Palantir

What happened. The Lowdown reported on 25 October 2026 that Palantir's NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract, published on Contract Finder with an initial value of 182 million pounds rising to 330 million, has a first term that runs to March 2027, extendable by two years and then by two further one year extensions, for a seven year ceiling. March 2027 is the first renewal decision. The Lowdown and today's brief both describe the structure the same way. Palantir has hired Lord Tom Watson, a former Labour deputy leader, as Senior Vice President; he has told the BBC «do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want mob rule». A motion at Labour conference to cancel the contract was blocked. On 1 October 2026 a coordinated International Day of Action against Palantir ran in 40 British locations, backed by Global Justice Now, Good Law Project, Amnesty UK and others. A Freedom of Information response showed 16 NHS trusts do not use the FDP; Andy Burnham, NHS England chair, has publicly said Palantir should be replaced (17 October brief).

Also from today's PLTR brief. CTech reported on 25 October 2026 on a conversation at the Citi conference between Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Citi analysts, from Palantir's own 23 October video. Karp said the US leads China in AI by about six months; that AI competition is a whole stack race across chips, models, the connection layer between data and models, applications, and deployment infrastructure that does not surrender customer IP; and that in effect «Europe can only buy from one of the two, US or China». Karp also said Palantir operates under strict security constraints because of its work in Ukraine and Israel. The brief notes that this is CEO commentary without a new contract or data behind it, and that the «buy from US or China» line is one of the arguments campaigners use against Palantir in Europe. The SEC EDGAR check in the brief finds no insider Form 4 filings since 19 October.

What this video does not claim. That the renewal is a done deal, in either direction. That Lord Watson is the swing vote. That the 330 million pounds is Palantir's single largest contract anywhere; it is a seven year ceiling, not an annual figure, and we have not globally compared every public health contract. That Karp's six month US lead is a new claim; he has made similar comments on other stages.

Our wording, flagged. Up to three hundred thirty million pounds reflects the Contract Finder figure of 182 million pounds initial value rising to 330 million. One of Palantir's largest public health contracts is defensible against the 330 million pound seven year ceiling without a global ranking. The March renewal call is the first renewal decision in March 2027 under the Lowdown's described structure. The chief executive is Alex Karp.

Sources: The Lowdown, 25 October 2026, «Decision time on Palentir data platform in the NHS»; The Lowdown, 1 April 2026 for the Contract Finder figure; CTech, 25 October 2026, on the Karp Citi conversation and the Palantir video of 23 October; SEC EDGAR Form 4 index (nil since 19 October); Stray Dog daily brief, 26 October 2026. Per row URLs are in today's memory note.

What happened. On Tuesday 21 October 2026, Palantir Technologies issued a Business Wire release naming five customers currently fine tuning their own models on AIP, Ontology and Foundry, using NVIDIA Nemotron open weight models as the base: L3Harris Technologies, McCarthy Building, NVIDIA, Tampa General Hospital, and Ondas Holdings via Regna AI (sources: Business Wire via Yahoo Finance and Stocktitan; Palantir Bullets).

L3Harris. The release quotes the Chief Transformation Officer: in a few days we were able to outperform the frontier labs in our test environment and cut costs by 95 percent. Frontier labs are not training their models with the relevant data for our industry. L3Harris has consolidated more than 30 ERP systems into the Palantir ontology, with hundreds of applications built on top, about 3.5 million data connections and more than 5,000 scheduled data streams. The company says it is next pairing its model with field mission systems such as the VAMPIRE anti drone kit.

The other four. NVIDIA uses AIP to manage wafer to deployment supply chain (announced September, detail now). McCarthy Building, one of the largest US private contractors, used more than 100,000 construction requests for information to train a model predicting cost and schedule impact; subcontract clause drafting now saves about 30,000 engineering hours per year. Tampa General Hospital, a Palantir customer since 2021, built an on prem fine tuned model for data exfiltration risk classification, with +7 percent performance and 22x lower latency. Ondas Holdings' Regna AI confirmed its platform is built on AIP (already reported on 13 October).

Why this matters, in plain terms. Palantir's commercial argument is that the model layer is being commoditized: open weight small models (Nemotron here) trained on a customer's own ontology data can beat frontier labs in vertical use cases. Value accrues to the data and orchestration layer, which is where AIP, Ontology and Foundry sit. This is the commercial read of CTO Shyam Sankar's 12 October line about swapping models anytime without disrupting operations.

