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…
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Nick Corbishley 