France and Germany have committed to examine a European sovereign digital backbone for military AI, with TNW reporting that France's Arcadia command-and-control platform is the starting point and that both countries have already moved intelligence services away from Palantir.

The joint declaration was signed after talks between Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz.

It covers data-centric security, AI and cloud solutions, and it names Arcadia alongside unspecified comparable German systems.

Arcadia Becomes The Named Starting Point

Arcadia is an AI-powered command-and-control platform developed in France.

The declaration places it at the centre of the new Franco-German effort rather than naming a finished replacement system.

The policy move follows earlier procurement decisions.

TNW reported that France's DGSI made the ChapsVision ArgonOS switch in June after renewing Palantir's contract six months earlier.

Germany's BfV chose ChapsVision for the same role.

The Bundeswehr has also excluded Palantir from its defence cloud procurement, keeping the software question inside a wider European sovereignty debate.

NATO Use Keeps Palantir In The Background

The declaration comes after a NATO commander told Politico that there was no real European alternative to Palantir's Maven software.

The alliance uses Maven for battlefield data processing, placing the Franco-German project against an identified capability gap rather than a routine software announcement.

TNW's account also separates national intelligence decisions from alliance-level software dependence.

France and Germany can remove Palantir from specific domestic services while NATO continues to rely on Maven for battlefield data workflows.

The same split affects procurement timing because the declaration begins with examination of a European backbone rather than a signed deployment order.

Arcadia is named, but the German side of the proposed stack remains unspecified.

Funding And Delivery Timetable Remain Unnamed

The declaration gives the project a political sponsor and a named French software base, but not a completed procurement schedule.

It also does not identify the German systems that could sit beside Arcadia.

TNW did not name a budget, first operational customer, procurement timetable or delivery date for the proposed European sovereign military AI alternative.