France’s domestic intelligence service told Palantir it was leaving in June. The DGSI had been running Gotham since 2016, adopted in the months after the Bataclan attacks, and had renewed the contract repeatedly, most recently only six months before the announcement. The replacement is ChapsVision, a company almost nobody outside French procurement circles had heard of.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu gave the reason without much diplomatic padding. France could not depend on the goodwill of partners capable of cutting off access to models like Anthropic’s.
That was not an abstract worry. It had happened three days earlier.
The kill switch stopped being theoretical
On 12 June, Washington applied export controls to Anthropic’s newest models over a cybersecurity concern. The order took effect immediately. Access went dark for everyone outside the United States, with no notice and no appeal, and it stayed dark until the controls were lifted at the end of the month. European governments, universities and companies that had built workflows on those models spent three weeks locked out of tools they had been using the day before.
The specifics matter less than the shape of the thing. A single foreign jurisdiction severed access unilaterally. Customers on the other end had no say, no warning and no recourse. Whether the reason was legitimate is almost beside the point, because the reason is not what changed. The mechanism is what changed, and the mechanism is still there.
Every European official who had spent two years arguing that dependency on American software carried political risk suddenly had a worked example.
The legal problem no contract can solve
Underneath the politics sits a piece of American statute that European lawyers have been pointing at for years.
The CLOUD Act of 2018 obliges any US-incorporated company to produce data it controls when compelled by US law enforcement, wherever in the world that data physically sits. A Palantir server in a German data centre does not neutralise a valid US warrant. Local hosting, European subsidiaries and contractual assurances do not touch it either, because the obligation attaches to the parent company, not the hardware.
This is the same structural conflict that killed Safe Harbour and then Privacy Shield. What is different now is the category of data. Nobody was arguing about advertising cookies. This is intelligence casework, police records and battlefield targeting.
ChapsVision’s pitch, and Valarian’s, and Quantexa’s, all reduce to the same sentence: we are not subject to that statute.
Karlsruhe got there first
The German objection started earlier and came from a court rather than a cabinet.
In February 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court found that Hesse’s legal basis for HessenDATA, its Gotham deployment, was unconstitutional. Automated bulk data analysis violated the right to informational self-determination, a right the court had established back in the 1983 census judgment. Hesse had been running those queries thousands of times a year on people with no connection to any crime.
Hesse rewrote its police law. The Society for Civil Liberties filed a fresh complaint in 2024 arguing the rewrite still fell short, and lodged a separate challenge against Bavaria’s VeRA platform.
Note what the court objected to. Not the vendor. The technique. That distinction is why the German fight has outlasted every news cycle about Peter Thiel, and why buying a French platform instead does not automatically make the underlying problem go away.
Germany is split, not united
The received version of this story has Europe turning on Palantir as one. It has not.
Bavaria, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg are all customers. Jens Spahn has backed wider deployment, arguing the state has to keep pace with criminals who use every digital tool available. The German police union’s chairman dismissed the opposition as outdated data-protection anxiety mixed with ideological resistance to the Trump administration.
On the other side, at least seven states have come out against. Lower Saxony’s interior minister called the software unmanageable and closed the question there.
The intelligence services went the other way from the police forces. The BfV picked ChapsVision’s ArgonOS rather than renewing with Palantir, and framed the choice explicitly as a signal against dependence on American suppliers.
Who is actually lining up
ChapsVision is the only European firm that has taken a live contract off Palantir. Founded in 2019 by Olivier Dellenbach, who previously built eFront, it has raised roughly 284 million dollars from Qualium, Tikehau and Bpifrance and turned over about 200 million euros in 2025. The group was assembled by acquisition, most notably Sinequa, whose generative-AI enterprise search was folded into the ArgonOS platform. Its managing director rejects the European Palantir label, calling it useful advertising and bad description.
Helsing is the best-funded European defence AI company by a wide margin, at 1.8 billion dollars raised on an 18 billion valuation, with software already integrated into the Eurofighter Typhoon and Saab’s Gripen E. It sells only to democracies and NATO members, which is good politics and good marketing. Its recent expansion into weapons manufacturing has made it more controversial at home than it was a year ago.
Arcadia is not a company but a French consortium, pulling in Mistral alongside Thales, Airbus and Safran.AI, aimed squarely at replacing Maven. It was tested at a NATO interoperability exercise in Poland. Macron and Merz named it as the starting point for a joint Franco-German sovereign military software effort in July.
Siren, Irish and founded in 2014, was competing with Palantir on investigative analytics before the current AI cycle began, and took some of its clients as far back as 2017 largely on price. Elastic recently took a strategic stake.
Valarian is the closest thing to Palantir rebuilt for sovereignty, which makes sense given co-founder Josh McLaughlin spent twelve years there and left as a managing director. It has 70 million dollars in total funding after a 50 million Series A led by NEA. The architecture is a walled garden: the customer’s data never reaches Valarian and never reaches a frontier model company.
The British picture is its own thing. Quantexa won a 175 million pound ten-year contract from HMRC, one of the largest public-sector AI deals Britain has done, against a backdrop of more than 900 million pounds already spent with Palantir across at least ten departments. It is bidding for the NHS single patient record programme and weighing an IPO above three billion dollars. Its chief executive, awkwardly for the buy-British case, argues that sovereignty depends less on where a supplier is headquartered than on whether the customer keeps ownership of its data and can move it when the contract ends.
Adarga, also British, sells information intelligence to defence and national security customers including the British Army, with around fifty staff. Faculty was the obvious candidate until Accenture agreed to buy it in January, which had a certain irony to it given founder Marc Warner had spent the previous year arguing that a win for a foreign tech company is a loss for British sovereignty.
The part that undercuts all of it
Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander for transformation, was asked in May whether Europe had an alternative. As far as he knew, he said, there is no real competitor to Palantir today. He added that Europe now has to prove it can deliver something relevant in months and years rather than a decade.
That is the honest position. Governments are switching before the replacements are proven, because the political risk of staying now outweighs the operational risk of leaving. It is a bet, and everyone placing it knows it is a bet.
Meanwhile the incumbency keeps deepening in the one country making the least noise about it. Palantir’s UK Ministry of Defence work was renewed in a three-year deal worth 240 million pounds, awarded without competitive procurement, while MPs were calling the company’s presence in the public sector an unacceptable point of weakness.
Sovereignty rhetoric on one side of Whitehall. Uncontested renewals on the other.