The UN's World Food Programme is finalizing a five-year renewal of its contract with US data software firm Palantir despite “key privacy concerns” raised in a leaked 2025 internal audit. The audit, seen by PassBlue and FRANCE 24, reveals UN misgivings about allowing Palantir to process data for the world’s largest humanitarian supply chain.
The World Food Programme (WFP) manages one of the biggest biometric databases in the world. Its SCOPE system contains information on millions of people, many of them beneficiaries of global humanitarian aid.
To help the WFP track humanitarian aid and manage its supply-chain data, Palantir developed the Digital Operations and Transformation System (DOTS).
Founded in 2003, Palantir – named after the all-seeing eye in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings – was partly seeded with money from the US intelligence community. It has since developed AI-powered data-integration software that can collate, process and analyze massive amounts of data on governments, organizations or individuals – software that is now deeply embedded in the US military and surveillance complex.
Within the UN itself, there is a split between those who resist Palantir’s growing involvement in its agencies – who want to ensure that any adoption of related AI-powered programs is responsable and ethical – and the move-fast-and-break-things crowd trumpeting “efficiency”.
A cyberattack on the Rome-based WFP in May exposed sensitive data on thousands of aid beneficiaries in Gaza, underscoring concerns about data protection. However, the WFP said the attack was limited to its Self-Registration Application for Palestine, where displaced people can sign up for aid, but which has "no direct connection" to Palantir software.
Some WFP personnel have expressed concern that data from the UN agency on beneficiaries could be used to train Palantir's data systems. Some are also apprehensive about partnering with a software company whose technologies have reportedly been used by US authorities in immigration enforcement and by military forces for lethal operations in the Middle East, notably in Iran and Gaza. To quote CEO Alex Karp, Palantir's product is "used on occasion to kill people".
Despite the misgivings, a WFP spokesperson said the agency is set to renew its contract with Palantir.
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A new report by independent researchers Tina Indrani Mason and Rose Worden for the "Tech for Bad" initiative says the WFP is still “investing heavily” in DOTS and warns of a “contravention of UN principles”.
Entitled “Palantir and the World Food Programme: The egregious partnership at the heart of the world’s largest humanitarian supply chain,” the report describes the UN’s partnership with Palantir as “a clear conflict of interest and a grave abdication of ethical responsibility”.
'Inadequate risk management'
Florida-based Palantir specializes in creating software that can sift through huge quantities of data and detect patterns or connections that would take human analysts weeks or months to uncover. But it underscores that it is not a "data-mining" company.
The leaked internal audit by the WFP’s Office of the Inspector General, dated August 2025, focuses on information and communications technology, highlighting “inadequate risk management” and a lack of “proper guidelines and policy” on data privacy in the WFP’s relationship with Palantir. The problem is listed as “‘high priority”.
"Since the inception of the partnership, key privacy concerns raised by both internal and external stakeholders regarding the use of DOTS have not been adequately addressed," the audit states.
The audit was completed as the original pro bono contract between WFP and Palantir was quietly extended.
“We are finalizing a renewal of our existing five-year agreement. The general scope and terms of the contract remain the same [as in the 2019 contract],” a WFP spokesperson told FRANCE 24 and PassBlue. This renewal is set to be signed in August, according to WFP sources.
The leaked audit states that the WFP “lacks a unified and trusted system” for managing its data, adding that “reputational considerations surrounding the partnership [with Palantir] have led to institutional uncertainty”.
It also raises questions about the potential costs and complications of ending the partnership. “At present, there is no clearly defined exit strategy for DOTS, nor clarity on the potential costs that may arise should the partnership be terminated,” the audit stated.
It notes that the WFP’s technology division “has assessed opportunities to export and save data from DOTS in case of the partnership’s termination”, but that such a plan has not been presented to key WFP or Palantir parties and “substantial investments” into DOTS continue.
This was not the first time Palantir involvement had been red-flagged by WFP; an audit from 2020, conducted by the agency’s legal office, also raised concerns. The team within the legal office that carried out due diligence audits was disbanded in June 2025 and such assessments are now entrusted to the WFP’s internal audit group, which reports directly to the head of the agency.
The leaked audit provided further details about the original 2019 five-year contract with WFP.
An expert in humanitarian aid familiar with the contract – who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals – told PassBlue and FRANCE 24 that it contains a provision that could legally allow Palantir to “train its software” on UN data.
“In the User Licensing Agreement they had specific language that WFP wanted put in to prevent retention of the raw data by Palantir, but then they had a sneaky line, which is, ‘Palantir reserves the right to utilise data for performance improvement of the system.’”
That line “would potentially allow Palantir to use the data to train algorithms”, the source noted.
