrey Epstein, despite his conviction for sexual abuse of minors, depressed the stock for several weeks.

But war with Iran has been good for the firm’s shareholders, its stock rising 7% in the first week of the conflict.

Palantir did not respond to request for comment.

The convergence of ideological conviction, commercial interest, lobby infrastructure and surveillance technology suggests that the Iran strikes may not represent the end of a regional crisis but the beginning of something larger.

If Karp’s three-front prediction reflects the operating assumptions within this network, the question facing policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic is not whether the conflict will widen, but when.