Germany opts for French software for its intelligence operations, rather than Palantir

Berlin has made its decision: the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, has selected the French company ChapsVision to equip its analysts with big data analysis tools, passing over the American firm Palantir, which had been courting the market for years.

The chosen platform, ArgonOS, uses artificial intelligence to aggregate data from a wide variety of sources, ranging from internal databases to open-source intelligence and the Darknet. The whole system operates on a sovereign cloud, in an isolated environment, with no external connections. For the German authorities, the issue is no longer simply a question of which software performs best, but who can have access to national data.

German security officials have been insisting for months that relying on US providers for sensitive infrastructure amounts to accepting a geostrategic vulnerability. Sinan Selen, head of the BfV, put it bluntly last December: we must “sharpen the European focus”. Germany has not forgotten the Snowden revelations, nor the NSA’s tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone.

Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, has a controversial reputation. Its CEO, Alex Karp, compared the German debate about his company to “conversations about witchcraft”, a remark that strained relations further rather than easing them.

Founded in 2019 by Olivier Dellenbach, ChapsVision has made 29 acquisitions in five years, including Sinequa, the intelligent search engine used by Netflix, Boeing and NASA. With €200 million in turnover and 2,000 clients across 40 countries, the Paris-based company had already won over the DGSI in 2024. It is now the first German federal agency to officially choose a European alternative to Palantir, and the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) are evaluating three candidates this summer for its defence cloud, including ChapsVision. The message sent to European public procurers is clear: credible alternatives to the American giants exist and are beginning to gain ground. OpexNews

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