At least six different police forces have recently used artificial intelligence (AI) investigation tools provided by Palantir Technologies, Computer Weekly and Good Law Project have found.
Agreements between Palantir and these police forces have cost £7.8m, and the firm was close to signing an additional £50m contract with the Metropolitan Police before London’s mayor put it on hold.
At least six confirmed police forces have had access to Palantir, while officers from several others appear to have limited access to applications in Palantir’s Nectar system.
Palantir Nectar allows information sharing between local forces, regional taskforces and partner agencies using Palantir’s Foundry data integration platform. Nectar uses AI to process large volumes of personal data from crime records, seized digital devices and other unknown sources.
Some police forces have been reluctant to disclose their involvement with Palantir. The company’s UK chief, Louis Mosley, said in mid-2025 that the firm was working with “almost a dozen” police forces. Over a year on, only a handful have been identified.
Investigative outlet Democracy for Sale reported that a secret unit in the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has been “systematically instructing” forces to withhold information “that may or may not be held in relation to Palantir software used for covert purposes”.
The most recently identified force to test Palantir’s technology is Lancashire Police, which acquired Palantir’s Foundry software through Softcat, a UK-based IT infrastructure and software supplier. Foundry is the same software framework that underpins Palantir Nectar, the NHS Federated Data Platform and the Met Police’s internal staff compliance monitoring tool.
Lancashire’s agreement was for a “proof of concept” the force was developing, at a cost of £860k. The force appears to have had access to Palantir’s software between March 2025 and June 2026, which included a contract extension.
The force also said in freedom of information (FOI) disclosures that “there have been conversations with this supplier [Palantir] and others to look at opportunities on how these AI-driven technologies can assist digital policing”. However, Lancashire Police has kept no minutes of any meetings that may have discussed the project.
The force was approached to ask whether its project was related to its regional taskforce and Nectar, but had not responded at the time of publication.
Leicestershire Police also signed an £800,000 contract with Palantir in October 2024, as reported by The Leicester Gazette, which obtained the information under the Freedom of Information Act, following intervention of the regulator on behalf of the publication. The force is one of the few confirmed users of Palantir’s software in the East Midlands Special Operations Unit (Emsou), a regional taskforce tackling organised crime and terrorism.
The Emsou is composed of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire police forces. According to meeting records obtained by Computer Weekly, all these forces have taken part in several cross-constabulary briefings on Palantir Nectar.
Other forces in the Emsou neither confirm nor deny (NCND) responses – the tactic applied by the police chiefs’ disclosure blocking unit – to Computer Weekly’s freedom of information requests, or have ignored them entirely, when asked if they are using Palantir’s software.
After approaching the respective press offices, Lincolnshire Police said Nectar does not “appear” to be in use by the force. Northamptonshire Police said officers have no “direct access” to the system and there are no plans to adopt it.
Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire were both contacted to answer queries about possible access to Palantir Nectar, but did not respond by the time of publication.
A spokesman for the Emsou did not answer questions about which forces in the regional unit get access to the system, but said: “We followed appropriate processes to secure services to support the delivery of operational policing.”
Bedfordshire Police is leading a trial of Palantir Nectar in the Eastern Regional Special Operations Unit (Ersou). The trial was first reported by Liberty Investigates as a “real-time surveillance network” that monitors special category personal data such as race, religion, political beliefs and sexual orientation, and The i Paper reported that rape victims could have their data trawled by its AI.
The Metropolitan Police described Bedfordshire’s Nectar programme as a “real-time data-sharing network across Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire police, Regional Policing, UK Policing and partner agencies” when evaluating the launch of its own internal monitoring project.
Documents obtained by Computer Weekly reveal the range of permissions granted to members of the Ersou to access Nectar’s internal applications. The unit appears to be granted access to live environment applications handling call data records, device analytics, thematic scanning, operations management and more.
A spokesperson for the force has confirmed that seconded officers from other police forces in the Ersou “may be provided access to Nectar applications using role-based access control in accordance with information security and access management policies and procedures”.
Police forces in the Ersou include Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.
Computer Weekly has previously found that Bedfordshire Police admitted in internal memos that there remains a “medium risk” that the system will potentially process data for purposes that are neither proportionate nor necessary.
According to these documents, victims and offenders of crimes were not consulted when developing the system, although victim support groups were.
One of the data sources for Bedfordshire’s Nectar project is Athena, a crime records information sharing system used by nine forces, including Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Warwickshire and West Mercia police. It’s not known if other forces in the Athena consortium are using Nectar itself, although they may be contributing data into the system.
Bedfordshire Police told Computer Weekly and Good Law Project it has been engaged in a rolling contract with Palantir since September 2023, with the most recent extension between August 2025 and August 2026.
