Cohere is quietly working with Palantir to deploy its AI models

Cohere is one of the best-known AI startups outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, hitting a $5.5 billion valuation as of July as we previously reported. It’s co-founded by an author of the ‘Attention is All You Need’ paper that helped launch the LLM revolution.

Based in Toronto and San Francisco, Cohere sells AI to the enterprise and doesn’t have a viral consumer chatbot. While Anthropic made headlines last month for a deal it inked with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers, TechCrunch has learned that Palantir is also a Cohere partner. And Cohere’s models are already in use at various unnamed Palantir customers, according to info discussed in a video posted by Palantir.

The video is of a presentation in November 2024 at DevCon1, Palantir’s first developer conference. It shows Cohere is “already deploying to Palantir customers,” according to remarks made by Cohere engineer and former Palantir employee Billy Trend.

“This is why I’m really excited about working with Palantir, and we’re going to give you a bunch of details about exactly how we’re able to serve their customers,” Trend said during the presentation.

In the video, Trend mostly stuck to technical details. While he did not name any specific Palantir customers, Trend did mention one deployment of Cohere’s AI with a Palantir customer that has “really strict constraints” on where it can store its data and wants to be able to do inference in Arabic, “which is a great opportunity for Cohere, because that’s something we excel at,” he said.

Palantir’s customers can access Cohere’s latest AI models via ‘compute modules’ within Foundry, Trend said. It should be noted that Foundry, one of Palantir’s flagship platforms, is geared more towards commercial customers versus Palantir’s other, older main platform, Gotham, which was designed for defense and intelligence agencies, Palantir has described. So while, we don’t know which organizations are using Cohere through Palantir, this implies it could be corporations.

Palantir works with all sorts of huge enterprises, like Airbus. But it is also vocal about its close work with US defense and intelligence agencies, recently publishing a manifesto about how to rebuild the defense-tech sector.

Cohere has touted partnerships with major tech companies like Fujitsu but has stayed quiet about any deals with Palantir, according to a review of its website and announcements. 

TechCrunch asked Cohere if it could specify if its AI is being used for military or intelligence-related use cases, and what Cohere’s general policy is towards these kinds of deployments. Cohere declined to comment.

Palantir did not immediately comment. As for OpenAI, it is being used by defense tech, as well, with news earlier this month that it had penned a deal with Anduril.