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In February 2025, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer traveled to Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time since the latter reentered office. They talked tariffs, Ukraine, and an invitation to visit King Charles. That was routine: The prime minister’s next stop was more unusual. Starmer headed to the showroom of software giant Palantir Technologies for a meeting arranged by Peter Mandelson, then the U.K. ambassador to the United States, whose now-shuttered lobbying firm Global Counsel counted Palantir as a client worth more than 30,000 pounds (about $40,900) a month. Footage shows Starmer flanked by American military personnel and Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, as he inspects an attack drone.

Civil society groups such as the Good Law Project and Foxglove had questions about the visit, and about the 240 million pound ($327.1 million) contract that Palantir was awarded shortly afterward. I have a different set of questions: Why does an enterprise data-integration company have a showroom? Why does that showroom contain weaponized drone platforms and screens relaying satellite feeds? What, exactly, was the prime minister being shown, and what was he meant to feel?

In February 2025, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer traveled to Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time since the latter reentered office. They talked tariffs, Ukraine, and an invitation to visit King Charles. That was routine: The prime minister’s next stop was more unusual. Starmer headed to the showroom of software giant Palantir Technologies for a meeting arranged by Peter Mandelson, then the U.K. ambassador to the United States, whose now-shuttered lobbying firm Global Counsel counted Palantir as a client worth more than 30,000 pounds (about $40,900) a month. Footage shows Starmer flanked by American military personnel and Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, as he inspects an attack drone.

Civil society groups such as the Good Law Project and Foxglove had questions about the visit, and about the 240 million pound ($327.1 million) contract that Palantir was awarded shortly afterward. I have a different set of questions: Why does an enterprise data-integration company have a showroom? Why does that showroom contain weaponized drone platforms and screens relaying satellite feeds? What, exactly, was the prime minister being shown, and what was he meant to feel?

Unlike its competitors, Palantir places a military and intelligence aesthetic front and center, and not just when selling to military clients. It self-consciously evokes the visual grammar of post-9/11 spy, war, and superhero films: dark “tactical” interfaces, dense webs of link-analysis graphs, and an “AI-defined” truck for the U.S. Army. Its London office has blacked-out windows and no signage; visitors reportedly sign nondisclosure agreements simply to enter. The showroom exists to immerse the visitor in that world of elite operators and threat feeds rather than the quotidian reality of data visualization. It’s theater, and so is the product.

This approach has paid off extremely well for Palantir in the U.K. In the London Review of Books, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin describe a company with an unprecedented level of political........

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