LONDON — A US surveillance company that helps the American immigration service hunt people for deportation and supplies technology to the Israeli military is going to court for the right to help police London. Palantir said it will sue Mayor Sadiq Khan after he blocked a £50 million contract with the Metropolitan Police, turning a procurement dispute into a test of whether a city can refuse a firm on the grounds of what it does elsewhere.
The deal Khan stopped would have been Palantir’s largest with any UK police force. The Met wanted to use the company’s software to automate the analysis of intelligence in criminal investigations, the kind of work that decides who gets looked at and who does not. The mayor’s office blocked it, citing what it called a clear and serious breach of procurement rules: the force had not put its strategy to the deputy mayor for policing and crime for approval as required, had not approached any rival supplier, and had left London at risk of being locked into a single company’s technology with no demonstrated value for money.
Underneath the procedure was a plainer objection. Khan signalled reluctance to spend public money on a firm that campaigners say acts against London’s values, a phrase that did the work everyone understood it to be doing. Palantir has called the veto a politicised decision and its lawyers have written to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime to say they will challenge it in the courts. Louis Mosley, who runs Palantir’s UK arm, accused the mayor of putting politics over public safety. The Met has lined up behind the company, warning that without the technology it may have to cut officer numbers, the argument that public safety leaves no room for scruples.
What that argument skips over is the company being defended. Palantir was built by the billionaire Peter Thiel to turn government data into a single searchable picture, and it has grown into one of the most contested firms in the Western security state. In the United States it holds contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose raids and deportations its tools help organise, and its offices have drawn repeated protests. The firm has faced scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic for a business model its critics describe as a doctrine of permanent technological warfare.
The sharper objection is what Palantir does in Gaza. After agreeing a strategic partnership with Israel in January 2024, the company expanded its work in the occupied territories, and reporting and rights researchers have described its systems being used to fuse intercepted communications and satellite data into the target lists the Israeli military draws on. Palantir characterises its software as analysis rather than a trigger, but its own UK spokesperson has stated plainly that the company supports Israel, and United Nations figures have argued that tools like it shape the pace and scale at which an army can kill. It is part of the web of firms that have turned surveillance into an instrument of control, the same infrastructure exposed when Microsoft moved to cut the Israeli military’s access to its cloud after disclosures about the surveillance of Palestinians.
This is the company the Met wanted woven into how it decides whom to investigate, and Khan’s block is the rare case of a public authority keeping such a firm at arm’s length rather than waving it through. The objection was never to public safety. It was to who would own the data underpinning London’s policing, and to handing that role to a company whose other clients include a military widely accused of waging a genocide in Gaza. Lock-in matters precisely because the dependence, once built, is hard to undo.
By taking the mayor to court, Palantir is contesting more than one contract. It is challenging the idea that an elected official may weigh a vendor’s conduct and a city’s stated values when spending public money, rather than treating procurement as a narrow technical exercise stripped of ethics. The company would prefer that the only permissible questions be about price and capability, with everything it does beyond London ruled out of bounds. The case it is bringing is, at bottom, an argument against the right to say no.
What the courts will settle is whether that right survives. A ruling for Palantir would narrow the room a public body has to refuse a supplier on anything but the most technical grounds. A ruling for Khan would affirm that a city can look at what a company does in Gaza or at the US border and decide it does not want that company inside its police force. Either way, the firm that markets itself as the indispensable backbone of Western security has been told no by one of the West’s largest cities, and it is not willing to accept the answer.
