Palantir wins contract to manage UK’s guns, explosives, and poisons

Far-right AI war firm Palantir has won yet another UK contract. This time the genocide-linked company’s software will manage guns, explosives, and even poisons held by the British state. The news comes as the UK’s tech committee urged the government to pull the plug on Palantir’s takeover of vast areas of UK infrastructure.

Tech website The Register reported on 4 June:

Palantir has secured a £9 million ($12 million) government contract to provide software for managing firearms licensing across the UK.

And:

The US spy-tech biz will also handle Home Office licensing for explosives, explosive precursors, and poisons. The contract covers a replacement for the National Firearms Licensing Management System (NFLMS), which has been in use since the mid-2000s.

This is despite London Mayor Sadiq Khan banning a major Palantir contract with the Met Police.

Palantir becoming embedded in UK

The Register found a government procurement notice which shows Palantir will “help”:

43 Police Forces in England and Wales record how they grant, renew, and revoke firearms licenses.

The contract — set to last up to ten years, including possible extensions — could also support Police Scotland and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) if required.

The procurement process was run by the Police Digital Service:

which is responsible for “coordinating, developing, delivering, and managing digital services and solutions”, according to its website.

The UK military, police, NHS and, allegedly, the Telegraph newspaper have started to use Palantir technology. The firm is deeply involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and maintains a permanent desk in southern Israel. Trump’s paramilitary immigration operations, ICE, also use the firm’s gear.

The Canary reported on 2 June that UK officials are even using Palantir software to decide what Palantir technology to buy to fight future wars.

Manosphere

And as the Canary reported on 20 April, Palantir’s ‘manifesto’ is a collection of far-right tropes more suited to a far-right manosphere podcast than a multinational arms firm.

For example, Point 21 reads:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

While Point 22 is a fascist-accented lament for Western white supremacist ‘culture’:

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

The march of these AI firms through the British state is deeply alarming. The company’s founders are tech-bro billionaires with a perverse and fascistic ‘civilisational’ worldview. They seek not only to enrich themselves, but to govern in a bid to save what they see as a ‘superior’ western, white supremacist civilisation. Divesting from their software is the very least that is required.

Featured image via Getty/Carl Court

By Joe Glenton

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