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.
Open source software has long been a pillar of U.S. technology leadership.
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.
