- Several countries have rejected Palantir or announced plans to replace it
- U.S. growth contrasts with overseas objections to its government work
- NHS protests and a European campaign intensified the dispute this week
It’s been a good news, bad news year for Palantir (PLTR). Its stock has recovered from a rout in 1H 2026, soaring like a General Atomics’ Reaper drone over the last quarter to trade at $190.36.
At the same time, France has chosen a replacement for Palantir in its domestic intelligence service. Germany’s military has ruled out contracts for now. Swiss federal agencies have repeatedly turned the company away. Spain has reportedly instructed state-backed firms to avoid new agreements involving sensitive information.
Palantir’s overseas problem has moved beyond hostile headlines. The commercial consequence is real: These institutions have declined to enter, expand or indefinitely sustain the relationships Palantir seeks.
The contrast with America is striking. Palantir is an American business success story unfolding alongside mounting resistance to the company elsewhere.
The split between the U.S. and the rest of the world has more to do with policy than technology. Palantir does not present itself as a neutral software supplier; it is overtly political. Its annual report says it generally avoids customers whose positions conflict with its mission to support Western liberal (sic) democracy and its strategic allies. It supplies the Pentagon’s Maven platform, ICE’s immigration-enforcement systems, and technology for the Israel Defense Force.
And according to Bloomberg’s investigation, Palantir’s Maven system processed outdated intelligence and accelerated the targeting chain that led to a strike on an Iranian school on the war’s first day, killing at least 123 children. Palantir denies its software was at fault. I examined the implications of that accelerated kill chain in “When the autonomous dream becomes a nightmare.”
Continental drift
European governments are making the connection between Palantir and its worldview explicit. Their response, which has been slow to arrive, has been made unavoidable by grassroots objections from real people: the citizenry and trade unions of European countries who have educated themselves — without the help of mainstream media — to the risks posed by Palantir to democracy, civil rights, and wealth equality.
The movement has gone from a social media grapevine to grassroots pressure. For supporters of the coalition demanding its removal from public services, America’s success story is a sovereignty nightmare. The European open letter circulating this week, backed by more than 120 organizations and unions, demands the termination of existing public contracts and exclusion from future procurement. Its authors warn of surveillance and dependence on a private supplier inside essential institutions. That is a coordinated campaign, not a decision adopted by every government. It nevertheless gives procurement authorities specific demands to answer.
Killing kindness
Nowhere is the contrast between Palantir’s ethos and its client’s mission more profound than in its work for Britain’s NHS: a beacon of universal care, founded on the principle that treatment should depend on need rather than wealth. It occupies a place in British affections few institutions can rival — think Queen Elizabeth II, warm beer, and football.
NHS England’s Federated Data Platform now runs on Palantir’s Foundry software, bringing patient and operational data into systems supplied by a company based in America, the only G20 country without universal healthcare, run by a chief executive who described “saving lives and on occasion taking lives” as “super interesting,” said “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” and spoke of “when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”
Quite the bedside manner
NHS England’s response is that the platform remains under NHS control, Palantir cannot commercialize patient data or use it to train its own models, and the contract contains continuity and exit provisions.
But Palantir won its NHS contract under former prime minister and tech-bro fanboy Rishi “Rich” Sunak, while employing a lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson, who was later sacked as UK ambassador to the U.S. over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Failed UK prime minister Keir Starmer subsequently joined the bandwagon, taking a cheeky trip to Palantir’s Washington headquarters alongside Mandelson in February 2025.
These are not convincing bona fides. No wonder the UK population is pushing for Palantir’s ouster. On September 30, the Guardian reported more than 44,000 objections to health-data processing through the NHS’s Palantir-powered platform.
The same day, Amnesty International and Just Treatment protested outside Palantir’s London offices. They connected its NHS role directly to its agreement to supply technology to Israel’s defense ministry. Their complaint was about the company behind the software, not simply the software’s performance.
A global backlash
The ouster of Palantir by other countries and institutions is not simply a failure to build out business bridgeheads in new markets or a result of technical deficiencies in its technology. It is also a rejection of the company's worldview and its principles. And it is tracking in parallel with a quantifiably precipitous fall in America’s popularity and influence globally under the Trump administration.
Overseas, Pew’s February–May survey across 36 countries found a median 57% viewed the U.S. unfavorably, against 37% favorably. Under Biden in 2024, the balance was reversed: 54% favorable and 31% unfavorable across 34 countries.
These are not Palantir opinion polls. But Palantir and its CEO are the biggest tools in the Trump administration’s most contentious projects: mass deportation and AI-assisted warfare. Where Palantir goes, the shadow of Trump’s gerontocratic kleptocracy follows.
For citizens, Palantir poses an ethical challenge. For carriers, enterprises, and governments, the question running through this dispute is also operational sovereignty. Can an institution inspect the system, challenge its recommendations, keep operating without the supplier, and replace it without losing essential capabilities? A server’s location does not establish who controls the organization’s ability to act. An exit clause and an executable exit are different things.
The operational question is whether human reviewers have the information, time and authority to stop a wrong recommendation. In Minab, they did not. And at least 123 children died.
Palantir can continue growing in America while encountering barriers in particular overseas markets. Its revenue figures prove it. The issue for its international sales operation is no longer just whether the software works. It is whether the institution buying it trusts the supplier enough to depend on it, and whether the voting populations in the democracies that Palantir claims to champion will allow their governments to use it.
This goes not only to the issue of Palantir but to the larger question: What do U.S. Big Tech and America stand for on the global stage?
“If you’re evil, you’re at least competent,” said Palantir’s co-founder and chairman of its board Peter Thiel, this month.
So much for the American dream.