Palantir's Europe boss says continent is ghosting AI like it ghosted the internet 🚢

Palantir (PLTR) executive vice president for the U.K. and Europe Louis Mosley warned that Europe is repeating the strategic miscalculation it made with the internet by hesitating on artificial intelligence adoption. Where the United States "got the internet right," built a roster of major businesses and became the backbone of the digital economy, Europe "missed the boat," Mosley said in an interview with CoinDesk. He pointed to ASML (ASML) as the rare exception, calling it "by far and away the largest European company" and adding, "Which is, it tells you that the value is in tech."

Mosley framed Palantir as "the purest proxy on public markets for the rate of AI adoption in an economy." He described a posture among European corporates of "This is new, that means it could be risky. I'll wait and see," and contrasted it with strong growth in the company's U.S. commercial business, which he cited as evidence of faster American uptake. Palantir's offerings are model-agnostic, allowing customers to deploy large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, open-weight models or Chinese systems and fine-tune them on their own data via the company's ontology and governance stack for sectors including healthcare, industry and defense.

The remarks come amid political headwinds for Palantir across the U.K. and Europe tied to its defense and law enforcement work. The company has supplied targeting systems to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and provides surveillance software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the administration of President Donald Trump. Campaigners have pushed back against those contracts, with opposition in Europe focusing on Palantir's role in policing and military technology rather than on the underlying AI tools.

Mosley acknowledged the controversy but argued it distracts from what he described as AI's potential to improve public services and productivity, and warned that another cycle of European caution could leave the region dependent on U.S. and Chinese platforms. The interview was published by CoinDesk on Oct. 12, 2026, at 12:18 p.m. EDT, with reporting by James Van Straten and editing by Jamie Crawley, Sheldon Reback and Nikhilesh De.