Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Palantir Foundry: an operating system, or a governed data plane?

Palantir calls Foundry "The Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise", and for once the marketing is literal. The Foundry Ontology models your objects, your actions and your business logic, then AIP puts agents on top of it. Airbus runs Skywise on it. Cleveland Clinic runs bed assignment on it. If you want the operation itself to run inside the software, nothing on this page is going to talk you out of Foundry, and we will not try.

We do one layer of that, and we sell it differently. DataShield is a governed data plane for agents: classify the fields, tokenize the dataset, authorize the tool call, then keep proof of the decision. It runs self-hosted on your own hardware, with no forward-deployed team and a price you can read on the website. One naming note before we start, because it trips everyone up. Palantir's Ontology is the object and action model inside Foundry. DataShield Ontology is our dataset platform. Same word, different product, and we will label both every time.

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The short version

Pick DataShield when

Someone will eventually ask you to prove an agent's access log was not edited. An examiner, an auditor, or Article 12 of the EU AI Act. Our chain answers with math. Run the verifier.
You need to pull an agent's authority mid-session and have the very next tool call fail. Not the next token refresh. The next call.
The data plane has to run on hardware you own, installed by your own team, with no vendor engineers in the building.
You would like to see a price before you book a call. Ours is published.

Pick Palantir Foundry when

You want the operation to run inside the software: pipelines, apps, scheduling, digital twins, process mining. We build none of that, and we are not close.
Your win condition is a modelled business. The Foundry Ontology binds data, logic and action into one object model, and two decades of that tradecraft is not something a young vendor copies.
You are federal or defense. Their own material lists FedRAMP and IL5/6. We have no accreditation path today.
You would rather buy outcomes than components, and you want a bootcamp that lands a working use case in five days.

Bottom line: Foundry wants to be where your business runs. We want to be the layer that decides what an agent may touch and keeps proof of it. If you already own Foundry, this page is about the second job, not the first.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Palantir's public site and docs say as of the date above. If we have mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we will correct it, credited.

What matters	DataShield	Palantir Foundry	Edge
Operational apps and workflows	Not our job. We ingest, catalog, profile, transform, snapshot and serve datasets. There is no app builder, no orchestrator and no digital twin here.	The whole point. Pipeline Builder, Foundry Rules, dynamic scheduling, process mining, streaming, a marketplace, and applications real operators use daily.	◇
Semantic model	DataShield Ontology gives you a catalog with asset and column metadata, a business glossary materialized from entity types, and typed lineage you can traverse with access gating at every hop.	The Foundry Ontology models objects, actions and business logic, and AIP binds models and optimizers to it as tools. Deeper than ours, and the reason customers buy.	◇
Audit evidence	SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. Verification names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Try the verifier.	AIP's page says "All action can be audited." We found no published cryptographic tamper-evidence mechanism. Ask them what stops a platform admin editing the record.	◆
Agent authorization	Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, a declared authority tier and a revocation re-check before dispatch, then gets metered and attributed to the agent. The call fails closed.	Ontology MCP tokens are scoped by OAuth grant, application restrictions and the user's own Foundry permissions. That is real authorization at grant time. We found no per-call re-check described.	◆
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes, is admin and IP gated, and cannot be quietly deleted from the log.	Not described in their public material that we could find.	◆
GDPR erasure	Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the audit still verifies after the subject is gone.	Purpose-based access controls and granular governance are well documented. The erasure mechanism, and what it does to historic audit records, we could not find.	◆
Tokenization and classification	Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Fields are classified against 129 built-in PII, PHI, financial and secret classes, including all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers, with reproducible verdicts and no model in the loop.	Security markings, purpose-based access controls and granular AI guardrails. Tokenization is not vocabulary they use in public material.	◆
MCP and agents	More than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings, and delegation is RFC 8693 token exchange with an enforced ceiling.	Two documented MCP surfaces. Ontology MCP lets external agents read objects, run predefined actions and query data. Palantir MCP gives builders 70+ tools and cannot write ontology data. Clean design, and honestly explained.	◈
Entity resolution	Fellegi-Sunter probabilistic linkage with Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, Soundex and Double Metaphone comparators, LSH blocking, EM-trained parameters, five survivorship strategies, and drift monitoring on every promoted match config.	Foundry ships entity resolution as part of the platform. The matching method is not published in the detail ours is, so compare them on a real file, not on a page.	◈
Deployment	Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Docker images for Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse, and a signed deploy manifest Guardian verifies. Ed25519 audit-signing keys can live in your KMS or HSM. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your environment today, not in a KMS.	Cloud, on-prem and accredited government environments, including classified ones. Virtual Tables let the Ontology read BigQuery, Snowflake, S3 or Azure Blob in place "without requiring any data replication or duplication."	◇
Independence	We govern data we do not own and do not run. No incentive to keep your workloads anywhere in particular.	The governance, the semantic model, the apps and the agents all belong to the platform being governed. For some buyers that is the point. For others it is the objection.	◆
Maturity signals	Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so.	Founded 2003, NYSE listed, Forrester Wave Leader for AI/ML Platforms, ranked first by Dresner in agentic AI in 2025, and a customer list that includes Airbus, Swiss Re and Cleveland Clinic.	◇
Pricing	Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	Quote only. Their sitemap carries 620 pages and none of them is a price list. Every path ends at a form.	◆

◆ DataShield leads◇ Palantir Foundry leads◈ comparable

Palantir claims are drawn from palantir.com and the Foundry documentation, last checked 13 September 2026. We link the sources below rather than work from memory.

