In the hours after a pandemic was declared in March 2020, Palantir, the secretive American data analytics company, was invited to 10 Downing Street along with other tech groups, including Amazon, Google and Meta, to discuss how it could help the British government respond.
The contract Palantir is competing for would create one of the largest repositories of health data in the world and make the company a key partner in modernizing the health system, which has an annual budget of 160 billion.
Civil society groups have raised alarms about a single private company handling so much personal data, especially one dogged by concerns that its software can be used for mass surveillance.