A controversial manifesto by American spy-tech company Palantir has renewed calls in the UK to follow the EU and pursue digital sovereignty.

There are growing fears in the UK over more than £500 million ($676 million) in contracts the country has with Palantir, including deals with the police and Ministry of Defence, as well as a £330 million contract with the National Health Service (NHS).

Having a firm run by a well-known surveillance capitalist – Palantir’s chief executive Alex Karp – involved in a treasured public healthcare system was already befuddling critics, who say that the new “manifesto” is raising even more questions.

The 22-point declaration posted over the weekend on X, a social media platform, extolled the virtues of a surveillance state and said AI weapons are the future – strongly suggesting it must be dominated by the US.

The message was described as “technofascist” by some commentators, and several British MPs came forward with statements saying that Palantir was “entirely unsuited” to work with citizens’ most sensitive personal data.

Some described the manifesto as “the ramblings of a supervillain” and “a parody of a RoboCop film.”

The British government had faced calls to scrap deals with Palantir even before the manifesto, with critics pointing to its contracts with ICE and the US military apparatus, as well as to its close ties to US President Donald Trump, whose rhetoric towards Europe, including the UK, has become increasingly hostile.

Open Rights Group, a UK-based digital rights organization, called the continued over-reliance on a small number of tech giants “a matter of national security that must be urgently addressed.”

It said the UK government should follow the lead of EU countries, including Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, in a digital sovereignty push through strategic investments in open technologies and international collaboration.

Rough road ahead

Cybernews has been following efforts in these countries and elsewhere in the EU towards greater digital sovereignty.

This included German and French authorities ditching Microsoft in favor of Linux, the Netherlands working on a “digital emergency kit” in case the internet is shut down, and Denmark essentially spearheading the crusade against the US big tech after Trump threatened to take over Greenland.

Some of the more recent efforts in Europe include work on an “anti-kill switch” technology, aimed at ensuring critical work can continue in the event of a foreign vendor seeking to shut it down, and investing in homegrown cloud providers to reduce dependence on American tech.

Both are especially pressing issues, with one report showing that defense agencies in most European countries appear to rely on American cloud providers aligned with the Trump administration, raising concerns about their vulnerability to a kill switch scenario.

Sixteen of those countries, including Germany and the UK, are in a high-risk category, with a lower number of countries, including France, classified as medium risk. Only Austria is considered to be low risk.

However, the road to digital sovereignty won’t be easy, and some top military officials in Europe are resisting the push, warning that technological independence isn’t realistic and could endanger the continent’s security.

There are also concerns about an encroachment on internet freedom, masked as internet safety, and expressed through measures such as online age verification systems and VPN bans.

Whether Europe is capable of implementing some of the technological solutions is also a matter of debate, with the EU’s age verification app reportedly hacked in 2 minutes.

What’s in Palantir’s manifesto?

The so-called manifesto appears to be based on Karp’s book The Technological Republic, published last year, which calls for the US to exercise its hard power through software.

“Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed,” Palantir’s post on X read.

It lamented the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan, while stating that “some cultures have produced vital advances – others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

The post said Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime, expressed regret that billionaires like Elon Musk are being “snickered” at, and criticized the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.”

The manifesto concluded: “We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”

The manifesto follows a series of other loud statements made by Karp recently, including pride in Palantir becoming “the first company to be completely anti-woke” and claims that AI will replace office jobs with manual labor.

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