‘It does feel like an intimidation campaign’: why is US tech giant Palantir suing a small Swiss magazine?

Palantir’s logo is displayed during the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The article published in December suggests the company has failed to gain a more permanent foothold in the country. Photograph: Laurent Hou/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images

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.