The contract to help stem covid-19 will cause a stir. But if the work is done in the open, it could be a boon

PALANTIR TAKES its name from crystal ball-like artefacts in the “Lord of the Rings” novels. The secretive Silicon Valley data-analysis company is used to working with governments. It carries out vital-but-dull digital plumbing for the most sensitive sorts of data—those collected by spy and security agencies. It merges datasets, cleans them and plugs holes, and provides tools which make them easier to access and analyse. Now, as the covid-19 pandemic rages, several independent sources say that Palantir has started work with a new client: Britain’s National Health Service.

The NHS’s databases certainly need attention. The British government has spent billions of pounds and many years trying to spruce them up and streamline them, often through expensive multi-year contracts with better-known technology companies such as Fujitsu and Oracle. Transforming information-technology infrastructure is never easy, but now, at a time of crisis, the NHS is moving fast.

Exactly what Palantir is doing is not clear. The government’s most immediate concern is to use NHS data to plan the service’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. The government wants health-analytics software that is as accurate as possible, so that it can predict when and where the caseload will overwhelm local hospitals’ capacity. London, unsurprisingly, is first in line to cross the threshold.

Palantir is working to pull NHS data into one of its two data platforms, Gotham and Foundry. There it can be cleaned and merged with other datasets, enhancing the ability of NHS administrators and the government to run analyses quickly. Palantir is working under the auspices of NHSX, the health service’s innovation arm. The firm is thought to have been drafted into the covid-19 response through Faculty, a small British artificial-intelligence (AI) company with connections to Downing Street. Faculty’s boss, Marc Warner, is the brother of Ben Warner, who became an adviser to the government on data science in December. Other American tech companies have also been drafted in to help the government’s response, among them Microsoft and Amazon, who provide cloud-computing services.

A tech unicorn worth some $20bn at the time of its last fundraising round, Palantir is under pressure to grow and provide a handsome return to its investors. To do this it needs to shift away from heavy-duty consultancy towards a broader software offering that can reach a bigger market. Work of the kind it has started with the NHS can help with that.

Palantir’s approach is different from that of companies that have tried to transform NHS infrastructure in the past. It does not seek to own any of the intellectual property embedded in the datasets that it handles. It simply provides software for a fee, with some data-wrangling consultants thrown in for good measure.

Nevertheless, critics of Palantir’s involvement with the NHS worry that the health service is acting in haste. They think it may find it hard to extricate itself if it ever wishes to swap providers. They are also concerned that—from what can be gleaned from its website— Palantir’s expertise does not appear to lie in managing public-health data. The firm has something of a poor reputation among civil libertarians, partly because its clients have included the CIA and the FBI, although Palantir states that it “designs technology to help institutions protect liberty”.

Neither Palantir nor the NHS immediately responded publicly to questions. The NHS has been at the centre of tech-related privacy concerns before, notably over a deal between Royal Free NHS Trust, which runs three large hospitals in London, and DeepMind, a Google-owned AI firm. It would be wise for the NHS and Palantir to be open about exactly what is going on. As the firm itself noted, in a blog post last week on principles for responding to covid-19, “in acting decisively to defeat this pandemic, we must do so in a way that we will recognise ourselves when it’s done.”