Palantir hired four ex-Ministry of Defence officials last year, with its latest recruit joining months before the US spyware giant won its biggest ever contract with the department, openDemocracy can reveal.
On 31 August 2025, Barnaby Kistruck left his role as the Ministry of Defence’s director of industrial strategy, prosperity and exports – marking the end of a career in the civil service spanning almost two decades, in which he’d worked primarily on national security and defence.
Nine days later, he took up his new position as senior counsellor at Palantir, a US tech firm with close ties to the Trump administration that specialises in providing AI-powered military and surveillance systems and data analytics.