The language appears similar to Palantir’s other user-agreement contracts, including its partnership with Britain’s National Health Service, according to Privacy International, a UK-based NGO.
Privacy International examined the details of Palantir’s 2019 license agreement with the US Department of Defense, which included the following clause:
“10. Usage Data. Palantir may collect analytics, statistics, metrics, or other usage data related to Customer’s use of the Products (i) in order to provide the Products to Customer; (ii) for statistical use (provided that such data is not personally identifiable); or (iii) to monitor, analyze, maintain and improve the Products.”
Palantir's business model is different from consumer AI companies in that it sells “enterprise software” – tech built for organizations to help them manage data.
The company's website states that customer data is not used to train its models unless explicitly requested, nor do third-party-hosted services have access to client information for use in training.
"Palantir does not use, retain or sell customer data for its own purposes," a spokesman said. "We do not use customer data to train models."
But if a contract contains a User Licensing Agreement that grants Palantir the right to use customer data for "performance improvement", it could potentially use that information to train or improve its own AI systems.
“Software providers have always wanted usage data to improve performance,” which helps them identify popular features, peak usage times and application failures. “And so they routinely ask for that right in their contracts,” said Chris Wlach, a New York-based technology lawyer.
“But today, data can also help train algorithms and AI models. So users have to approach these clauses more cautiously. They need to ask, 'What exactly is my ‘usage data’ and how, exactly, is it being used?'”
Former Palantir employee Juan Sebastian Pinto explained to PassBlue and FRANCE 24 how the firm could also use client data indirectly.
“Although Palantir doesn't allegedly train its systems on client data, it can develop use-cases/applications with that data and sell it to another client, potentially in a dual-use (weaponized) capacity," he said in a Signal message.
This could be problematic for the UN.
“The data that WFP and other humanitarian agencies have access to about some of the world’s most vulnerable people provides an otherwise unavailable training data set for understanding how civilian populations physically move during conflict, seek food, water and shelter, and provides insights to their mortality and morbidity,” said Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.
In the wrong hands, such information could be deadly.
“Humanitarian agencies are de facto stewards of both the personally and demographically identifiable information about the prime targets of multiple global militaries and intelligence services,” Raymond said.
The "Tech for Bad" report goes even further: “When hunger is ‘being increasingly exploited as a weapon of war’ WFP must reassess whether embedding the software of a complicit US and allied-military contractor within their data ecosystem – pertaining to the supply of food – compromises them.”
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WFP told FRANCE 24 and PassBlue that it “undertakes an extensive due diligence process to ensure any services or capabilities provided adhere to WFP's strict data governance, privacy and security needs”.
“WFP processes and controls all its own data and has stringent safeguards built into all its technology contracts,” it added.
‘Hot potato’
The WFP first announced its partnership with Palantir on February 5, 2019. But the agency had been working on a pilot project with the company since 2017, around the time David Beasley, a prominent US politician and Trump admirer, took over leadership of the WFP.
Palantir confirmed it has been partnering with the WFP since 2017.
Enrica Porcari, WFP’s chief information officer and director of technology at the time, said that although the Palantir system had access to records of humanitarian aid distributions, there was no personally identifiable data about beneficiaries.
According to UN insiders, Palantir aggressively pursued access to SCOPE but a small group of WFP staffers brokered a deal in which the biometric data would be fenced off.
Nevertheless, the Syrian Red Crescent withdrew from SCOPE in 2019, fearing its data would be shared with the US software giant.
Details about WFP’s partnership with Palantir are not widely shared. One senior WFP official told FRANCE 24 and PassBlue that he signed a nondisclosure agreement.
“There was a deliberate choice, an unspoken rule not to communicate on Palantir,” according to Pedro Garbellini, a former communications officer in the WFP’s technology division. “Nobody wanted to deal with it due to the reputational risks.”
Garbellini, who worked for the WFP from September 2021 to December 2025, said there was a dispute between the communications teams from the technology and partnership divisions in 2024 over who would have to deal with Palantir-related issues.
There was an unwritten rule: “Never speak about Palantir.”
The subject was a “hot potato”, Garbellini said.
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‘Why are we still partnering with Palantir?’
Palantir posted a social media manifesto in April extolling the virtues of US power and issuing a call to arms for the West in an era of AI-driven geopolitical competition. Critics described it as a "disturbing" vision that "embraces AI state surveillance of citizens".
Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel, a libertarian turned Trump donor, has explicitly stated: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
CEO Karp has famously called Palantir “completely anti-woke” and called for those undervaluing the company to be sprayed with “fentanyl-laced urine”.
At a departmental meeting at WFP headquarters in Rome in April, one employee who read the manifesto asked a crucial question: “Why are we still partnering with Palantir?”
