London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has been accused of putting politics over public safety after blocking a £50m contract between the Metropolitan Police and US tech firm Palantir. Scotland Yard had been in talks to use the company's artificial intelligence to speed up criminal investigations. Palantir's UK chief executive Louis Mosley also said the decision would give hostile states and criminals an advantage. The Met has previously warned it will have to cut officer numbers if the deal does not proceed. Palantir, founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a prominent donor to US President Donald Trump, already holds contracts with other UK public sector bodies.

Sadiq Khan's office blocked Palantir's deal with the Met police, saying there had been a'clear and serious breach' of procurement rules. Sadiq Khan's office blocked Palantir's deal with the Met police, saying there had been a'clear and serious breach' of procurement rules. London mayor accused of'putting politics above public safety' for rejecting deal to use AI in intelligence analysis Fri 22 May 2026 09.45 EDTLast modified on Fri 22 May 2026 09.55 EDT Palantir has accused Sadiq Khan of "putting politics above public safety" after the London mayor blocked its £50m contract with the Metropolitan police in a move that has also led to tensions inside Labour over its involvement with the US tech company. Louis Mosley, who heads Palantir in the UK and Europe, accused Khan of politicising procurement after he rejected a two-year deal for Scotland Yard to use AI to process intelligence in criminal investigations, as first revealed by the Guardian. Mosley said: "What Londoners value is not being mugged, not being raped by a serving police officer." The Met had planned to hire Palantir, which was co-founded by the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel, to automate aspects of investigations.

Court challenge over Met Police's use of live facial recognition thrown out Privacy campaigners have lost a High Court challenge aimed at limiting the Metropolitan Police's use of live facial recognition technology. Youth worker Shaun Thompson, and Silkie Carlo, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, brought the claim over concerns that facial recognition could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory way. Scotland Yard defended the challenge, telling the court that the policy was lawful. The Met Police will continue to use the technology, with commissioner Sir Mark Rowley calling the ruling an important victory for public safety. One of the claimants, Thompson, was misidentified by live facial recognition technology (LFR).

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: 'We Are a City on the Rise' Since taking office, San Francisco's mayor has been on a quest to revitalize the city and increase public safety. He's also kept the National Guard out--with a little help from some very powerful friends. I first met Daniel Lurie, San Francisco's newly minted mayor, about five minutes before we walked onstage at WIRED's Big Interview event, held in his city last week. Lurie's team let me know ahead of time that his window for this conversation was tight: He'd just come from announcing a new city police chief, and had about half an hour for me before he needed to be on to the next thing. Which was? "No idea," Lurie quipped, shortly before we were foisted from backstage and into our conversation in front of several hundred attendees--a local crowd, who, judging from their boisterous reactions to Lurie's every word, are among the 73 percent of San Franciscans who approve of the job he's done since taking office in January of this year. To Lurie's credit, the story of San Francisco right now is largely a positive one. The city is indisputably the global hub of AI innovation and the billions of dollars that accompany it, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with smaller startups, investors, and plenty of young, AI-focused technologists all calling San Francisco home. Yes, that means rents are up and housing stock remains precariously low. But office vacancy rates are dropping, retail outlets are coming back to the city's downtown, and as Lurie's office is quick to tout, several key metrics measuring municipal crime--including homicides and car break-ins--are at historic lows. I wanted to talk to Lurie about all of that, but I was also curious about the bigger picture: his administration's dynamic with the federal government, particularly in the context of President Trump's October plan to send the National Guard into San Francisco--an endeavor that Lurie managed to thwart, according to The New York Times, by recruiting a powerful coterie of technology executives to work the phones in his favor. Lurie wasn't exactly forthcoming there, in keeping with his diligent efforts to focus conversations on San Francisco, and perhaps avoid attracting the attention, or the ire, of the current administration. It's a different tack than other Democrats governing progressive parts of the country have taken, from New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to California governor Gavin Newsom. But if the response in the room last week was any indication, Lurie's local fans don't seem to mind his "say less" strategy--at least for now. Someone has a 70-something percent approval rating.

