A Berlin-based non-profit has filed a criminal complaint against Meta’s smart glasses, arguing the devices breach Germany’s strict privacy rules and should be banned.
Privacy concerns over the device have snowballed in recent months amid reports of people being filmed without their consent, or recording intimate footage without knowing it could be reviewed by Meta contractors.
The non-profit HateAid is arguing that the sale of Meta smart glasses in Germany is a criminal offense because the devices allow wearers to covertly film other people.
The complaint, which alleges the sale breaches Germany’s Telecommunications, Digital Services and Data Protection Act, was filed against Meta, Ray-Ban and Oakley — eyewear brands that have partnered with Meta to design the glasses — and several retailers.
Meta spokesperson Matthew Pollard said the smart glasses were approved by Germany’s regulator BNetzA in 2022, and “were built with privacy safeguards from the ground up that go beyond what any smartphone offers.” Those include an LED light that turns on when the glasses are recording, as well as technology to stop anyone from tampering with the light.
HateAid said that smart glasses should only be sold if they are clearly identifiable, and that there should be limits on recording in certain spaces as there is for dashcams or bodycams.
Europe’s privacy regulators have commissioned a report on smart glasses that is due to be finalized this summer.
BERLIN — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government is moving to turn the country’s foreign intelligence agency into a more potent weapon to counter mounting threats from adversaries including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Under the proposed reform, spies working for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, could carry out acts of sabotage, conduct offensive cyber operations and pursue more aggressive espionage operations. Until now, those spies have been limited to information-gathering operations due to intentional restraints put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy apparatus.
But with the threat of sabotage and influence operations from Russia growing — and concerns that U.S. President Donald Trump could halt or leverage the intelligence sharing Germany heavily relies on — Merz’s government has moved to push through a historic strengthening of the country’s foreign intelligence apparatus.
“We are daily targets of espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks and covert actions by foreign powers aimed at destabilizing Germany, at harming our country and at bringing about political and social changes within our country,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters after the cabinet meeting in Berlin.
“Our mission is to continually adapt the state’s protective mandate to these new threat scenarios,” he added.
The reforms must still be passed by both chambers of parliament before going into effect by 2027.
Nina Warken, the chancellery chief overseeing the BND reforms, suggested Germany can no longer afford to rely so heavily on foreign allies for sophisticated intelligence operations it has long been unable conduct itself.
“So far — and this must be stated objectively — we have relied too heavily in too many security-related areas on our partners to help ensure our security,” Warken said. “In short, we are simply too dependent on the support of other countries’ intelligence services. And in too many areas, this assistance is a one-way street.”
Germany’s postwar foreign intelligence service was founded in 1956 with far more legal constraints than intelligence agencies elsewhere. Those restraints have had the side effect of making Germany particularly dependent on the U.S. for intelligence gathering.
In view of the growing threat from Russia, leading politicians now argue that it is time for Germany’s spies to be given the ability to hit back harder. That argument took on new urgency following the sighting of an explosive-laden drone at Leipzig-Halle Airport in eastern Germany last week that was found near a Ukrainian Antonov plane used to transport munitions.
Dobrindt, in remarks after the incident, stopped short of naming Russia as responsible for the drone incursion, but said that “a hybrid threat is evident” and that such perils do not originate from amateurs but are “often linked to foreign powers.” On Wednesday, he said results of an investigation into the drone incident were still pending.
Germany’s security “worsened significantly” in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a report by the country’s domestic intelligence agency last year.
Germany’s intelligence reform would allow authorities to actively respond to hybrid threats such as the Leipzig drone incident. Measures could range from exposing those involved or destroying their property to sabotaging explosives before an attack or feeding adversaries false intelligence afterward, according to the proposed reform. Any response would have to be directly linked to the original incident and could not endanger life or physical safety.
“We are expanding the technical capabilities of the intelligence services and granting them active, operational powers,” Dobrindt said. “This is not just about enabling the services to see and hear better in the future and analyze information more quickly. Above all, it is about being able to take active measures against our attackers and adversaries.”
The BND will also face fewer data-protection restrictions, allowing it to make greater use of tools such as AI and facial recognition and to store data for longer periods of time, according to the proposed reform. The agency is also set to receive more funding in the coming years. Merz’s government increased the agency’s budget by about 26 percent to €1.51 billion this year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday passionately defended the use of artificial intelligence, as the rapid advancement of the technology faces increased scrutiny — and calls for regulation — in the U.S. and globally.
