Military & AI
What Palantir Tells UK Government Buyers About Gotham: Reading the G-Cloud 14 Service Definition
Palantir's own G-Cloud 14 documents describe Gotham as a platform for AI-enabled defence, intelligence and law enforcement. What the service definition lists, what it leaves out, the security claims, and the price list, from a £1 trial to £66,000 per server core a year.
Akmal Alif · 10 October 2026 MYT
This is the second of three posts on Palantir Gotham. The first revisits a Harvard Business School student's case on the company. The third watches Palantir's own defence demo frame by frame. This one reads what Palantir puts in writing when it sells Gotham to the UK public sector.
How to read this document
G-Cloud is the UK government's catalogue framework for buying cloud services. Suppliers publish a listing, a service definition, a price list and terms, and public bodies can buy from the catalogue without running a full tender. G-Cloud 14 (agreement RM1557.14) started on 29 October 2024 and was extended to 28 October 2026. It was run by the Crown Commercial Service, which became the Government Commercial Agency on 1 April 2026 (Government Commercial Agency, n.d.).
Palantir Technologies UK listed Palantir Platform: Gotham in Lot 2, cloud software (Palantir Technologies UK, n.d.). The service definition is a 24-page PDF dated May 2024 (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a).
Two cautions before the summary:
These are the seller's claims. A service definition is a sales and procurement document. Nothing in it has been independently tested for this post.
The screenshots use notional data. The document illustrates each application with sample screens, such as a person profile, a network graph and an operation order. We describe what the screens show without reproducing them.
What Gotham is, in Palantir's words
The document calls Gotham a commercial off-the-shelf platform for AI-enabled defence, intelligence and law-enforcement operations. It says the platform grew out of more than a decade of work with military, intelligence and police agencies. Palantir says Gotham is deployed across all Five Eyes nations, coalition partners, NATO members and some of the world's largest listed companies (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a, p. 3).
The core idea is a single shared data foundation. Instead of rows and columns, Gotham models data as objects (people, organisations, places, documents, events) and the relationships between them. Palantir calls this model the Ontology. On top of it, the platform offers a common operating picture and a common intelligence picture. The document lists the work these support: intelligence collection, investigative network analysis, mission planning, targeting, execution and after-action analysis (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a, pp. 3–4).
Gotham also builds on Palantir Foundry, the company's commercial data platform, to bring data in from other systems and send it back out.
The applications it lists
The service definition walks through its main applications, all working on the same data (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a, pp. 5–15):
Browser and Custom Object Views. A profile page for any object, such as a person, with properties, links, media and a map. Teams can configure different views of the same type of object.
Object Explorer. Top-down analysis across millions of records, with filters, histograms, timelines and alerts when data changes.
Chat. Messaging that respects classification. A shared object is visible in a channel only to members cleared to see it, and the platform redacts the rest automatically.
Inbox. Alerts in one place. One alert type is the geofence: draw a boundary on a map and get notified when an object enters or leaves it. A sample screen groups alert feeds by US combatant command.
Slides and Dossier. Briefings and reports built from live data, so a figure in a deck updates when the underlying data changes. The sample dossier is a notional operation order for a raid on a compound.
Graph. Network analysis on a shared canvas, with "search around" to expand from one object to everything linked to it.
Gaia. A geospatial command-and-control map. The document's example is a five-kilometre radius search for everyone near an incident over a time window. Gaia can also work with military mapping tools such as ATAK and WINTAK.
Video. Live or recorded full-motion video with augmented-reality overlays, including friendly-force trackers, no-strike lists and AI detections. Third-party AI models can run on the stream.
The Video section is where the "AI-enabled" claim is most concrete. Detections are superimposed on the video and surfaced to analysts, who confirm or dismiss each one. Palantir says that feedback is used to improve the models.
What the document leaves out
One sentence stands out. After introducing the applications, the document notes that applications for more sensitive work are not listed. It names targeting, fires control and execution, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and "ISINT" analysis, and asks buyers to contact Palantir directly (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a, p. 5).
So the public catalogue describes the analysis and collaboration layer. The applications closest to the use of force are discussed privately. That split is normal for defence software, but it matters when reading any public description of Gotham: the published material is not the whole product.
