European alternatives to Palantir

Palantir, the US data-analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has quietly become the software running behind many Western police forces, armies and health systems, stitching together vast databases to find patterns. In Europe, that has set off an argument about sovereignty: whoever runs the software that sees everything holds a lot of power, and US law (the CLOUD Act) can compel American firms to hand data to Washington.

The pushback is real and accelerating. In 2023 Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that police use of Palantir’s automated data-mining was unconstitutional, striking down Hamburg’s law and forcing Hesse to rewrite its own. In 2025 Germany excluded Palantir from a major Bundeswehr military-cloud project, and its domestic intelligence service (BfV) picked the French firm ChapsVision instead. France’s own DGSI is replacing Palantir with ChapsVision too. Swiss federal agencies have declined Palantir over CLOUD Act exposure; the Netherlands’ defence ministry says it wants off the platform within two years; and UK MPs have called Palantir the ‘most concerning’ supplier in the NHS data platform. heise

Sweden’s strongest card is Neo4j, the graph-database company founded in Malmö by Emil Eifrem. Neo4j now markets an AI layer that finds hidden connections in police investigations, and pointedly promises a self-hosted ‘Palantir replacement without a kill switch’. (Sweden’s other well-known name, the threat-intelligence firm Recorded Future, was founded in Gothenburg but bought by Mastercard in 2024, so it is no longer a sovereign option.) The European contenders are below.