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AI firms are pushing hard for a bigger and bigger slice of the UK war machine, namely Palantir. Watchdog Drone Wars’ new briefing paper sheds light on how these powerful tech companies, often led by far-right bosses, have inserted themselves into the UK military.

The new report is titled ‘The Datafication of War‘. It is the first part of a series of briefing called ‘Killing By Code: New Briefing and Dataset on UK Military AI Programme‘. The NGO also published a breakdown of key military projects currently working to integrate AI.

Drone Wars warned of a revolutionary shift in warfare:

Today, with the rise in geopolitical uncertainty and intense competition for military technological supremacy; private technology companies working alongside states, are pushing towards a new technological transformation on the battlefield: the development of military AI and Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems that promise to reshape the methods of war.

As private firms start to work closely with states on AI, and:

With algorithms, Large Language Models, and autonomous systems permeating throughout the military domain, modern warfare is becoming increasingly reliant on data sets.

This first briefing “explores Palantir and their algorithmic and data systems”:

It examines the company’s origin and leadership; their footprint in different institutions within the UK and elsewhere; its key software and data analytic platforms and ends by looking at their involvement with the Israeli and Ukrainian governments during times of profound violence and war.

Palantir: far-right AI bosses

The report captures the worldviews which drive Palantir’s leadership in the US and UK. It describes how founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp:

co-founded Palantir in the aftermath of 9/11, partly using funding from Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA.

The name, Palantir, is a reference to the all-seeing orbs in the Lord of the Rings books and movies. The leadership:

openly embraces the language of warfare, crisis and existential threat to frame the company’s public image.

Thiel is described as a ‘techno-libertarian’:

with a strong aversion to progressive politics and a pronounced scepticism of democracy.

While Karp’s politics speak to a hard-right, ‘civilisational’ worldview, which:

argues for the abandonment of ‘frivolous’ consumer products in the pursuit of ‘national projects’ that strengthen ‘Western civilization’ to the detriment of its perceived enemies.

UK boss Louis Mosley – the hyper-privileged grandson of aristocratic fascist Oswald Mosley – is described as:

descended from a highly politicised, aristocratic lineage whose legacy has played a visible role in Anglo-American history. It seems he will go onto to have greater influence albeit a very different role in shaping the country’s future trajectory.

And Drone Wars points out:

His relationships with the higher echelons of the labour government are clear.

Palantir’s footprint in the UK

Palantir are active in the US, Canada, Australia, Israel and Ukraine. And the firm is increasingly powerful here at home:

According to MoD figures, in the financial years of 2020/21 – 2024/2025, Palantir’s UK subsidiary received £190m from the Ministry of Defence. Within this range one of their most lucrative contracts worth £75m was an ‘Enterprise Agreement’ which integrated ‘Palantir[‘s] software tool-set to accommodate…
MoD demand’

Typically:

these operations are shielded by national security exemptions and so are opaque to the outsider – most of the details of these contracts are not in public view or incredibly vague.

Thiel is a major donor to US president Donald Trump, which means that the UK taxpayer is helping fund a far-right presidency with violent global ambitions.

In this way, the British taxpayer is helping to support an administration that makes Britain less secure – antithetical to the very reasons used to justify the British state’s relationship with Palantir.

A movement that under Trump has threatened Denmark over Greenland, struck Iran de-stabilising a region and the wider global economy with a complete disregard for international law, and norms.

As Drone Wars also point out, Palantir has interests in the National Health Service, UK police and even the HS2 rail project. Their project isn’t just about war – it is about governance and state power.

Palantir’s hunger for war

Drone Wars surveyed the Palantir systems currently in use in the UK. These include military targeting  systems like Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP),Gotham, Foundry, MetaConstellation and Palantir Edge AI. Palantir’s ideology and business model hunger for war and crisis. But the firm also views wars as a laboratory to sharpen and develop their for-profit killing technology.

Drone Wars said that Ukraine and Israel are two of the prime examples:

For companies like Palantir, armed conflicts are prime opportunities to test their technologies under real-life conditions. This dynamic is acutely visible in the war in Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing wars in the middle eastern regions where Palantir has embedded itself within state and military institutions.

