Part six — the companion. The first five parts followed Splink, the UK government’s open-source record-linkage tool. This one answers the obvious question: where does Palantir fit? Built from public contracts, court filings and journalism; every connection tiered by how direct it actually is.
↗ Read the full 8-vector master analysis (GitHub)
The honest thesis
Palantir does not run Splink. There is no documented technical, contractual or data-flow link between them — I looked, and I’m telling you plainly, because the single arrow drawn from one to the other would be the line that discredits everything true beside it. They are different categories of thing: Splink is an algorithm (an open-source Python library, MoJ-built, no network listener); Palantir Foundry and Gotham are proprietary, hosted, operational platforms that ingest, fuse and act on live data.
The defensible claim is sharper than “they’re connected,” and harder to dismiss: Palantir is the proprietary, US-owned operational layer sitting in the same government departments, contracting over the same citizen datasets, that Splink links statistically — and Palantir is precisely where the ‘statistics → operations’ slide lands. Splink counts you. Palantir acts on you. Two parallel tracks of one joined-up state, over one population, with no wire between them — and they don’t need one.
The one direct link
The strongest documented Palantir-to-department tie is the Cabinet Office border & customs contract — ~£27m, awarded August 2020 with no competitive tender, on Palantir Foundry, for “risk-based monitoring for the movement of goods and people across the UK border.” It was facilitated by a July 2019 introduction from former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers. Everywhere else, Palantir and Splink are co-located in the same body but run on entirely separate tooling — the NHS, the MoD, the Ministry of Justice.
The map, department by department
• NHS England — the strongest overlap. Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (up to £330m, 2023, Foundry) runs operational direct care — waiting lists, beds, discharge — while a separate Splink-based Data Linkage Hub does the statistical linkage. Same body, no shared pipeline. The FDP dodges the national data opt-out by calling itself “direct care,” so patients cannot opt out — mirroring Splink’s no-consent finding exactly.
• Ministry of Defence — Palantir Foundry as the MoD “data fabric” (£75m in 2022; a £240.6m follow-on in Dec 2025, awarded with no competition; a £750m / £1.5bn-investment partnership in 2025), alongside ONS’s Splink linkage of service-leaver and veteran records to the Census. Co-resident, no shared pipeline.
• MoJ / HMPPS — where Splink is most operational (Core Person Record, the daily North Essex PNC→police feed). Palantir has no MoJ contract — only a 2024 reoffending-scoring pitch. An honest negative.
• UK policing — Palantir’s ‘Nectar’ real-time fusion (Bedfordshire/Herts/Cambs), national firearms licensing (~£9m); a ~£50m Met deal was blocked. The tie to the MoJ PNC→police feed is thematic, not a documented shared system.
• ONS — the clean negative control: ONS’s Integrated Data Service runs on Google Cloud / BigQuery, not Palantir. Splink yes; Palantir no.
The part that should worry you most: who owns it
Splink is the British state’s own code. Palantir is a US national-security firm — CIA In-Q-Tel origins, founder voting control locked near 50% in a Thiel–Karp trust, a chairman who is a major Trump donor, an active US ICE deportation contract — now positioned to hold integrated UK NHS, defence, border and policing data. Two MoD engineers warned in February 2026 of the “mosaic effect”: aggregate enough of it in one private vendor and you can profile the whole population. Ministers offer contractual sovereignty; that is not constitutional control. In June 2026 the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee called for the NHS contract to be terminated.
What I will not claim
No Splink↔Palantir pipeline (none exists). No UK Home Office immigration-enforcement contract (the deportation tool, ImmigrationOS, is US ICE, not Britain). No proven NHS→police patient-data flow (a campaigner-flagged risk, not an operational reality). ONS is not a Palantir customer. Each of those was searched, and excluded. The undismissable finding stands without them: one government, one population, two joined-up layers — one open-source and counting, one US-owned and acting — and the public was asked about neither.
Method: 8 connection vectors each researched and then put through an adversarial verification pass (briefed to argue like a Palantir lawyer); the verifier’s corrections and tier downgrades applied strictly. Full per-vector analysis, contract values, citations and the do-not-overstate list: master analysis on GitHub.