In this paper we address recent years'' attempt to include data science in school mathematics treated from the perspective of mathematical modelling. In our analysis we draw on the notion of scale of levels of co-determinacy from the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD) to identify the options or limitations for implementing data science in mathematics education as part of mathematical modelling. We analyse trends in educational debate, curriculum documents, textbooks and teaching material developed for Danish upper secondary school and called ‘Data analysis and Cancer’. We identify fruitful conditions and delimiting constraints for merging mathematics and data science in upper secondary mathematics.