Adding:

In both conflicts, the company uses warzones as laboratories for refining their data analytics, surveillance and AI-driven decision-making systems.

A new way of war

Drone Wars’ conclusion paints a chilling picture of a rapidly emerging shift away from even basic accountability in warfare:

Palantir’s ascendence illustrates the value of data, algorithms and software not just in the governance of everyday life, but as a core foundation of contemporary military and social power.

The NGO said that Keir Starmer’s government:

is courting the company guided by the notion that they can deliver AI innovation and institutional regeneration.

This is a naive, technocratic approach – because Palantir promises something much darker than simple efficiency. The end result of reducing populations into “statistical trends” is profound dehumanisation, and:

in the case of war, to reduce combatants to data points does not recognise their humanity, it is a form of abstraction that lowers the threshold of violence; they are no longer persons but numbers to be killed.

The new way of war isn’t just coming, it is here. But Palantir’s vision is much broader than simply speeding up targeting processes. Palantir is driven by a far-right worldview in which democracy is a threat. Its leaders think ‘Western’ civilisation is under under threat and only profound, often racialised violence, authoritarianism and surveillance can rescue it. The firm’s increasing influence over British politics must be opposed tooth and nail.

Featured image via Getty/Eugene Gologursky

By Joe Glenton

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Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos gave a speech on 16 May to anti-genocide activists marching to mark Nakba Day. Hundreds of thousands turned out, despite police repression, in solidarity with the Palestinian people to mark the anniversary of the violent expulsion from their land and homes.

Stephen Kapos: ‘We must not tolerate it anymore’

And Kapos had firm words for the Israel lobby — including the UK government — and its “unending” smears against the anti-genocide movement. He pointed out that those smears are enabling the rise of fascism in Europe as well as the murder and displacement of Palestinians. And he skewered a major propaganda lie of that lobby — the claim that almost all Jews support the apartheid colony.

Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos addressed the Nakba ’78 rally on Saturday – speaking on the rise of the far right, the heroic spirit of Palestinians and the cynical mischaracterisation of our marches.
Watch his full speech on our Youtube channel: https://t.co/O2N8P13TvH pic.twitter.com/7Y6mt6kmTp

— Palestine Solidarity Campaign (@PSCupdates) May 18, 2026

As Kapos made his speech, Israeli media marked their genocidal theft of Palestine by deriding Jews who oppose genocidal colonisation as cowards trying to avoid antisemitism by fitting in with those who hate them. The nonsense of this could not be more clear. But when you’re trying to defend an inherently racist state and its ideology, you have little choice but to scrape through barrel bottoms.

In contrast, the moral clarity of Stephen Kapos and other Holocaust survivors who oppose Israel becoming the genocidal oppressor shines out. Watch his full, five-minute speech below.

Featured image via X/ Aliwala786110

By Skwawkbox

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Humane World for Animals UK , the Fur Free Britain coalition, 50 MPs, veterinary experts and celebrities are strengthening calls on the UK government to ban imports of fur.

This comes as new investigative footage shows mink in Chinese fur farms trembling in tiny wire cages before being brutally killed for fur that could end up sold in the UK. And there are concerns that a reset of the UK-EU relationship could make banning fur imports more difficult.

Despite banning fur farming in 2003, the UK continues to import millions of pounds worth of fur from overseas. It has imported more than £60m worth from China in the last decade (2016-2025 inclusive), making China the single biggest source of UK fur imports.

Humane World for Animals campaigners say the UK government is complicit in cruelty for as long as it keeps allowing fur from China and other countries to enter the UK market.

The cruelty of fur farming

The investigation at five farms in Qinhuangdao and Dandong, northern China, reveals thousands of mink, foxes and raccoon dogs kept in barren wire cages measuring one square metre or less.

Many of the animals exhibit signs of psychological distress, such as repetitive head bobbing and pacing, resulting from the lack of stimulation and chronic stress.

