World News

It was over beers on an autumn evening in Zurich in 2024 that a group of journalists with an independent Swiss research collective began to discuss investigating Palantir, one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

Three years earlier, Palantir had advertised that it was setting up a “European hub” in the Swiss municipality of Altendorf, a sleepy town of roughly 7,000 people on the shores of Lake Zurich.

Press coverage of the move was positive: a Swiss national newspaper said the canton of Schwyz had “pulled off a coup” by landing a US tech company. But the journalists in the collective, WAV, were not so sure. They wondered what Swiss authorities were doing with Palantir.

WAV approached a small Swiss reader-funded magazine, Republik, to collaborate on a story. One year and 59 freedom of information requests later, their investigation, which alleged that Palantir had persistently courted Switzerland but had been rejected, made waves across Europe – prompting debate in Germany and comment from UK politicians.

Palantir was not happy. The journalists say they had interviewed company executives and sent a full list of questions before publication, but that the company demanded they print a detailed rebuttal, with a list of points that the journalists say went well beyond the scope of their investigation. When the magazine refused, Palantir filed a lawsuit in a Swiss commercial court demanding that it do so.