Palantir
An American data analytics company that sells software to governments and militaries, and a recurring flashpoint in arguments about public sector AI contracts.
Palantir builds platforms that pull scattered data together and make it searchable and analysable, sold mainly to defence ministries, intelligence agencies, police forces and health systems. Founded in 2003 and taken public in 2020, it grew alongside the post-9/11 expansion of government data work, and increasingly markets AI capabilities layered on top of that same data plumbing.
It shows up in European AI coverage less for its technology than for the politics around it. Contracts with the UK’s NHS and with various European governments have drawn sustained criticism over data protection, dependence on a single American supplier, and how much visibility a private firm gains into public records. Whether that criticism is proportionate is genuinely contested; the pattern of the argument is not.