Digital Rights |

The UK must use the Break Clause and Terminate its Contract with Palantir

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note

This collaborative post was written by the Rights and Tech Group at the University of Warwick and was originally published at

As the digital transformation of health continues to reshape health systems globally, states face a stark choice: how to strengthen cash-strapped health systems and get command of health data? While some might think high-income countries are better at protecting their sensitive health data than low-income countries, in fact the UK’s current problems with security and defence firm Palantir show no one is immune to the pressures of the private sector. In this piece, we outline some of the key concerns that emerge through the outsourcing of critical infrastructure to the private sector in the case of the UK. We make an argument that given these concerns, the UK should exercise its break clause and terminate Palantir’s contract in 2027.

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In 2023, the NHS awarded U.S. data analytics firm Palantir a to provide software and manage the NHS Federated Data Platform to connect fragmented NHS databases and allow data from different systems to be shared and analysed. While the digital transformation of health has sped forward, it has led to a proliferation of tools and platforms, creating siloed pockets of health data that cannot easily be shared from clinic to hospital to decision-maker. This fragmentation creates multiple challenges, ranging from sharing lab results in time with doctors who need them, to spotting the next epidemic in time to prevent its spread. For cash-strapped health agencies, the appeal of Palantir is its promise to improve efficiency by integrating data and making it easier for diverse platforms to connect, communicate, and use the data for public health.

Health data, however, is extremely sensitive, and without building necessary governance safeguards, purpose limitations, and transparent data processing methodologies, the creation of large and centralised data infrastructures poses serious risks for everyone; in particular, for marginalised groups at greater risk of violence, discrimination and inequitable access to healthcare. These populations are the ones whose trust the NHS most needs to keep. The , is an illustration of how such incidents can undermine trust and drive those away from health services who need them most.

As a group of scholars working on digital rights at the University of Warwick, we are concerned and echo civil society calls for the UK government to exercise the break clause in the contract and terminate the agreement with Palantir for the reasons set out below:

Ideological incompatibility

Palantir’s appeal for those who manage public services is that it provides efficiencies at scale. However, as the recently published by the co-founder, Alex Karp, articulates a world view that is imperialist, US-centric, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist, and openly hostile to public institutions, including . Reflecting on the Palantir manifesto, philosopher Mark argues that ‘efficiency’ is framed as a political value, which takes precedence over values of pluralism, democratic deliberation and institutional independence.

This demonstrates that Palantir is not merely a tech company offering a technical solution, but an ideological project that is fundamentally at odds with the values of a democratic and multicultural UK. In addition, Palantir’s close ties with the US military and whose technology has been key to target citizens in warfare and border control in the US and internationally raises serious questions about its political independence and ethics. For the UK government, continuing the NHS contract, therefore, requires reflection on how it can justify working with a company whose stated principles undermine the very norms upon which public services depend.

Institutional dependency and loss of sovereignty

The continuation of Palantir’s role within the NHS must also be understood in the broader context of the company’s expanding deals with other wings of government. Palantir now provides or is in talks to provide services to the , the , , and . These institutions have distinct functions, mandates and forms of expertise. Yet the increasingly blur these boundaries and erode institutional independence.

The fact that Palantir is being used in other UK sectors means that it can require the NHS or local governments to extend their contracts to those areas to “increase functionality”. This participates in a race of tech companies for the monopolisation of public services, especially as this is where the “big money” is. Although it might provide faster access to records (for example, during an emergency surgery), the risks of hyper-centralised data infrastructures are substantial. These include increased vulnerability to hacking, physical fragility (where the failure of a single node can disrupt the entire system), and the potential for co-option by “unwanted” or “unelected” actors.

Further, through the outsourcing of such critical department functions to Palantir, the state cedes its sovereignty to private enterprises. Critical media scholars Grohman and Barbosa call this as . The successive adoption of Palantir across sectors renders the sovereignty of the UK state to be now purchased and offered on the terms of a platform as part of its proprietary offering.

