Palantir announced an intelligent engine using NVIDIA Nemotron open models to deliver customizable, secure AI capabiliti

Open source software has been foundational to American technology leadership since the internet's inception. In 1969, DARPA connected four university computers from UCLA, Stanford, UCSB and the University of Utah, establishing the infrastructure that became the internet. U.S.-led contributions also drove early programming language innovation with UNIX in 1969 and C at Bell Labs in 1972, followed by subsequent breakthroughs including the Linux Kernel in 1991, GitHub in 2008 and Docker in 2013.

Today, open models are making frontier-level AI broadly accessible while enabling control through transparency. They allow enterprises and government agencies to inspect, adapt and deploy AI in sensitive environments, which is essential for national security, corporate sustainability and industrial innovation. When paired with domain-optimized harnesses, strong open models can deliver frontier capabilities while helping customers retain control over proprietary data, model weights and deployment environments.

Palantir's announcement brings NVIDIA Nemotron open models into air-gapped environments—secure setups completely isolated from unsecured networks—running on NVIDIA accelerated computing. The U.S. government, with approximately 3 million civilian employees, operates as one of the world's largest enterprises, with operations spanning commerce, energy, healthcare, agriculture, education and transportation. AI can help streamline operational complexity across these disciplines, from food safety to highway infrastructure maintenance.

With this new engine, government agencies and operators can run customized Nemotron models on their own infrastructure, train on their own data and retain full ownership of the resulting models, including the weights that encode their operational knowledge. Palantir's Sovereign AI Operating System, built on AIP, Ontology, Foundry and Apollo, provides the operational and data authorization layer for deployment in sensitive environments, with explicit data authorization, architecturally enforced isolation and full auditability. As customized models are used in production, agencies can continually improve them using new data and feedback, creating a data flywheel that optimizes performance while keeping data, models and auditability under customer control.

The combination delivers three core benefits. Trust through transparency allows independent researchers to identify vulnerabilities, biases and unintended behaviors, enabling refinement and improved safety. Customization and control allow governments, companies and developers to modify and fine-tune models for specific use cases, enabling deployment in regulated environments like financial services where closed models might breach data security or privacy laws. Lower costs are significant—about two-thirds of companies already use open models and report cost efficiency as an important factor for scaling AI.

Together, NVIDIA Nemotron open models and Palantir's critical infrastructure products bolster U.S. technology leadership. Running the models on air-gapped NVIDIA-powered infrastructure keeps data and models secure while supporting critical missions.