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UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

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Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#21
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could palantir consulting be replaced by LLM in the hands of a half competent hacker?

No. 1. Palantir isn't selling consulting as much as Palantir is selling the confidence you get from buying a name brand. It's the same as paying for McKinsey to provide justification to do what you already want to do. 2. Palantir actually has some good core tech. An in house team can probably do a better job just because the incentives are better aligned, but they'll be starting from behind and have to catch up. 3. L…

Its much easier to replicate a thing that already exists and has had many sunk expenditures incurred.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#23
Palantir is not just analyzing data, but, it is increasingly wired into operational decisions like deportations, policing, health-data access, military targeting and public-sector workflows.

Tjheir "ELITE" guide says that during "special operations" normal safeguards may need to be turned off.

Palantir's Maven Smart System ha grown into a Pentagon program of record with 20,000+ active users. "Human in the loop" may become "human rubber stamp" when the number and speed of AI recommendations exceed real human review capacity.

A Palantir-backed program reportedly operated secretly from city council members, defense attorneys, and the public.

Vendor lock-in issue: once a system becomes embedded in agency workflows, switching vendors becomes politically and operationally hard and they are trying their best to achieve this. The Army's $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidating many contracts into one Palantir platform is the cleanest example of institutional dependence.

--- tldr;

The accountability chain is broken: when harm happens, the agency blames the tool, the vendor blames the customer, the operator blames policy, and the model blames the data.

---

Also, I won't share the full report link since whenever I share something like that here, I get banned/flagged for a day.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#24
post #18

Palantir is very expensive. This is because: 1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model. 2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means. This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data…

could palantir consulting be replaced by LLM in the hands of a half competent hacker?

Seriously what did LLMs replace or can replace? You are living in a world of dreams

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#25
Palantir’s roots seem practically indistinguishable from the traditional Korean/Japanese dispatch programmers (often referred to as SI, or System Integration). They dispatch engineers under the title of FDSEs, but in Korea and Japan, this kind of on-site deployment is often considered the lowest tier of programming.

In my own experience consulting with factory owners—advising them on hardware choices like Lumens versus Mitsubishi—I see the physical reality. The idea of absorbing a client's database into an ontology and hooking it up to an LLM sounds great in theory. However, considering the extreme fragmentation of equipment standards and data representations across different sites, I seriously question if this is a sustainable business model.

Sure, initially it’s just dispatch programming. But how can they possibly absorb all these disparate, chaotic field environments into a single platform asset? Even within a single factory, different assembly lines use entirely different equipment, often from completely different manufacturers.

The idea of interpreting every piece of equipment's specific protocol, reverse-engineering the DB schemas, standardizing the terminology, and modeling the entire approval flow seems practically impossible. Is this actually achievable? Take PLCs, for example: even if they share a standard communication protocol, the ladder logic itself is completely incompatible across different brands

Thinking about it in reverse, Palantir might have absolutely no intention of solving this fragmentation problem themselves. Their survival strategy might be to dictate the core tech stack of the end-point B2C clients, creating a structure that essentially incentivizes specific B2B vendors to fall in line. Ultimately, what makes Palantir so dangerous is the high likelihood that they will simply shift the massive cost of standardization onto those B2B subcontractors

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#26

Palantir is not just analyzing data, but, it is increasingly wired into operational decisions like deportations, policing, health-data access, military targeting and public-sector workflows. Tjheir "ELITE" guide says that during "special operations" normal safeguards may need to be turned off. Palantir's Maven Smart System ha grown into a Pentagon program of record with 20,000+ active users. "Human in the loop" may b…

... Continuing with a few important numbers...

1. ICE awarded Palantir a reported $30 million contract for ImmigrationOS, described as a platform to support immigration lifecycle operations, including enforcement prioritization and self-deportation tracking.

2. Palantir’s Maven Smart System was designated a Pentagon ‘program of record’ in March 2026, with 20,000+ active military users and a contract ceiling that grew from $480 million to $1.3 billion.

3. The US Army’s $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidates 75 separate contracts into one Palantir platform.

4. The Maven Smart System has 20,000+ military users across 35+ military tools.

5. The UK NHS Federated Data Platform, valued at £330 million ($448.4 million), places Palantir at the center of England’s health-data architecture.

6. Palantir’s UK public contracts across NHS, Ministry of Defence, councils, and police forces total more than £500 million.

7. NHS England’s Data Protection Impact Assessment documents 15 inherent risks, all assessed as ‘Low’ residual risk after mitigations.

8. The NHS FDP contract was published with 417 of 586 pages redacted.

9. Palantir received more than $113 million in federal spending since Trump took office, plus a $795 million Pentagon contract.

10. Polling cited by The Guardian indicates more than two-thirds of the UK public are concerned about Palantir’s growing number of public contracts, and 40% distrust Palantir specifically regarding NHS patient data.

11. From detection to ‘prosecution’ (killing), ‘no more than two or three minutes elapse’ with Palantir systems, compared to six hours previously.

12. Palantir’s lobbying spending more than quadrupled since 2019, from $1.4 million to $5.8 million.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#28

Palantir is very expensive. This is because: 1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model. 2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means. This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data…

reads like Salesforce to me, ugh! Enterprises are paying so much to blatantly vendor-lock in themselves using hundreds of "Salesforce engineers". It's baffling to me.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#29

Palantir is very expensive. This is because: 1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model. 2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means. This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data…

I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#30

Palantir is very expensive. This is because: 1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model. 2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means. This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data…

reads like Salesforce to me, ugh! Enterprises are paying so much to blatantly vendor-lock in themselves using hundreds of "Salesforce engineers". It's baffling to me.

I owned Salesforce setup with 4 engineers and 500+ licenses. I don‘t see how could I replace our SF setup with an in-house product on the same budget within reasonable timeline. We won local competition within a few years, because our sales could use good CRM from day 1 and our competitor, according to the rumors I heard, could not calculate properly sales agent commission. Vendor lock-in is not always a stupid thing. Sometimes it‘s the bet that wins you a market.
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