The US spy tech firm Palantir has been in talks with the Ministry of Justice about utilizing its expertise to calculate prisoners’ “reoffending dangers”, it has emerged.
The proposals emerged in correspondence launched underneath the Freedom of Info Act which confirmed how the corporate has additionally been lobbying new UK authorities ministers, together with the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
Amnesty Worldwide is among the many organisations expressing concern concerning the increasing position Palantir is making an attempt to carve out after it was controversially awarded a multimillion-pound contract with the NHS final 12 months.
The prisons minister, James Timpson, obtained a letter three weeks after the final election from a Palantir govt who stated the agency was one of many world’s main software program corporations, and was working on the forefront of synthetic intelligence (AI).
Palantir had been in talks with the MoJ and the Jail Service about how “safe info sharing and knowledge analytics can alleviate jail challenges and allow a granular understanding of reoffending and related dangers”, the manager added.
The discussions, which began underneath the Conservative authorities, are understood to have included proposals by Palantir to analyse jail capability, and to make use of knowledge held by the state to know developments regarding reoffending. This may be based mostly on aggregating knowledge to establish and act on developments, factoring in drivers equivalent to earnings or dependancy issues.
A Palantir spokesperson stated: “Superior software program that routinely integrates knowledge might present a single, continuously updating supply of fact for jail capability throughout the UK – serving to to maximise using finite jail areas. This sort of answer has parallels with how our software program supported the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, the place it supplied a transparent, real-time image of takeup at an area, regional and nationwide stage.”
Nonetheless, Amnesty Worldwide UK’s enterprise and human rights director, Peter Frankental, has expressed concern. “It’s deeply worrying that Palantir is making an attempt to seduce the brand new authorities right into a so-called courageous new world the place public companies could also be run by unaccountable bots on the expense of our rights,” he stated. “Labour faces the intense problem of making certain digital applied sciences are used according to human rights, together with defending folks’s privateness, proper to equality, non-discrimination and knowledge safety.
“Ministers have to push again in opposition to any use of synthetic intelligence within the legal justice, jail and welfare methods that might result in folks being discriminated in opposition to, unfairly focused and different miscarriages of justice. The Submit Workplace scandal is a stark warning of what can occur when digital applied sciences are thought-about infallible.”
Issues about Palantir have been compounded by the political position performed by its co-founder and chair, Peter Thiel, a significant Silicon Valley supporter of Donald Trump, in addition to a backer and former employer of the vice-president-elect, JD Vance. Thiel as soon as wrote: “I not imagine that freedom and democracy are appropriate.”
Different letters launched to the Guardian reveal that Palentir’s co-founder and chief govt, Alexander Karp, wrote to ministers together with Reeves, asking to satisfy to debate how one can assist drive development and use of its merchandise at authorities departments.
Karp is a self-described “socialist” however has spoken of Palantir being a counter to “woke” corporations and is understood for making provocative statements, claiming the corporate believed “the west is a superior option to dwell”.
This was mirrored in a letter Karp wrote to the science minister, Peter Kyle, telling him: “Our firm was based to assist strengthen essential establishments throughout the west.”
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As with Reeves, Karp sought to satisfy Kyle to debate “harnessing AI to ship the following technology of technology-enabled public companies throughout HMG”.
Karp informed Reeves that the corporate employed practically 1,000 software program engineers in London, its European workplace for AI, and anticipated opening one other workplace elsewhere in Britain quickly. Palantir wrote to different ministers together with the chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, and the commerce minister Douglas Alexander.
Kyle and Reeves haven’t met Palantir throughout their time as ministers, in line with the federal government, whereas different ministers lobbied by the corporate don’t seem to have responded. Others in Labour have been deeply uneasy concerning the firm’s hyperlinks with the get together, significantly with its Blairite wing.
The Labour backbencher Clive Lewis stated he was involved that “huge company entities” equivalent to Palantir have been making an attempt to change into integral components of offering public companies.
“We’re inviting in a extremely extractive company entity which is all the time going to behave in its personal pursuits first, not what would in the end be the pursuits of the NHS or different public companies. You may go down a science-fiction route however in the end the place will it go away us?” Lewis stated.
“It feels to me as if there’s strain for this Labour authorities to ship development in any respect prices. My concern is that it’ll lead us into taking shortcuts to ship that development at a speedy charge and we might remorse what now we have carried out.”