TL;DRHMRC has awarded a £175 million, ten-year AI contract to London-based Quantexa to detect tax fraud, fix errors, and close the £46.8 billion tax gap, marking a deliberate shift toward British AI sovereignty after more than £900 million in contracts with American firm Palantir across UK government departments.
HM Revenue and Customs has awarded a 175 million pound, ten-year contract to Quantexa, a London-based AI company, to modernise the tax authority’s data infrastructure and deploy artificial intelligence to detect fraud, fix errors, and close the tax gap. The contract is one of the largest AI deals in UK public sector history. It is also a sovereignty statement. The UK government has spent more than 900 million pounds on contracts with Palantir, the American data analytics firm, across at least ten departments including the NHS. The Quantexa deal is the opposite of a Palantir deal. The company is British. The data stays inside HMRC’s environment. The decision was deliberate.
The tax gap, the difference between what is owed to the exchequer and what is actually collected, reached 46.8 billion pounds in 2023-24. The government has committed to recovering an additional ten billion pounds per year by 2030. Quantexa’s job is to help find it.