Evidence shows the lifeless bodies of mink and raccoon dogs littering the ground below the cages, and pools of blood around the minks’ heads. A mink is seen writhing on the floor where the animal was thrown by a farm worker after being bludgeoned.

In March 2026, the UK government’s animal welfare committee published a damning report condemning the animal suffering involved in the UK fur trade. MPs and campaigners are increasingly concerned that the UK’s sovereign right to ban fur imports could be sacrificed by the government.

In the letter, MPs and Peers state:

We are concerned by recent media reports indicating that the EU reset could compromise the UK government’s ability to ban fur imports and sales.

A handful of EU countries, including Finland and Greece, continue to permit cruel fur farming.

Ruth Jones, MP for Newport West and Islwyn, says:

It’s sickening to think that fur from these animals tormented in tiny cages and brutally killed could end up traded in the UK. We can’t call ourselves a ‘nation of animal lovers’ if we ban cruelty here but then keep shipping it in from overseas.

Reports that the UK-EU reset might remove the UK’s freedom to ban imports of fur are extremely concerning. Labour backed a Fur Free Britain when we were in opposition, and we must not now trade that promise away.

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Claire Bass, senior director of campaigns and public affairs at Humane World for Animals UK, says:

Millions of animals are suffering on farms in countries including China, Finland and Greece so their fur can be shipped to the UK. The global fur trade causes immense animal suffering and virologists are ringing the alarm bell that it could be the source of another pandemic.

Our government must not sign any deals that keep the UK complicit in this cruel, reckless and unnecessary trade.

Former Defra minister Zac Goldsmith says:

One of the advantages of Brexit was that we could boost animal welfare in ways that were not previously possible. At the moment we don’t allow fur farming in the UK, but we do allow imports, which means we have simply exported cruelty.

We can now change that, unless the Brexit ‘reset’ closes that option off. It would be a terrible waste of a real and meaningful opportunity to stand up for animal welfare.

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Potential for disease

Fur farm outbreaks of COVID-19, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, and Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome Virus (SFTSV) have resulted in millions of animals dying or being killed. SFTSV is an emerging infectious disease that affects animals and humans, with symptoms including fever, respiratory and gastrointestinal issues and even death.

Virologists have voiced serious concerns about the fur industry’s potential to drive disease spread to humans and even trigger the next pandemic. A 2024 Nature paper focused on Chinese fur farms identified 39 viruses as high-risk for spillover potential, including 13 potentially high-risk novel viruses. It concluded that fur farming represents:

an important transmission hub for viral zoonoses.

Outbreaks of infectious SFTVS disease on six fox farms in China resulted in “tens to hundreds” of deaths per farm and virologists have warned that:

close contact between farmed foxes and farmers could facilitate the viral spillover from foxes to humans.

Veterinarian professor Alastair Macmillan, formerly head of animal health and welfare evidence base core team at Defra,  says:

As a veterinary microbiologist, I am deeply concerned by the clear potential for disease transmission when highly stressed animals are confined in close proximity, while other species -including geese, ducks, and cats – roam between the cages.

We already know that fur farms can act as incubators for zoonotic diseases, and this footage perfectly illustrates that risk.

None of the animals on these fur farms is permitted a life that even remotely satisfies their natural behavioural instincts. These are wild, intelligent animals that belong in complex, stimulating environments. Instead, they are locked in barren wire cages, their lives reduced to a meaningless, repetitive loop of eating, sleeping, and wasting away, until the day they are finally killed and skinned.

Fur is a declining trade that needs stamping out

China’s fur trade has been in steep decline with a 90% reduction in animals kept and killed from 87 million animals in 2014 to 8 million in 2025, according to the China Leather Association.

The decline of the trade in China mirrors a similar downward trend worldwide. Globally there has been an 86% decline in the number of animals kept and killed for fur in the last decade, from 140 million in 2024 to 20.5 million in 2025.

You can read the letter from the MPs and Peers here.

Featured image via Humane World for Animals

By The Canary

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President Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for Texas’ Senate GOP race in an eleventh-hour decision, siding with a longtime MAGA ally — and potentially imperiling GOP control of the seat.

