BERN. Five approaches, five refusals. The Swiss army and Armasuisse examined software from Palantir, the controversial American data analytics company, on five occasions between 2020 and this year, and decided against it every single time. That is the finding of an investigation by the online magazine Republik and the WAV research collective, based on internal documents, freedom of information requests and interviews with officials.
The five cases span the army’s most sensitive work. In 2020, Palantir submitted documentation for a military intelligence IT system and failed to meet all mandatory requirements. In 2022, the army cancelled a planned software test after concluding that the proposed solution could not operate entirely on military owned infrastructure. In 2024, an internal assessment recommended against procurement, while Armasuisse separately considered and did not select the company for an electronic warfare project. Most recently, talks in 2025 and 2026 about an AI assisted situational awareness platform ended before any feasibility test.
In three of the five cases, the decisive concern was sovereignty over confidential data. Army specialists worried that Palantir engineers, who configure and maintain the software, could gain access to critical processes and information. Data protection, legal and ethical considerations counted alongside licensing costs. “We not only discovered these five contacts,” Balz Oertli, one of the journalists behind the research, told Swiss public broadcaster RSI. “In three of the five cases, it was the lack of control over the data that led to the rejection. They obviously did not trust Palantir enough.”
Palantir disputes the account
The company acknowledges exchanges with the Swiss Armed Forces but maintains that no formal, in depth technical evaluation of its software ever took place. It rejects the suggestion that its products pose data sovereignty problems, stating that customers retain legal, technical and physical control over their information and that neither Palantir nor third parties can independently access customer data.
The commercial context explains the company’s persistence. A joint European media investigation found Palantir holds contracts worth 1.44 billion euros across Europe, while the bulk of its roughly 4 billion euros in total revenue is earned in the United States. Its software promises to fuse vast data streams into real time answers for intelligence services and battlefields, and its client list includes the governments and armies of several NATO states. Switzerland, neutral and outside the alliance, remains a conspicuous gap on the map.
Parliament wants a rule
No door is formally closed. The defence department under Martin Pfister has made no fundamental decision that would preclude cooperation with Palantir, which means the company may continue to offer its services in Switzerland. The Greens want to change that: a parliamentary initiative now pending calls for a ban on contracts with foreign providers of such services, citing precisely the transparency and data security concerns the army’s own specialists raised.
The debate reaches beyond one company. Switzerland is simultaneously weighing an air defence purchase with its own geopolitical charge and asking, as this newspaper reported in September, what neutrality means when the decisive infrastructure is American or Chinese software. The five rejections show the army answering that question quietly, file by file, for six years. Parliament may now answer it in law.