France moves to drop Palantir for a French rival in a test of Europe's tech sovereignty

France's domestic intelligence service is preparing to replace the American data-analytics software it has relied on for nearly a decade with a homegrown alternative, in a decision that turns Europe's abstract debate about digital sovereignty into a concrete question of who controls the tools of the security state.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced on 16 June that the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI) had selected the French firm ChapsVision to take over the large-scale data processing currently handled by Palantir Technologies, the US company co-founded by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Lecornu framed the move, disclosed in a video on artificial-intelligence investment, as a matter of strategic independence.

"We cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere," Lecornu said, adding that France wanted to "build genuine autonomy" and avoid having to depend on the goodwill of partners "capable of turning off the tap on access" to AI.

What is changing, and when

The DGSI first turned to Palantir's Gotham platform in 2016, in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks, when French services faced a surge of data to analyse and few European tools capable of the task. The contract was renewed in 2019 and 2022, and again in December 2025 for a further three years — a deal Lecornu's office now describes as a stopgap pending a sovereign replacement. France plans to migrate to ChapsVision's ArgonOS, an AI-driven system for fusing heterogeneous data.

Palantir pushed back. In a statement to Agence France-Presse, the company said its long-term DGSI contract "remains fully in force." Lecornu's office clarified that Palantir's tools would keep running until ArgonOS can be integrated, to avoid a capability gap — a handover expected to take between one and three years. ChapsVision, founded in 2019 by Olivier Dellenbach, had already won a DGSI contract in 2024 to process heterogeneous data.

• Agency: the DGSI, France's domestic intelligence service
• Outgoing: Palantir's Gotham platform, in use since 2016
• Incoming: ChapsVision's ArgonOS
• Timeline: a phased transition expected to take one to three years

A European pattern

France is not acting alone. In mid-May, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), selected the same ChapsVision platform over Palantir for large-scale data analysis, insisting on a "sovereign" environment without external access. In Britain, the government is reviewing a £330 million NHS data contract with Palantir, and the mayor of London blocked a roughly £50 million policing deal. Underlying the unease is the political climate in Washington: European officials cite the unpredictability of President Donald Trump's administration and recent US moves to restrict foreign access to advanced AI.

Why it reaches Luxembourg

The intelligence shake-up lands amid a broader EU drive to wean its public sector off US technology — one in which Luxembourg, a hub for cross-border data infrastructure, has a direct stake. On 17 April, the European Commission awarded a six-year framework worth €180 million for sovereign cloud services to four European providers, the first such tender judged explicitly on sovereignty criteria. Among the winners was Post Telecom, the Luxembourg state operator, bidding through its Deep by POST unit alongside France's OVHcloud and Clever Cloud.

The contract was scored under the Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework, published in October 2025, which ranks providers on so-called SEAL levels from zero to four; bidders had to reach at least SEAL-2, and most cleared SEAL-3. Henna Virkkunen, the Commission's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, has cast the agenda as strengthening Europe's digital autonomy and resilience without closing the bloc off to the rest of the world.

For Luxembourg, where data centres and financial-sector hosting are pillars of the economy, the award validated years of investment. "It's really important because it brings to life the strategic alliance we formed last year and makes things a reality," said Sébastien Genesca, director of Deep by POST.

Whether the model travels is the open question. For now, the DGSI's switch is as much a signal as a finished migration: Palantir's software will keep running while French engineers prove ArgonOS can match it. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. If Europe's security services can be weaned off US software without losing capability, the same logic — and the same political pressure — will bear down on the cloud and data infrastructure that countries like Luxembourg host. The Palantir handover has become an early test of whether European strategic autonomy in critical software is a slogan or a plan.