Trump’s endorsement Tuesday gives Paxton a late boost over establishment Republicans’ preferred candidate, Sen. John Cornyn, ahead of next week’s May primary runoff, where polls show a razor-thin race. And it comes after the president refused for months to take sides, in spite of heavy lobbying from both Cornyn’s and Paxton’s allies.

The timing of the last-minute endorsement comes as a surprise, months after he was initially expected to jump in: Just on Monday, Cornyn said “the ship has finally sailed” regarding Trump’s stamp of approval.

“Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough.”

Cornyn and his supporters fear that nominating scandal-plagued Paxton, a figure of the far right with significant personal baggage, would put control of the Senate at risk and cost the party hundreds of millions of dollars to defend the seat this fall.

As Texas’ top lawyer for a decade, Paxton has faced impeachment, a securities fraud investigation, ethics complaints and an ongoing divorce with allegations of infidelity. Democrats believe they have the best shot in decades at winning statewide in Texas, and Republicans worry that Democratic nominee James Talarico is a formidable opponent.

White House allies predicted that Cornyn’s stronger-than-expected showing in the first round of voting would convince Trump to endorse him. The president played into those expectations when he posted on Truth Social back in early March that the Texas GOP primary can’t “be allowed to go on any longer” and he would announce his pick soon.

But in the end, after more than six weeks of delay, Trump was swayed by the MAGA wing of the party who see Paxton as a true believer in their movement and despise Cornyn for occasionally being at odds with the president.

Paxton is a staunch Trump ally who supported his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And after some White House allies told POLITICO and other media outlets that Trump was looking at endorsing Cornyn, MAGA influencers including Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec led a public full-court press to get Trump to reverse course.

Paxton, ahead of Trump’s decision, said he would consider stepping aside if the Senate chose to eliminate the filibuster and pass the “SAVE America Act,” the elections overhaul bill that has since stalled in the Senate over GOP divisions. That offer was seen among Texas Republicans as a ploy from Paxton to remind Trump that the pair are closely aligned, while driving a wedge between the president and Cornyn, an establishment Republican who is opposed to removing the filibuster.

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Ministers are regularly holding off-the-record meetings with the CEOs and senior staff of England and Wales’ scandal-riddled privatised water and sewage sector.

As the Labour government introduces a new bill anti-privatisation campaigners brand a “gift to shareholders”, the Canary can reveal how water bosses are schmoozing with cabinet ministers behind closed doors.

Water companies schmoozing with Labour in unminuted meetings

Official data from the Department of Food, Environment, and Rural Affairs (Defra) shows that government ministers met with CEOs and representatives of water companies across at least nine separate meetings in the final three months of 2025.

Now, a Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) request the Canary submitted to the department has revealed how ministers attended these meetings entirely unminuted and without formal agendas.

The quarterly release gives a limited description of the purpose of these meetings, as required by the Ministerial Code and further set out in Cabinet Office guidance.

But the lack of documentation raises serious questions over the nature and content of what essentially amounts to secret discussions between the government and the millionaire CEOs of privatised water corporations.

Secretary of state discussions behind closed doors

The off-record meetings included a meeting between secretary of state Emma Reynolds and Thames Water chair Adrian Montague at the end of November.

The department recorded this simply with the description “Discussion on Thames Water”.

Of course, the government has so far actively refused to bring Thames Water into special administration. It has repeatedly fallen back on water industry spin to justify pursuing a ‘market-led’ – privatised – solution. Now, ministers and Ofwat are poised to sign a deal that would allow it to dodge fines for the next four years.

Another meeting Reynolds hosted at the end of October included a “Discussion on water operations” with Severn Trent CEO Liv Garfield.

Days earlier, Severn Trent was one of just two major water suppliers that regulator Ofwat did not order to make ‘underperformance’ payments to its customers. This is where the regulator forces companies failing to meet certain pollution targets to pay up. As a result, this is meant to reduce customer bills.

In practice, however, it doesn’t actually mean customers see a reduction in their water bills. This is because parasitic private suppliers have been simultaneously hiking these. In reality, then, underperformance payments simply mean Ofwat forces companies to reduce an already raised bill. Nonetheless, Severn Trent’s supposed ‘overperformance’ meant it evaded these payments.

