TL;DR:

• The Metropolitan police has held talks with Palantir that could see the UK’s largest force adopt the US firm’s AI for automating intelligence analysis on criminal investigations.
• Palantir’s existing UK public-sector contracts already exceed £500 million across the NHS, Ministry of Defence, councils and 11 smaller forces — a Met deal would mark a step-change in concentration.
• Internal Met intelligence officers have told the Guardian they don’t need “£100m AI” and would prefer existing systems worked properly — a tension that the Home Office’s “Police.AI” push has so far masked.

The Metropolitan police has held talks with Palantir about buying its intelligence-analysis AI, the Guardian reported on Tuesday. Palantir demonstrated its systems to senior officers in the Met’s intelligence division last month, and staff have been tasked with identifying intelligence workflows that AI could automate. No deal is confirmed; the Met declined to comment and Palantir declined to comment.

Scale and context

Palantir’s UK public-sector footprint is already substantial. Existing contracts across the NHS (including a £330 million patient-data deal now under parliamentary pressure), the Ministry of Defence (£240 million, signed after Peter Mandelson took Keir Starmer to Palantir’s Washington showroom), councils and 11 smaller police forces including Bedfordshire collectively exceed £500 million. Bringing the Met — 46,000 officers and staff — into that footprint would represent a material expansion, and internal expectations are for a multi-million pound contract if the talks mature.

Palantir already supplies the Met with experimental AI for detecting rogue officers, so the commercial relationship is not new. What would be new is the category: intelligence data touching victims’ personal information, processed in a US-owned system whose parent company’s political positioning has become a liability for procurement teams.

The political temperature

MPs have in the last week demanded ministers scrap the NHS England deal over Palantir’s ties to the Trump administration and the Israeli military, and criticised a manifesto the firm published on X that parliamentarians called “the ramblings of a super villain”. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has meanwhile pushed police to “ramp up use of AI” — including a £115 million platform-build for identifying, testing and scaling policing AI, a programme some are calling “Police.AI”.

Met officials quoted anonymously pushed back: “We don’t need £100m AI. We would like the more basic systems we already have to work properly.” That is a distinct editorial tension worth flagging: the political velocity on UK AI-policing procurement is outrunning the operational view from inside the force.

Looking forward

A Met–Palantir contract would be the most politically exposed AI procurement in UK policing to date. Expect scrutiny from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Home Affairs Select Committee and civil-liberties groups, and expect the contract — if signed — to become the reference point for how NHS, MoD and local authority Palantir deals are judged. The Cabinet Office’s Central Digital and Data Office may need to publish clearer public-sector AI procurement guidance before the next contract cycle.