Palantir's UK boss rules out contract bids for digital ID – "undemocratic" (www.thenational.scot)

Palantir Technologies’ UK head Louis Mosley announced the firm will not bid to build the UK’s planned digital ID scheme, calling the rollout “undemocratic” because it wasn’t endorsed in last year’s election manifesto and arguing such a programme “needs to be decided at the ballot box.” Despite being seen as a likely contractor—given Palantir’s UK Ministry of Defence ties and recent £1.5bn investment—Mosley raised technical and privacy concerns: the government would need to reconcile many existing identity forms (passports, driving licences, tax codes, National Insurance), confront a larger online attack surface, and design systems robust against misuse and poor user experiences. Public opposition mirrors this unease, with more than two million people signing a petition against mandatory IDs. For the AI/ML community, Palantir’s refusal is notable because it removes a major data-integration specialist from a high-profile national identity project and highlights key technical and ethical pitfalls. Centralising diverse identity datasets would create fertile ground for powerful analytics and model-driven decisioning—but also magnify risks around data breaches, surveillance, biased models and governance failure. The episode underscores the need for demonstrable democratic legitimacy, privacy-preserving architectures (e.g., federated or minimal-sharing designs), strong threat modeling, and clear procurement standards before AI-driven identity systems are commissioned at scale.