In a 6,500 word post timed to the announcement of his company’s new open source version of its own model, Muse Spark, Zuckerberg detailed his vision for AI, arguing the technology is not to be feared and pushing back on concerns that superintelligence could strip people of jobs.
“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.”
Zuckerberg’s vision is a direct contrast to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s, who has previously warned how AI could cause job disruption. Meta lags behind Anthropic and OpenAI, which have the most advanced AI models.
While Zuckerberg’s essay did not name Amodei or OpenAI directly, he called to broadly distribute superintelligent AI for economic opportunity. Doing so, Zuckerberg said, would provide a safety net to prevent just a handful of governments, businesses and other institutions holding too much power.
Still, Zuckerberg emphasized that the U.S. must address restrictions on AI companies in order to create the best models in the world.
“It is also important that the US and its allies lead the open source AI ecosystem that will make up a large percent of global AI use,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data.”
Zuckerberg’s essay comes amid growing concerns around AI safety. Last month, Anthropic revealed that several of its advanced models gained access to three organizations in three separate incidents dating back to April. That hack came shortly after OpenAI said that two of its most powerful models escaped a testing environment and breached multiple companies.
Lawmakers last month introduced a bill that would give the government power to restrict the use of models that could lead to catastrophic risks. While it is the latest bipartisan effort to address concerns around AI models, Congress has ultimately failed to advance broad legislation.
Zuckerberg urged the federal government to work with companies to test new models as he laid out his strategies for protecting against cybersecurity and bioterrorism.
“First, we should focus on limiting the physical production and distribution of harmful materials,” he wrote. “I expect it will be easier to regulate and control physical components than the spread of knowledge, so this is an important area of policy focus. Second, we should accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise. This includes streamlining how the FDA and other regulators test and approve new treatments.”
Zuckerberg also defended the spread of data centers, arguing that the centers represent investment into communities as he touted his company’s goal of being “water-positive, meaning that we’ll restore more water than we use in the watersheds where we operate by 2030.”
PARIS — Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is the latest in a string of French presidential candidates allegedly targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign.
Attal, the candidate of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, said on Thursday he had been “a victim” of an electoral “interference” attempt originating from Russia, and that he expected such “destabilization efforts” to increase ahead of France’s April 2027 election.
Viginum, the country’s agency for fighting online disinformation, confirmed it had detected the operation against Attal and attributed it “with a high level of confidence” to “pro-Russian” disinformation tactics.
Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who is also running for president, was the first to be reportedly targeted last week, before center-left parliamentarian Raphaël Glucksmann, who is expected to run, shared that he had been targeted by a “Russian operation” on Monday.
Attal said on RTL radio on Thursday the smear campaign against him consisted of falsified news reports about his health and policy proposals, which copied the branding of French news outlets. “Russia wants to steal the election from the French,” he said.
A 2024 report from Viginum identified a similar “pro-Russian campaign” known as “Matriochka,” which involved news and media reports impersonating well-known French outlets.
“Combating foreign interference and protecting our democratic framework are a priority,” current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu posted online on Wednesday. “Several instances of foreign interference targeting candidates have already been detected, and in each case, the individuals were immediately notified.”
LAS VEGAS — Weeks before they escaped a closed test and launched a cyberattack without any human prompting, some of OpenAI’s most advanced artificial intelligence agents secretly began sharing tips on how to cheat their way through an internal hacking evaluation, two of the AI company’s researchers said Wednesday.
“This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” Michael Dalton, one of the AI-maker’s researchers, said during a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The latest disclosure provides greater detail on the timeline and methods used by two of OpenAI’s models before they slipped outside a controlled environment and onto the open internet, allowing the models to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face undetected. OpenAI admitted its models were responsible for the hack late last month, roughly a week after Hugging Face said an autonomous AI system broke into its network.
The revelation is likely to spur fresh scrutiny of the measures leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are taking to monitor the behavior of their most cyber-capable technology — especially during evaluations where agents are prompted to demonstrate their hacking skills in what is meant to be a controlled setting.
On Tuesday, the U.K.’s AI Safety and Security Institute disclosed that Anthropic’s most powerful AI model created fake online personas and sought to trick a human coder into abetting a cyberattack during a recent hacking test gone wrong. After the Hugging Face disclosure last month, Anthropic conducted a review and found models it was testing had breached three organizations in separate incidents dating back to April.
