Open Models, Closed Environments: Palantir Brings Secure AI to US Agencies With NVIDIA Nemotron

Showcasing the importance of open source innovation in American AI, Palantir’s new intelligent engine — introduced today — uses NVIDIA Nemotron open models to serve the needs of U.S. government agencies.

Open source software has long been a pillar of U.S. technology leadership. 

In 1969, DARPA connected four university computers — from UCLA, Stanford, UCSB and the University of Utah — laying the infrastructure backbone that became the internet.

In those early days, U.S.-led open source contributions also drove leadership in coding languages, with UNIX in 1969 and C at Bell Labs in 1972. These languages led to more open source software building on those foundations, including the Linux Kernel in 1991, GitHub in 2008 and Docker in 2013.

Today, open models are making frontier-level AI broadly accessible, with control over customization and trust through transparency. They give enterprises and government agencies the ability to inspect, adapt and deploy AI in sensitive environments, making them essential for national security, corporate sustainability and industrial innovation. 

With domain-optimized harnesses, strong open models can deliver frontier capabilities while helping customers retain control over proprietary data, model weights and deployment environments. Today’s Palantir announcement brings NVIDIA Nemotron open models into air-gapped environments — secure setups that are completely isolated from unsecured networks — on NVIDIA accelerated computing.

Palantir will use NVIDIA Nemotron open models to build custom frontier-quality models to serve the U.S. government. Many of the government’s operations mirror private-sector enterprises — including commerce, energy, healthcare, agriculture, education and transportation. With about 3 million civilian employees, the U.S. government is essentially one of the world’s largest enterprises.

Providing critical services across so many disciplines is incredibly complex. AI can help streamline this complexity and boost insights to drive productivity. From food safety to maintaining safety on interstate highway infrastructure, AI can help government agencies tackle operational challenges, just like American public sector businesses.

With this new engine, 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 — handles the operational and data authorization layer for easy deployment in sensitive environments. Explicit data authorization, architecturally enforced isolation and full auditability are already central to Palantir’s Sovereign AI Operating System. 

As these customized models are used in production, agencies and operators can continually improve them within their own environments using new data and feedback. This creates a data flywheel that continually optimizes model performance while keeping data, models and auditability under customer control.

While NVIDIA Nemotron open models provide a customizable and continually learning model layer on Palantir’s Sovereign AI Operating System, enterprise-grade deployments can be supported through the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite. 

Open Models Support Trust, Access, Control and Lower Costs

Together, NVIDIA Nemotron open models and Palantir’s critical infrastructure products enable trust, accessibility, control and lower costs.

Trust through transparency: Through independent review of open models, researchers can identify vulnerabilities, biases and unintended behaviors that a single organization may miss. This visibility then allows for models to be refined to address these issues, improving safety through transparency.

Customization and control: Companies, governments and developers can modify and fine-tune open models to better suit their use cases. Open models can be deployed in regulated environments, like in the financial industry, where closed models might breach data security or other privacy laws.

Lower costs fuel economic development: Open models are in broad use, with about two-thirds of companies already using them and reporting on their cost efficiency. Organizations note that these cost savings are an important factor as they build AI that can scale with success.

The combination of NVIDIA Nemotron open models with Palantir’s critical infrastructure products — AIP, Foundry, Ontology and Apollo —  bolsters U.S. technology leadership for government agencies and commercial businesses alike. Running the models on air-gapped NVIDIA-powered infrastructure keeps the data and models secure — and ready to support the most important missions.

Learn more about NVIDIA Nemotron and the Palantir Sovereign AI Operating System Reference Architecture with NVIDIA.