Experts have raised concerns about the involvement of a company vital to Trump’s deportation machine with sensitive health information. Mother Jones illustration; Fabrice Coffrini/
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During his 2015 State of the Union address, then-President Barack Obama announced what he promised would be an ambitious public health project. “Tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier,” Obama said with confidence. “We can do this.” He was met with applause.
That announcement introduced the National Institutes of Health’s “All of US”initiative, designed to organize and provide to researchers the health data of up to a million Americans who opted in to donate their blood, general electronic health records, and more. People’s names are replaced with a code before researchers access their data, and NIH asserts that only a few people have access to the list of codes that correspond with names. As of late June, <a href="https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nihs-all-us-research-program-now-largest-integrated-genomics-health-database-world” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>data from nearly 750,000 participants is available to researchers who are studying such diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, as well as overall health patterns like sleep.
Since then, proponents of the program have highlighted how it has addressed urgent issues. A 2022 study from the University of California, Irvine, study that used the NIH data, for instance, was the first to find that Latino immigrants have higher rates of liver cancer than Latino people who were born in the United States. In a 2024 speech, the head of the All of US initiative said that 87 percent of its participants belong to “underrepresented groups in biomedical research,” such as Latino and Black people.
“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health.”
What many participants may not know is that the defense technology and data giant Palantir, which has deep links to both the intelligence community and the Trump administration, is one of thefirms involved with the project—the same Palantir that the Trump administration has tapped to gather information for ICE and which already worked extensively with the Department of Defense
Palantir’s involvement with All of US is a matter of public record; it has been announced in press releases. However, experts I spoke with about the firm’s connection to the massive federal health data project have raised ethical concerns about what it means for a company involved in Trump’s deportation machine—a choice that has reportedly troubled even some of Palantir’s own employees—to manage such sensitive information.
Palantir’s involvement with All of Us was announced in 2023, through its role in the Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data, which is now hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The company was brought in by an NIH awardee, the University of Colorado Anschutz, a major medical research center. An NIH press releasefrom October 2023 announcing the center boasted that the sub-awardees were “comprised of leading academic, data, security, and software organizations.”
“That it was approved during the Biden administration only underscores how much unfortunate buy-in the tech industry has across both Democrats and Republicans,” said Anita Chan, chair of Indiana University Bloomington’s department of information and library science and author of a 2025 book that looks at the use and misuse of data
“Palantir’s CLAD role is limited and non-research: no participant interaction, no study administration, no scientific analysis,” an NIH spokesperson said in response to a request for comment, adding that “data aren’t owned by Palantir or available for independent use, and can’t move into external corporate databases,” and that Palantir “doesn’t control the data, use it independently, or decide how it’s shared or analyzed
“To be clear, there’s no partnership with Palantir,” the spokesperson said, emphasizing that the firm was a subcontractor
A University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill spokesperson noted in response to a separate request for comment that “Protecting privacy is a top priority for the university while using technology in research,” and that “Every action on the data is captured in tamper-proof audit logs, and because the data stays inside this controlled environment, it cannot be copied out, sold, or used for any purpose” not approved by the research project
Palantir’s involvement in the sphere of personal health data is fairly expansive. In 2020, near the end of the first Trump administration, NIH awarded Palantir a contract to work with data related to Covid, a database that has also been used for Long Covid research. Palantir also has a contract worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars with the UK’s National Health Service to create a health data platform
“[It] is concerning to have one company that has such a large role in [handling] so many different kinds of data,”Center for Genetics and Society executive director Katie Hasson told me. “I don’t think people hoping to benefit public health by sharing their genetic data were really thinking that that’s the kind of company that would be handling their information.”
Kenny Morris, of the American Friends Service Committee, which is running a campaign to encourage divestment from Palantir, said he was concerned that the company was “involved in health data at all,” citing its relationships with the Israeli military, which has used Palantir technology in Gaza, the US military, which has employed it in attacks on Iran, and the Department of Homeland Security, which relies on Palantir’s “ImmigrationOS” and other software to help carry out the dictates of Palantir stockholder and White House deputy Stephen Miller.
A Palantir spokesperson said that the firm was “not in the business” of storing, collecting, mining, or selling data: “We don’t ‘use’ data from customers for other efforts,” the spokesperson said. “In all cases, our customers control and retain their own data. We are simply the software that helps them make sense of it. And in all deployments of our software, we strictly uphold our enduring commitment to protecting privacy and civil liberties.”
All of Us has been able to attract a diverse set of participants through the outreach of community engagement partners, including the Asian Health Initiative, the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, and the American Association on Health and Disability. (TheUniversity of California, San Francisco’s hospital system reached out to me in 2024 to ask if I wanted to participate Palantir’s potential involvement wasn’t mentioned.)
“I don’t know if all of the hospitals or institutions that have been involved in recruiting people into the study at various times would necessarily even know” about Palantir’s involvement, Hasson said
There are many questions about how visible Palantir’s involvement is, including if any hospitals disclose it to patients and if researchers are acutely aware of Palantir’s involvement, despite the public press releases. Sample consent forms for patients on NIH’s website do not mention Palantir
“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health, or sort of traditional obligations of democratic institutions and states,” Chan said. “Its vision of civic accountability is non-existent.”
