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The Miami-based company, co-founded by the billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel, has been appointed for a three-month trial, paying more than £30,000 a week to analyse the FCA’s vast “data lake”, which could lead to a full procurement of an AI system, the Guardian reports.
Palantir is expected to apply its AI system, known as Foundry, to huge quantities of information held by the watchdog, including case intelligence files marked highly sensitive; information on so-called problem firms; reports from lenders about proven and suspected frauds; and data about the public, including consumer complaints to the financial ombudsman.
The data includes recordings of phone calls, emails and trawls of social media posts, the Guardian understands.
Palantir’s technology is used by the Israeli military and in the US president’s ICE immigration crackdown. In 2023 it signed a £330m deal with the NHS, which has sparked resistance from doctors, and a £240m contract with the Ministry of Defence in December 2025, which prompted MPs to highlight “reports of serious allegations of complicity in human rights violations and the undermining of democratic processes made against Palantir”.
The contract with the FCA has prompted warnings of significant privacy concerns.
Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay, a partner at the law firm Hickman & Rose told the Guardian: “We could be talking about hundreds of whole email accounts and full financial records. Many innocent people will be caught up in that and the data may contain bank account details, email addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information.
“If you ingest that data and use it to train an AI system, there are very significant privacy concerns. There should be serious confidentiality requirements regarding what Palantir does with the data.”
The FCA has defended its decision, saying that it would retain exclusive control over the encryption keys for the most sensitive files and that Palantir will have to destroy data after completion of the contract.
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