Tuesday, March 24, 2026
An over-reliance on US technology firms?
The paper says that the Financial Conduct Authority, the watchdog for thousands of financial bodies from banks to hedge funds, has hired Palantir to apply its AI systems to two years’ worth of internal intelligence data to help it tackle financial crime.
They add that the Liberal Democrats on Monday called for a government investigation into the contract, which the party said could be “a huge error of judgment”:
Questioned on whether the UK was becoming “dangerously overreliant” on US tech companies including Palantir, Keir Starmer told parliament he would prefer to have more domestic capability but added: “I don’t think we’re overreliant.”
Palantir was founded by the Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel and it supports the US and Israeli militaries and the ICE immigration crackdown. In the UK it has built up more than £500m in contracts including with the NHS, police and Ministry of Defence.
Insiders at the FCA, where security-cleared Palantir staff are to gain access to FCA data in a 12-week trial, have questioned if there are sufficient safeguards to prevent its “data lake” from being exploited in unintended ways.
There are concerns about the potential for data about sensitive FCA investigations into high-profile figures to be accessed during Palantir’s work. These have recently included the banker Jes Staley, who was an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, and the hedge fund boss Crispin Odey. The FCA has insisted Palantir will be a “data processor”, not a “data controller”, meaning it could only act on instruction from the regulator.
The FCA said it would retain exclusive control over the encryption keys for the most sensitive files and the data would be hosted and stored solely in the UK. Palantir will have to destroy data after completion of the contract and any intellectual property derived from the data trawling should be retained by the FCA, it said.
One insider told the Guardian that the information so far available was “very lacking in details about how the obvious risks would be controlled or limited”.
Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrats’ Treasury spokesperson, called for a investigation into the FCA’s Palantir contract and said: “Palantir has spent years embedding itself within the Maga machine. Awarding a contract for sensitive UK financial data to a Trump-aligned tech giant seems like a huge error of judgment.”
If there is one thing that Trump and Maga have established, it is that we have become far too dependent on American technology companies. This is a case in point and the FCA need to reconsider.
