Cohere quietly works with Palantir on deploying its AI models
It was co-founded by the author of “Attention Is All You Need”, which helped launch the large language model (LLM) revolution. It’s co-founded by an author of the “Attention Is All You Need” paper that helped launch the large language model (LLM) revolution.
Based in Toronto and San Francisco, Cohere sells AI to enterprise customers and doesn’t have a viral consumer chatbot. TechCrunch learned that Palantir, which is also a partner of Cohere, has a similar deal with Anthropic. The latter made headlines in the past month when it signed a contract to sell AI services to defense clients through Palantir. The video shows a presentation from November 2024, at DevCon1, Palantir’s first developer conference. Billy Trend, a former Palantir employee and Cohere engineer, said that Cohere was “already deploying” to Palantir’s customers. In the video, Trend mainly focused on technical details. While he did not name any specific Palantir customers, Trend did mention one deployment of Cohere’s AI with a Palantir customer that has “really strict constraints” on where it can store its data and wants to be able to do inference in Arabic, “which is a great opportunity for Cohere, because that’s something we excel at,” he said.
Palantir’s customers can access Cohere’s latest AI models via “compute modules” within Foundry, Trend said. Palantir says that Foundry is one of Palantir’s flagship platforms and is more geared towards commercial customers than Gotham, the older platform. Gotham was originally designed for intelligence and defense agencies. So while, we don’t know which organizations are using Cohere through Palantir, this implies it could be corporations.
Palantir works with all sorts of huge enterprises, like Airbus. But it is also vocal about its close work with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, recently publishing a manifesto about how to rebuild the defense-tech sector.
Cohere has touted partnerships with major tech companies like Fujitsu but has stayed quiet about any deals with Palantir, according to a review of its website and announcements.
TechCrunch contacted Cohere to ask if they could provide specifics about whether their AI was being used in military or intelligence related use cases and what Cohere’s policy is towards these types of deployments. Cohere declined to comment.
Palantir did not immediately comment. Palantir did not immediately comment.
