The Palantir UK chief said the U.S. is racing ahead on enterprise AI while Europe hesitates, and explained why he thinks the company faces intense political attacks.
- Palantir’s head of U.K. and Europe Louis Mosley warned that Europe’s cautious approach to artificial intelligence risks repeating its failure to capitalize on the internet economy.
- Mosley described Palantir as a proxy for AI adoption, citing strong growth in its U.S. commercial revenue while European companies remain hesitant.
- Palantir faces European opposition over its defense and law enforcement contracts, but Mosley argued that political controversy distracts from AI’s potential to improve public services and productivity.
Palantir (PLTR) head of U.K. and Europe Louis Mosley warned that the region is making the same mistake with artificial intelligence (AI) that it made with the internet.
Where the U.S. "got the internet right," built a score of businesses and became the backbone of the digital economy, Europe "missed the boat," Mosley told CoinDesk in an interview.
The divergence between the markets in the decades since has been stark. Europe and the U.S. were roughly comparable 20 years ago on GDP per capita, capital-market depth and the scale of their largest companies. Since then, the U.S. has compounded growth while Europe has barely advanced in comparison.
Previous technology waves produced European champions. The internet wave produced almost none, with ASML (ASML) the rare exception, he said.
“It’s by far and away the largest European company. Which is, it tells you that the value is in tech,” he said.
Mosley, Palantir's executive vice president for the U.K and Europe, argued AI will be even more consequential. European corporates remain cautious, with an attitude of “This is new, that means it could be risky. I’ll wait and see,” according to Mosley.
Palantir builds an ontology and governance scaffold that lets governments and companies deploy large language models and agents in healthcare, industry or defense.
Mosley called the company “the purest proxy on public markets for the rate of AI adoption in an economy.” Palantir is model-agnostic: customers can run OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, open-weight models or Chinese systems and fine-tune them on their own data.
Opposition to Palantir across the U.K. and Europe stems from its deep defense and law enforcement ties, including providing surveillance software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the administration of President Donald Trump and supplying targeting systems to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Campaigners have argued against the use of Palantir in systems used by the public services such as the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) on ethical grounds.
“The issues that really get those people fired up are Gaza and Trump," Mosley told CoinDesk. "Palantir has contracts in America for Trump’s administration and has contracts in Israel with the IDF and we have a contract with the NHS.”
Mosley called this a distraction from domestic priorities, asking whether politicians would tell a constituent they must wait longer for a hip operation because of a supplier’s unrelated foreign contracts.
Political hostility to energy-intensive tech is commonplace: bitcoin miners were attacked over electricity use a decade ago. Many of them have now pivoted to AI high-performance computing and face identical criticism over power consumption.
While it’s true AI will disrupt jobs, it will also free nurses and police from paperwork, raising productivity, he said. With only around 1,000 customers against a far larger addressable market of complex organizations in allied countries, Mosley said he still sees Palantir as early.
The biggest risk to AI, he said, remains political failure to explain why the technology is good for people.
“You’re making all the same mistakes again,” Mosley noted of the recurring political response. “In the end, I want to believe that good wins out over bad.”
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