Sadiq Khan Blocks £50m Palantir AI Deal With Met Police

Sadiq Khan has blocked the Metropolitan Police from signing a £50m deal with US spytech giant Palantir and accused the force of breaching procurement rules. 

Khan’s spokesperson said Londoners only want to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.

Palantir – which provides military tech to the IDF and bespoke tools to facilitate ICE raids in the US – already holds more than £670m in government contracts in the UK, including a £240m deal with the Ministry of Defence and a highly controversial £330m patient data contract with the NHS.

The Met was in talks with Palantir to buy its AI tech in a two-year deal to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. Khan stepped in to block the contract – which would’ve been the biggest yet in British policing – on 21 May.

While the Met has its own procurement team, the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) has final sign-off on contracts worth over £500,000. 

Mopac withheld its approval of the Palantir contract, saying Scotland Yard had only seriously engaged with a single potential supplier – Palantir.

The Met failed to get Mopac’s approval for its procurement strategy without “acceptable explanation”, which Khan’s deputy for policing and crime, Kaya Comer-Schwartz, said in a letter to the Met commissioner Mark Rowley she regards “as a clear and serious breach of the applicable procedural requirements”. 

Comer-Schwartz added that the procurement process created “legal and reputation risks” for both Scotland Yard and the mayor. 

Khan’s office warned that the Met risked getting locked into Palantir’s tech and that the proposed deal had not “ensured or demonstrated value for money”.

A recent Met Police trial of Palantir’s AI tech to root out corrupt or poorly performing cops was carried out under a directly-awarded contract with no advertising or open competition, Mopac found.  

Palantir was a client of disgraced former US ambassador Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel. Mandelson accompanied prime minister Keir Starmer on a visit to the company’s Washington DC headquarters in February 2025. There is no record of what was discussed.