Palantir, the multi-billion dollar AI surveillance company, has been dealt a major blow after London mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a contract with the city’s Metropolitan police force.
Named after the seeing stone used by the villain Sauron, the physical embodiment of a cosmic evil in JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” books, Palantir the company is not backing down. According to the Guardian, the surveillance-tech giant has now signaled its intent to sue Khan over his decision to block the contract.
In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for the London mayor’s office said that the “Met did not present its procurement strategy as required and the Met only fully engaged with one potential supplier: Palantir.”
Per the mayor’s office, the contract wasn’t blocked on political grounds — as a key piece in US president Donald Trump’s deportation machine, Palantir is a massively controversial company, whose CEO Alex Karp’s reactionary manifesto is currently making the rounds. Rather, the decision was based on the Met’s lack of due diligence in scoping out which surveillance company it wanted to partner with. As the spokesperson explained, the Met “did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners.”
While Londontown seeks a corporate manager for its rapidly-expanding surveillance regime, Palantir continues to bully its way to good business.
Palantir previously sued the US army in federal claims court, claiming the Pentagon had unfairly overlooked the company’s products in its search for a $206 million IT contract (it later won that contract a few years later, after winning the court case.)
Last year, Karp went on a week-long diatribe mocking investors who sold their shares in the company, as Palantir’s stock price dipped by over 11 percent. Speaking at a November Yahoo Finance Invest Conference, Karp took specific aim at analysts and journalists whose critical coverage of the for-profit surveillance venture was leading to negative investor sentiment.
“Do you know how much money you’ve robbed from people with your views on Palantir?” he berated financial analysts.
And just recently in February, Palantir sued the swiss magazine Republik over its critical investigative reporting on Palantir’s software sales with the Swiss Armed Forces. Tellingly, the company didn’t refute any of the claims made in Republik‘s reporting, but rather weaponized a Swiss legal statute alleging the magazine didn’t give the company’s response enough space.
As European Federation of Journalists president Maja Sever put it in a statement regarding the lawsuit: the “legal action brought by this powerful multinational firm against a small Swiss media start-up is, in our view, an attempt at intimidation aimed at discouraging any critical analysis of Palantir’s activities.”
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