Palantir Settles the £50M Met Police Lawsuit — and Both Sides Pretend 'Values' Never Came Up

By TechPulse USA Newsroom — London | 15 October 2026

Photo: A Metropolitan Police Special Escort Group vehicle in London. The Met's proposed £50 million AI contract with Palantir was blocked by Mayor Sadiq Khan's office earlier this year. Photo: Mike Peel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

On Wednesday, Palantir and the office of London Mayor Sadiq Khan ended one of the strangest legal fights in British tech — and the joint statement read like a vow of mutual amnesia. Both sides, they announced, had "withdrawn their allegations against each other." The decision to block Palantir's £50 million ($66 million) Metropolitan Police AI contract, the statement insisted, "was not based on Palantir's values or ethics or any wider reporting about the company."

Which is a remarkable thing to say, given the entire row began because it looked very much like it was about exactly that.

This is the story of how a two-year contract to automate police intelligence analysis became a proxy war over whether a US defence-tech company — co-founded by Donald Trump's billionaire backer Peter Thiel — should be allowed anywhere near the data infrastructure of the British state. And while London's lawyers were drafting their peace treaty, five police forces in the East Midlands quietly walked out the back door.

The settlement: a masterclass in saying nothing

The bare facts, first. In June, Palantir filed a claim at the High Court against Mopac — the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime — alleging it had imposed an "unlawful veto" by wrongly weighing the company's "values and ethics" when blocking the deal. The contract would have put Palantir's AI systems to work automating certain tasks and analysing evidence for the Met over two years. A full trial had been expected in January.

Now it's over. The joint statement says Mopac "does not have, and has never had, any policy of not contracting with Palantir," and that the company remains welcome to bid for Met work. Palantir is still in the running for a Met contract to be decided in the spring. The official explanation for the block is now purely procedural: Mopac told the Met it had failed to run an open competition, since Palantir was the only supplier the force had seriously considered.

Read that again. Not values. Not ethics. A procurement technicality. The statement even reaches back to explain away the original sin: "Mopac recognises Palantir's concerns that media reporting of a statement from the mayor's spokesperson before the decision was taken could have incorrectly created the impression that an assessment of the company's values had been a factor in that decision."

Translation: the mayor's own spokesperson was quoted raising concerns that Palantir did not align with "London's values" — and now both sides have agreed to pretend nobody meant it.

We compared the Reuters wire's account of the joint statement with the versions carried by two UK broadcasters. The wording matches verbatim, including the unusual formulation that the parties had "withdrawn their allegations against each other" — legalese for: nobody is admitting anything, and nobody is getting anything.

The East Midlands walkout: five forces quietly delete their data

If the London settlement was loud, the other half of this week's story was conspicuously quiet. The East Midlands Special Operations Unit (EMSOU) — a regional taskforce covering Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire — has declined to renew a two-year trial of Palantir's Foundry software and demanded the company sever its links and delete the forces' data.

The pilot began in October 2024, using Leicestershire Police datasets to test AI-assisted analysis for organised crime. It was funded by the Home Office. When that funding ended, the unit decided not to pay for a new contract itself.

"We have taken the decision to not take this project further," Ian Green, the unit's assistant chief constable, told Liberty Investigates and Democracy for Sale, who revealed the move on September 19. The decision followed "scoping work," consideration of "funding streams" and "an assessment of what it would deliver," he said.

This wasn't a small experiment. Leicestershire Police signed an £800,000 contract with Palantir in October 2024, according to The Leicester Gazette, which obtained the figure through a freedom of information request (reported by Computer Weekly). Across the country, at least six forces have racked up roughly £7.8 million in Palantir contracts, trials and extensions, per Computer Weekly's reporting — while a separate rolling pilot led by Bedfordshire Police has cost £3.6 million, according to procurement analysts Tussell.

And the software at the centre of it — "Project Nectar," Palantir's real-time data-sharing tool built on Foundry — is where things get genuinely uncomfortable. Internal police documents obtained by Liberty Investigates suggest Nectar was creating a "unified view" of data on people's race, religion, sex life, political opinions, philosophical beliefs and genetic information. Twelve of the 43 police forces in England and Wales were reported to be using it. The Home Office paid the EMSOU pilot's costs but never disclosed them.

Palantir, for its part, argues the software delivered real outcomes — pointing to support for Clare's Law enforcement work, the conviction of a £700,000 cash-machine gang, and its work with the Met and the NHS. EMSOU has demanded that Palantir demonstrate its links are cut and the force's data deleted.

The politics: 'mob rule' versus the rule of law

Strip away the procurement language and this is, at bottom, a political fight — and both sides have now hired political talent to wage it. Last month Palantir brought on former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson as a senior vice-president, tasking him with deepening what the company calls the "social and economic value" of its British public-services work. Watson took a leave of absence from the House of Lords to take the job; his parliamentary pass is suspended for as long as he works there.

On October 9, Watson went on the BBC's Political Thinking with Nick Robinson and framed the choice facing Downing Street in blunt terms: "Do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want to let mob rule lead procurement practices? Because you get yourself in a lot of trouble if you go down the latter one."

