TL;DR
France and Germany pledged to develop a sovereign alternative to Palantir’s military software. France’s Arcadia is the model. Both countries already dropped Palantir for ChapsVision.
France and Germany pledged on Friday to develop a European alternative to Palantir’s military AI software. A joint declaration signed after talks between Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz committed the two countries to examine “a European sovereign digital backbone” covering data-centric security, AI, and cloud solutions. France’s Arcadia, an AI-powered command-and-control platform, was named as the starting point, alongside unspecified “comparable German solutions.”
The declaration arrives after both countries moved to drop Palantir from their intelligence services. France’s DGSI announced in June it was replacing Palantir with ChapsVision’s ArgonOS, six months after renewing the American firm’s contract. Germany’s BfV chose ChapsVision for the same role. The Bundeswehr has excluded Palantir from its defence cloud procurement entirely. A top NATO commander recently told Politico there was no real European alternative to Palantir’s Maven software, which the alliance uses for battlefield data processing. Friday’s declaration is Paris and Berlin’s answer: build one.
The joint statement also covers missiles, tanks, and space. France, Germany, and the UK will examine cooperation on long-range weapons with a 2,500-kilometre range, drawing on capabilities at ArianeGroup. The Franco-German MGCS tank programme, intended to replace the Leopard 2 and Leclerc, will launch a research programme on autonomous driving, sensors, and battlefield networking. The troubled FCAS next-generation fighter jet was notably absent from the declaration. Instead, the two countries agreed to create a “European collaborative combat standard” so fighter jets and drones from different nations can communicate in the field.
Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp called Germany’s refusal to consider his company “conversations about witchcraft“ in a Bild interview last month, arguing the software was proven on every serious battlefield. That argument has not moved Berlin. The sovereignty question is not whether Palantir’s technology works, it plainly does, but whether Europe’s most sensitive military infrastructure should depend on an American company at a time when transatlantic relations cannot be taken for granted. France and Germany have now put that question into a joint declaration. Whether they can turn it into working software is the harder part.