Dalton and Eric Wallace, another OpenAI researcher, said Wednesday the AI giant recently learned that multiple agents it was testing simultaneously began communicating over an internal message board in early May. There, different models shared advice about how to accomplish difficult hacking challenges they were struggling to surmount, including workarounds that required internet access.
Two OpenAI models ultimately strung together a series of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the internet and worm their way inside Hugging Face in mid-July. OpenAI has said the models were focused on completing a hacking evaluation they were prompted to solve, and that correct answers could be found on the AI developer platform.
The OpenAI researchers told conference attendees that since early May, the models created a message board inside OpenAI’s Artifactory internal file system. Without the company’s knowledge, the models spent months independently exchanging information and techniques to help each other complete difficult tasks.
Wallace said that when models get stuck, they often “try to game or cheat the task in order to get their reward.”
“The beginning of this incident kind of traces back to this point where one agent realized it could communicate by uploading a note,” he added.
By late May, one model found a way to abuse Artifactory’s internet access to retrieve files from various websites — effectively giving the models indirect access to the internet. In June, the models were able to find and exploit a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain administrative privileges on Artifactory, install remote software and expand their activity within the system.
These efforts eventually overloaded Artifactory, causing a system-wide outage in early July that alerted OpenAI’s engineers to the ploy. After investigating, the company revoked the model’s credentials, removed the message board and worked with Artifactory to fix any gaps before resuming training. But the models found another way to communicate inside Artifactory just days later and continued exchanging techniques to target additional vulnerabilities within OpenAI’s infrastructure and external systems, including Hugging Face.
In light of the incident, Dalton said OpenAI is “consciously slowing down research to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles and foundation of our environment, and dramatically scaling up the monitoring of our AI agents and improving our general security control environment across prevention, detection, and mitigation.”
Leading artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI created fake online personas and tried to deceive human coders into abetting a cyberattack during a recent safety evaluation, the U.K.’s AI Safety and Security Institute disclosed Tuesday.
It marks the latest case in which a powerful AI system has attempted a digital attack on an unwitting third party without direct prompting during such an evaluation — heightening concerns the powerful technology is advancing too fast for responsible oversight.
The disclosure is likely to ignite fresh calls in Washington and Silicon Valley for more rigorous regulation of the AI industry, particularly over frontier models with advanced capabilities to detect and launch cyberattacks. It comes just days after similar testing mishaps involving some of the same models from OpenAI and Anthropic sparked urgent calls for new AI safety regulation and a push within Silicon Valley to slow the rapid pace of AI development.
Like its U.S. counterpart, AISI routinely conducts security evaluations to better understand what dangers both new and soon-to-be-released AI models pose to public health and safety. But even the digital security body said the actions it uncovered by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6 — the latest publicly released model from either AI lab — were unlike anything it had seen before.
AISI said the malicious activity began on July 25. The AI safety evaluator detected it and launched an investigation on July 28, when it spotted “unusual data transfers” stemming from a cyber evaluation it was conducting on Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6.
Overall, AISI determined that Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6 took “autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organizations” during 10 of the 122 evaluations the research body conducted and isolated for review. The majority of those actions, it said, involved Mythos 5 and arose during a “single, sustained line of activity.”
In the most alarming incident it uncovered, Mythos 5 attempted a supply chain attack — a sophisticated technique often deployed by North Korean and Russian cyber operatives, in which hackers bury malware inside legitimate code.
To do so, Anthropic’s model created “multiple fake identities” on developer platform GitHub and used them to send messages “pressuring” an open-source software engineer to unwittingly introduce a bugged update into code widely available on the popular site, AISI said. When that effort failed, the AI “edited its earlier activity to appear harmless” and “considered adopting a fresh identity to continue,” AISI added, a sign the model was intent on repeating the ruse.
As part of the same effort, Mythos 5 also sent direct messages over GitHub to software engineers that contained malware.
In another sign of deceitful behavior AISI uncovered in its investigation, multiple AI agents it was testing appeared to communicate with one another about how to convince real engineers using GitHub to trust them. “One agent left public messages on GitHub offering collaboration with other agents working on the same challenge,” AISI wrote.