He wasn't talking in the abstract. He was talking about his own employer's contracts — and about the people trying to cancel them. Guardian columnist George Monbiot has publicly questioned the appointment, arguing Watson should take a harder look at his new employer's deepening integration into British public services.

The pressure on Palantir's UK business is real and bipartisan in flavour. A parliamentary committee said the company had a "clear mismatch with UK values" and recommended the government use a break clause in its £330 million NHS Federated Data Platform contract — a suggestion Palantir's UK chief executive Louis Mosley called "irresponsible." The NHS deal, which we covered when the review was announced, has its break clause opening in February 2027. Labour delegates even tried to force an emergency motion on dropping Palantir from the NHS at the party conference; the arrangements committee blocked it.

Then there's the backdrop Reuters keeps returning to, because it matters: Palantir supplies software to the US military and to immigration enforcement, and co-founder Peter Thiel is one of Donald Trump's most prominent billionaire backers. As European governments grow warier of dependence on US tech platforms, that association has become a liability — and Palantir knows it.

The bigger fight: who owns the state's data infrastructure

Zoom out and the Met lawsuit and the EMSOU walkout are two skirmishes in the same war: sovereign data control versus US tech platforms. Britain is currently reviewing Palantir's NHS contract. The investigative outlet The Nerve calculates Palantir's total UK public-sector contracts have hit nearly £1 billion. The company is in the running for a new National Data Integration and Exploitation Service (NDIES) — a national police intelligence-sharing platform whose pre-market tender put the expected cost between £75 million and £250 million. In March, the Financial Conduct Authority handed Palantir a trial to analyse its sensitive "data lake" of case intelligence files. The Ministry of Defence signed a £240 million deal in December 2025.

This is the pattern critics call the "Palantir playbook": a cheap pilot, a foothold in the data architecture, and then a renewal conversation where walking away means rebuilding the plumbing from scratch. EMSOU's decision is interesting precisely because it broke the pattern — the forces tried it for two years and said no. A pilot that ends in a "no" is, inconveniently for everyone with a grand theory, exactly what pilots are for.

It also punctures the inevitability narrative that has surrounded the company since CEO Alex Karp's nationalization remarks put Palantir at the centre of the AI sovereignty debate. The software may work. The company may be the best bidder. But "the best bidder" and "the only bidder" are different things, and Mopac's procedural objection — that the Met never ran an open competition — is the one part of this week's settlement that nobody is pretending about.

Here's our judgment, and we'll say it plainly: the joint statement is a fiction both sides needed. Mopac's insistence that values never entered the room is hard to square with its own spokesperson's reported "London's values" remark, and Palantir's claim of vindication sits oddly next to a settlement that leaves the £50 million contract just as dead as it was in May. What actually happened this week is simpler and more important. One city government used a procurement technicality to kill a deal it didn't want to defend. Five police forces ran a two-year trial and declined to buy. Neither outcome required anyone to agree on Palantir's ethics — and that, paradoxically, is the strongest signal yet that governments are learning how to say no to the platforms. The question now isn't whether Palantir's software works. It's who controls the data infrastructure of the state — and this week, for the first time in a long while, the answer leaned toward the state.

Sources: Reuters (Sam Tobin, Oct 14, 2026); Liberty Investigates and Democracy for Sale (Sep 19, 2026); Computer Weekly; Sceptic; The Nerve; BBC Political Thinking with Nick Robinson.

TechPulse USA is an independent newsroom covering the global technology industry — from AI policy to the business of data — for readers in the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia.

Update, Oct. 15: Khan's victory lap

Mayor Sadiq Khan struck a bullish note after the settlement. "London is the technology capital of Europe, and I am proud that leading software firms choose the city as their home," he said in remarks carried by Radio X on October 14. "Palantir makes a significant contribution to jobs and investment in the capital, employing a large number of Londoners whose services have been procured legally by organisations across the UK and beyond." The substance behind the spin: Palantir remains in the running for a new Met contract to be decided in the spring — while Britain's review of its £330 million NHS contract continues, with that deal's break clause opening in February 2027.

Palantir v. Mopac: your questions answered

What was the £50M contract for? A two-year Met Police deal to automate intelligence-analysis tasks and analyse evidence using Palantir's AI systems.

Why did the mayor's office block it? Officially a procurement technicality: Mopac said the Met failed to run an open competition, with Palantir the only supplier seriously considered — "values and ethics" were, per the joint statement, "not a factor."

What did the settlement actually say? Both sides "withdrawn their allegations against each other"; Mopac "does not have, and has never had, any policy of not contracting with Palantir."

What happened in the East Midlands? The EMSOU regional taskforce declined to renew its two-year Foundry trial and demanded Palantir cut its links and delete the forces' data.

What comes next? The spring Met bidding decision, the ongoing NHS contract review, and the £75–250M NDIES national police-data tender.

Europe's regulatory squeeze on US platforms is widening — see the antitrust complaints against Sportradar in the EU and UK, filed the same week — while Britain's regulators also gave frontier AI labs a kill switch.