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Europe’s Gathering Backlash Against Palantir Hits NATO Resistance

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The AI systems managed by Palantir are becoming even more deeply embedded in the collective West’s war-waging.

On Wednesday, President Trump launched yet another hissy fit against Spain, this time from the stage of the NATO summit in Ankara. Trump declared Spain a “terrible partner” and a “wasted cause” — a portmanteau, presumably, of “waste of space” and “lost cause” — and once again called for the termination of US-Spanish trade. This is something even Trump would struggle to pull off given trade with Spain falls under the umbrella of US-EU trade agreements.

There are, of course, many reasons for Trump’s growing frustration with Spain. The Pedro Sánchez government has repeatedly refused to bow to Trump’s demands to increase military spending to 5% of GDP, arguing that it would not be compatible with maintaining its welfare state and ensuring sustainable public finances.

Oddly, just 10 hours after Trump’s tirade, the US president was suddenly full of praise for the Spanish government — apparently because Madrid had finally honoured a request for “lots of payments.” According to El País, all Sánchez had done was explain that he had fulfilled the promised 2% and committed Spanish forced for a NATO mission in Finland.

Other reasons for Trump’s frustration with Spain include, of course, its government’s refusal to allow US forces to use joint Spanish-US bases to wage war against Iran. Spain has also been one of the most outspoken critics of that war as well as Israel’s myriad war crimes in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond. The Sánchez government has also pushed for much closer EU-China cooperation.

Most recently, Spain has sought to sever the public sector’s ties with the US data surveillance firm Palantir. Given the key position Palantir has come to occupy within the US armed forces and three-letter agencies, not to mention Trump’s close ties to Palantir’s co-founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, this is unlikely to have gone down well in the White House.

As The Candle reports, Madrid last week launched a blacklist of CIA-backed Palantir Technologies from public and private state-controlled entities:

The Spanish Prime Minister’s Office issued directives to companies under the State Society of Industrial Participations (SEPI) to cease future contracting due to security concerns and worries regarding the vulnerability of sensitive state data.

The ban targets organizations handling high-level communications and military intelligence, including Indra, Telefonica, and the shipbuilder Navantia.

Specific casualties of the policy include a Navantia project nearing completion and a negotiated partnership with the Guardia Civil that was vetoed by Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska.

Despite these restrictions, an over $18-million contract with the Armed Forces Intelligence Center (CIFAS) remains active until November.

While army and navy leadership have urged Defense Minister Margarita Robles to renew the deal, the Spanish Prime Minister’s Office has yet to make an official determination.

Spain’s stance aligns with broader European trends.

In mid-June, France’s domestic intelligence service ditched Palantir’s IA data tools in favour of a domestic provider in a bid to avoid, or at least reduce, strategic dependency on foreign powers.

“We must use our own AI models; we cannot accept new strategic dependencies in ‌the digital sphere,” the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu posted on social media. “We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools.”

Lecornu’s office said the French DGSI intelligence agency would supplant Palantir’s tools with those from the French firm ChapsVision, though the process is likely to take several years to complete since the US company’s long-term contract was renewed only a year ago.

The announcement came just a week after Washington decided to restrict foreign nationals’ access to Anthropic’s latest AI model. France must “build real autonomy” and “not depend on the goodwill of certain partners, who are capable of turning off the access tap” for artificial intelligence, the prime minister said.

For their part, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) and the armed forces (Bundeswehr) have both refused to deploy Palantir’s services, once again in favour of ChapsVision. The announcement came in May, just a few weeks after Vice Admiral Thomas Daum, the Bundeswehr’s chief of the cyber and information domain service, described the idea of granting employees of a private US company access to national databases as “inconceivable”.

This does not represent a total ban on government agencies’ use of Palantir’s services, however, as some have wrongly suggested. Several state police forces use the company’s “Gotham” platform, including Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia.

In a subsequent interview with Bild, Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp feigned surprise at the Bundeswehr’s decision not to use his company’s defence technologies. From Politico:

“Every serious battlefield in the world uses parts of Palantir. There’s a reason for that,” said Karp.

While he expressed understanding that Germany and other major countries want their own autonomous systems, he said he was puzzled by German scepticism — especially given that his co-founder, U.S. entrepreneur Peter Thiel, was born in Germany. Karp, an American entrepreneur, studied in Germany and speaks fluent German.

“Peter and I are the most prominent Germanic and/or German-speaking business people in the world by far and every other country would have found a way to adopt us,” said Karp. “If we were French, the French would wholesale force us to have French passports and only speak French and change our name to Falantir … I don’t understand how Germany believes it can afford this.”

Karp said that “at a general societal level, a lot of the discussions sound like they’re talking about witchcraft.”

The first European country to shut the door on Palantir was Switzerland, despite aggressive sales pitches from the US company. According to the small Swiss online magazine Republik, “Palantir was turned down outright at least nine times – either because its software was deemed unnecessary or because agencies feared reputational damage.”

The Swiss Army was apparently interested in acquiring Palantir software until as recently as 2024. But according to an internal report cited by Republik, worries over confidential Swiss military data being passed on to US intelligence agencies ultimately led the army to abandon the project.

When Republik reported the story, Palantir responded by launching a right-of-reply lawsuit against the magazine. At the resulting trial, the court rejected 22 of the 23 counterstatements Palantir attempted to force the magazine to publish.

