“Regulation must genuinely help”: Palantir chief says France will hurt itself with fake digital sovereignty

Palantir chief Alex Karp says France will “hurt itself” if it mistakes a French intermediary for genuine digital protection. His warning targets Paris’s plan to replace Palantir’s data-analysis software at the DGSI with a system from French company ChapsVision.

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It is literally the technical equivalent of “a 5 to 7 without a condom.”

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced the change in June under the banner of “strategic autonomy.” Palantir’s software has supported France’s domestic intelligence service since 2016. The company said at the time that its contract, renewed through 2028, remained fully in force.

Karp argued that assigning French companies to deploy closed American or Chinese models without an application layer would offer only an illusion of sovereignty. “It is literally the technical equivalent of ‘a 5 to 7 without a condom,’” he told AFP in French during a G20 ministerial meeting in North Carolina.

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It will hurt France.

He also criticized decisions guided by fear and by people who do not understand the issues, saying they would harm France. Karp said he was not speaking for Palantir’s commercial interests, describing the company’s presence in France as very small and saying it was not really seeking to expand there. Instead, he said he was speaking in France’s interest, calling it culturally Europe’s most important country and economically its second-largest.

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Those are legitimate concerns.

Karp acknowledged that concerns about artificial intelligence were legitimate. He said Europe and France needed regulation that genuinely helped them, rather than rules that failed to address their technological dependence. The debate intensified after the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its two most powerful models for all foreign nationals, alarming Europeans about their reliance on U.S. technology.

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Those who love well, punish well.