Can Europe Escape Palantir?
From France’s troubled Artemis project to ChapsVision’s rise, the battle for military AI sovereignty has begun. Some remain reluctant to cut ties with the US.
In short
-Despite the spectacular battlefield performance of Palantir’s Maven, several European countries are increasingly reluctant to depend on an American platform for military data and strategic decision-making. A few others don’t.
-France’s long-troubled Artemis program, designed as a sovereign rival to Palantir, may finally be inching towards operational credibility after years of delays and political embarrassment.
-French startup ChapsVision has emerged as Europe’s most credible challenger to Palantir Technologies after French intelligence services chose its Argonos platform to replace Gotham, with German counterparts expected to follow soon.
-Europe may lag behind America, but it already possesses much of the technological talent needed to build a sovereign military AI ecosystem, from Helsing and Systematic to Octostar and ICEYE.
The whole story
UPDATED, May 21 — “No alternative to Palantir for Europe,” states Admiral Vandier in an interview with Politico.
NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation Pierre Vandier reacted to The Wald Brief story below: “As far as I know, today there is no real competitor for Palantir. (...) The question for the alliance is to show up with equivalent solutions. It’s a race. It’s the ability of Europeans to show that they are able to provide something which is relevant in a matter of months, years, and not a decade.” Regarding the issue of dependence on a single supplier, Vandier said that risk can be reduced by pushing companies toward interoperable systems, allowing NATO countries to switch between vendors or rotate suppliers if they are dissatisfied. —
As Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS) demonstrates its formidable targeting capabilities on the Iranian front, the American AI giant is coming under growing scrutiny across Europe.
With Donald Trump regularly insulting America’s allies and threatening to pull out of NATO, several European military headquarters are now searching for a sovereign alternative to the US military-AI powerhouse. NATO Allied Command Operations’ emergency adoption of Maven in March 2025 particularly angered the French. For Paris, surrendering combat data to an American decision-acceleration and analytics platform is out of the question. So too is contributing to the rise of yet another US monopoly — and becoming dependent on an increasingly erratic partner.
The same concerns are emerging in Germany. On April 28, Vice Admiral Thomas Daum, head of the Bundeswehr’s cyber command, confirmed that the German military would not use Palantir — neither for cloud services nor military AI — triggering fury from the company’s CEO. Sovereignty is one issue, but not the only one. Palantir has long been controversial in Germany because several Länder use Gotham, its data-collection software, which critics accuse of enabling mass surveillance and population profiling — deeply sensitive subjects given Germany’s history.
Similar concerns are also surfacing in Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Nineteen European countries — including France — currently use Palantir software. The publication on April 21 of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s “manifesto,” widely described by commentators as “techno-fascist,” only reinforced those fears. Added to this are warnings from experts concerned about military decision-making being increasingly delegated to artificial intelligence — something Maven has come to symbolize.
Palantir’s European supporters — including Poland, which recently signed a letter of agreement to equip its armed forces — argue that such software has become strategically indispensable against Russian threats, while stressing that Europe already lags years behind in this new era of warfare. And urgency is dictating the pace. In Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky has little patience for such philosophical debates. On May 12, he met Alex Karp privately to further integrate AI into Ukraine’s drone-interception capabilities.
Artemis, the French Platform That Has Yet to Deliver
The real question, then, is what alternatives Europe actually possesses to counter a Palantir increasingly aligned with Donald Trump’s bellicose worldview.
In the name of sovereignty, France was the first to react. As early as 2017, after Palantir’s Gotham proved highly effective in Afghanistan, the French procurement agency DGA launched the Artemis project. The goal: equip French Military Intelligence (DRM) with a comparable platform. In 2019, Athéa — a joint venture between Atos and Thales — took over the project. Despite millions invested, progress remained elusive. By 2021, one French lawmaker openly described the project as “unworkable and unsuitable.”
Artemis gradually came to resemble both an industrial and political fiasco. According to several estimates, more than €120 million had already been sunk into the project by 2024. French AI startups mocked it, while military officials grew increasingly frustrated. To this day, senior officers use remarkably colorful language when discussing the delays, mistakes and repeated budget overruns associated with Thales. They also recall that in 2025, exasperated by endless technical failures, the French military terminated another Sopra Steria/Thales-led inter-service data-analysis project known as SIA C2 and immediately purchased the battle-tested Danish software SitaWare instead.