Take the promise of interoperability. Although companies claim that they can deal with many different datasets from different sources, the proprietary condition of their software means that they are not interoperable with other platforms and datasets. This means in practice that the client is made dependant on their services across governmental areas and over time. This results in transnational big tech companies monopolising local and national services, eliminating competition and locking governments to pay for unsolicited updates and upgrades of their systems. It is, therefore, critical that the UK government does not become just a consumer of outsourced services. As a democratic state, the UK government derives legitimacy from the public and must retain the capacity to collaborate with multiple suppliers rather than surrendering control to a single platform provider whose CEO has publicly declared (and demonstrated) their allegiance to the US. The case of NHS and Palantir poses a further geopolitical question, which is whether critical infrastructures such as public health providers can be in the hands of powerful transnational companies.

Erosion of trust, especially among marginalised groups

Allowing Palantir access to data on patients, and in particular on patients from marginalised communities, also raises serious concerns. For instance, racialised communities and people with insecure legal status already worry about sharing data between the NHS and the Home Office. This has happened in the US, where Palantir’s systems facilitated data sharing and identification to ), which was then used in raids to unlawfully target and deport migrants. Palantir’s capacity to cross personal data with surveillance technologies or to share it with other bodies, like the police, increases fear and anxiety among vulnerable populations, damaging their trust in the public health system. As a result, they may avoid seeking healthcare altogether: for example, a migrant with an infectious disease might stay away from their GP out of fear of being interrogated or deported. This loss of trust undermines the right to healthcare for all.

Maldistribution of resources

Finally, the substantial sums allocated to Palantir to facilitate managerial decisions in the NHS are drawn from wider public budgets. This diverts resources way from welfare provision and eliminates services that are essential for addressing social inequality and supporting the most vulnerable members of society. The promises of combining large amounts of data and having speedy decision-making cannot replace the need for adequate healthcare infrastructure or the labour of care provided by healthcare professionals, from doctors and nurses to cleaners and other employees. These raise pressing questions. What are the broader implications of these cuts and repurposing of public resources? Are any of the savings that the use of Palantir is promising to be ploughed back into the healthcare system, for example by fixing hospitals, hiring more healthcare workers, or improving working conditions? There is a serious risk that this approach will amplify existing inequalities in access to, and quality of, healthcare across the UK (see or a survey from ). Palantir is monetising these inequalities and presenting technological solutions as quick fixes for deeply structural problems, which risk being exacerbated.

Palantir’s involvement in NHS databases has received significant reaction from civil society. Campaigns led by organisations, such as the and highlight the lack of transparency and human rights due diligence in the contractual process, as well as the dangers of infrastructural lock-in. Palantir’s purported is also called into question. These concerns provide compelling grounds for the UK government to exercise the break clause and terminate its agreement with Palantir, as system has. The decision should be based not only on technical considerations, but also on fundamental issues of ideological incompatibility, institutional dependency, digital sovereignty, public trust and unjust distribution of public resources.

Call to action

February 2027 marks a window of opportunity . For the reasons argued here (ideological incompatibility; loss of sovereignty; erosion of trust; and maldistribution of resources), we enjoin the UK government to exercise the break clause in the contract and terminate the agreement with Palantir as a first and immediate step towards ensuring that the rights and data of all UK citizens (and particularly, the most vulnerable) are protected. However, this should not be the end goal: other actors may come and pose similar threats. The case of Palantir has surfaced a series of structural issues when it comes to digital rights and technology providers. We have highlighted a few: how can digital sovereignty for critical infrastructures be preserved? How can vendor lock-in can be avoided? How can data from subjects be protected from unlawful or nefarious purposes? Who benefits the most with these contracts? How can any efficiency savings be redirected to underfunded and under-resourced critical services? We contend that technological decisions are also political and, therefore, call on the UK government to ensure these issues are addressed.

