A familiar warning from Palantir
Louis Mosley, Palantir’s head for the U.K. and Europe, says the region is making the same mistake with artificial intelligence that it made with the internet. He told CoinDesk that the U.S. “got the internet right,” built many businesses, and became the backbone of the digital economy. Europe, in his view, missed the boat.
The divergence since then has been stark. About 20 years ago, Europe and the U.S. were roughly comparable 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 by comparison. Previous technology waves produced European champions. The internet wave produced almost none, with ASML a rare exception. Mosley said ASML is by far the largest European company, which he argued shows where the value sits: in tech.
AI will be more consequential
Mosley, Palantir’s executive vice president for the U.K. and Europe, argues AI will be even more consequential. European corporates remain cautious, he said, with an attitude of “This is new, that means it could be risky. I’ll wait and see.”
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 and politics
Opposition to Palantir across the U.K. and Europe stems from its deep defense and law enforcement ties. These include providing surveillance software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Donald Trump and supplying targeting systems to the Israel Defense Forces. Campaigners have argued against the use of Palantir in public services such as the U.K.’s National Health Service on ethical grounds.
Mosley told CoinDesk that “the issues that really get those people fired up are Gaza and Trump.” He noted that Palantir has contracts in America for Trump’s administration, contracts in Israel with the IDF, and a contract with the NHS. He called this a distraction from domestic priorities. He asked whether politicians would tell a constituent they must wait longer for a hip operation because of a supplier’s unrelated foreign contracts.
What to watch
The debate matters because Europe’s pace of AI adoption may shape its economic future. Palantir’s business relies on governments and companies moving from pilots to production. If European buyers keep waiting, Mosley warns, the gap with the U.S. could widen. But opposition to Palantir is not only about AI. Ethical concerns around defense, immigration, and health contracts will keep shaping the conversation. How European leaders balance risk, sovereignty, and speed may determine whether they build local champions or rely on American and Chinese platforms. For now, Mosley’s message is blunt: caution has a cost.
