Union RNs demand: ‘Palantir out of our hospitals and out of our society’

On Thursday, Aug. 27, registered nurses – joined by patients and community allies  – will be mobilizing nationwide to demand hospitals and elected officials immediately cut ties with the artificial intelligence giant Palantir. The nurses belong to National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, which has opposed Palantir’s growth as a dangerous threat to democracy and human rights. 

Thursday's demonstrations are the largest coordinated, national actions NNU nurses and their allies have organized to date against Palantir. Each demonstration will visually represent the cost of Palantir’s technologies, including the approximately 500 babies and more than 6,000 children who have been detained by ICE and CBP since the second Trump term began. Palantir developed and now operates an application used by federal agents, called ELITE, which identifies people for arrest using improperly obtained Medicaid data.

“No part of the country has been untouched by the terror and violence of ICE and CBP, enabled by Palantir’s technology,” said NNU President Jamie Brown, RN. “While nurses have had to witness the fear and desperation of our patients and neighbors facing the threat of immigration raids, we have also seen hospitals start to buckle under conditions of extreme scarcity. That's why we have to resist a future where tech billionaires control our politics and our public resources. Otherwise, we will see fewer and fewer resources for working people – for our health care, for our education, for our housing.”

The August 27 actions will take place in Palo Alto, Calif.; Los Angeles, Calif.; Chicago, Ill.;  Washington, D.C.; Portland, Maine; Asheville, N.C., Austin, Texas; and New Orleans, La. 

Nurses say: “Palantir Out!”

Palantir’s growing notoriety – fueled by a growing wave of grassroots protests organized by nurses and criticism from employees, clients, and elected officials – have threatened its business and made its brand politically toxic in the United States and abroad. However, Palantir continues to benefit from its close relationship with the Trump administration, and, increasingly, with the U.S. hospital industry.

Already, Palantir manages more than one-fifth of U.S. hospital beds. For nurses, this marks a dangerous threat to the nursing profession, which is seeing a glut of untested and unregulated technology introduced into patient care settings.

The firm’s technology is already being used for automated scheduling and staffing in the largest for-profit hospital group in the country, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). Timpani, otherwise known as HCA Inspire, is used for nursing staff scheduling, removing hospitals’ local managers from staffing decisions and replacing them with an anonymous office in Nashville. 

Even these limited applications are already exacerbating the nationwide staffing crisis, as executives are rushing to use untested and unregulated technology to replace clinical judgement and make critical health care decisions like how many nurses are on a unit to take care of patients on a shift.

Other hospitals represented by NNU, like MaineHealth, are also using Palantir technologies. As with HCA, MaineHealth has refused to disclose the extent of the hospital’s cooperation with Palantir, including how patients’ and health care workers’ data are being protected. That lack of transparency only underscores the importance of demanding hospitals purge Palantir out of their operations. 

While the U.S. government and corporations award the company billions of dollars in contracts to Palantir, U.S. hospitals are facing a dire threat. The U.S. federal government has cut more than a trillion dollars in funding for Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies, which threatens health coverage for tens of thousands of people and risks closures and service cuts at more than 600 hospitals nationwide, according to new NNU research.

From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation. In Feb. 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract. 

In addition to working closely with the U.S. government, Palantir has also entered into partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support their “war effort” in Gaza which Israeli human rights organizations, the globe’s leading association of genocide scholars, and a United Nations Special Committee, among others, have concluded is a genocide. More than 1,500 health care workers, in addition to tens of thousands of innocent civilians, have been murdered in Gaza since Israeli forces invaded in October 2023.

National Nurses United is the largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses in the United States with more than 225,000 members nationwide. NNU affiliates include California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, DC Nurses Association, Michigan Nurses Association, Minnesota Nurses Association, and New York State Nurses Association.