The UK boss of controversial tech firm Palantir has slammed its woke critics for trying to get the firm banned from the NHS.
Louis Mosley said critics were ‘so ideological’ they were calling for a ban, even if the firm might help their relatives get treatment.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mosley said more than 80,000 patients had now had an operation they would not otherwise have had thanks to its data technology – even at its early stage of being rolled out.
But the firm’s products are used by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in the US – which has been criticised for its actions, including the shooting of unarmed US citizen Renee Good – and by the Israeli armed forces in Gaza. Palantir was also co-founded by Peter Thiel, a leading backer of Donald Trump.
Mosley said most people were unable to ‘divorce the software and whether it works from the politics of the founders’.
He said: ‘There’s unfortunately a subset of people who are so ideological that they would have Palantir banned from the NHS.’
Controversy: Palantir’s products are used by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in the US and by the Israeli armed forces in Gaza
His comments come after Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, called for the firm to ‘pack its bags and get the hell out of the NHS’. Mosley admitted that ICE was ‘amazingly controversial’ but noted Palantir had been working with the agency since 2011, when Barack Obama was president.
In Israel, Hamas’s October 7 attacks in 2023 gave a ‘clear cut case for a just war response’, so Palantir would support that. But he added: ‘We’re often accused of having supported targeting in Gaza, which we haven’t done.’
Palantir has 1,000 employees in Britain, its largest concentration outside the US, and data contracts with the Ministry of Defence.
In the NHS, its software helps to collate information held by trusts into the Federated Data Platform as even within one hospital patients may have to give their name, address and details of their ailments to different people.
He said: ‘There is a focus on bringing down waiting lists and shifting the focus from treatment to prevention so they never have to go to hospital in the first place.’
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