The case of the UK and Palantir is not unique, but it is paradigmatic of a global trend in turning data, and particularly, health data, into commodities that threaten the human subjects that lie behind those figures. As the World Health Organization drafts its new Global Strategy on Digital Health 2028-33, the challenges faced by the UK should spark broader discussions about health data governance, with development of new and clearer standards so that all countries establish clearer guardrails to ensure that the public sector continues to serve the public interest.

Author’s bios

Siddharth Peter de Souza is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. His research and teaching focus on how data is governed globally in contested, and plural settings. He is the author of Designing Indicators for a Plural Legal World (Cambridge 2022)

Derya Ozkul is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Social Theory Centre at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. Her teaching and research focus on the politics of migration and (im)mobility in the digital age.

Serena Natile is an Associate Professor at Warwick Law School. Her work on digital technology is mainly concerned with questions of social reproduction and maldistribution, at the intersection of law, feminist political economy, labour, and finance. She is the author of (Routledge 2020) and is currently completing the ISRF project .

Carlos Cámara-Menoyo is a Senior Research Software Engineer at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. He is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work sits at the intersection of technology and society, with a particular focus on the ways in which worldviews embedded in technology shape the experiences of under-represented communities.

Nerea Calvillo Gonzalez is a Reader at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. They work on digital infrastructures, environmental pollution and queer ecologies, and they are author of Aeropolis: Queering air in toxipolluted worlds (Columbia, 2023).

Sara (Meg) Davis is a Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick; and Principal Investigator for the Digital Health and Rights Project, an international consortium of academics, health advocates, human rights lawyers, and communities of people living with and affected by HIV. She is author of The Uncounted: Politics of data in global health (Cambridge 2020).

Digital Sovereignty - Lexicon Entry

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last 21st April, I attended to a workshop on Developing a Governance Lexicon for Digital Public Infrastructures, organised by my colleague Siddharth de Souza and Emrys Schoemaker at the University of Warwick (see details below). The workshop brought together researchers, practitioners and policy makers in the UK and beyond to examine, unpack and build a lexicon for governance approaches needed to ensure that DPIs are public, inclusive, and accessible.

In this post, I’m sharing the first version of the entry for Digital Sovereightny, which I authored with Emrys.

Preamble: Sovereignty, sovereignties

Sovereignty refers to the ultimate authority someone has over things. Historically, sovereignty has been used to refer to the power of States to exert independent control and lawmaking over their territories (i.e. without the involvement of any other party in such decisions and enforcement).

However, with the rise of social movements advocating for alter-globalisation, climate justice, social justice, or the Commons, the subject of such authority has also been applied to other smaller units beyond Nations (such as regions or communities), and its meaning has permeated to many other contexts, such as physical resources (food¹, energy, water) and, more recently, digital resources (infrastructure, data, platforms, AI…).

Regardless of their scale or domain, these new forms of sovereignties share an aim to protect communities from external shocks and coercion by demanding that critical systems are completely governed without depending on any external agent with a different agenda. This is usually achieved through favouring the conditions for these systems to be produced locally and democratically and the empowerment of all the communities involved in their production, distribution, and consumption. These demands are usually rooted in the following pillars: a rejection of globalisation and neoliberal dogmas about markets, and a pursuit of fairer, more democratic and resilient systems.

Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty² refers to the political perspective in which the digital technologies and infrastructures that are essential for competitiveness and welfare are in accordance with the laws and interests of a particular community or region (usually, but not always, a nation). This is typically achieved through favouring , open formats and protocols, federated platforms or self-hosting, or, the creation of [[Digital Public Infrastructures]] (DPI), particularly in public organisations and governments.

Digital sovereignty is increasingly supported, demanded and enforced by governments (e.g. France³, Canada⁴), organisations, or social movements and communities of users, and their motivations range from economic motivation, justice (e.g. [[Digital Rights]]) or -more recently, due to the complex geopolitics context- security and privacy.

