11 European countries use Palantir.

European countries spend at least €1.4 billion on 'dangerous' Palantir

At least 11 European countries use Palantir software in their defence, intelligence, and health sectors, among other fields. Experts and officials describe this dependence on the controversial US company as dangerous.
Author: Sebastiaan Brommersma
Image: © Rosa Snijders

15 October 2026

At least 11 European countries have signed contracts at the national level with the controversial American technology company Palantir. 
In eight of these countries, the armed forces use the company’s software, and in five countries, the national police do so. 

Why does it matter?
Palantir plays a key role in crucial aspects of these countries’ digital infrastructure, and in Europe as a whole.
Experts describe this dependence as problematic, partly due to the political views of Palantir’s management and the company’s close ties to US President Donald Trump’s America First movement. 

How was this investigated?
Led by Follow the Money, journalists from 18 countries surveyed governments that had entered into partnerships with Palantir. These included the governments not only of EU nations but also of the UK and Israel. 
Reporters drew on public sources, submitted questions and – on occasion – made requests under freedom of information acts.
Follow the Money discussed the findings of this survey with various experts in the fields of political science, economics and warfare. 

This summer, Alex Karp told shareholders that Europe was lucky to have the services of his company Palantir. 
“We’re supporting lots of institutions in Europe ... I mean clandestine institutions,” the controversial CEO and co-founder of tech giant Palantir said. “Without our products, they’d have rampant terrorism and their problems – their migration problems – and the results would be ten times worse.”

Palantir does not disclose who its European clients are, what they purchase, or to what extent they are dependent on those products.

But research by journalists from 18 countries reveals that Palantir has offices in 14 European countries, including the United Kingdom, and does business with national governments – ministries, armed forces, and national police forces – in at least 11 of them. 

The company also has an office in Israel and Palantir works closely with the Israeli army.

The figures cited cause concern among experts. They describe Europe’s reliance on Palantir for parts of its digital infrastructure as “dangerous”.

‘US warfighters above everything’

Palantir poses a threat, experts say, because of the company’s connection to the White House, and the anti-democratic ideology of Karp and his co-founder Peter Thiel. 
Since its foundation in 2003, Palantir has been intertwined with the US intelligence services and the Pentagon, but after Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, the ties between the company and the US government became closer than ever. 

Palantir secured billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts in the US for software used, among other things, to implement Trump’s MAGA policy through the immigration agency ICE and the war in Iran.

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In Iran, the company has been linked to a bombing of a girls’ school, in which more than 120 children were killed because the army’s targeting software was not up to date.
In public statements, Palantir and Karp make no secret of the fact that they want to make America the dominant power in the world.

This year Karp said that, in the event of capacity issues, his company would always “prioritise US warfighters above everything else”.

Palantir’s tools
Palantir’s tools are designed to link large amounts of data from various sources, make it searchable, and analyse and present it in such a way as to reveal connections that would otherwise have remained hidden. 
Palantir’s best-known tools are Gotham and Foundry. Foundry makes it easier to manage work processes in the commercial sector, while Gotham is specifically designed for law enforcement, defence and intelligence.

Another well-known product is the MAVEN Smart System. 
This serves as the US Army’s central software platform and was also acquired by NATO in March 2025. 

NATO uses MAVEN as a central command system to ensure, amongst other things, that member states’ weapon systems communicate quickly and effectively during military operations. The system was awarded the highest security accreditation and runs on the part of NATO’s network that carries classified information.

MAVEN can process large amounts of data from satellites, drones, cameras, sensors, weather systems, telephone calls, and countless other sources almost in real time to locate and take out targets. 

The system can carry out this process almost entirely autonomously. It identifies targets, devises a plan of attack, checks weapon stocks and – following human intervention in the form of a press of a button – neutralises opponents: “find, fix, finish”, in military jargon.

According to the CEO of Palantir UK, Louis Mosley, NATO utilises this capability. 

‘Woefully naive’ 

In eight of the 11 European countries where Palantir operates at national level, the ministry of defence and/or the armed forces are clients of the company. These include countries such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain.

The United Kingdom is by far Palantir’s largest market outside the United States. According to the journalism platform The Nerve, between 2012 and 2025 the company secured contracts worth nearly one billion pounds there with organisations including the Ministry of Defence, the National Health Service (NHS), the nuclear agency, and the financial regulator. 

Security experts described the idea that the sensitive data involved in these deals would be secure as “woefully naive”.

A desire for digital autonomy is prompting some governments to review their ties with Palantir.
In June, the French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced that his domestic intelligence service would not renew the contract – which had been extended as recently as December 2025 – a further time. This is to avoid strategic dependence. 

Spain is following suit: the government’s only contract with Palantir is expiring at the end of this year and the government will not be renew it, media partner El Pais reported on Friday. 

In Norway, the police and customs authorities have so far paid a combined total of 555 million Norwegian kroner (€52 million) to the company, and the Danish police have paid over 211 million Danish kroner (€28 million). The Spanish Ministry of Defence spent €16.5 million on Palantir, while its Italian counterpart spent €6.2 million.

The full paper here.