LONDON Mayor Sadiq Khan has blocked a £50m Metropolitan Police contract with US surveillance technology company Palantir, citing a ‘clear and serious breach’ of procurement rules.
Scotland Yard had been in advanced talks to use Palantir’s AI to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations.
The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), which must approve contracts of this size, withheld sign-off after finding the Met had seriously engaged with only one potential supplier.
Khan’s office also said the force risked technological lock-in and had not ‘ensured or demonstrated value for money’.
A spokesperson added that Londoners expected public money to go to companies that ‘share the values of our city’.
In a letter to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, Khan’s deputy mayor for policing and crime, Kaya Comer-Schwartz, wrote: ‘I have not been provided with any acceptable explanation for this failure, which I regard as a clear and serious breach of the applicable procedural requirements.’
She warned the botched process had created ‘legal and reputation risks’ for both Scotland Yard and the Mayor’s office.
Mopac also found that a recent Met trial of Palantir’s AI to monitor officer conduct had been awarded directly, without advertisement or open competition, under a contract valued just below the threshold requiring City Hall approval.
The Met had described that trial as a success, saying it led to hundreds of officers being investigated for misconduct.
Palantir, co-founded by Trump-aligned tech billionaire Peter Thiel, holds more than £600m in UK public sector contracts spanning the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the Financial Conduct Authority, and several police forces.
The company also serves the Israeli military and Trump’s ICE deportation operations, and has been deeply implicated in facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands of people have signed petitions demanding the government cancel its contracts with the firm, including a £330m NHS England data platform deal that MPs have called ‘dreadful’ and ‘shameful’.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood called in January for forces to ‘ramp up use of AI’ at ‘pace and scale’, with £115m earmarked for a national AI policing platform.