France’s intelligence service is dropping Palantir for a homegrown rival

France’s domestic intelligence agency is dropping Palantir. The DGSI will replace the American firm’s data-analysis tools with software from ChapsVision, a French company, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Tuesday, framing the switch as part of a wider push to put sovereign technology at the centre of the French state.

The timing is the part worth pausing on. Palantir announced the renewal of its three-year DGSI contract in December 2025, extending a relationship that had run for the better part of a decade.

Six months later, the agency that signed that renewal is preparing to walk away from it. The French government did not explain how the two decisions sit together, and it is an awkward sequence to read in order.

The replacement is ChapsVision’s ArgonOS, an AI-powered data-processing platform built by the firm controlled by the entrepreneur Olivier Dellenbach. ChapsVision had positioned itself for exactly this moment, having competed in a French procurement process launched in 2022 for a heterogeneous-data-processing tool, alongside the Thales-Eviden joint venture Athea and others.

As of late 2025, none of the domestic candidates had reached operational stage, which is part of why Palantir kept the contract in the first place.

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That gap between ambition and readiness has been the recurring French story on Palantir. Sovereignty was always the stated goal, and the practical absence of a homegrown tool that could match Palantir’s performance kept pushing the deadline back.

The announcement is, in effect, the government deciding the alternative is now good enough to commit to, whether or not the procurement record fully agrees.

The move arrives inside a broader European turn against the company. Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the BfV, recently chose ChapsVision over Palantir for its own data analysis, and the Bundeswehr has been pressing for a secure cloud in which no foreign firm has structural access.

Palantir has, accordingly, been facing German military rejection and investor jitters at the same time. In Britain, the government has been reviewing its £330m NHS contract with the firm. The pattern is European governments reconsidering how much of their most sensitive infrastructure should run on American software.

The reconsideration has a beneficiary class, and France has been building it deliberately. The ChapsVision decision landed the same day Lecornu confirmed that French civil servants would get an AI assistant powered by Mistral, the company the government most often holds up as Europe’s sovereign answer to the American labs.

Mistral’s chief executive, Arthur Mensch, has argued for two years that Europe must own and operate its own AI infrastructure rather than rent it, and the DGSI switch is that argument applied to the most sensitive corner of government.

What has not been disclosed is the timeline for the handover, the value of the ChapsVision contract, or what becomes of the Palantir agreement that was renewed only months ago.

Migrating an intelligence service from one analytical platform to another is not a flip of a switch, and the practical transition is likely to run well beyond the announcement. Palantir did not immediately comment on the French decision.