Palantir’s AI snares Met police boss copying intimate images

The head of the Metropolitan Police’s volunteer officers has been sacked after Palantir’s software helped investigators find intimate images he had copied on his work phone. Special Chief Officer James Deller, who led the Met’s Special Constabulary, was dismissed without notice at an accelerated misconduct hearing on Friday, October 9, the force said.

It is the highest-profile case yet to come out of the Met’s use of Palantir tools to look for wrongdoing by its own staff, a programme that has split the force, its officers’ union and London’s City Hall.

What Palantir’s system found

According to the Met, on two occasions in July and August 2025 Deller used his police-issued phone to photograph intimate images of a woman that had been sent to his personal phone using WhatsApp’s “View Once” feature, which is meant to stop pictures being saved. He then sent both photos from his work phone to his personal one and deleted them from the work device.

The Met says his actions were uncovered during Project Galatasaray, “a week of action using advanced technologies to tackle corruption and professional misconduct”. In his case, it says, lawful business monitoring of work devices and Palantir’s Foundry system “helped identify the images and other key evidence”. Foundry is Palantir’s data platform, which pulls an organisation’s records into one place so analysts and AI tools can search them for patterns.

Deller will be added to the College of Policing’s barred list, so he can never serve in policing again. Commander Pete Stevens said:

SCO Deller failed to meet that bar. He let himself down but more importantly, he let the Special Constabulary down. His actions were an abuse of the trust put in him and it is right that he is no longer able to serve in policing.

Commander Pete Stevens, Metropolitan Police

The Met added that it is reviewing the future leadership and structure of the Special Constabulary.

“An outrageous and unforgivable invasion of privacy”

The Met began using Palantir to look at its own officers in April. Within about a week, it said, the tool had led to arrests and suspensions, and hundreds of officers were being assessed, including 98 over alleged abuse of shift rostering systems. The force said its use of AI was “limited” and “does not replace further fact-finding and professional judgement”.

The Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 London officers, reacted furiously. Its general secretary, Matt Cane, said officers had been told about an upgrade to the Met’s lawful business monitoring software but not that it included Palantir. He called it “an outrageous and unforgivable invasion of privacy”, said its round-the-clock location tracking risked monitoring officers “when they are off duty, on rest days, or at home”, and told members to be extremely cautious about carrying Met-issued devices off duty. The federation said it was considering legal action.

The fight over the Met’s Palantir contract

Palantir’s wider work with the Met is caught up in a court battle. On May 21 London’s Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) refused to let the Met sign a contract worth up to £50 million (about $67 million) for Palantir to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. City Hall said the Met had seriously considered only one supplier, a “clear and serious breach” of procurement rules, and that the deal had “not ensured, or demonstrated, value for money”.

Palantir has taken Mopac to the High Court, arguing that the company’s “values and ethics” played an “unlawful and non-transparent role” in the decision. Mopac denies that and says it is running a new, open procurement that Palantir can bid in. A full hearing is due in January. In the meantime, Mopac has given the Met a 12-month extension to its existing Palantir pilot, which Assistant Commissioner Rachel Williams said had “already helped the force strengthen its professional standards work”.

Palantir is no stranger to controversy over how governments use its software. Its Maven platform sits at the centre of the Pentagon’s AI work, including the row over Anthropic’s Claude, and its chief executive, Alex Karp, has argued that AI labs will end up asking Washington to nationalise them.

Why it matters

The Deller case is the Met’s strongest argument yet that AI monitoring of its own workforce catches real wrongdoing, and it comes as the force fights to keep Palantir on its books. It also shows exactly what officers feared: software combing through what staff do on work phones, including in their private lives.

Sources: Metropolitan Police, London Assembly, Computing, Silicon UK, ITV News, Police Professional