Security and accreditation claims
Palantir lists the following for its platforms (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a, p. 17):
alignment with the US NIST 800-53 and 800-171 security controls;
an annual SOC 2 Type 2 audit;
compliance with FedRAMP Moderate, US Department of Defense Impact Level 5, ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and ISO 9001;
Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus certificates;
an annual NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit assessment.
The marketplace listing adds that Palantir staff hold UK government security clearance up to Developed Vetting (DV). It also lists MoDNet, the Ministry of Defence's network, among the public-sector networks the service connects to (Palantir Technologies UK, n.d.).
The access model is the most interesting technical claim. Permissions can apply to a single property of an object, such as one building's address or one vehicle's model, not just to whole files. Every user action is logged, and the logs can be made tamper-evident.
Hosting, backups and leaving
Hosting. According to the document (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a, pp. 21–22), Gotham runs on AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. Its primary data store is Postgres or Oracle on the cloud provider, with Elasticsearch or Postgres for secondary indexes.
Resilience. Palantir describes an active-active setup across availability zones, and claims no data loss and no downtime if one zone fails.
Backups. A system called Rescue takes snapshots every two hours and keeps them for seven days.
Updates. Updates ship roughly monthly. Emergency security fixes have shipped in as little as an hour.
On leaving, the document is emphatic. It says data can be exported in open, non-proprietary formats through public APIs, that the platform is designed to prevent vendor lock-in, and that Palantir will purge and destroy customer data at the end of a contract (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024a, p. 23).
That claim is worth setting beside the HBS case, which calls Palantir's government business extremely sticky. Both can be true. Raw data can be exportable while the ontology, the workflows built on it and the trained analysts are what is hard to replace.
The price list
The pricing document is the clearest window into how Gotham is sold. These are list prices for the G-Cloud catalogue; real contracts are negotiated (Palantir Technologies UK, 2024b).
Item | List price |
|---|---|
Trial licence | £1 |
Pilot licences (term and scope set by Palantir) | £50,000 to £500,000 |
Organisation licence, including £3 million of usage a year | £3,000,000 a year |
Each additional organisation, including £2.5 million of usage | £2,500,000 a year |
Usage blocks, with discounts of 0.5% to 10% | £5,000 to £2,500,000 |
Core-based licence (minimum six months) | £66,000 per server core a year |
Support and maintenance | £21,500 per server core a year |
Implementation and engineering | £150,000 per person a quarter |
Field service representatives, levels 1 to 4 | £12,100 to £38,500 per person a month |
The headline price on the marketplace, £66,000 a unit, is the per-core annual licence. The structure says a lot about the business model: a nominal trial, paid pilots, then large organisation-wide licences, with Palantir's own engineers available by the quarter.
What to take from it
Read as a whole, the service definition describes software for collecting everything an organisation knows about people, places and events into one model, then searching, mapping, watching and briefing on it. That makes it powerful for a military staff or a police investigation. The same features make governance the real question: who is in the data, who can see it, and what is done with the results.
The document's own answer is technical: fine-grained permissions and audit logs. Policy, oversight and the law still decide how those tools are used. The first post in this series is about exactly that debate.
Also in this series
Software That Saves and Takes Lives: An HBS Student's Palantir Case, Four Years On
Palantir Gotham, Paused and Explained: Cyberfam on Palantir's Notional Defence Demo
References
Government Commercial Agency. (n.d.). G-Cloud 14 (RM1557.14). Retrieved October 10, 2026, from https://www.gca.gov.uk/agreements/RM1557.14
Palantir Technologies UK. (n.d.). Palantir Platform: Gotham [G-Cloud 14 service listing, service ID 801146272055049]. Digital Marketplace. Retrieved October 10, 2026, from https://www.applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/801146272055049
Palantir Technologies UK. (2024a). Palantir Platform: Gotham. Service definition document [Prepared for the G-Cloud 14 framework]. Digital Marketplace. https://assets.applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud-14/documents/92736/801146272055049-service-definition-document-2024-05-02-1537.pdf
Palantir Technologies UK. (2024b). Palantir Platform: Gotham. Pricing document [Prepared for the G-Cloud 14 framework]. Digital Marketplace. https://assets.applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud-14/documents/92736/801146272055049-pricing-document-2024-05-01-1419.pdf