France’s Ministry of Defense then considered killing Artemis altogether. Yet DRM technicians argued there was simply no credible alternative. Artemis survived. The project — described by the head of DRM himself Lieutenant General Jacques Langlade de Montgros as “a level of complexity beyond us” — was transferred back to the DGA. Thales kept the contract but was told to dramatically accelerate progress.
Then came March 2026, when Palantir heavily publicized Maven’s performance during operations against Iran. European military staffs suddenly discovered a platform capable of enabling 50 analysts to perform work that previously required 2,000 personnel — and to process 1,000 enemy targets within 24 hours.
Faced with renewed political pressure, French military and industry officials now insist they are finally close to success — eight years later. “Today, Artemis works,” one senior officer who supervised the project told The Wald Brief. “By 2027, we should have something resembling a real alternative to Maven,” added a military engineer responsible for digital strategy.
That forecast may prove optimistic. At present, Artemis still looks more like a data-consolidation infrastructure than a true equivalent to Gotham or Maven. “Artemis does not yet perform target designation, but we now have the ecosystem required to achieve that,” the engineer explained. “We have some layers,” a senior defense-innovation official added cautiously — referring to capabilities such as generative AI, tactical mapping and data fusion.
Artemis nevertheless holds one important advantage over Maven: it is NATO-compliant and therefore interoperable with Alliance militaries. “The issue is not choosing between Maven (NATO) and Artemis (France); the two approaches are complementary,” wrote French Colonel Bruno de San Nicola, NATO’s Expert National, in December 2025. “Maven provides a proven operational capability, while Artemis represents the long-term technological autonomy Europe will need.”
The remaining question is whether NATO itself will ultimately adopt it.
Argonos, the Outsider Challenging Palantir
At present, only one European data-analysis platform genuinely appears capable of competing with Palantir: Argonos, developed by the French company ChapsVision. In 2024, it won Lot 1 of a tender issued by France’s domestic intelligence service DGSI to replace Gotham, which had been in use since 2016. ChapsVision — a startup barely three years old at the time — prevailed over both Thales and Atos.
Lot 2 is still pending, which explains why Palantir renewed a three-year transition contract with the DGSI last year to facilitate the shift from Gotham to Argonos. By choosing ChapsVision, French authorities clearly signaled their determination to regain sovereignty over highly strategic data. France evidently possesses the technological expertise to do so — especially since it is a newcomer outperforming long-established incumbents.
Argonos has another advantage: thanks to its permissive licensing structure, it could potentially be adopted by other French state agencies without additional cost. More agile, more efficient and cheaper, the platform is now attracting attention in Germany and Denmark, aided by DGSI officials actively promoting its capabilities to European counterparts.
On May 15, the German press revealed that Germany’s domestic intelligence service had chosen ChapsVision over Palantir, highlighting Berlin’s determination not to depend on American technology. If officially confirmed, the decision would represent a major step toward European technological sovereignty — and a breakthrough moment for the French AI company. It would also mark a remarkable comeback for ChapsVision, which the DGA had not even considered as a fallback option during the height of the Artemis fiasco. The French unicorn could now seek entry into NATO programs.
Europe Holds the Keys
Although lagging behind, Europe still possesses significant assets to develop sovereign military AI platforms. In Germany, Helsing is already producing artificial-intelligence software designed to improve weapons systems and battlefield decision-making. Denmark’s Systematic has seen its SitaWare command-and-control software adopted by NATO.
While Britain remains closely aligned with Palantir, Italy is also developing its own tools through startup Octostar. The company is reportedly building a platform capable of rivaling the American giant’s products, though it has yet to secure a major contract.
In Northern Europe, Finland’s ICEYE no longer provides only satellite imagery but increasingly AI-driven data analysis as well. And last but not least, Ukraine’s DELTA software, developed by the Aerorozvidka group, has emerged as a genuine battlefield management and situational-awareness system. DELTA remains fully sovereign, although it is sometimes used in combination with Palantir Technologies.
Meanwhile, countries on NATO’s eastern flank — long supportive of Palantir — are themselves beginning to question their dependence on American technology amid Donald Trump’s repeated threats.
Europe therefore still holds strong cards. The future of its sovereignty in military data and intelligence may ultimately depend less on technological capabilities than on political choices.
Thank you for this rather positive article. Enough of those who constantly decry European capabilities. It is good to see that Europe is full of talents and that European leaders are finally starting to realise the need to escape American hegemony.