AISI’s blog and technical assessment make no mention of whether the models also attempted to exploit previously unknown software bugs — called zero-days — during the evaluation.
Last month, OpenAI disclosed that GPT 5.6 and another of its models escaped onto the open internet during what was supposed to be a controlled test, and then hacked another company in a first-of-its-kind, autonomous breach.
In response, Anthropic launched an investigation into whether any of its models took illicit action during recent testing and discovered Mythos 5 and two other models had hacked three organizations during tests dating back to April.
In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said they are “grateful” to AISI for their leadership and that this review underscores the need for “a broader conversation about how to safely evaluate increasingly capable AI agents.”
The spokesperson added: “As we shared after disclosing our own incident last week, the field needs stronger, shared standards for how evaluation environments are built and secured. We look forward to partnering with the UK AISI to learn more about this incident as we conduct our own investigation.”
An OpenAI spokesperson referred POLITICO to a blog post about the incident that went up Tuesday evening. “We are committed to working across the industry to strengthen shared practices for conducting high-risk evaluations safely, including convening stakeholders such as national AI institutes, independent evaluators, other AI labs, and other groups in the coming weeks,” the blog read.
AISI stressed in its blog that the malicious activity it disclosed Tuesday took place under “deliberately permissive conditions” so they could assess the safety risks posed by the two models. This included granting the models access to the internet, unlike the earlier incidents detailed by Anthropic and OpenAI.
AISI also noted the models were intentionally stripped of internal guardrails that block malicious behavior. AISI was only able to disable those controls because of its role testing Mythos 5 and ChatGPT 5.6.
Still, AISI said the incidents highlighted the need for greater monitoring of model behavior during testing, and tighter controls over their access to the internet.
The Trump administration is finalizing a voluntary framework under which AI labs would submit powerful models they want to release to the public for federal safety testing. But it has not yet made the framework public, and it includes no provisions for models AI labs are developing internally.
The incidents last month from OpenAI and Anthropic both involved models not intended for public release.
Some cyber experts say recent incidents highlight deeper questions around AI development, such as who is liable when AI systems break federal hacking laws.
“If any of these were human-originated, they would lead to clear and vigorous prosecution. I think it’s time for a serious discussion about updates to existing computer security law,” said Marc Rogers, a hacker and prominent cybersecurity expert.
Palantir is shifting profits from its European operations to the United States, allowing the Florida-based data analytics giant to pay minimal taxes in Europe, a new report finds.
The report by the U.K.-based Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research,a group partly funded by labor unions that researches corporate tax avoidance in an effort to win reform of global tax rules, found that Palantir’s European subsidiaries, which took in €440.5 million in annual revenue in 2024, report far smaller profit margins in Europe than in the U.S.
“Although a substantial part of Palantir’s revenue is realized in Europe, almost all of the pre-tax profits are funneled to the United States,” the report said.
Palantir pays no U.S. federal income tax because previous losses, tax credits, and R&D deductions offset its taxable income; and virtually no state income tax, with the exception of Maryland, which levies a digital services tax.
The profit gap between the U.S. and Europe is stark. In 2025, Palantir’s American business pocketed 47.7 cents in profit from every dollar of revenue — more than double the previous year’s 22.5 cents. Outside the U.S., the profit margin was just 6.3 percent. In some European subsidiaries, it fell to around 3 percent, according to the new report.
CICTAR argues that Palantir “intentionally and artificially” shrinks European profits — and therefore its European tax bills — to concentrate profits in the U.S. There is no claim in the report that such arrangements, often referred to as “profit shifting,” are illegal. Multinational companies often reduce reported profits by paying subsidiaries or otherrelated entities for intellectual property, loans or expertise.
In Sweden, for example, Palantir reported €13.7 million in revenue in 2024, but only €1.1 million in profit. At Sweden’s 20 percent corporate tax rate, that left the company with a tax bill of just €424,000.
In its Q2 earnings report on Monday, Palantir made no explicit reference to earnings from its European subsidiaries. Instead, it highlighted its U.S. business, where revenue rose 115 percent year-on-year to $1.57 billion (€1.36 billion), and boasted of its 62 percent profit margin.
A U.K.-based Palantir spokesperson said that the majority of the company’s 2025 revenue and profitability was driven by its U.S. business. “Our tax position in each jurisdiction reflects the level of economic activity there, and we meet our tax obligations in every market in which we operate,” the spokesperson said.
