Palantir Has a Hand in NIH's Most Ambitious Health Initiative

The defense tech firm’s work with public health data has largely flown under the radar.

Six Hours Ago
By Julia Métraux
Reporter

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, 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.

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 the firms 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.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/palantir-national-institutes-health-data-tech-defense-unc-research/

22:38
07 July 2026