Met extends Palantir AI deal after mayor blocked £50m contract

TL;DR:

• The Metropolitan Police have been granted a 12-month extension to their Palantir AI pilot while a new procurement process runs.
• It follows Sadiq Khan’s office blocking a £50m deal over a “clear and serious breach” of procurement rules; Palantir has threatened a court challenge.
• The pilot has pooled data on around 45,000 staff to flag potential officer misconduct.

Britain’s largest police force has secured breathing room for its most contentious AI project. The Metropolitan Police will keep using Palantir’s software for a further 12 months while it runs a fresh procurement process, weeks after the Mayor of London blocked a £50m contract to make the arrangement permanent.

A procurement clash, not a capability one

The dispute is about how the deal was struck rather than what the tool does. Last month the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) said there had been a “clear and serious breach” of procurement rules, with police having seriously considered only one supplier. Palantir’s lawyers responded by signalling an intention to challenge the decision in court. The compromise lets the Met retain the existing capability during an open tender that other vendors can bid for.

The underlying pilot is striking in scope. Assistant Commissioner Rachel Williams said the system had, for the first time, brought together data the force already holds to surface “standards, welfare or cultural concerns”. Commissioner Mark Rowley said it had pooled information on roughly 45,000 people across the organisation, shifting to a “discovery-based model” that proactively spots problem officers rather than waiting for complaints — a capability that sits uneasily alongside the civil-liberties concerns that have long dogged Palantir’s public-sector work.

The story lands the same day as Rowley’s warning that police risk being outwitted by AI-enabled criminals, and it echoes the divisive debate over AI facial recognition in Peterborough. Together they sketch a force leaning hard into AI while the governance scaffolding is still being built.

Looking forward

The 12-month window turns a political flashpoint into a procurement exercise — but it does not resolve the deeper question of whether City Hall and Scotland Yard can agree on how surveillance-grade AI enters British policing. Expect the tender to be watched closely by rival vendors and rights groups alike, with the threat of Palantir’s legal challenge still hanging over the process.