France swaps Palantir for ChapsVision at DGSI spy agency

France's domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, is dropping Palantir as its mass-data analysis tool and moving the work to a French company called ChapsVision. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced the switch on June 16, 2026, as reported by The Guardian, framing it as a decision to "build genuine autonomy" and refuse "new strategic dependencies" in the digital sphere.

The timing is the part worth sitting with. According to Euronews, the original DGSI-Palantir contract dates back to 2016, signed in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks, and was renewed in December 2025 for three more years. Six months after that renewal, Paris is publicly walking away. A government does not unwind a decade-old intelligence platform on a whim, and the proximate trigger that European officials keep pointing at is the recent episode in which a US AI lab cut access to some of its best models for foreign nationals after instructions from Washington. Once that becomes a live precedent, every mission-critical US vendor stops being a procurement question and starts being a continuity-of-operations question.

ChapsVision is the named beneficiary, and the company is no longer a small bet. Sifted reports it was launched in 2019, has grown past 1,000 employees and reported close to €200m in revenue in 2024. It also won an initial DGSI contract in 2024 for heterogeneous data processing, so this is an expansion of an existing relationship rather than a cold start. Germany's domestic intelligence agency picked the same firm over Palantir the previous month, which means ChapsVision now has back-to-back wins inside two of Europe's most demanding intelligence customers.

The honest caveat is that the reporting does not give you the contract value, the migration timeline, or any concrete comparison of ChapsVision's tooling against Palantir Gotham on the specific counter-terror workflows DGSI has built up since 2016. Take the sovereignty framing as the political signal it clearly is, and the technical equivalence as something still to be demonstrated under load.

For anyone selling AI into European public sector buyers, the lesson is that the Anthropic-style access cut has reset the conversation. ChapsVision is the early winner; the broader opening is for any credible European stack that can argue, with a straight face, that Paris or Berlin will not wake up one morning to find a foreign government has turned the keys.