The question was met with a round of applause from UN staff.
It was also a question that the acting director of the agency had been asked over dinner at the end of January, according to UN insiders.
A UN human rights expert, Andrew Gilmour, handed acting WFP director Carl Skau a letter signed by UN staff members from multiple departments calling on WFP to end its ties to Palantir.
The letter read, in part, that the staffers were concerned that WFP “may be in contradiction of its core human rights due diligence obligations” due to its relationship with Palantir. According to a source, Skau acknowledged that the relationship was problematic but said it would be hard for the WFP to get out of it.
WFP systems, he explained, were now so intertwined with Palantir that it would be expensive and arduous to move supply-chain logistics to another platform. Besides, he said, Palantir had helped the WFP save money and improve its efficiency.
Skau did not respond to FRANCE 24's questions about the exchange. Palantir declined to be interviewed but said in an email it is "proud to partner with the World Food Programme".
Funding fears
The Palantir contract extension comes as the Trump administration pushes an "America First" candidate, Luke J. Lindberg, as the agency’s new chief. Lindberg is a senior official with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which signed a $300 million deal with Palantir in April.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has reportedly "slow walked" Lindberg's approval process, according to a well-placed UN source, and it is unclear whether the new WFP head will be named before the end of his term. The WFP is usually led by an American.
As the United States threatens to withdraw more funding from the UN, some senior WFP staff believe ending the agency’s partnership with Palantir could prompt retaliation from the Trump administration, according to UN insiders who spoke to FRANCE 24 and PassBlue on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
A 34 percent reduction in WFP funding from major donors in 2025 – particularly from the US, the agency’s largest contributor – triggered major layoffs and restructuring, with plans to cut nearly a third of its global workforce this year.
While the $45 million contract the WFP signed with Palantir in 2019 is pro bono – enabling Palantir to get a tax-break for the full book value – it "is also a vendor lock-in contract", one WFP employee explained on condition of anonymity.
This type of agreement can make a customer dependent on a single supplier for products or services – making it expensive, technically difficult and legally onerous to breach.
The WFP told FRANCE 24 and PassBlue it is not locked into any single technology provider.
The staffer said a WFP assessment found that developing a similar system internally would cost an estimated $20 million.
But this could prove to be cheaper in the long run than the current Palantir partnership, the person said. For example, consultants for WFP who are trained to use Palantir’s systems charge much higher rates. And Palantir could start demanding payment for the use of its programs at any time.
WFP said that using the pro bono software nevertheless requires the agency to pay for third-party cloud infrastructure, hosting and additional support. The UN’s procurement site shows payments to Palantir totaling more than $10.5 million from 2017 through 2024.
One employee with extensive knowledge of WFP technology described Palantir’s software as “mediocre”.
“It doesn’t bring anything new compared to what is already available on the open internet,” the person explained. “It’s like they put some makeup on a product that already existed.”
Another former WFP staff member who used Palantir software extensively said that around 98 percent of WFP operations use DOTS, which Palantir designed to connect data across the organization’s many fragmented systems.
They described it as “the best tool in the sector”, adding: “Nothing comes close to it. Everyone has access to it, you can build and ingest your own datasets, develop your own tools, and drive hyper-efficiency across the board. There is very little oversight if you’re a self-starter.”
They added that the platform significantly improves efficiency and can be used, for example, to optimize the entire supply chain.
Removing Palantir would “collapse” WFP’s supply chain, the staffer said.
Global reckoning
As Palantir’s worldwide influence grows, so does the global resistance to it.
An international grassroots movement, called Purge Palantir, has successfully lobbied several entities, including New York City’s public hospital system, to end partnerships with Palantir.
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has reportedly been put on notice to prepare for an eventual break from the company after coming under pressure from members of parliament. The NHS admitted in May that some Palantir staff could access identifiable patient data despite previous statements to the contrary.
Meanwhile, a deal between the UK's financial watchdog and Palantir has sparked fears that Britons' financial information could be shared with the Trump administration, given that US law allows the government to access US company data by issuing a FISA warrant.
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France’s domestic spy agency, the DGSI, decided in June to end its partnership with Palantir and opt for a domestic competitor due to national security concerns, as has Germany's internal security service.
France's ambassador for digital affairs and AI, Clara Chappaz, told FRANCE 24 and PassBlue that “the DGSI's decision to stop partnering with Palantir was taken, in part, over concerns about data sovereignty and digital resilience”.
Given the mounting global pushback, many employees are wondering why the UN continues to partner with the controversial data software giant on delivering aid to the world's most vulnerable people.
This FRANCE 24 investigation was published in coordination with PassBlue. Damilola Banjo and Khatya Chhor contributed to this report.
