- NYC Health + Hospitals will not renew its $4 million Palantir contract when it expires in October 2026
- The contract gave Palantir access to patient health notes for Medicaid billing optimization, with a clause allowing de-identified data use beyond research
- CEO Mitchell Katz testified the contract was “always intended to be a short-term solution” and claimed an “absolute firewall” protected patient data
- The decision follows sustained pressure from the Purge Palantir coalition and parallel NHS scrutiny in the UK
What Happened
New York City’s public hospital system, the largest municipal healthcare provider in the United States, announced it will not renew its contract with Palantir Technologies when the agreement expires in October 2026. NYC Health + Hospitals president and CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz testified before the New York City Council on March 16 that the hospital system’s relationship with Palantir would end. The Intercept reported on the contract termination following its earlier investigation that exposed the deal.
“We haven’t had any problems. And we’re going to end the contract anyway because we always intended it to be a short-term solution,” Katz told the council. He maintained that an “absolute firewall” existed between patient data and Palantir’s government customers, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Why It Matters
The contract allowed Palantir to scan patient health notes to help the hospital system claim more money through Medicaid and other public benefit programs. A provision in the agreement also stated that, with permission from the city agency, Palantir could de-identify patients’ protected health information and use it for purposes beyond research. Data privacy experts have warned that de-identification is no longer the safeguard it once was.
Sharona Hoffman, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, noted that AI capabilities are making it increasingly feasible to re-identify supposedly anonymized health data. Ari Ezra Waldman of UC Irvine expressed concern that the contract’s broad data-use clause suggested the city “either lacked bargaining power or failed to recognize the risk during negotiations.”
Technical Details
Contract documents obtained through public records requests show NYC Health + Hospitals paid Palantir nearly $4 million since November 2023. The system used Palantir’s Foundry platform to automate the scanning of clinical notes, identifying billable services that human reviewers had missed. The goal was revenue recovery from public insurance programs, a common challenge for safety-net hospitals that treat large uninsured and underinsured populations. The Intercept’s initial investigation in February 2026 brought the contract to public attention, triggering the protests and council hearings that led to the non-renewal decision.
The de-identification clause is particularly notable because modern re-identification techniques, including AI-driven cross-referencing of datasets, have demonstrated that stripping names and Social Security numbers from health records is insufficient to prevent individuals from being identified. Research published in Nature Communications has shown that as few as 15 demographic attributes can uniquely identify 99.98 percent of Americans in any dataset.
Who’s Affected
NYC Health + Hospitals serves approximately 1.4 million patients annually across 11 acute care hospitals, five post-acute care facilities, and more than 70 community health centers. The system is the largest municipal healthcare provider in the country and primarily serves low-income, immigrant, and uninsured New Yorkers, populations that advocates argue are disproportionately vulnerable to surveillance and data misuse. The Purge Palantir campaign, a coalition including nurses, ACT UP members, and the American Friends Service Committee, had pressured the hospital system to sever ties.
Kenny Morris of the American Friends Service Committee said: “Palantir makes money by enabling mass violence in the U.S. and around the world. They should have no place in our hospitals, our pension funds, or our government.”
What’s Next
NYC Health + Hospitals said it will transition to systems built entirely in-house after the contract expires, with no data shared with Palantir going forward. The hospital system has not specified what technology will replace Palantir’s Foundry platform for revenue recovery operations, or whether the transition will affect the billing efficiency gains the contract was designed to deliver.
The decision arrives as Palantir faces parallel scrutiny in the United Kingdom over its 330 million pound agreement with the National Health Service. A March 12 briefing by health charity Medact warned that Palantir’s software could enable data-driven abuses of power, and fewer than half of UK health authorities had adopted the technology as of mid-2025. Campaign organizers say the New York decision strengthens their case against the NHS contract. Palantir has not publicly commented on the non-renewal.
