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Palantir's revenue grew 85 percent in the first quarter of 2026. The pension fund for Dutch civil servants sold every share it owned.
What happened
ABP manages the retirement money of civil servants in the Netherlands. It is the largest pension fund in the country and one of the largest in Europe, with roughly €500 billion under management.
In January 2026, the investigative outlet Follow the Money revealed something most of ABP's members did not know. Their pensions included an €825 million position in Palantir Technologies.
The criticism arrived fast. By April, the position was gone. Palantir no longer appeared on the fund's published investment list, and a spokesperson confirmed to Financieele Dagblad the shares had been sold.
Why they did it
Palantir builds data analysis software. It can pull together communications, financial records, travel history, fingerprints, and surveillance footage, then find the person hiding inside the data. Hundreds of intelligence and investigative agencies use it. In the United States, the immigration service ICE uses it to locate, detain, and deport people.
Amnesty International has warned repeatedly that these deployments violate human rights.
ABP would not discuss the individual company. Its spokesperson pointed instead to how the fund makes decisions: it weighs returns, risk, costs, and how responsible an investment is. The same framework pushed Caterpillar out of the portfolio earlier, over bulldozers sold into demolitions in Palestinian territory.
The fund did the math with an extra variable. Palantir failed it.
Why did one company's AI work, and another's didn't?
One had a dedicated owner. Resolution rate: 48.9%. One didn't: 0.38%. See the full breakdown.
What it signals
This was not a market call. Palantir posted its tenth straight quarter of accelerating growth. US commercial revenue rose 133 percent. The stock had climbed for years, and ABP sold anyway.
Look at what surrounded the decision. More than a hundred major European banks, insurers, and asset managers increased their combined Palantir holdings by roughly 70 percent between 2024 and 2025. Amundi alone held close to $3 billion.
And yet. Storebrand in Norway exited the stock in 2024. The New York City Comptroller pressed Palantir for an independent human rights assessment in February. Norway's $2.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund voted for a human rights review at Palantir's June shareholder meeting rather than sell.
Different instruments. Same direction.
What it means for builders
The earlier exits in this space were about procurement. Institutions replacing software. This one is about capital, and capital exits create two markets at once.
The first is screening. Institutional investors who manage hundreds of billions now need to answer a question their ESG data providers handle poorly: what is this AI vendor's human rights exposure? Traditional ESG scoring was built for emissions and board seats, not for algorithmic harm, surveillance contracts, or deportation infrastructure. A builder who can score AI and data companies on rights exposure, with sources a compliance officer can defend, has a product that funds like ABP are already paying consultants to approximate.
The second is the software gap sitting one step downstream. When the pension fund for civil servants cannot hold the stock, the government employing those civil servants will eventually face the same question about the software. European agencies still need serious data analysis. The demand does not disappear with the vendor. It waits for an alternative built on European infrastructure, with a supply chain that does not arrive attached to an Amnesty report.
The fund read the filings. Then it acted on what it read.
404 Found covers AI developments from a European Insider, three times a week.
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