Not alone
Palantir is not the first U.S. tech company to draw scrutiny over how it books profits in Europe.
In 2024, the European Court of Justice ordered Apple to pay Ireland €13 bn in back taxes, ending an 8-year-long fight over what Brussels said amounted to illegal state aid. Amazon also fought the European Commission over claims it had received an unlawful tax advantage worth around €250 million in Luxembourg — a case the company ultimately won. Microsoft, meanwhile, has faced scrutiny over its Irish subsidiary, Microsoft Round Island One, which avoided paying millions to the state after claiming tax residency in Bermuda. The U.S. software giant has denied that it is circumventing Ireland’s tax laws.
Jan Willem Goudriaan, General Secretary of the European Federation of Public Service Unions — a supporter of CICTAR— said that companies such as Palantir, Amazon and Microsoft focus on minimizing the taxes they pay, “thus robbing funding for public services.”
“Companies bidding for public contracts should have to demonstrate responsible tax conduct by disclosing where their revenues, workforce, profits and taxes are located,” he said.
Another reason for the low profits of Palantir’s European subsidiaries is their high personnel costs. In the U.K., where most of the company’s non-U.S. workforce is based, Palantir reported £173 million (€204.3 million) in employee costs for 749 staff in 2024 — an average of £230,974 (€272,803) per employee.
The report also points to Palantir’s use of stock-based compensation across its European subsidiaries, especially in the U.K., Spain and Norway. This means employees are paid partly in company shares or awards. Those awards are recorded as staff expenses, which can lower a subsidiary’s corporate tax bill.
PARIS — A group affiliated with Russia’s intelligence agency launched a disinformation campaign against center-left MEP and likely presidential candidate in next year’s French election, Raphaël Glucksmann, he claimed in a post on X on Tuesday.
Glucksmann, who is expected to announce whether he will run for president in the coming weeks, said he had been informed by the French Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security of a “Russian operation” that was “directly controlled by the [Russian] GRU.”
Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who is a confirmed presidential candidate, was also reportedly targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign last week. And several local candidates from the left-wing France Unbowed movement, known for its pro-Palestinian advocacy, were allegedly targeted by an Israeli firm earlier this year.
The alleged disinformation effort against Glucksmann involved an article posted on a website mimicking well-known left-wing news outlet Blast, as well as a social media clip claiming Glucksmann’s partner Léa Salamé — the host of French public television’s prime-time news program — had tried bribing other journalists to speak about his likely candidacy favorably.
Glucksmann is a prominent critic of the Russian government and took part in the 2013 Maidan uprising in Kyiv.
“Russian agencies have begun operations to destabilize the 2027 presidential election,” he wrote on social media. “This attack is merely a foretaste of what is to come.”
The Russian Embassy in Paris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As he nears the end of his term, French President Emmanuel Macron has said that safeguarding the 2027 presidential election from foreign interference would be a top priority.
BRUSSELS — When French and German security chiefs announced plans last month to develop a “European sovereign digital backbone,” tech and defense industry insiders on both sides of the Atlantic knew what they really meant: Adieu Palantir.
Across Europe, the hunt is on for alternatives to the U.S.-based data analytics company that a growing number of government officials believe is too deeply lodged in some of the most sensitive areas of government, from local policing and global intelligence to national defense and health systems.
Yet it is precisely Palantir’s crucial functions in daily workflows, and its largely unmatched data expertise, that will make it extremely hard for Europe to cut it off in pursuit of greater digital sovereignty.
“Let’s be honest, Palantir’s product is very good and addictive, it’s pretty much like the sugar in Coca-Cola,” said French digital sovereignty advocate, Philippe Latombe. “Palantir can treat massive amounts of data with great precision and with their experience, they had time to improve their algorithms with many clients and adapt them to many use cases.”
Still, the drive to break free from Palantir is sweeping across the continent, from Madrid, where the government of Pedro Sánchez has instructed state-backed companies to block Palantir from future public procurement contracts, to France’s domestic intelligence services (DGSI) selecting French company ChapsVision over Palantir. In Britain, the next test may come in February 2027, when the new Labour government of Andy Burnham will face a choice of whether to cut off Palantir’s £330 million National Health Service Federated Data Platform contract.