However, fast-forward to April 2026, and the Environment Agency revealed that the company had wracked up the highest bill for fines over pollution incidents. These totalled £4.6m – the highest total of any provider within the 2025-26 financial year.

Rubbing shoulders with water privatisation lobbyists

On 9 December, the environment secretary also held a ‘Water Investor Roundtable’ to discuss “water sector investability”. But the register entry fails to disclose attendees. And of course, according to Defra’s response to the Canary’s EIR request, Reynolds held the roundtable entirely unminuted.

As such, there’s no public record of the companies involved in these conversations. Of course, it’s likely that discussions on ‘investability’ concern the water sector’s and corporate capitalist creditors’ vested interests in maintaining the privatised status quo.

Defra minister Emma Hardy also held a number of meetings with CEOs of major water companies off-the-record. This included two meetings with South East Water boss David Hinton in December.

At the beginning of May, Hinton stepped down from his role after scathing criticism from the EFRA parliamentary committee. The committee had issued a damning report documenting the company’s routine failures. This included a two-week water outage in Tonbridge Wells during November 2025 that left 24,000 properties without water. It declared no confidence in SEW’s leadership team.

Hardy also held an unminuted meeting with industry trade group Water UK that same month. The lobby body has been a staunch defender of privatised interests in the sector.

Dodging public scrutiny over water privatisation: a feature of this Labour government

The Canary’s recent EIR request also wasn’t the first time Defra ministers hosted unminuted meetings with the water sector.

We previously submitted an EIR request concerning ministerial meetings with Water UK. This revealed that Defra ministers had hosted four separate off-the-record discussions between October and December 2024.

Previously, the Good Law Project also found that ministers had taken no minutes in nine meetings with water companies. The meetings took place between July and September that same year.

The Canary hasn’t (yet) obtained minutes and agendas for all the meetings Labour ministers have held with water companies. Nevertheless, a clear pattern is emerging that points to dodging public scrutiny as a shameful feature of this government.

Separately, the Canary also discovered that former environment secretary and shady Labour Together-linked MP Steve Reed had failed to publish a record of his meetings in the ministerial register. This was for the first quarter of 2025 – and to this day, there’s still no entries. As such, not only would meetings Reed held with water companies be off-the-record – currently, they’re entirely scrubbed from it.

Room to ‘bend and break the rules for profit’

Given all this, anyone might think the government has something to hide. Its continued failure to even temporarily nationalise Thames Water could have something to do with it. Instead, the government continues to tinker around at the edges of the glaring problems of privatised water.

And this Labour administration full-well knows that sewage pollution is a hot button issue for the electorate. If meetings were to show ministers getting chummy with the privatised water racket, that might just blow an irreparable hole in their – already dire and plummeting – popularity.

On the Canary’s findings, Sophie Conquest, lead campaigner at anti-privatisation campaign group We Own It, said:

Water is one of our most vital resources. We are dependent upon it, and we pay increasingly high bills for it. So it is insulting that fundamental decisions about our water system are being made without us, behind closed doors – without even a public record of what was said.

It is hardly surprising that – following these conversations – the government produced a water White Paper which is a gift to shareholders, with new measures which will give water companies even more room to bend and break the rules for profit.

A single regulator will be ripe for corporate capture. Plans for a ‘tailored approach’ for each water company will even further reduce consistency and transparency.To make these reforms into law would be a dangerous step in the wrong direction – favouring faraway shareholders over the people that use and pay for our water system.

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Instead, this government should be bringing water into public ownership, starting with the collapsing Thames Water. Under public ownership, we can make water truly democratic, with decisions being made on Boards where Environmental Groups, Households and Workers are represented.

Ultimately, ministers rubbing shoulders with the corporate criminal bosses of England and Wales’ sewage scandal-laden water industry in clandestine conversations may make people legitimately wonder whose interests this government serves.

But of course, the answer to that has long been obvious with this shower of corporate-captured ministers.

Featured image via Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

By Hannah Sharland

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