In all of these cases, the arguments vary but they tend to focus around two core issues: digital sovereignty (having an indigenous system that does not rely, or relies minimally, on US companies) and data security (the risks of using a foreign system to manage sensitive information).

Even in the UK, Palantir’s biggest commercial market in Europe and the location of its European headquarters, things hang in the balance. As we noted a few months back, one possible silver lining of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal is that Palantir’s massive expansion into UK government services is finally getting the attention it deserves — and not a moment too soon.

Since 2020, Palantir has won over £670m in contracts with UK civil and defence industries, raising both ethical and national-security concerns among politicians and campaigners. Chief among those are a £330m contract with the NHS and a £240m deal with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), alongside a £15m contract related to Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

In September last year, just months after then-UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson had brokered a meeting between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Palantir chiefs in Washington, the UK government signed a £1.5bn investment deal with Palantir to help the UK military develop digital tools, utilise AI technology in decision making, and improve targeting systems. Mandelson called the resulting deal “my personal pride and joy.”

By then, however, serious questions were  being asked about the US tech firm’s role in managing the NHS’ federated data platform. As a Foxglove report lays bare, the focus hasn’t been just on the ethical and data-risk implications of Palantir’s involvement but also the government’s “dubious” claims of benefits for the NHS arising from that involvement.

In the UK, the backlash against Palantir has a strong grassroots element…

When the Mandelsongate scandal broke in early February, much of the resulting fallout has ended up splattering Palantir.

Since the scandal erupted, a parliamentary committee has called Palantir’s role in the NHS an “unacceptable weakness” and the mayor of London Sadiq Khan has blocked a £50 million contract with the Metropolitan Police. Palantir’s response was to launch a High Court challenge arguing the decision amounts to stifling free speech.

As Al Jazeera reports, Palantir’s £330 million NHS contract and its wider role in UK government hangs on the future Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s next move:

Should Andy Burnham enter Downing Street as early as July 17, if he is confirmed unopposed as Labour leader, one of his most consequential early decisions will have nothing to do with defence spending, immigration, or the economy.

It will concern a seven-year 330-million-pound ($440m) contract between NHS England and Palantir Technologies, a leading defence and intelligence software firm in the United States that received no contracts from Burnham’s Greater Manchester administration during his nine years as mayor.

The ramifications of such a decision could extend well beyond the NHS.

Media reports surfaced last week that Burnham is minded to hold that line with Palantir across all of the UK government when he arrives in Downing Street.

When approached by Al Jazeera, an Andy Burnham spokesperson said: “We’re not going to comment on individual government procurement contracts or companies and there are legal processes that must be followed.

“However, in general, Andy’s guiding principles on procurement are that we need to be getting value for money for the taxpayer and that we need to be safeguarding people’s data and British interests.”

For a company that has spent six years embedding itself across several public sector entities – the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, the Financial Conduct Authority – that posture is a real shift from the outgoing Labour administration led by Keir Starmer.

It remains to be seen what Burnham will do once he is actually in office. Memories are still painfully fresh of the popular Corbynite manifesto pledges Starmer made before becoming PM, almost none of which were honoured. Instead, Starmer prioritised hugely unpopular policies such as digital ID, facial recognition surveillance and the restriction of jury trials.

Meanwhile, as some national governments in Europe close the door, at least tentatively, on Palantir’s advances, NATO is escalating its reliance on the US tech firm’s services. On Tuesday, NATO announced that Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS) has become the Alliance’s operating system at a time of unprecedented battlefield digital transformation.

Palantir’s MSS is already the primary AI operating system for the US military and has played a key role in Israel’s AI-driven targeting in Gaza and pager attacks in Lebanon. MSS is also providing the targeting for Operation Epic Fury, including the bombing of Minab school in which 160 school-age girls were killed.

Another Palantir “product”, PRISMA, is helping Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) coordinate its drone attacks on Russia, according to CNN. Now, NATO is “quietly” placing its trust in Palantir to move troops and identify targets in the military alliance’s escalating war against Russia, reports the Murdoch-owned Times of London:

Inside the Nato military headquarters near Mons in Belgium, a new artificial intelligence system runs on a secret network. It will change how the alliance deters — and, if necessary, fights — Russia.

Built by Palantir, the American tech company that critics fear has become too powerful, Nato’s Maven Smart System (MSS) is a command and control platform powered by AI that speeds up response times from hours to minutes.

Maven, already embedded within the British Ministry of Defence, joins data from Nato members to expose vulnerabilities in the alliance’s defence plans and inform future personnel deployments.

It will show positioning across Nato’s eastern flank, relay Russian force movements in detail, alert officials to concerning changes from Moscow that demand an alliance response, and identify targets to strike…

Nato announced last week that it had reached full technical operational capability but omitted the word “Palantir” from the press release as many of its members are sceptical that the alliance should be so heavily reliant on the CIA-backed firm’s technology.

Obviously, when it comes to NATO, it is the US that generally calls the shots, including presumably on this particular issue. Most of Europe’s governing class were presumably content just to see Trump once again back in the NATO fold and talking about further helping Ukraine strike targets deep inside Russia, thus bringing Europe even closer to war with Russia. 

One can’t help but wonder, though, to what extent the recent boycotts of Palantir by some European governments represent a genuine shift in policy or rather a negotiating chip in their back-and-forths with the Trump administration. If the latter, it appears to have worked nicely — for now. Meanwhile, the AI systems managed by Palantir, a firm that has no vision of civic accountability, are becoming even more deeply embedded in the collective West’s war-waging.

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