France intelligence agency drops Palantir for homegrown rival amid AI sovereignty push

France's intelligence service is dropping Palantir for a homegrown rival

The DGSI will swap the American firm's data tools for ChapsVision's ArgonOS, six months after it renewed Palantir's contract for another three years. France's domestic intelligence agency is dropping Palantir. The DGSI will replace the American firm's data-analysis tools with software from ChapsVision, a French company, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Tuesday, framing the switch as part of a wider push to put sovereign technology at the centre of the French state. The timing is the part worth pausing on. Palantir announced the renewal of its three-year DGSI contract in December 2025, extending a relationship that had run for the better part of a decade. Six months later, the agency that signed that renewal is preparing to walk away from it. The French government did not explain how the two decisions sit together, and it is an awkward sequence to read in order. The replacement is ChapsVision's ArgonOS, an AI-powered data-processing platform built by the firm controlled by the entrepreneur Olivier Dellenbach. ChapsVision had positioned itself for exactly this moment, having competed in a French procurement process launched in 2022 for a heterogeneous-data-processing tool, alongside the Thales-Eviden joint venture Athea and others. As of late 2025, none of the domestic candidates had reached operational stage, which is part of why Palantir kept the contract in the first place. That gap between ambition and readiness has been the recurring French story on Palantir. Sovereignty was always the stated goal, and the practical absence of a homegrown tool that could match Palantir's performance kept pushing the deadline back. The announcement is, in effect, the government deciding the alternative is now good enough to commit to, whether or not the procurement record fully agrees. The move arrives inside a broader European turn against the company. Germany's domestic intelligence service, the BfV, recently chose ChapsVision over Palantir for its own data analysis, and the Bundeswehr has been pressing for a secure cloud in which no foreign firm has structural access. Palantir has, accordingly, been facing German military rejection and investor jitters at the same time. In Britain, the government has been reviewing its £330m NHS contract with the firm. The pattern is European governments reconsidering how much of their most sensitive infrastructure should run on American software. The reconsideration has a beneficiary class, and France has been building it deliberately. The ChapsVision decision landed the same day Lecornu confirmed that French civil servants would get an AI assistant powered by Mistral, the company the government most often holds up as Europe's sovereign answer to the American labs. Mistral's chief executive, Arthur Mensch, has argued for two years that Europe must own and operate its own AI infrastructure rather than rent it, and the DGSI switch is that argument applied to the most sensitive corner of government. What has not been disclosed is the timeline for the handover, the value of the ChapsVision contract, or what becomes of the Palantir agreement that was renewed only months ago. Migrating an intelligence service from one analytical platform to another is not a flip of a switch, and the practical transition is likely to run well beyond the announcement. Palantir did not immediately comment on the French decision.

French spies drop AI giant Palantir over US overreliance fears

Paris (France) (AFP) - France's domestic intelligence agency will stop working with American AI giant Palantir, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said Tuesday, as European nations increasingly doubt the dependability of the United States. "We cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere," Lecornu said in a social media video announcing 655 million euros ($760 million) of new public investment in developing the country's own AI. The decision by the Direction Generale de la Securite Interieure (DGSI) to end its contract with Palantir follows Washington's move last week to cut off access to AI firm Anthropic's powerful Fable model to non-American users. France should "not depend on the good will of certain partners, who are capable of turning off the access tap" for artificial intelligence, Lecornu said. The Fable incident prompted calls for greater independence from the United States in AI development from candidates across the political spectrum for next year's French presidential election. Palantir's French arm did not immediately respond Tuesday to AFP's request for comment. The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel, a right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire close to US President Donald Trump, with support from America's CIA. It has notably worked with the US government to identify undocumented immigrants or targets in the US-Israel war on Iran. Campaign groups have warned that the company's products pose risks related to mass surveillance, infringements on individual freedoms and data protection. But Palantir insists it simply provides powerful data processing services that can help surface nuggets of useful information in the flood available to government agencies and big companies. British lawmakers earlier this month called for the country's National Health Service (NHS) to end its own contract with the American company. "Reliance on a small number of US-based providers represents a clear vulnerability" which could leave public services "at the mercy of foreign actors," the report from parliament's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said. The London mayor's office also blocked a bid by the British capital's Metropolitan Police to work with Palantir.