PALANTIR is a national security threat, according to two high-level sources in the Ministry of Defence.

Two senior systems engineers reportedly warned on Friday against government involvement with the US security and AI tech firm, which has received millions in contracts in Britain’s public sector.

The insiders contradicted earlier statements from a department spokesperson who claimed that “all data remains sovereign and under the ownership of the MoD.”

They condemned the statements as ignorant and misleading, according to reporting from the Nerve website.

“Ministers clearly have a lack of understanding of Palantir’s technology” and are “missing the point entirely,” one source said.

“[They’re] missing the realities of data scraping, of aggregation and the fact that Palantir is building its own rich picture of our nation that they can use for their own ends.

“Allowing a single entity, foreign or domestic, to have such far-reaching, pervasive access is inherently dangerous. How our national cybersecurity centre has allowed this beggars belief.”

Despite the department claiming the data will remain in public hands, the whistleblowers warned that insights extracted from the data are not protected from the tech company.

“Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”

A second source with a background in intelligence said Palantir probably has “a complete profile on the whole UK population. At the very least I’d call that a security risk.”

Defence Minister Luke Pollard previously said: “All data used and developed in Palantir’s software deployed across the Ministry of Defence will remain under the ownership of the MoD.”

A spokesman for Palantir said: “These entirely false claims have no grounding in fact and no serious media outlet would report them.”