I haven’t read all the risks or looked at the financials, but from a skim of the Palantir IPO filing, I bet we’ll see a lot more of their platforms popping up across UK government. If you’re a UK civil servant working with data, you should read this sec.report/Document/00011…
The headlines. Palantir’s customers want to see deep connections across unrelated data sets to drive decision-making and are annoyed that is not commonly possible. 
This seems to me a whisker away from conspiracy thinking and almost certainly speaks to a desire to post-rationalise decisions with otherwise ungatherable data. But anyway ...
Passages like this almost double-up as a sales pitch to Dominic Cummings.
And this is technology that can be dropped in quickly - existing infra is no bar.
Nothing gives me the chills like discussion of “network effects” in public-service decision making, but maybe that’s just me. Also worth noting the current cheap as chips model is a gateway to a $26bn market in gov tech outside of the US.
The very big picture summary is that these platforms are made for people who demand the moon on a stick last Tuesday. Readily available, embracing risk and imperfection in high-stakes choices, speaking to a need for an operating system for the world.
Easy to panic buy with an entry price of a dollar. Silicon Valley is stood up as the villain here, but this is a company that wants to be the data operating system for whole industries and governments. Not sure in this instance that your enemy’s enemy is necessarily your friend.
Anyway, if you’re a civil servant who can, I would batten the procurement hatches, because this will be quick to implement and hard to eradicate.
Also worth reading this alongside Steve Barclay’s speech about the Spending Review gov.uk/government/spe…
