Sadiq Khan blocked a £50M Met Police deal with Palantir. Scotland Yard had only talked to one supplier.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked the Metropolitan Police from signing a £50 million AI contract with Palantir on May 21. The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the body that oversees the force, said the procurement process had a “clear and serious breach” of the rules: Scotland Yard had only seriously engaged with one supplier, never submitted its procurement strategy for approval, and could not demonstrate value for money.

The contract would have been the largest AI deal in British policing. Palantir was set to provide tooling to automate intelligence work on criminal investigations.

What the Met was buying

Scotland Yard’s pitch was an AI-driven intelligence layer designed to sit on top of its existing case-management systems, automatically pulling together evidence trails, cross-referencing suspects, and surfacing patterns across investigations. It is the same general shape as the Palantir Gotham deployment the Met has been piloting since 2024, and the proposed £50M contract would have expanded that pilot into the force’s primary intelligence platform.

According to Novara Media, an earlier Met trial had used a directly-awarded contract with no open competition. The expanded deal followed the same pattern. MOPAC’s letter said the force engaged with only one potential supplier and offered no acceptable explanation for skipping a competitive tender.

Khan’s reasoning

Khan’s office framed the block as a procurement issue first, an ethics issue second. A spokesperson for the Mayor said Londoners want to see “public money being paid to companies that share the values of our city.” That’s the editorial line; the legal one is what stopped the contract.

Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime Kaya Comer-Schwartz wrote that the way the Met had moved through the process created “legal and reputation risks” for both Scotland Yard and the mayor. Without MOPAC sign-off, the deal could have been challenged by losing bidders and unwound in court at a later date.

Matt Cane, general secretary of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 officers, was sharper. “This use of AI will seriously damage the trust Metropolitan Police officers have in the force,” he said in a statement to LBC. The federation’s concern is dual: that operational decisions get outsourced to a vendor’s model, and that the Met locks itself into a single proprietary stack it can’t replace later.

Palantir’s UK footprint

Palantir already holds more than £670 million in UK government contracts. The biggest line items are a £240M deal with the Ministry of Defence and a £330M patient-data contract with NHS England. The Met deal would have added the country’s largest police force to that list.

Novara also noted Palantir’s wider context: the company supplies analytics tools to the Israel Defense Forces and the technology used in ICE deportation operations in the United States. Former US ambassador Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm has represented Palantir in the UK; Mandelson accompanied Prime Minister Keir Starmer to Palantir’s Washington headquarters in February 2025. Palantir announced a £1.5 billion UK investment last September, intended in part to win exactly this kind of police contract.

What’s still unknown

• Whether the Met re-tenders. The £50M ceiling stays; what changes is the bidder list. Scotland Yard hasn’t said whether it will rerun the process or scrap the project.
• What happens to the existing pilot. The Gotham pilot the Met has been running with Palantir since 2024 is not affected by today’s block. That contract remains live.
• How other UK forces respond. Several police forces had been watching the Met’s deal as a template. The block does not bar them from buying Palantir; it does set a precedent that direct awards face oversight resistance.

Palantir had not commented publicly at the time of the MOPAC letter. The Met confirmed receipt and said it would respond in due course.

What this means for you

If you work in UK public-sector procurement, the precedent is the headline: a £50M AI award that skipped competitive tender just got vetoed at the mayoral level, on procurement grounds first and politics second. The procedural argument is the one that stuck. That’s a useful template for any agency-of-the-mayor pushing back on a same-shaped award.

For developers in the broader AI-for-government space, the block reads as a market opening. Palantir’s pole position assumed there was nobody else in the room. Today’s letter forces a tender, which means competitors get a written brief and a window to bid. The Met still wants the capability. It just won’t get it through a sole-source award.