More than a hundred registered nurses in red union T-shirts blocked traffic and chanted outside Palantir's former headquarters in Palo Alto on Thursday, calling on hospital executives and elected officials to cut ties with the AI software and data analytics giant.
The protest was part of a coordinated day of action by National Nurses United, which held similar demonstrations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and four other cities. The union said the events were its largest to date against Palantir, now based in the Miami area, reflecting growing alarm among bedside nurses about the company's rapid expansion into American hospitals. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI industry coverage.
Why Nurses Are Targeting Palantir
Nurses are worried that the company — which has won lucrative but controversial contracts with federal defense and immigration enforcement agencies — is extending its reach into healthcare, where its tools are beginning to shape staffing and patient-care decisions.
Hospital executives at HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the United States, have introduced Palantir's AI-powered tools for nurse staffing and scheduling. New York's Mount Sinai Health System uses the company's products to evaluate patient records and determine which patients are eligible for at-home care, according to Palantir's own website.
Craig Cedotal, a pediatric nurse at Kaiser Oakland who previously worked at an HCA hospital in New Orleans, said nurses want more transparency and a greater say in how AI is deployed on hospital floors.
"It's affecting staffing decisions and care decisions in ways that are not in line with what healthcare should be," said Cedotal, one of the protesters in Palo Alto. "A machine should not make decisions about how we take care of each other. That is not good healthcare."
The Palo Alto action built on smaller, earlier demonstrations — nurses at Maine's MaineHealth protested the system's ties to Palantir in recent weeks, according to local news reports — but Thursday's eight-city turnout marked a significant escalation for the union.
The core objections center on accountability and control: who decides how AI recommendations are weighted, whether nurses can override algorithmic staffing targets, and what happens to patient data flowing through platforms built by a company best known for government surveillance and military analytics.
Algorithmic staffing is a particular flashpoint. Hospitals facing chronic nursing shortages have increasingly turned to software that forecasts patient volume and computes how many staff each shift requires. Unions argue those calculations too often translate into leaner assignments and heavier workloads, with nurses pressured to treat algorithmic output as an efficiency benchmark rather than a suggestion.
Palantir's Healthcare Push Comes Amid Record Growth
Palantir's healthcare expansion is happening against the backdrop of extraordinary financial momentum. In a letter to shareholders this month, CEO Alex Karp said the company's business has nearly doubled in the span of 12 months. Palantir earned nearly $2 billion in net income during the first half of this year.
"The core of our business, in the United States, continues to expand at an unrelenting and breakneck pace," Karp wrote.
That growth has made Palantir one of the market's most celebrated AI winners — and a magnet for criticism. Civil liberties groups have long objected to its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Pentagon. The nurses' protests extend that scrutiny into a new domain, arguing that the same data-integration platforms used for military and enforcement work have no place making bedside decisions.
Hospital systems, for their part, have defended the tools as a way to manage staffing shortages and administrative burden. Palantir's healthcare products sit on top of existing hospital data, surfacing recommendations about scheduling, resource allocation and care pathways. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the protests.
California Moves to Set Guardrails
The demonstrations landed on a consequential day for healthcare AI regulation in the union's home state. On Thursday, California lawmakers approved a bill sponsored by the California Nurses Association that would establish guardrails on the deployment of AI in patient care.
The measure is among the most concrete legislative responses yet to concerns that algorithmic tools are making or influencing clinical and operational decisions without adequate oversight. If signed, it would give nurses and patients new protections as hospitals accelerate AI adoption — and could become a template for other states.
National Nurses United has signaled that the day of action was a beginning rather than a culmination. The union is pressing hospitals to disclose where AI is used, involve frontline nurses in procurement and deployment decisions, and guarantee human override over algorithmic recommendations.
The standoff reflects a broader question facing the healthcare industry in 2026: as AI vendors promise efficiency gains amid chronic staffing shortages, who gets to decide how much authority those systems are given — hospital executives, software companies, regulators, or the nurses who live with the consequences at the bedside?
For now, nurses are making clear they intend to be part of that answer. "We want a say in what technology touches our patients," Cedotal's message to hospital executives summed up. The eight-city turnout suggests the message will keep coming.
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