Paris (France) (AFP) – France's government took a new step Tuesday in search of "strategic autonomy" for its intelligence services, announcing that it would ditch American AI giant Palantir's data sifting systems in favour of a domestic provider.

The move comes as European governments are increasingly uneasy about relying on US-controlled technologies, with Washington squeezing access last week to the latest model from AI giant Anthropic.

"We cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere," Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said as he announced the break by its DGSI agency with Palantir.

France must instead "build real autonomy" and "not depend on the goodwill of certain partners, who are capable of turning off the access tap" for artificial intelligence, he said.

French company ChapsVision will now become the "technological foundation" for "many public agencies for their critical data processing needs", the company said in a statement.

ChapsVision, founded in 2019, is a relative minnow compared to American AI behemoths, reporting 200 million euros ($232 million) of revenue in 2025 compared to Palantir's $4.5 billion.

Its tools designed to gather, prepare and analyse vast swathes of data have also been selected by Germany's VS internal security service, according to specialist media.

For its part, Palantir said in a statement that its contract with the DGSI "remains fully in force" and that "the company will continue to support the French government wherever its solutions are needed".

The continued Palantir contract was "to avoid suffering a capacity gap in this sensitive field essential to our national security", Lecornu's office told AFP.

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