It has paid, according to expenditure disclosures, almost £3m to Palantir Technologies since 2023. A portion of this was funded by the Home Office, which gave the Ersou £1.5m to develop the project in the financial year 2024-25, according to freedom of information disclosures to Computer Weekly.
Hertfordshire Police also has a contract with Palantir costing £750,000 for one year, according to freedom of information disclosures to Good Law Project, although the firm hasn’t appeared in any detailed expenditure disclosures.
Meanwhile, Cambridgeshire Police claimed it has not held any contracts with Palantir in the past five years when asked through FOI requests.
However, spending disclosures reveal the force made a payment of almost £12,000 to Palantir in August last year. When asked about this, the force explained to Computer Weekly and Good Law Project that it had, in fact, signed a “short-term contract” spanning two months, beginning in March 2025, for a pilot “focused on a specific safeguarding function”.
The force said the pilot “helped inform our understanding of how this type of technology could support specific policing processes. It was exploratory in nature, time-limited, and did not represent a wider implementation of Palantir technology by the constabulary”.
“Beyond that pilot, no live operational contract was in place, and no decisions had or have been made regarding any broader use of the technology,” it added.
The Metropolitan Police has also been engaged in a controversial internal monitoring project with Palantir, called the Culture, Standards and Integrity Ecosystem, built on the Foundry framework. The aim is to “identify patterns that may indicate inappropriate behaviour” using data such as, for example, door entry logs and misconduct reports.
The initial three-month deal with Palantir, beginning in February this year and costing £489,999, was extended for a further two weeks, free of charge. A 12-month extension has since been awarded, valued at £1,959,996.
As Computer Weekly has previously reported, “high-risk” processing in the Met pilot would include special category data, data on children under 13 and other vulnerable individuals, alongside tracking individuals in public areas.
The Met Police’s data protection impact assessment, obtained by Good Law Project, found that the force has not completed an ethical review and the “necessity and impact on privacy of the data processing is currently being assessed”.
The document highlights that only “some stages of data handling meet legal standards” for evidential use, and that “improvements are needed”. Meanwhile, the documented criteria to assess accuracy, relevance and bias minimisation are currently being “developed and documented”.
It’s understood that the Met Police’s internal monitoring project, although focused on rooting out corruption in the force, has also been able to access sensitive operational policing material in justified circumstances.
A spokesperson for the force said: “Our pilot work allowed the Met for the first time to bring together data it already lawfully holds in one place to identify potential standards, welfare or cultural concerns. This focused on identifying potential conduct issues and a significant number of matters are now being progressed by our professional standards team.
“This contract will support both our work on raising standards and our ambitions to use the technology to streamline administrative processes, close budget gaps and free up officers to police the streets of London.”
The force also said it’s working with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) to develop a procurement strategy to identify a long-term supplier.
The Met has long experimented with Palantir’s software, including trials with the company between 2014-15 alongside a number of other crime-mapping software providers.
The company was, earlier this year, on the brink of signing a £50m agreement with the Met, but this was blocked by Mopac. It would have been the firm’s largest contract with law enforcement yet, but concerns around the procurement process put an end to that.
Palantir, on the other hand, said it has “clear reason to believe that the decision may have been taken because, in the words of the mayor’s spokesperson, of a subjective assessment that [Palantir] does not share their ‘values’”. The firm is now taking legal action against Mopac.
So far, policing districts known to have contracts with Palantir or access to Palantir’s data processing technology include Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Lancashire, and Leicestershire police forces, alongside the Met Police’s nearly 50,000 employees.
It’s understood that several other forces have either granted limited access to Nectar through regional taskforces or are contributing data to information sharing systems used by Nectar.
The full extent of Palantir’s spread across UK police forces remains uncertain. Several forces continue to rely on NCND exemptions to prevent FOI disclosures relating to their work with the firm.
Duncan McCann, Good Law Project’s tech and data lead, believes secrecy around Palantir’s software is due to its “flaws and inherent dangers”.
Campaign groups have previously called for an investigation into the police chiefs’ unit responsible for blocking disclosures relating to Palantir through the Freedom of Information Act, the NPCC.
Jake Hurfurt, head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch, said: “The NPCC’s central FOI unit is a danger to transparency and the public’s right to know.”
Martin Wrigley MP for Newton Abbot, part of the parliamentary Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, told Good Law Project and Computer Weekly: “We are in a very dangerous world where these tools are followed up without sufficient process around them, and without sufficient data protection around them.”
He called Palantir’s deals with UK police forces and public authorities “extremely worrying”.
Palantir Technologies and the Emsou were also approached for comment.
