By Pierre SAUVETON
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
The issue is not new. The digital dependence of the French armed forces on the United States has already been the subject of warnings, reports, and committee discussions. What has changed is the context: a Trump administration that openly uses technological dependencies as leverage, NATO having just adopted a US AI platform for its command, and the French domestic intelligence service (DGSI) renewing its contract with Palantir for three more years. All the warning lights are red.
Palantir, a contractor like no other
It was supposed to be temporary. In 2016, following the November 13, 2015, attacks, the DGSI urgently turned to Palantir. No French tool was available to process, on that scale and at that speed, the masses of data needed to track jihadist networks. The American provider was imposed by default. Nearly ten years later, the contract has just been renewed for an additional three years.
This renewal has ended up in the report on “France’s Dependencies on Foreign Powers” that deputies Aurélien Saintoul (LFI) and François Cormier-Bouligeon (Together for the Republic) have just submitted to the National Defense and Armed Forces Commission, which we were able to consult.
Their verdict is clear. They highlight “the danger represented by the renewal of the DGSI contract with Palantir” and identify three concrete risks: possible extraction of French data to the United States, a risk of access being cut off if bilateral relations deteriorate, and the gradual suffocation of national alternatives, doomed to never dislodge such a well-established incumbent. What the two elected officials add, and this is significant: dependence on the United States cannot be treated like dependence on any other partner. It is of a different nature. And on a different scale.
To understand why this contract is problematic, you need to understand what Palantir is. Founded in 2003 in Silicon Valley, the company benefited from the outset from financial backing from In-Q-Tel, a fund linked to the CIA. It works with most US federal agencies (CIA, FBI, Pentagon), and its co-founder Peter Thiel is a figure of the American conservative right, close to Donald Trump. Its Gotham platform, deployed at the DGSI, allows cross-referencing and analysis of heterogeneous data on a large scale. A tool recognized as effective by the services themselves. But a tool over which France controls neither the source code, nor the deep architecture, nor the real conditions of long-term maintenance. The rapporteurs are direct: “control of the domestic situation must remain sovereign.”
A tender to find a national successor was indeed launched in 2022 under the code name OTDH (Heterogeneous Data Processing Tool). Three candidates were selected in 2023: Athea (the Thales-Atos/Eviden alliance), Blueway, and ChapsVision, often presented as the “French Palantir.” None secured the contract. The DGSI chose operational continuity, and the reasoning is sound: migrating an active intelligence platform is not a trivial operation. But the rapporteurs refuse to let this real constraint become a permanent excuse. The more entrenched a system becomes, the higher the cost of replacing it. The rapporteurs want to break out of this logic.
ITAR, the Cloud Act, minerals: The American arsenal
What makes dependence on the United States particularly delicate is that it is not limited to a market share issue. It comes with a legal and operational arsenal that Washington uses, unapologetically, to maintain its technological and commercial superiority.
The report provides no shortage of concrete examples. In 2012, the modernization of French AWACS aircraft was blocked by the United States due to the sensitivity of the modules involved. For the Air and Space Force’s Reaper drones, pilot training had to be carried out exclusively on US soil, and when the US Air Force’s needs increased, the number of training slots available for Europeans simply decreased. More recently, the development of ArianeGroup’s VMAX hypersonic glider was delayed by a year: Washington refused access to the suborbital launchers needed for testing, using French dependence to slow down a program deemed sensitive. Since then, ArianeGroup has launched its own suborbital launch program to regain autonomy. Regarding the F-35, purchased by several European partners, doubt persists about the US ability to act remotely on the aircraft’s cloud or its operational maintenance (MCO).
Added to these operational risks are legal constraints that frame dependencies in a very concrete way. ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulation) and EAR (Export Administration Regulations) give the United States extraterritorial jurisdiction over any equipment containing a US component, even a minority one. This is not a theoretical scenario. A 2019 parliamentary report already pointed out the use of ITAR “as a weapon serving the commercial and strategic interests of the United States to the detriment of their European allies,” citing the difficulties in selling the Rafale to Egypt, blocked by US components integrated into the MBDA missiles in the offer. The warnings existed. No one acted. Today, French defense industrial and technological base (BITD) companies submit nearly a thousand license applications to US authorities each year. And the slightest breach, even unintentional, exposes them to fines of several million dollars.
And it is not only in the digital domain that this strategy of coercion is expressed. It now extends to raw materials and critical minerals. Since Donald Trump’s first term, the United States has methodically built a policy of capturing global strategic resources. Successive presidential decrees, starting in 2017, laid the groundwork for a revival of domestic mining production.
Trump’s return has shifted this strategy into an openly coercive logic. The annexation ambitions regarding Canada (which possesses 34 critical minerals) and Greenland, whose subsoil is estimated to contain 25 of the 34 raw materials considered strategic by the European Union (EU), are not rhetorical provocations. The agreement signed on April 30, 2025, with Ukraine illustrates this logic: Washington obtained preferential rights to future Ukrainian mining extraction projects. In exchange for military aid that, according to the Kiel Institute, had already fallen by 99% compared to previous years.