The reason can be found in the following: today, almost every facet of our lives is mediated by the digital. There are few (if any) instances in the way we work, socialise, consume and access to leisure or culture that do not require any kind of digital infrastructure (e.g. servers, hardware), technology (e.g. software) or data. At a national level, this means that the economy is more and more dependent on such technologies, the vast majority of which is provided by a handful of big techs from the US (with China gaining momentum). Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google) alone “control almost 70% of the cloud market, and over half of the world’s undersea cables once Meta is included. The accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has only made the situation more acute”⁵. These companies, along with Apple, Nvidia and Tesla (known as the “Magnificent seven” due to their high performance in the stock market) have a combined market capitalisation of $20.8 trillion, surpassing the GDP of the European Union (approximately $19.4 trillion).

This over-representation of US big tech along with their monopolistic practices often collide with EU’s interests and regulations. Some recent examples of these tensions are the number of lawsuits⁶ against US big techs for not complying with EU regulations (e.g. , , and ), which triggered heated reactions from their CEOs. The US-president, Donald Trump, threatened to impose tariffs⁷ as a form of retaliation against what he considers to be “discriminatory” against American companies and, therefore, “unfair”. Other examples include Microsoft blocking email accounts based on U.S. sanction over investigations of Israel⁸. Given the growing hostilities with the USA, Digital sovereignty has become a strategic priority for the many countries, including the EU⁹, where it is supported by leaders like Ursula von der Leyen (European Commission) and Mario Draghi (European Central Bank).

Who is working on Digital sovereignty?

Governmental

European Commission — Digital Sovereignty Strategy: The EU’s overarching framework including the GDPR, Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, and AI Act. Aims to regulate Big Tech, protect citizens’ data, and reduce Europe’s dependency on foreign digital infrastructure.
France–Germany Digital Sovereignty Task Force: Joint Franco-German initiative launched in November 2025 to develop a common definition of European digital services, sovereignty indicators for cloud and AI, and measures to promote European competitiveness and tech independence.
Canada’s Digital Sovereignty Framework: a framework aimed to improve Canada’s “digital readiness” to “manage and protect its data, systems and infrastructure to operate securely and independently in a globally connected environment”.

Organisations and grassroots

Open Rights Group: UK-based digital campaigning organisation protecting privacy and free speech. Challenges government surveillance legislation, mass data collection, and censorship through legal action and public advocacy.
The Digital Sovereignty Coalition: a coalition to protect civil liberties, democratise technological power, and ensure that the future of artificial intelligence, data, and digital infrastructure reflects the values of freedom, equity, and self-determination.

Initiatives

DPI and Digital Sovereignty

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has emerged as one of the most prominent policy instruments through which states, particularly in the Global South, seek to translate [[Digital Sovereignty|digital sovereignty]] commitments into operational practice.

The DPI approach centres on foundational digital systems (identity, payments, data exchange) built on open standards, open-source software, and interoperable architectures, with the explicit aim of enabling states to exercise genuine authority over the technologies their societies depend on, rather than outsourcing that authority to foreign commercial providers (Massally, Matthan & Chaudhuri, 2023; Varma et al., 2024). By moving from siloed, vendor-specific solutions to shared public infrastructure, DPI promises to convert digital dependency into digital choice, restoring, in principle, the conditions for critical systems to be governed in the interests of the communities they serve (TechPolicy.Press, 2025).

The structural irony of this promise is that DPI systems require substantial cloud computing capacity to function at scale, and for most governments deploying DPI to reduce foreign dependency, that capacity runs on the very same hyperscalers identified above: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (Rest of World, 2026). India’s own case is telling, while the India Stack represents domestically designed and governed foundational systems, the cloud and AI backend sustaining those systems is provided by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia (TechPolicy.Press, 2025). These companies have responded to the sovereignty moment not by retreating but by expanding, launching “sovereign cloud” offerings that repackage dependency as a product feature (Lawfare, 2025), deploying them directly in markets where governments are undertaking DPI programmes (Fierce Network, 2024). The concept of sovereignty that mainstream DPI discourse mobilises also sits in tension with the pluralist, community-rooted understanding described above.

