TL;DR

Palantir has withdrawn its High Court claim against MOPAC, the mayor’s policing office, over the blocked £50m Metropolitan Police contract, and the block stays in place. A joint statement issued on Wednesday 14 October says the decision was “not based on Palantir’s values or ethics” and that the company may bid once the procurement is rerun. The case is the second Palantir police matter to end this week, after an East Midlands unit dropped its trial, and the Met’s budget still assumes AI will replace 500 posts.

The withdrawal closes a dispute that had been heading for trial in January, and which would have involved a search of Sadiq Khan’s texts and emails. Neither side has paid the other, and each carries its own legal costs.

What the joint statement says

MOPAC conceded that an earlier comment from the mayor’s spokesman “could have incorrectly created the impression” that Palantir’s values had counted against it, and said it “does not have, and has never had, any policy of not contracting with Palantir”. The decision rested, it said, on the legal duty it has to scrutinise spending and secure value for money. It is now rerunning the procurement with the Met “with all due expediency”, and Palantir is “free and welcomed” to take part.

Khan said Palantir “makes a significant contribution to jobs and investment in the capital”, and that organisations across the UK had procured its services lawfully.

How the dispute arose

We covered the original block in May. Writing to the commissioner at the time, deputy mayor Kaya Comer-Schwartz said the force had given serious consideration to only one supplier and had not sought MOPAC’s sign-off on its procurement strategy, which she called a “clear and serious breach” of the rules. Palantir’s June lawsuit argued MOPAC had applied an “unlawful veto” by weighing its ethics, a claim MOPAC always rejected.

The contract covered AI software meant to speed up intelligence work on criminal cases. Sir Mark Rowley said at the London Policing Board in June that the system would have let the Met shed 500 jobs against budget gaps of £100m in the current year and £125m in the next. The force’s 2026-27 budget plans 1,150 job cuts, with AI expected to take on the work of 500 of those roles, and Rowley has said officer numbers relative to London’s population were lower in March than at any time since 1981.

Earlier this week we reported that the East Midlands Special Operations Unit had ended its own Palantir trial.

Looking forward

The re-run procurement is where the substance now lies. MOPAC’s complaint was about process, and a competition that genuinely tests more than one supplier is the obvious cure. In our view the harder question for the Met is the budget: its savings plan depends on AI absorbing 500 roles, and that assumption now waits on a procurement that has only just restarted.