Last month’s decision by the French and German intelligence agencies to choose ChapsVision was a double-blow for Palantir’s leadership. CEO Alex Karp showed little patience for the sudden turn away from his company’s wares, declaring that he wasn’t worried about European competitors. “We have a model of what doesn’t work,” he quipped last week on Fox Business. “It’s called Europe.”
Palantir CEO Alex Karp visits “The Claman Countdown” at Fox Business Network Studios. | John Lamparski/Getty Images
Olivier Dellenbach, ChapsVision’s chief executive, told POLITICO that his company has benefited from what he calls a “visceral rejection of Palantir” in Europe.
But he also cautioned that he did not want ChapsVision reduced to an anti-Palantir way out. Digital sovereignty, he argues, will remain an empty phrase unless governments turn it into industrial policy. “We need more public procurement,” Dellenbach said.
Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania, the Netherlands and Canada have already shown interest in the French Army’s Artemis AI, according to Patrick Moreau, one of the architects of the solution built by French aerospace and defense company Thales.
“They all want to be able to choose a sovereign solution that is compatible with NATO standards,” he said. “Unlike Palantir’s black box.”
But for now, even officials who want sovereign alternatives acknowledge that Europe’s replacement market remains fragmented and European companies are yet to match Palantir’s scale and track record.
Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander transformation, recently told POLITICO the alliance has no viable alternative to Palantir’s battlefield AI technology.
Another NATO official, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said that Palantir’s system has an unmatched capacity to sift through mountains of satellite imagery to help identify a target, advise on the weapon to strike it, inform how much ammunition is required — and automatically put in an order to replenish the stock.
“As far as I know, today there is no real competitor for Palantir,” Vandier said in May.
Freedom or democracy?
Co-founded by Karp and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Palantir built its reputation inside the U.S. national security apparatus. Today, the company has a market capitalization of $330 billion.
Thiel has been one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, while the company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli military has come in for criticism from Amnesty International and others for alleged human rights violations. Adding to unease about Palantir’s ideology-driven business were recent revelations of Thiel’s secretive Dialog society, an invitation-only ideas club for the global elite, and Karp’s manifesto arguing that Palantir is the democratic West’s best hope to stay ahead of authoritarian rivals.
“Peter Thiel explains that the defense of freedom does not necessarily require democracy,” French member of Parliament Aurélien Saintoul, who wrote a report on foreign military dependencies, told POLITICO. “He is clearly putting technical means to serve his political project, and we are talking about technofascists here.”
A Palantir spokesperson who declined to be named dismissed such accusations as “ludicrous,” noting that similar characterizations about the company have been made recently by the Russian foreign ministry.
Peter Thiel and his husband Matt Danzeisen attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference at the Sun Valley Lodge on July 9, 2026. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
“We know what side we’re on, and who we’re standing with,” the spokesman said, citing ongoing work to support the Ukrainian military. “Since our inception, protecting privacy and civil liberties has served as the foundation for how we conduct our work across both public and private sector institutions. Western politicians should think hard about who the real enemy is and not allow themselves to be ventriloquized by the Kremlin.”
Many of the company’s European critics maintain that the Palantir question is much more about tech sovereignty than political ideology. Extracting the company from some of the most delicate corners of European security structures would offer a blueprint for claiming more technological independence.
Instead, if governments in Europe cannot wean themselves off a company that provides software solutions, it would reveal how unrealistic hopes are to reduce dependence on U.S. technology giants that provide cloud infrastructure and hardware.
There is also the uncomfortable reality that at the same time that political leaders are calling for a break from Palantir, Europe’s biggest banks and asset managers have dramatically increased their investments in the U.S. company over the past year as it positions itself to profit from the AI gold rush, reports investigative outlet Follow the Money.
From crisis tool to critical infrastructure
Palantir’s European foothold was built long before the current boom in AI. A hallmark of its growth was that it never wasted a crisis to demonstrate its value for governments in need.
In France, for instance, Palantir arrived in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks as security services scrambled to respond to a fervent public backlash on how they could have allowed such a tragedy to happen. The domestic intelligence agency signed a contract with the data analytics giant in 2016.
A similar pattern played out in Germany, where Palantir’s first major deployment came in Frankfurt, in the central state of Hesse, where police purchased Palantir’s Gotham in 2017 and deployed it under the name hessenDATA. It proved to be a crucial tool for officers to turn sprawling information into leads to help solve crimes.
