ZURICH — Palantir, the American data company whose software helps the Israeli military draw up targets in Gaza and the US government track people for deportation, went to court in Switzerland to make a small magazine print its rebuttals. On Friday it lost, almost entirely.
Zurich’s Commercial Court dismissed 22 of the 23 counterstatement demands that Palantir and its Swiss subsidiary had brought against Republik, an investigative magazine, the Financial Times reported. The company had not sued for damages or alleged that it had been defamed. It had instead invoked Switzerland’s right-of-reply law, which lets a party demand that a publication carry its response to claims about it, and asked the court to make Republik print a long list of counterstatements.
The court refused nearly all of them. Most of the passages Palantir objected to, it found, were journalistic interpretation, value judgments, or the reporting of other people’s allegations, none of which triggers a right of reply under Swiss law. The mechanism exists to correct disputed facts, the judges reasoned, not to let the subject of an unflattering article rewrite the parts it dislikes.
Only one demand succeeded. The court ordered Republik to publish a brief counterstatement on a single point, a line asserting that Palantir’s Foundry platform was originally built for American counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the company disputes. On everything else, the magazine prevailed.
What Palantir had tried to suppress was not invented. The two Republik articles at the centre of the case, published in December and built largely on freedom-of-information requests, reported that Swiss federal authorities had repeatedly declined to adopt Palantir’s software, citing concerns about data sovereignty and legal compliance. In a country that guards its independence as jealously as Switzerland does, the question of whether to hand sensitive state data to an American firm is a live one.
That firm is no ordinary contractor. Founded with backing from the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and run by Alex Karp, Palantir has become one of the most powerful and most protested companies in the surveillance economy. In the United States it is among Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s largest contractors, paid hundreds of millions of dollars for tools that aggregate vast personal datasets to support workplace raids, deportations and family separations, part of a wider apparatus of digital surveillance built largely on Israeli technology.
Its work for Israel is starker still. Palantir announced a strategic partnership with the Israeli government in January 2024 and expanded its operations as the war on Gaza ground on, feeding intercepted communications, satellite imagery and other data into the targeting databases that critics describe as kill lists. Amnesty International has accused the company of a track record of flagrantly disregarding international law, and its self-styled pro-Western manifesto has alarmed critics who see in it a corporate embrace of techno-authoritarianism.
The Swiss case fits a pattern. A company built on watching others has grown notably intolerant of being watched in return, reaching for lawyers when journalism gets close. It has threatened to sue the mayor of London over a blocked police contract, and its move against Republik was an attempt to use a consumer-protection style of media law as an instrument of reputation management against an outlet a fraction of its size.
That is why a narrow procedural ruling in Zurich carries weight beyond Switzerland. By refusing to let the right of reply become a tool for powerful corporations to edit the journalism written about them, the court drew a line that press-freedom advocates across Europe will cite. A surveillance company asked a court to control what was said about it, and the court, in twenty-two of twenty-three instances, said no.