What this release does not disclose. Contract values. Deal durations. Incremental revenue. The L3Harris 95 percent and under two days numbers are the customer's own test environment claim, not independent evaluation. L3Harris and Tampa General are existing customers adding use cases, not net new logos. Timing one week before the 2 November Palantir Q3 earnings makes this a marketing release; the real fundamental test is Q3 US commercial revenue growth, net dollar retention and customer count.

Separately, BBC reported on 21 October that several Google DeepMind researchers resigned over Pentagon contracts, naming the Maven Smart System (Palantir built, integrates multiple AI vendor models) used for target identification. Former Maven project lead Shanahan was quoted criticizing deployment speed overriding test and evaluation discipline. The backlash is on Google and does not touch Palantir revenue, but Maven becoming shorthand for military AI ethics controversy sits alongside the UK NHS and HSBC holdings review as a governance and reputation tail risk.

Our wording, flagged. Two days rounds the quote in a few days and the Palantir Bullets paraphrase in less than 48 hours to a round number. A twentieth of the cost rounds 95 percent lower. A hundred thousand construction tickets rounds the 100,000 plus RFIs figure. Palantir does not sell the model, it sells the layer the model runs on is our wording of the model neutral orchestration thesis; the release itself does not use the word layer.

Sources: Palantir Business Wire release, 21 October 2026 (via Yahoo Finance, Stocktitan, Marketchameleon); Palantir Bullets issue 198; BBC coverage of the Google DeepMind resignations, 21 October 2026; Stray Dog daily brief, 22 October 2026.

What happened. On Monday 19 October 2026, Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: PLTR) and Knox Systems announced a partnership focused on customers with critical mission sets in FedRAMP and Impact Level 5 (IL5) environments. The release, carried on Business Wire at 06:59 AM EDT, says the goal is to accelerate the delivery of commercial software into US federal government environments.

Who Knox is. Knox describes itself as one of the largest Federal and Department of War managed clouds. It hosts more than 100 AI and enterprise software applications, including Adobe, Sierra and Armis. Knox delivers FedRAMP authorization in 90 days, which it calls the biggest bottleneck in government IT.

What Palantir is adding. Palantir Global Head of Business Development Kevin Kawasaki said Palantir has helped leading software companies deploy to the federal government on Palantir's accredited infrastructure, and that the partnership scales that model. Together, Palantir and Knox say they are giving commercial software innovators one clear route into the government.

Why it matters for a Palantir shareholder. Palantir has been positioning itself as the layer that other software companies deploy through to reach US federal buyers. The 9 October announcement of a Google Cloud Marketplace listing for Palantir, the 16 October Surf Air secondary distribution deal, and today's Knox partnership are three similar moves in eleven days. The common pattern is that Palantir sells the accredited base and other vendors sit on top. If the model works, Palantir earns from the deployments of other software, not only its own.

What this is not. The release does not disclose any contract value, revenue share, or committed customer count. It does not change Palantir's reported revenue. The 90 day authorization figure is Knox's own description of its service, not an independent benchmark.

Timing. Palantir reports third quarter 2026 results on Monday 2 November, after the US market close. The brief says to watch whether management calls out the FedRAMP partner ecosystem as a distinct growth line.

Numbers in this video. 90 days is Knox's figure. More than a year is the common FedRAMP timeline before the Knox fast lane. Over 100 software applications is Knox's figure.

Sources: Business Wire, 19 October 2026. Stray Dog daily brief, 20 October 2026. SRF, 19 October 2026, for the Switzerland note in this section.

What happened. On Thursday 15 October 2026, Customers Bank, the bank owned by Customers Bancorp (NYSE: CUBI), announced a collaboration with Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR). The bank will deploy Palantir's Foundry and AIP platforms to rebuild its deposit onboarding, which is how new clients open accounts; the release says reimagine. Palantir has embedded its own engineers alongside the bank's in house AI engineering and technology teams, building on the bank's own data and systems. The two will seek to use AI and automation to streamline document collection, entity verification and risk signal aggregation into a more connected, real time digital application. The release says client deposit accounts are up over 17 percent from a year earlier, and that the work is designed to sustain and scale that growth.

What the two sides said. Sam Sidhu, President and CEO of Customers Bancorp: You only get one chance to make a first impression, and for a growing number of our customers, that first impression is how fast and seamlessly we open their account. He called the collaboration the beginning of something bigger for Customers Bank, and another step toward becoming the AI native leader in banking. Elias Davis, Office of the CEO at Palantir: This is exactly the kind of use case our platform was built for. He said the goal is a client deposit onboarding and servicing experience that sets a new bar for the banking industry.