As our cities and communities become smarter, the systems that keep us safe, such as traffic control centers, emergency response networks, and public transportation, also become more complex. With this complexity comes a greater risk of security threats that can affect not just machines but real people's lives. To address this challenge, we present ThreatGPT, an agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant built to help people whether they are engineers, safety officers, or policy makers to understand and analyze threats in public safety systems. Instead of requiring deep cybersecurity expertise, it allows users to simply describe the components of a system they are concerned about, such as login systems, data storage, or communication networks. Then, with the click of a button, users can choose how they want the system to be analyzed by using popular frameworks such as STRIDE, MITRE ATT&CK, CVE reports, NIST, or CISA. ThreatGPT is unique because it does not just provide threat information, but rather it acts like a knowledgeable partner. Using few-shot learning, the AI learns from examples and generates relevant smart threat models. It can highlight what might go wrong, how attackers could take advantage, and what can be done to prevent harm. Whether securing a city's infrastructure or a local health service, this tool adapts to users' needs. In simple terms, ThreatGPT brings together AI and human judgment to make our public systems safer. It is designed not just to analyze threats, but to empower people to understand and act on them, faster, smarter, and with more confidence.

Residents and law enforcement officials are reporting numerous large, unidentified drones flying at night over New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Some of the fixed-wing devices are estimated to be roughly four-feet-wide, while others are believed to be as large as a car. And while officials including New Jersey governor Phil Murphy have stressed there is no evidence suggesting the drones pose a threat to public safety, at least one related incident may have delayed medevac transport of a seriously injured car wreck victim. As The New York Times noted over the weekend, sightings date as far back as November, and have occurred over residential areas, highways, railroads, reservoirs, and power lines. In most instances, the loud, blinking drones appear to be "significantly larger" than standard drones piloted by hobbyists. At least two events prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily ban drones at Donald Trump's Bedminster National Golf Club and Picatinny Arsenal, a 6,400-square-acre military research and manufacturing facility in Morris County, New Jersey.

Officials are still investigating unusual drone activity that has been reported in recent weeks in New Jersey. The FAA set temporary restrictions above Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster in response. Authorities investigating the unusual drone activity observed several times in northern New Jersey in recent days, including the vicinity of President-elect Trump's Bedminster golf club, continue to stress that there is no threat to public safety. Multiple videos show drones flying in Somerset and Morris counties over the past few weeks, including Dec. 1 and Dec. 3. In a video from Nov. 25, a Morris County resident named Mike Walsh spotted drones flying over Black River Middle School in Chester.

LLMs have emerged as a promising tool for assisting individuals in diverse text-generation tasks, including job-related texts. However, LLM-generated answers have been increasingly found to exhibit gender bias. This study evaluates three LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Claude) to conduct a multifaceted audit of LLM-generated interview responses across models, question types, and jobs, and their alignment with two gender stereotypes. Our findings reveal that gender bias is consistent, and closely aligned with gender stereotypes and the dominance of jobs. Overall, this study contributes to the systematic examination of gender bias in LLM-generated interview responses, highlighting the need for a mindful approach to mitigate such biases in related applications.

UCLA police, who were called on to handle some of the nation's largest campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war last spring, are asking for approval to double their stockpile of pepper balls and sponge rounds, obtain eight more projectile launchers and purchase three new drones. The University of California Board of Regents will consider the requests by UCLA, along with the other nine UC campus police departments, on Thursday. All California law enforcement agencies are required by state law to report annually on the acquisition and use of weapons characterized as "military equipment." A UC spokesman called the police requests a "routine agenda item" not tied to protests or other particular incidents. "All of the campus's requests are for non-lethal alternatives to standard-issue firearms, enabling officers to de-escalate situations and respond without the use of deadly force," UC spokesman Stett Holbrook said in a statement.

Kismet Jackson used to carry her handgun just about everywhere in San Bernardino County. To get her nails done. To pick up her prescription. To hang out with her grandchildren. For her, it was all about staying safe. "Being out and about, you just want to protect yourself," explained Jackson, an Air Force veteran and member of the National African American Gun Assn.