For France and Europe, the overall picture is worrying. The race for critical minerals involves three players, not two: Washington seeks to secure its supplies against China, which controls 90% of global rare earth refining and began restricting exports as early as 2025, including to the United States itself. In this triangular competition, Europe risks getting caught between two powers that have each already started locking down the resources on which the manufacturing of GPUs, semiconductors, and batteries depends. The America First Arms Transfer strategy also deliberately uses arms sales “intentionally as a tool of US foreign policy.” And the Cloud Act, adopted as early as 2018, already allows US judicial authorities to access data stored by providers subject to US law, even on European servers.
NATO under American software
If the situation at the DGSI is worrying, what is happening at NATO is even more so. In March 2025, the Alliance announced the adoption of the Maven Smart System NATO, also developed by Palantir, to equip its Allied Command Operations. The contract was signed in six months: a record for an organization whose acquisition procedures are normally an endurance sport.
Maven Smart System is not an administrative management tool. It is a command and control (C2) platform integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning models, and real-time data fusion capabilities. It strikes at the heart of how NATO thinks about and conducts its operations: intelligence, planning, situational awareness, speed of decision cycles.
For the rapporteurs, the signal is serious. They write without detour that the choice of Maven represents “a serious risk of undermining France’s decision-making sovereignty” and that this system, “once implanted, would completely close the door to European solutions.” And the report goes further: “France’s freedom of decision would necessarily be very strongly constrained, particularly faced with the risk of denial of access.” That is to say: if Washington cuts off access, allied staffs work blind.
Moreover, this is not the only signal. The report notes more broadly that “the introduction of Palantir and the certification of Apple devices for use by agents working at NATO illustrate the influence of the United States on the institution.” For twenty years, the United States has been “developing and formalizing” major doctrinal evolutions, directly shaping the format of European armies. Maven is therefore not an anomaly. It is the culmination of a long-term trend.
The French response exists: Artemis IA, developed by the company ATHEA and financed to the tune of 700 million euros in the military programming law (LPM). But the rapporteurs consider it “far too weak in the face of the power of American technology.” The figures are staggering: American tech giants have mobilized over 700 billion euros in artificial intelligence in recent years, equivalent to 1.5% of the European Union’s GDP. On the French side, signals exist: Mistral AI became in September 2025 the first decacorn of French Tech with a fundraising of 1.7 billion euros, and AMI Labs, the startup of Yann LeCun, raised over one billion dollars upon its launch in March 2026. Real ambitions. But they remain on another order of magnitude. The gap is not a delay of a few quarters.
Under Palantir, the Iceberg
Palantir focuses attention, but it is only the visible part of a much broader structural problem. The framework agreement signed with Microsoft in 2008 structures the digital daily life of 220,000 agents of the Ministry of the Armed Forces via INTRADEF and Active Directory. A real advantage at the time, it allowed the merger of the ministry’s historic intranets. A real vulnerability today. The rapporteurs do not shy away from it: “this situation, accepted until now, is being questioned by the changing behavior of strategic actors, who no longer hesitate to use all levers as means of pressure.” And they admit that “a total and instantaneous exit from Microsoft is not credible without jeopardizing the operational capability of the armed forces.” Sovereign alternatives are emerging (LaSuite, Hexagone) but their adoption remains very marginal.
On hardware, the picture is just as telling: 85% of the Ministry of the Armed Forces’ purchases of computer equipment go to ten suppliers, all foreign. Processors, servers, ruggedized equipment for the theater of war: the supply chain structurally escapes any national control in the short term.
The cloud illustrates the paradox of the situation well. The armed forces have sovereign infrastructures for their most sensitive data, and that deserves credit. But these same infrastructures rely on American components: Intel processors, Nvidia graphics cards, AMD chips. “Having the infrastructure does not necessarily mean being autonomous,” the rapporteurs soberly note. At the end of 2025, Google Cloud and Oracle also secured contracts with NCIA, NATO’s information and communication agency. The pressure towards an American homogenization of allied cloud is therefore only increasing.
Finally, there is the issue of GPUs. All French artificial intelligence solutions, including Artemis IA, rely on graphics accelerators produced by Nvidia, which holds a near-monopoly globally. This is the hardware layer on which all the software sovereignty that France seeks to build rests. Suffice it to say that this sovereignty remains, for the moment, partially contingent on the goodwill of a publicly traded American company.
If Washington turns off the tap
Aurélien Saintoul and François Cormier-Bouligeon do not advocate for a blanket technological withdrawal. They know that total digital autonomy is an illusion and state this clearly. What they ask for is more precise and, in a way, more demanding: a real strategy for the gradual reduction of the most critical dependencies, accompanied by a binding timetable and commensurate resources.
The report also points out a blind spot rarely mentioned in this debate: it is precisely where France has not yet developed its own capabilities that dependence on the United States tends to form. And once the technology is adopted, it becomes very difficult to break free; the cost of a national alternative seems disproportionate, and the historic alliance with Washington dampens the sense of urgency. This mechanism is not new. In 2019, deputy Françoise Dumas already noted that several European Union member states voiced support for European strategic autonomy while systematically buying American. Six years later, the observation has worsened and extended to the digital realm. It is this mechanism, repeated across dozens of segments for 30 years, that has built the dependency architecture the report describes today.
For years, dependence on Palantir has been presented as temporary. French alternatives have been announced as imminent. Contracts have been renewed. If tomorrow Washington decided, for one reason or another, to turn off the tap – whether through diplomatic pressure, commercial calculation, or simply because US priorities have changed – the question would not be whether France has an alternative. It would be whether it would have time to find one.
Original article: opexnews.fr
