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.

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.