The OpenAI part. In April 2026, Customers Bank announced a multiyear strategic collaboration with OpenAI to bring AI into its lending, deposit and payment work, including AI for digital onboarding and account setup, with OpenAI's technical teams working on site. The relationship began in 2023 with ChatGPT Enterprise. The Palantir release does not mention OpenAI, and neither release says how the two fit together. This video says only that the bank already works with OpenAI and brought in Palantir too. It does not say Palantir replaced OpenAI, beat it, or runs on top of it.

What this is not. No contract value, no length and no revenue figure were disclosed. Customers Bank is a midsize bank, not one of the largest US banks. One bank is not yet a pattern: whether other banks follow is the thing to watch. Any revenue from this would show up in later Palantir reports, if it is broken out at all.

Numbers in this video. Seventeen percent is the bank's reported growth in client deposit accounts, over 17 percent from a year earlier. No number in this video is our own arithmetic.

Timing. Palantir reports third quarter results after the US market closes on Monday 2 November.

Sources: Customers Bancorp releases on Business Wire, 15 October 2026 (Palantir) and April 2026 (OpenAI). Palantir release on Business Wire setting its results date, October 2026. Stray Dog daily brief, 16 October 2026.

On 14 October 2026 the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) and Palantir issued a joint statement that both sides had withdrawn all allegations against each other, cancelling a High Court trial that had been scheduled for January 2027. The dispute began in May 2026 when Mayor Sadiq Khan's office blocked a proposed two year £50 million contract that would have let Scotland Yard use Palantir's Unified Operational Analytics system to process intelligence in criminal investigations. Palantir sued in June. The joint statement explicitly states Mopac's decision was not based on Palantir's values or ethics. Khan's own quoted statement praised Palantir as a leading software firm making a significant contribution to jobs and investment in London. Caveat: the £50 million contract itself has not been re awarded, so there is no revenue win from the settlement. This is a legal and reputational tail risk going away, not a sale. The settlement comes one month after Palantir hired former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson as a full time UK lobbyist. Sources: The Guardian 14 October 2026, Reuters 14 October 2026, ITV News London 14 October 2026.

On Sunday, CBS News published the full transcript of Face the Nation's interview with Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar. Margaret Brennan put it to him that the Pentagon has recently stopped using Anthropic's products, in a dispute over Anthropic's insistence on safeguards for military use of AI, and that Anthropic's Claude was part of Palantir's Maven platform. She asked how much impact the decision would have and who replaces Anthropic.

Sankar's answers, from the CBS transcript. First: the Department today has a wide range of model providers ... there's been no operational impact from that. Then: It's already been replaced, and users who are building AI applications get to pick the models that they're using. Asked once more about the impact: No impact. He tied it to Palantir's business: companies are realizing, and it equally applies to the government, that you're not going to pick any one model provider, and he said that has been powering the growth of Palantir's commercial business. His description of what an institution controls: which models to use in what context, the ability to switch models, and control of the weights themselves.

How it got here. In February, Anthropic refused to drop its limits on mass surveillance of Americans and on AI making final targeting decisions with no human involved. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed that Anthropic be designated a supply chain risk and said its services to the Pentagon would continue for no more than six months. Earlier this month a Pentagon official told the BBC that the department has ceased the use of Anthropic products. Claude had been built into Maven, a data platform the Pentagon uses and Palantir operates.

What this does and does not show. No impact is Palantir's own account. The Pentagon has not described the switch in public. The six month window had run out before the Pentagon's statement, and sources told the BBC that Claude was still being used by the department for research, analysis and intelligence gathering. Reuters reported in March, citing one source, that Palantir would have to replace Claude with another AI model and rebuild parts of its software. Sankar did not say how long the switch took or what it cost. The link to commercial growth is his statement, with no figure attached. The commercial number comes with Palantir's next quarterly report.

Risks, stated straight. In the same interview Brennan raised the strike in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 123 schoolchildren, and Bloomberg's report that some personnel relied too much on the AI in Palantir's Maven system. Sankar said that reporting is inaccurate, that the likely cause is human error, and that the final report should be awaited. He said he does not know when it will be released. Today's brief also carries Palantir's continuing UK governance disputes, covered here on 10 and 11 October.

Numbers and dates. February and six months come from today's brief and match Hegseth's statement. Sunday is the day CBS published the interview. 123 comes from today's brief and from Brennan's question on air. No figure in this video is our own arithmetic.

Sources: CBS News, Face the Nation transcript, Shyam Sankar, 11 October 2026. CBS News, Melissa Quinn, February 2026. BBC, October 2026. Reuters, David Jeans and Mike Stone, 4 March 2026.