Germany remains deeply divided over whether to use Palantir’s software. At the national level, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has pushed to expand the use of Palantir and introduced legislation that could pave the way for broader federal use. But the move has run into opposition from coalition partners the Social Democrats, as well as senior security officials.
The same crisis-to-contract pattern appeared in the U.K. during the Covid-19 pandemic. Palantir’s relationship with the National Health Service (NHS) began when it was paid a nominal £1 fee to help aggregate data during the crisis, according to Palantir’s U.K. lead Louis Mosley.
Europol, the EU’s police agency, used Palantir’s Gotham platform from 2016 to 2021 before ultimately dropping it. For one Europol official who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely, the problem with Palantir is less ideological than practical. Yes, the platform is expensive, raises sovereignty concerns and leaves clients dependent on Palantir for updates, the official said. But the more basic question is whether every agency needs the full Palantir machine.
“[Palantir] is really good when you have massive amounts of data and want to connect everything,” they said. “But that is not the case for us. In many cases, the alternatives are close enough. If we used it, I’m not sure our efficiency would increase dramatically.”
Part of Palantir’s approach in Europe is to hire former officials from the institutions it wants as customers. OpenDemocracy reported that Palantir hired four former officials from the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence before winning a £240 million MoD contract.
The influence drive
Moreover, Palantir is now seeking new business on the continent in defense.
On Jul. 1, Palantir’s Maven Smart System — which was first used by the Pentagon — became fully operational at NATO, meaning it’s been given security clearance to operate on the classified network. According to a NATO statement, the platform links command-and-control systems across the Alliance.
“I think this is a very important milestone for European defense,” said Palantir’s U.K. chief Louis Mosley.
But Palantir’s grip on Europe does not stop at the doors of government or army barracks. It also runs through some of the continent’s industrial crown jewels. Airbus signed with Palantir in 2015, making Palantir’s Foundry the backbone of its aviation data platform. Automaker BMW, energy company British Petroleum and media publisher Axel Springer — POLITICO’s parent company — all use Foundry to improve their business productivity as well.
Looking for alternatives
Even if Europe manages to loosen Palantir’s grip, the company’s model built on top of the latest AI large-language systems appears to only be getting stronger. On Jun. 30, Amazon Web Services said it would invest $1 billion in a new “Forward Deployed Engineering” organization, embedding teams of engineers inside customer headquarters to build AI systems alongside them.
Days later, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion push to send 6,000 engineers and industry specialists into client organizations. Both initiatives echo Palantir’s pioneering model to not simply sell software but put engineers inside a buyer’s operation.
Both the strength of its products and the sensitive areas where they’re applied, make Palantir Europe’s sovereign test case par excellence. If governments and companies can replace a software layer that helps turn data into decisions, they may have a blueprint for clawing back some digital sovereignty. If they cannot, the next generation of AI tools from U.S. tech giants may prove even harder to quit.
“Europe’s public institutions cannot become dependent on software built by a small circle of U.S. tech billionaires with an obscure political worldview,” said German Green MEP Hannah Neumann, who sits on Parliament’s defense committee. “It would be like outsourcing part of the democratic state to a private intelligence service that answers neither to voters nor to parliament.”
The White House has a framework for how to review advanced AI models, according to an administration official, but did not detail it or say whether it would be released to the public.
AI companies are expected to review a draft Tuesday at a meeting with the Office of the National Cyber Director, according to four people familiar with the planning who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The framework will shape how the federal government works with the country’s leading AI developers before and after their most advanced models are deployed, and comes as the Trump administration seeks to address potential safety and national security risks while pursuing a mostly light-touch regulatory approach to the technology.
“The voluntary framework outlined in the June 2nd executive order was complete by the deadline,” said a White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations. “Discussions with industry about next steps are underway.”
The framework has not been released to industry, which was working closely with the White House on its contours over the last few weeks, and it’s unclear if it will be publicly released. The order does not stipulate one way or the other, though the voluntary nature of the order raises questions about how companies that aren’t briefed by the White House on the framework will be able to opt in, should it not be released more widely. The deadline for the framework was Aug. 1, 60 days after the executive order was signed, according to the order.
Meta, Anthropic and Google will be among the companies in attendance at the ONCD meeting, three of the people said.
Google, OpenAI and Anthropic jointly reviewed a draft and submitted edits in late July, as POLITICO previously reported.
The four companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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