Dominant DPI framings operate from a Westphalian, state-centred conception: sovereignty as the capacity of national governments to assert control and set the terms of digital governance within their territory (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). As Pohle (2024) argues, this framing displaces other legitimate sovereignty claims, from sub-national communities, civil society, and indigenous peoples, that the broader concept could and should accommodate. The sovereignty DPI delivers is sovereignty for the state, often mediated through infrastructure that remains, at its operational core, in someone else’s hands.

References

Fierce Network (2024) ‘Google, AWS, Microsoft invest in sovereign cloud in Asia-Pac’, 11 July. Lawfare (2025) ‘Tech’s “Sovereignty Washing” in Europe Will Ripple in the Global South’, 9 October.

Massally, K.N., Matthan, R. and Chaudhuri, R. (2023) ‘What is the DPI Approach?’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 15 May.

Pohle, J. (2024) ‘Unthinking Digital Sovereignty’, Policy & Internet, 16(1).

Pohle, J. and Thiel, T. (2020) ‘Digital sovereignty’, Internet Policy Review, 9(4).

Rest of World (2026) ‘India AI Impact Summit pitches “third way” beyond U.S. and China’, 11 February.

TechPolicy.Press (2025) ‘India’s Digital Infrastructure Is Going Global. What Kind of Power Is It Building?’, 22 July.

Varma, P. et al. (2024) The Future of Digital Public Infrastructure, Carnegie India.

About the workshop

Across the world, there is increasing interest and urgent concern in building state capacity to meet the opportunities of digitalization, and to confront the challenges of the concentration of power from big tech. Digital public infrastructures (DPI) refer to large state led digital systems that are used in domains related to health, social security, finance, and through their implementation are argued to improve administrative efficiency, create possibilities for economic growth, and enable better delivery of public services. These foundational digital infrastructures are recognized as important because they are argued to create value from the exchange of data for all involved parties and argued to work for the ‘common good’ (Mazzucato, 2023).

With the increasing popularity of DPI across the world, as is evidenced in the DPI Map produced by UCL, or the adoption of the DPI Safeguards by UNDP partners, it is critical to develop a vocabulary around governance, that foregrounds how to build an inclusive, collaborative process around the development of DPIs. Such attention is particularly significant to reflect the interests of marginalized and excluded groups, and to ensure the stability of support for digital systems.

With the increasing interest in DPI, there is a need for approaches to governance that are plural, contextual, and reflective of contexts in the global Majority.

This workshop aims bring together researchers, practitioners and policy makers in the UK and beyond to examine, unpack and build a lexicon for governance approaches needed to ensure that DPIs are public, inclusive, and accessible.

Food sovereignty was coined in 1996 by Via Campesina (“the peasants way”), an international organisation formed by 182 organisations in 81 countries that describes themselves as “an international movement which coordinates peasant organisations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe”. The term refers to a system where the people who produce, distribute and consume food also have control the mechanisms and policies that regulate those processes. Usually, this means that food is produced locally. ↩︎
The term is often used interchangeably with Technological sovereignty and there are some overlaps with Data Sovereignty, Cloud sovereignty or AI Sovereignty, albeit this term aims to be more inclusive, as the latter refer to specific ways in which the digital is operationalised. ↩︎
Last 8th April, France government (At the initiative of the Prime Minister, the Minister of Action and Public Accounts, and the Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, the Inter-Ministerial Directorate of Digital Affairs ) organised a seminar to discuss how to to reduce their non-European digital dependencies. In their official announcement, the term “digital sovereignty” is explicitly mentioned several times. Specific, immediate plans include migrating the operating systems of their government PCs and laptops from Windows to GNU/Linux. Source: ↩︎
Canada has recently implemented a Digital Sovereignty Framework to improve their “digital readiness” to “to manage and protect its data, systems and infrastructure to operate securely and independently in a globally connected environment”. Source: ↩︎
Rikap C., Durand, C., Paraná, E., Gerbaudo, P. and Marx P. (2024). Reclaiming digital sovereignty: A roadmap to build a digital stack for people and the planet. Available at: ↩︎
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