Anchit

Welcome to the team, Tom! As Labour’s former deputy leader, Tom brings deep understanding of how AI is changing the ways the state can help people in Britain, where more than one in six Palantirians are based. Conspiracy theorists - you’ll need to update your org charts. Sorry.

Big day over at the Guardian. They've uncovered a company paying its staff. Today's exposé reveals Palantir's latest diabolical scheme: give employees shares, watch employees pay tax on them at HIGHER rates than corporation tax, hand the Treasury MORE money overall. As tax dodges go, I’ll admit it needs work. The legal instrument behind this outrage? A relief introduced by the previous Labour Government to encourage employee ownership and collect more tax overall. The Guardian has bravely blown the whistle on the UK tax code. As only the Grauniad can pull off, the facts that dismantle their own headline can be found at the bottom of the article: Palantir paid $148m in UK employment taxes last year. @DanNeidle - who regularly seems to end actual tax avoiders' careers for sport - looked at this claim and called it “the worst tax avoidance scheme ever.” We’ll await the Guardian’s correction with the usual confidence.

30 years of workarounds. One foundation. Thank you @tom_nhs for finally saying it plainly.

Critics of Palantir’s work for the NHS sometimes raise the same risk. If Palantir staff are granted access to NHS data, what stops a rogue Palantir employee walking out with it? It’s a fair question, and the best answer is a technical one. You cannot answer it with contracts or vetting alone, because Biobank had both. You answer it with purpose-limited, compartmented access - enforced as engineering, not with policy alone. Separation of view from export. Granular controls tied to user identity and data sensitivity. Review gates on dangerous actions. Audit that cannot be edited after the fact.

The UK Biobank disclosure this week - that de-identified medical records of 500,000 volunteers were for sale on Alibaba in China - deserves a serious public conversation. I’ve spent years working on health data systems. Here’s a 🧵

@ZackPolanski - this is magnificent. Three things I can’t deny: 1. It is a video. 2. You are wearing a jacket. 3. Then you aren’t. 4. Then you are again. Unfortunately that’s where the accuracy ends. A few corrections for you: Peter Thiel is not our CEO. Alex Karp is — and has been for 20+ years. (A lifelong Democrat, for anyone keeping score.) We are not a “spyware company.” Spyware is malware. Malware is illegal. Calling a software company spyware is, technically, defamatory (don’t worry, we are not suing). We don’t build surveillance technology. We build software that helps organisations make sense of data they already hold. Not the same thing. There was no “private tour” of our HQ. There was a public photocall to which the media came. Hence, why there are so many pictures of the event. Our MOD contract is not “the biggest defence contract in UK history.” Ajax armoured vehicles = £5.5bn. Dreadnought submarines = £31bn. We’re grateful for the work, but let’s keep a sense of scale. We have no more access to NHS data than Microsoft has to the contents of your Word documents. I think you know this by now. We don’t have access to patient medical records. Same story. I agree that “nothing matters more than our health.” Which makes it worth reminding you of what Palantir’s software is actually doing in the NHS right now: ->110,000 additional operations ->15% fewer delayed hospital discharges ->7% more patients finding out within 28 days whether they have cancer Respect again for what you did with that jacket.