Europe Now Wants to Abandon Palantir But Can't

European governments are increasingly vocal about digital independence. But in fact they remain dependent on a U.S. firm that is already built into the most sensitive European workflows, from policing and intelligence to health care and defense.

In a Politico article entitled Europe Wants to Kick Its Palantir Habit, journalists Antoaneta Roussi, Émile Marzolf and Anouk Schlung describe how Europe tries to cease using Palantir data analysis software. France and Germany have announced plans to develop a ‘European sovereign digital backbone.’ France’s domestic intelligence service has selected the French company ChapsVision. Spain has restricted Palantir’s access to public procurement. In a few months, the UK may face a choice of whether to cut off Palantir’s contract with the National Health Service (NHS) worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

The problem is that the Palantir product really works. It processes huge arrays of data, connects fragmented sources, and has been improved for years to fit real cases. European alternatives look weaker and more fragmented for now. Even NATO officials admit having no viable alternative to the company’s battlefield systems. Admiral Pierre Vandier has stated expressly that the alliance has no comparable solution.

To make things worse, Palantir does not simply sell software. The company puts its own engineers inside a buyer’s operation, makes its product ‘habitual,’ and gets embedded in the workflow. To renounce it means not just to change the contractor but to completely overhaul the decision-making systems in place. At the same time, European banks and investors have increased their investments in the same company to profit from an expected AI gold rush.

Attempts to create sovereign alternatives look more like a declaration, not an industrial policy. Without large-scale public procurement and long-term support, European developers will be unable to catch up with the American player that already boasts years of experience, a wealth of data, and the security agencies’ trust. If Europe fails to substitute just one layer of software, then all talk about phasing out U.S. cloud services and hardware platforms will sound even less convincing.

There is a deeper-lying problem. Palantir has become not just a tool but part of numerous agencies’ daily operations. It showed its value precisely at crisis times: after terrorist attacks in Paris, during the pandemic, and amid growing cyber threats. No European alternatives have similarly been ‘combat tested’. As a result, even those who advocate sovereignty in public continue with the practical use of the American solution that has already proven efficient.

The very model of the company’s work creates an additional layer of dependence. Palantir does not sell an off-the-shelf product. It embeds engineers, adapts algorithms to the specific client and gradually becomes indispensable. The longer a system works on this platform, the higher is the cost of exit. European attempts to replace it with individual national solutions still fail to produce a comparable effect of scale and accumulated experience. Olivier Dellenbach, head of ChapsVision, admits that without a serious industrial policy and public procurement European companies will remain a temporary alternative only, not a good substitute.

Europe has found itself in a classical dependence trap. It wants sovereignty but is unwilling to pay for it in time or money, nor put up with a decrease in current efficiency. While this gap persists, Palantir and similar companies will be an integral part of the European State machine, not a temporary solution. And each new crisis will only entrench this dependence. At some stage, breaking free from the American tool will become not just a policy issue but a matter of whole departments’ operational resilience.

Original publication: https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-wants-to-kick-its-palantir-habit/