Three things you get here that you won't get from an enterprise operating system

Proof that survives an audit

"Auditable" is a property of a log. Tamper-evident is a property of math. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier names what broke, not just that something did. That is what EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers are actually asking for. Try it in your browser, no signup.

Authority that can change mid-flight

An analyst resigns on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked against current authority and fails closed. Scoped OAuth tokens are good, but a token issued this morning still believes in this morning. How Auth does it.

A stack you can install yourself

Docker images, a signed deploy manifest, your own Postgres, your own keys. No bootcamp, no forward-deployed engineers, no five-day camp to get a first use case out. If your team can run a container, it can run this. See the architecture.

Where Palantir Foundry is genuinely stronger

Almost everywhere that isn't our one layer. Foundry integrates the source systems, models them as objects and actions, and then lets people build the apps the business runs on. Their AIP AgentCamp promises "deployed systems executing real work in your environment" in a week, and the Bootcamp before it went "From 0 to use case in 5 days." That is a delivery machine we do not have. Their accreditation list, which their own Builders page gives as GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP, IL5/6 and SOC 2, is a door we cannot open yet. And the AIP guardrail story is thoughtful: the Ontology binds approved logic as deterministic tools, AI-authored proposals can be routed to a human, and Virtual Tables let them read your warehouse without copying it. They have also shipped two MCP surfaces and documented the split between them clearly, which is more than most vendors managed this year.

Here is the push-back, and it is narrow on purpose. Foundry's governance is excellent and it is Foundry's. The permissions, the markings, the ontology, the agents and the audit trail all live inside the platform being audited, and the party you would be asking to prove nothing was altered is the same party that runs the database. That is fine until the day a regulator, a counterparty or your own board wants evidence that does not depend on trusting one vendor. Our chain verifies offline, on your laptop, against keys you hold. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations rather than attacks, and internal violations are exactly the case where an in-platform log is weakest. So run the operation on Foundry. Keep the evidence somewhere the operation cannot reach.

Questions worth asking both of us

These are the questions we would want answered if we were the ones buying. Ask them on every call, ours included.

Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?

DataShield: yes. Each record commits to the one before it, checkpoints are Ed25519-signed and chained, and verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Palantir: their AIP page says all action can be audited, and Foundry's access controls are granular. We found no published tamper-evidence mechanism. Ask them what a platform administrator can change, and how you would know.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation lands on the next call and the context downgrades. Palantir's Ontology MCP docs describe OAuth scopes, application restrictions and per-user permissions, which is sound grant-time authorization. We could not find a mid-session re-check. Ask how long an agent keeps working after you pull the human's access.

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the evidence still verifies once the subject is gone. Palantir documents purpose-based access controls and retention at the platform level. What the erasure does to historic audit records is not something we could find. Ask for the mechanism, not the policy.

You both say "Ontology". Are these the same thing?

No, and we should probably both have picked a different word. Palantir's Ontology is the object and action model at the heart of Foundry: it represents your business so apps and AIP agents can act on it. DataShield Ontology is our dataset platform: ingest, catalog, field classification, tokenization, master data, RAG and analysis, all reachable over MCP. If your problem is modelling how the business works, that is theirs. If your problem is governing what an agent may read and proving what it did, that is ours.

Is DataShield a Palantir Foundry alternative for mid-market buyers?

For part of the job, yes. Palantir has come down-market deliberately: Palantir for Builders offers startups and SMBs "full access to AIP and Foundry" and the page says big data solutions shouldn't just be for big companies. That is a serious motion. But it is still a form, a conversation and a delivery engagement. If what you need is the governed data plane under your agents, installed by your own team on your own hardware at a price you can read today, buy that from us and skip the sales cycle. If you need the operation modelled and rebuilt, you want them.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we will not imply otherwise. Palantir's Builders page lists SOC 2, FedRAMP and IL5/6, and they are not exaggerating. Auth is live with a public threat model and a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow, so a small vendor is not a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

Foundry's hero: "The Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise", with the primary CTA "Get Started with the Ontology". — palantir.com, 13 Sep 2026
AIP describes the Ontology as "a decision-centric system at the heart of AIP", with granular AI guardrails and the line "All action can be audited." — palantir.com, 13 Sep 2026
Ontology MCP lets external AI agents read objects, execute predefined actions and query ontology data; Palantir MCP gives builders 70+ tools but "cannot write actual ontology data." — Palantir Foundry docs, 13 Sep 2026
Ontology MCP authorization is OAuth 2.0: authorization-code or client-credentials grants, with tokens "scoped to the operations and resources you have granted to the application." — Palantir Foundry docs, 13 Sep 2026
Palantir for Builders takes Foundry and AIP to startups and SMBs, and lists GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP, IL5/6 and SOC 2. — palantir.com, 13 Sep 2026
AIP AgentCamp promises "No Presentations. No Theoretical Pilots." and "deployed systems executing real work in your environment"; the AIP Bootcamp before it ran "From 0 to use case in 5 days." — palantir.com, 13 Sep 2026

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