In March of this year, we reported on a David vs. Goliath legal battle in Switzerland. Via a lawsuit alleging supposed journalistic “inaccuracies,” Palantir was harassing the independent magazine Republik and the WAV Research Collective for daring to publish an embarrassing fact—namely, that the Swiss government had rebuffed years of lobbying by Palantir and, citing reasons of data sovereignty, had said “no thank you” to U.S. military-industrial complex software.

A commercial court in Zurich has ruled in favor of the journalists and against Palantir, dismissing 22 out of 23 counts and ordering Palantir to pay 95% of the court costs and roughly 10,000 francs in legal expenses to Republik. In a Substack post about the verdict, the Senior Director of AI Strategy & Content Integrity at the Wiley publishing house noted that the case outcome “protects journalists’ ability to use strong public-interest language—including terms like ‘surveillance technology’ and ‘deadly weapon of war’—when scrutinising powerful defence, data and AI vendors.” For their part, the pleased Republik reporters pointed out that even the establishment Financial Times drew attention to the ruling.

Switzerland’s prioritization of data sovereignty takes on added wisdom in the context of other recent developments—notably, the U.S. government’s shocking plans to tightly “fuse” the U.S. and Israeli militaries. As reported in Responsible Statecraft in late May—and discussed by Catherine and John Titus on the June 4 episode of Money & Markets—the House version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes provisions (Section 224, “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”) that “would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military” than even the billions “in military assistance Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding in 1948.”

Elaborating on the “troubling implications” of Section 224, Responsible Statecraft continues:

“[T]his provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes ‘network integration’ and ‘data fusion.’ In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”

Responsible Statecraft observes that the unprecedented military integration proposed in the NDAA “comes at a time when the Israeli military has repeatedly … violated international humanitarian laws in Gaza,” using U.S.-supplied weapons. The article does not mention Palantir’s role in these abuses, but former Greek Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis does, in a video on social media describing a conversation he had with a Palantir employee. According to Varoufakis, the Palantir shill unashamedly and smilingly told him that Palantir used the Gaza genocide and its “panic imprint” to train its AI, saying “We owe such a huge debt of gratitude to Gaza.”

Switzerland’s hands are not entirely clean. The Middle East Monitor notes that “Zurich serves as a hub for Palantir’s European business relations, and the company has built significant ties with Swiss corporations.” Last December, however, Palantir’s role in Israel’s military operations in Gaza—and the brave reporting by Republik—shamed the Swiss Foreign Ministry into announcing that it would examine whether Palantir should register with authorities under Switzerland’s “mercenary law,” a step that essentially would bring Palantir out into the open as a military technology company.