Palantir lands at NHS and ICE on the same day

On May 12, 2026, NHS England confirmed that Palantir staff can now obtain admin access to identifiable patient data in the UK, before pseudonymization. The same day, 404 Media reported that U.S. ICE agents have 20 million people locatable from their iPhones, thanks to a Palantir-built tool.

Two continents, two ministries, one company. Before unpacking what this means, take two minutes to understand what Palantir actually is. The name shows up everywhere (Gaza, Ukraine, ICE, NHS) without much clarity on what the company really does.

A company born inside the CIA

Palantir was founded in 2003 by five people, including Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder) and Alex Karp (current CEO, trained as a philosopher). The name comes from the palantíri of Lord of the Rings, the stones that show what is happening elsewhere. Loaded choice from day one.

When Silicon Valley refused to fund the project, In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm, put 1.25 million dollars in seed capital. The trajectory was set from the start. Palantir built its products with the sovereign state as its first customer, then opened up to commercial clients.

Three products, one real business

Today Palantir sells three platforms. Gotham for intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense. Foundry for enterprises and civilian administrations. And AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform), launched in 2023, which plugs AI models directly into sensitive data without it leaving the controlled environment.

Palantir's real business is none of those three names. It is identity resolution. Imagine a state with twenty databases that do not speak to each other: health records on one side, tax files on the other, social filings somewhere else, immigration registries elsewhere again. Palantir sells the infrastructure that takes those twenty databases and unifies them around a single identifiable person. The company does not store data. It ships the system that makes them talk to each other.

Unification creates the value, and unification creates the risk.

May 12, 2026, full-scale demonstration

On the U.S. side, the tool is called ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement). According to statements by Matthew Elliston, ICE's deputy director for law enforcement systems, made at the Phoenix Border Security Expo: ELITE cross-references 30 to 40 databases, including those of the Department of Health and Thomson Reuters' CLEAR product.

Target location success rates jumped from 27% to nearly 80%. An investigation that used to take hours now wraps up in 10 to 15 minutes. For context: 70.8% of people detained by ICE in April 2026 had no criminal convictions.

On the UK side, NHS England confirmed to The Register that Palantir staff can now obtain admin roles on the National Data Integration Tenant, the central layer of the Federated Data Platform commissioned in 2023 for 330 million pounds. These roles grant access to identifiable patient records.

Sam Smith, from medConfidential, summed it up to The Register: "It is the equivalent of telling a civil servant 'only you can read your email', and then adding 'oh, but the right of access to administrative documents still applies'." The BMA, the UK's main doctors' union, voted in June 2025 against the platform's rollout. By March 2026, nearly a third of NHS trusts connected to the platform were failing required security standards.

Growth is no longer marginal

Financial numbers cut the "activist controversy versus strategic business" debate fast. In Q1 2026, Palantir posted 85% year-over-year growth, with quarterly revenue of 1.63 billion dollars.

In detail: U.S. commercial revenue jumped 133%, U.S. government revenue 84%. Market cap sits around 328 billion dollars mid-May. Alex Karp announced on the earnings call that he expects to double U.S. business again in 2027.

The political posture matches. In April 2026, Palantir published a 22-point manifesto, drawn from Karp's book, arguing that Silicon Valley owes a "moral debt" to the United States and calling for the return of military service. Karp owns a political vision of his company's role in the world, no longer hiding behind technical neutrality.

Sovereign infrastructure, privately owned

What changes in 2026 is integration, not the client list. ICE has worked with Palantir for over a decade, and the NHS contract dates back to 2023. With AIP, agentic tooling, and the 30-million-dollar ImmigrationOS contract signed in April 2025, Palantir becomes the only vendor able to move a state from "scattered databases" to "located individuals in 15 minutes".

All of this on two domains as sensitive as healthcare on one side and immigration on the other, on two continents at once. The phrase "private transcontinental sovereign infrastructure" is heavy, but it fits the facts.

The 2026 question

Five days before the May 12 news, on May 7, 2026, the European Union finalized its AI Omnibus deal. The strongest AI Act obligations on systems with high impact on fundamental rights are pushed to December 2027. Those on systems embedded in regulated products are pushed to August 2028. Brussels is loosening its own framework.

Meanwhile, in London, Palantir gains admin access to patient data. In Washington, Palantir equips ICE iPhones with a map of 20 million locatable people. The gap between the European and Anglo-Saxon trajectories is becoming a divergence in political models.

The 2026 question is no longer whether Palantir will keep gaining market share. That is settled. The real question is who regulates Palantir now that it operates, in the same week, on one country's public health and another's immigration enforcement. And on what legal basis it could be done.