Paris (France) (AFP) – France’s government took a new step Tuesday in search of “strategic autonomy” for its intelligence services, announcing that it would ditch American AI giant Palantir’s data-sifting systems in favour of a domestic provider. The move comes as European governments are increasingly uneasy about relying on US-controlled technologies, with Washington squeezing access last week to the latest model from AI giant Anthropic.
“We cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere,” Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said as he announced the break by its DGSI agency with Palantir. France must instead “build real autonomy” and “not depend on the goodwill of certain partners, who are capable of turning off the access tap” for artificial intelligence, he said. French company ChapsVision will now become the “technological foundation” for “many public agencies for their critical data processing needs,” the company said in a statement.
ChapsVision, founded in 2019, is a relative minnow compared to American AI behemoths, reporting 200 million euros ($232 million) of revenue in 2025 compared to Palantir’s $4.5 billion. Its tools designed to gather, prepare and analyse vast swathes of data have also been selected by Germany’s VS internal security service, according to specialist media. For its part, Palantir said in a statement that its contract with the DGSI “remains fully in force” and that “the company will continue to support the French government wherever its solutions are needed.” The continued Palantir contract was “to avoid suffering a capacity gap in this sensitive field essential to our national security,” Lecornu’s office told AFP.
The announcement followed multiple calls from across the spectrum by candidates for next year’s French presidential election to reduce the country’s dependence on US firms. Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, a right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire close to resident Donald Trump, with support from America’s CIA. It has notably worked with the US government to identify undocumented immigrants or targets in the US-Israel war on Iran. Campaign groups have warned that the company’s products pose risks related to mass surveillance, infringements on individual freedoms, and data protection. But Palantir says it simply provides powerful data processing services that can help reveal nuggets of useful information in the flood of intelligence sources available to government agencies and big companies.
British lawmakers earlier this month called for the country’s National Health Service (NHS) to end its contract with the American company. The London mayor’s office also blocked a bid by the British capital’s Metropolitan Police to work with Palantir.
Lecornu said Tuesday that Paris would plough an additional 655 million euros of new public investment into developing the country’s own AI. The funds would flow to “infrastructure, computing capacity, research, companies and industrial sectors,” he said. But Patrick Martin, head of the heavyweight Medef business association, said the government’s investments were “in line with France’s very limited means, given the state of public finances.” Following an “experimentation phase,” France is now moving to “the roll-out phase” of a government AI tool, Lecornu said, offering a chatbot to around one million of its 2.6 million civil servants. Built on models from the French AI startup Mistral, the system is supposed to help in areas like speeding up certain legal cases or helping university researchers secure grants. Ministers also want to crack down on “off-books” use of commercial AI tools that could introduce security risks.
© 2024 AFP
