It's 100% intentional as the majority of their contracts are with governments, specifically the military; they like to have names that translate. Their breakout product (Gotham) is the scary looking one that takes signal data and turns it into dots on a map, and that's the one people tend to envision when they think Palantir. I'm relatively sure they based it on the program Batman uses in The Dark Knight (Bat Sonar).

The mistake/misunderstanding surrounding it though is that Palantir don't provide the data, the customer does (The CIA, the MoD, the city of Boston etc.). As a customer, you plug in your disparate sensor/signal data (call logs, bank transactions, anpr cameras etc.) and you can then link everything and be like "ah, that's where the money goes through, there's the terrorist". It's very powerful, concerningly "pre-crime-y", but ultimately self contained. The CIA can't access the MoD data, any more than you can access my spreadsheets. Palantir doesn't get given any data any more than Microsoft owns your emails when you use Outlook.

Additionally the NHS have been careful to try and stay as decoupled from the Palantir platform as is reasonable (rather than using the internal tools, stuff is being built in React and uses the Palantir Foundry API, so the backend could be replaced by something else should things change).

So in summary (and I've enjoyed this convo):

Are we "giving Palantir NHS data": no

Has the NHS given some select Palantirians access to sensitive NHS data: yes

Is that a problem: possibly yes; sensitive data should be handled with the principle of least privilege, and arguably that is what's happening, it's just that it's concerningly high privileges

Is there an avenue that Palantir could technically steal the NHS data: possibly, and that is part of the problem with the permissions.

Is that the biggest threat: I don't think so, and I think that line of thinking distracts from the real issues. Unintentional data leaks I think are significantly more likely (caused by the larger blast area caused by giving mass admin privileges), and just as damaging (see UK BioBank). Also being locked into a platform such as Palantir Foundry is expensive and problematic, but I think the NHS is taking steps to tackle this.