France and Germany want a home-grown military AI stack because relying on Palantir looks a bit daft.
According to Nextweb, Palantir is furious at the move. Palantir CEO Alex Karp called Germany’s refusal to consider his outfit “conversations about witchcraft“ in a Bild interview last month. Karp said the software had proved itself on every serious battlefield, and we guess he wants to go back to burning witches.
A joint declaration signed after talks between French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz commits both countries to examine “a European sovereign digital backbone” for data-centric security, AI and cloud.
France’s Arcadia, an AI-powered command-and-control platform, will be the starting point. The declaration mentions “comparable German solutions” without saying what they are, which is handy if nobody wants to name anything still held together with procurement hope and slideware.
The move follows both countries edging Palantir out of their intelligence services. France’s DGSI said in June it was replacing Palantir with ChapsVision’s ArgonOS, only six months after renewing the American firm’s contract.
Germany’s BfV picked ChapsVision for the same job. The Bundeswehr has shut Palantir out of its defence cloud procurement entirely, which suggests Berlin’s patience with Uncle Sam’s surveillance-adjacent software bazaar has run thin.
A senior Nato commander recently told Politico there was no proper European alternative to Palantir’s Maven battlefield data software. Paris and Berlin have now replied with the traditional European answer: launch a declaration and hope engineers can sort it out.
The statement extends beyond AI to missiles, tanks, and space. France, Germany and the UK will examine cooperation on long-range weapons with a 2,500-kilometre range, drawing on ArianeGroup’s capabilities.
The Franco-German MGCS tank programme, intended to replace the Leopard 2 and Leclerc, will begin research into autonomous driving, sensors, and battlefield networking. That sounds useful, provided it escapes the swamp of national industrial politics.
Berlin appears unmoved. The issue is not whether Palantir’s kit works, but whether Europe should park its most sensitive military plumbing within an American company as Washington’s mood swings become a strategic risk.
