UK strategic partnership with Palantir to boost military AI and innovation (www.gov.uk)

The UK government signed a strategic partnership with Palantir on 18 September to establish Palantir’s European defence HQ in London, unlock up to £1.5bn of investment and create up to 350 high‑skilled jobs. The deal commits Palantir to invest up to £750m directly in advanced AI-enabled defence programmes over five years and to expand its UK workforce (about 1,000 today) by hiring up to 200 staff plus supporting up to 150 wider-sector roles. Ministers frame the agreement as accelerating the UK’s Defence Industrial Strategy and making Britain a NATO innovation hub, with Palantir also pledging mentorship and pro‑bono help to UK defence SMEs to scale into US and international markets. Technically, the partnership focuses on fast, data‑centric decision support: fusing open‑source and classified feeds to speed planning, targeting and the “kill chain” as part of the Digital Targeting Web from the Strategic Defence Review. Palantir will provide software deployment support, help the MOD implement its Defence Digital & Data Strategy, and ensure data sovereignty while enabling UK-developed tools to be exported. For AI/ML practitioners this means expanded access to operational datasets, integration pipelines and real‑time analytics tested in Ukraine, plus opportunities for UK startups to participate in a large, interoperable supplier ecosystem tied to NATO and US workflows.