Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu frames the migration to ChapsVision as a matter of sovereignty, but the gap between political will and ChapsVision's roughly €200m in 2025 revenue against Palantir's $4.5bn makes this a multi year gamble.
France's domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, is replacing Palantir's AI data tools with those of French firm ChapsVision, a decision Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu framed this week as a matter of national survival. "We must use our own AI models," Lecornu said. "We cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere" (The Guardian).
That dependency became visible to Paris in a concrete way just one week earlier, when Washington restricted foreign nationals' access to Anthropic's latest AI model. Lecornu's broader warning is that France cannot rely on "the goodwill of certain partners, who are capable of turning off the access tap" for the systems its spies depend on (The Guardian).
The chosen replacement is ChapsVision, the French firm founded in 2019 that has won public-sector and intelligence contracts in Europe. The political symbolism of a domestic provider is straightforward. The arithmetic is harder. ChapsVision reported roughly €200m in 2025 revenue. Palantir, the incumbent, reported $4.5bn in global revenue the same year. Palantir's long-term contract was renewed in 2025, and the transition to ChapsVision will take several years (The Guardian).
France is not making this calculation alone. According to reports, Germany's domestic intelligence service, the BfV, has also selected ChapsVision, a sign that European security services are beginning to treat US-controlled data platforms as a strategic liability rather than a default procurement choice (The Guardian).
What made the Palantir relationship politically untenable for France goes beyond technical capability. The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel, a US right-wing billionaire and ally of Donald Trump. Palantir supplies software to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and has been used, according to reports, to identify targets in the US-Israel war on Iran. For a French government that frames itself as defending European sovereignty, the vendor choice had become a foreign-policy posture, not just an IT decision (The Guardian).
The test for Lecornu will not be whether France can announce the migration. It will be whether ChapsVision, at a fraction of Palantir's scale and working on a multi-year timeline that overlaps with the renewed Palantir contract, can build a data platform capable of handling what the DGSI actually runs. The next signal to watch is whether the BfV selection in Germany produces a joint European procurement track, or whether each service ends up building its own sovereign stack on its own clock.