Palantir's head of U.K. and Europe Louis Mosley warned that Europe's cautious approach to artificial intelligence risks repeating its failure to build dominant companies during the internet era.
"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. The divergence between the regions has been substantial over the past two decades, with the U.S. compounding growth while Europe has barely advanced in comparison, despite starting from roughly comparable positions on GDP per capita and capital-market depth.
Mosley described Palantir as "the purest proxy on public markets for the rate of AI adoption in an economy." The company builds infrastructure that allows governments and enterprises to deploy large language models and AI agents across sectors including healthcare, industry, and defense. Palantir is model-agnostic, enabling customers to run systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, open-weight models, or Chinese systems.
According to Mosley, European companies maintain a hesitant stance toward AI adoption, with an attitude of "This is new, that means it could be risky. I'll wait and see." Palantir has demonstrated strong growth in its U.S. commercial revenue while expansion in Europe remains constrained.
Palantir faces significant opposition across the U.K. and Europe over its defense and law enforcement contracts, including surveillance software provided to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and targeting systems supplied to the Israel Defense Forces. Campaigners have raised ethical concerns about Palantir's involvement in public services, including the U.K.'s National Health Service.
Mosley characterized this political opposition as a distraction from domestic priorities and productivity gains. He noted that AI will disrupt certain jobs while freeing workers like nurses and police from administrative tasks, raising overall productivity. With approximately 1,000 customers against a much larger addressable market of complex organizations in allied countries, Mosley indicated Palantir remains in early stages.
The executive cautioned that the biggest risk to AI deployment remains political failure to communicate the technology's benefits to the public.
