London Mayor Blocks Palantir

Summary

A £50m Met police deal with the controversial US tech company Palantir has been blocked by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, with City Hall citing a “clear and serious breach” of procurement rules.Scotland Yard had been in talks, revealed by the Guardian last month, to use Palantir’s AI technology to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. But Khan intervened on Thursday to stop the flagship contract, which would have been Palantir’s largest yet in British policing.The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), which must approve contracts of this size, withheld approval, saying Scotland Yard had seriously engaged with only one potential supplier, Palantir. Khan’s office also said the Met risked becoming locked into Palantir’s technology and that the proposed deal had not “ensured or demonstrated value for money”.His spokesperson said Londoners only wanted to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.There does not appear to be any block on Palantir bidding for a similar future contract and Mopac said it wanted to work with the Met on a “new procurement at pace”.There is rising public and political concern about Palantir’s widening reach in UK public services, where it has more than £600m in contracts with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the Financial Conduct Authority and several smaller police forces. The US company was co-founded by the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel and also serves the Israeli military and Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown operations.It worked with Peter Mandelson’s lobbying company, Global Counsel, until its collapse, and Mandelson took the prime minister, Keir Starmer, on a trip to Palantir’s Washington DC showroom. Last month its chief executive, Alex Karp, published a mini-manifesto extolling the benefits of US power and implying some cultures were inferior to others, in what one MP called “the ramblings of a supervillain”.A company’s ethics cannot be taken into account d...