Palantir has dropped its High Court challenge against the Mayor of London's policing office over a blocked £50m contract with the Metropolitan Police.
The Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) has not reversed its decision. The contract will instead be re-run, with Palantir "free and welcomed" to bid.
What was agreed
In a joint statement on Wednesday, MOPAC said the decision was "not based on Palantir's values or ethics". Neither side made any payment to the other, and each pays its own legal costs.
MOPAC acknowledged that a statement from the mayor's spokesman "could have incorrectly created the impression" that values had been a factor, and said it "does not have, and has never had, any policy of not contracting with Palantir". It said the decision rested on its legal duty to examine spending proposals and ensure value for money.
Lord Sadiq Khan said 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".
What the case was about
MOPAC blocked the deal — for AI tools to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations — in May. Deputy mayor Kaya Comer-Schwartz wrote to the commissioner saying the Met had seriously considered only one supplier, and that failing to seek MOPAC's approval for its procurement strategy was a "clear and serious breach" of the rules.
Palantir sued in June, arguing MOPAC had imposed an "unlawful veto" by wrongly taking its "values and ethics" into account. MOPAC denied it. The case was due to go to trial in January, and Lord Khan had agreed to have his text messages and emails searched as part of it.
Read the outcome carefully
This is being reported as Palantir backing down, and in one sense it is. But look at what each side kept.
MOPAC kept the block and the principle that it may scrutinise procurement. Palantir got something it could not have won at trial: an on-the-record statement from a public body that its ethics were never the reason, which removes the precedent it most needed to avoid. A ruling that a public authority may weigh a supplier's values would have followed Palantir into every contract in Britain.
Neither of those is a loss. The case ended because both sides had more to lose from January than from stopping.
What it means in Bangladesh
What carries over here is the procurement rule rather than anything about the company itself.
MOPAC's objection was that the Met seriously considered only one supplier and did not get approval for how it was buying. That is the most common failure in public technology purchasing anywhere, and it is entirely familiar here: a specification written around one vendor's product, a single credible bidder, and an approval sought after the decision rather than before.
What makes the London case instructive is that the oversight body had the standing and the appetite to stop a £50m deal over process, and survived being sued for it. The question that transfers is not whether a particular firm is acceptable. It is whether anyone in the chain is positioned to say no to a purchase that has already been informally agreed.
The same company lost police business for different reasons in the East Midlands trial that was not continued.
Source: BBC News.
