As one of the most watched AI startups outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, Cohere's valuation reached $5.5 billion in July. One of the company's co-founders is an author of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which is considered pivotal in sparking the revolution of large language models (LLMs).

Cohere is headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, focusing on providing AI solutions for enterprise clients rather than launching popular consumer-grade chatbots like other companies. While Anthropic made headlines last month for its agreement with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense clients, TechCrunch has learned that Palantir is also a partner of Cohere. A video released by Palantir revealed that Cohere's models have already been applied to several unnamed clients of Palantir.

Human-Machine Collaboration

Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed through Midjourney

This video features a speech released by Palantir at its first developer conference, DevCon1, in November 2024. Cohere engineer and former Palantir employee Billy Trend stated in the video that Cohere "has already been deploying AI to Palantir's clients."

"That's why I'm excited about the collaboration with Palantir; we will detail how we serve their clients," Trend mentioned during the talk.

In the video, Trend primarily discussed technical details. Although he did not disclose any specific names of Palantir's clients, he mentioned a case where a Palantir client had "very strict limitations on data storage locations" and wanted to conduct reasoning in Arabic, saying, "This is a great opportunity for Cohere, as this is precisely our area of expertise."

Trend indicated that Palantir's clients can access Cohere's latest AI models through the "computing module" within the Foundry platform. Notably, Foundry is one of Palantir's flagship platforms aimed at commercial clients, while another older platform, Gotham, is designed for defense and intelligence agencies. Therefore, while we do not know which organizations are using Cohere's AI through Palantir, it suggests that they are likely enterprise clients.

Palantir collaborates with various large enterprises, such as Airbus. However, the company has also publicly stated that it works closely with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, recently releasing a manifesto on how to rebuild the defense technology sector.

A review of Cohere's website and announcements shows that while Cohere claims to have established partnerships with major tech companies like Fujitsu, it has remained silent about any dealings with Palantir.

TechCrunch inquired with Cohere whether its AI is used for JS or intelligence-related applications, and what the general policy is regarding such deployments. Cohere declined to comment.

Palantir also did not respond immediately. As for OpenAI, it has also been adopted in the defense technology sector, with reports earlier this month indicating it reached a partnership agreement with Anduril.

In summary, Cohere's collaboration with Palantir indicates that the potential of AI in enterprise applications is being gradually explored, and these partnerships may raise new ethical and security concerns that warrant our ongoing attention.