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.

A US company that gathered photos of people from Facebook and other social media sites for use in facial recognition by its clients is facing a £17m fine after the Information Commissioner's Office found it had committed "serious breaches" of data protection law. Clearview AI, which describes itself as the "world's largest facial network", allows its customers to compare facial data against a database of over 10bn images harvested from the internet. The database is "likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people's knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms", the ICO said. Clearview's technology had been offered on a "free trial basis" to UK law enforcement agencies, the data regulator added. It said Clearview had broken data protection law by failing to process the information of people in the UK in a way they were likely to expect or that was fair.