Palantir moves to sue Mayor of London over blocked Met AI contract while health secretary reviews NHS deal

The US company's lawyers have sent MOPAC a pre-action letter signalling a legal challenge to overturn the decision, first reported by the Times. Palantir has characterised the intervention as politicised, with its UK chief executive Louis Mosley accusing the Mayor of "putting politics over public safety".

In his report to the MOPAC’s board's meeting of 11 June 2026, the Commissioner said that the force depended on artificial intelligence to deliver its budget and outlined the consequences of the programme's collapse.

The contract, worth £25.3m in 2026/27 with an optional £24.8m one-year extension, would have delivered the Unified Operational Analytics (UOA) platform: Palantir software designed to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations, including AI tools to cut the time taken to produce intelligence reports and to analyse data from mobile phones.

The Met's 2026/27 budget, drawn up against a shortfall of £100m this year and £125m next, provided for the removal of 1,150 full-time equivalent posts, of which 500 - including 100 in Serious and Organised Crime - were to be covered by UOA capabilities.

With the contract refused, the Commissioner told the Board the force is "scoping at pace tough choice options", conceding that a contingency list had not been developed because the force had hoped to avoid the reductions. He has separately suggested in broadcast interviews that up to 700 frontline posts could ultimately be affected.

The report states that the force will review and reset downwards its operational targets for 2026/27, attributing this explicitly to reduced adoption of advanced technology, while assessing whether other productivity-enhancing technology programmes can be accelerated to mitigate what it describes as a major reset of the UOA programme.

Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime Kaya Comer-Schwartz refused approval for the contract on 20 May. The Mayor's office has said the Met did not present its procurement strategy for approval as required and fully engaged with only one potential supplier, failing to adequately demonstrate value for money at that contract size. It insisted the decision was not politically motivated.

City Hall has, however, also voiced concerns about using public money to support firms that "act contrary to London's values", a reference to criticism of Palantir's work with the Israeli military and US immigration enforcement.

The Commissioner maintains the procurement was legally and commercially compliant. His report acknowledges a misalignment between the MPS and MOPAC over the approval of the force's Commercial Strategy and accepts a critical need to review and reset commercial governance between the two bodies. He wrote that the introduction of new technology and AI "needs to be done carefully, so we build Londoner's trust and confidence", citing the force's approach to Live Facial Recognition as the model it had begun to apply to UOA.

The Metropolitan Police has been pursuing AI enhancements vigorously in recent months. In late May the force published around 30 tender notices covering more than £300m of technology requirements, including video analytics, AI-assisted video searching and situational awareness applications. Nationally, the PoliceAI centre coordinating AI adoption across forces in England and Wales formally launched this week with £75m of Home Office backing.

The UK government has more widely been scrutinising Palantir's footprint in UK government footprint. Ministers have begun a full review of the company's £330m NHS Federated Data Platform contract, weighing whether to exercise a 2027 break clause, and a parliamentary committee warned last week that reliance on the company creates an "unacceptable point of weakness" in UK public infrastructure.

Concerns have been raised about patient confidentiality, public trust in NHS data being linked together and reliance on an American supplier.

The Commons’ Science, Innovation and Technology Committee last week warned that Palantir was “the most concerning example of the public sector’s growing reliance on a small number of major technology providers, including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services”.

MPs urge the government to exercise the break clause and either develop an in-house replacement or seek an alternative UK provider. They said ‘vendor lock-in’ should not be seen as inevitable and that reliance on a small number of American firms “represents a clear vulnerability, with ambitions to digitally transform public services potentially ‘at the mercy’ of foreign actors”.

Committee chair Chi Onwurahh said: “Only once the foundations of the UK’s digital infrastructure are secure, and public trust has been gained, should the government proceed with its planned digital ID. The success or failure of this project will be a defining test of its wider digital transformation ambitions."

Derek Bedlow and Mark Smulian

This article first appeared on Local Government Lawyer's new site for public sector information governance professionals, www.info-gov.uk.