Karla Barker 
Palantir executive sees familiar pattern
Louis Mosley, Palantir’s head of U.K. and Europe, says Europe is at risk of repeating a mistake it made with the internet. In an interview with CoinDesk, he argued the U.S. built many internet businesses and turned them into the base of its digital economy. Europe, by contrast, mostly watched. That gap has widened over two decades, he said. Twenty years ago, Europe and the U.S. were close on GDP per capita, capital-market depth, and the size of their largest companies. Since then, the U.S. has compounded growth. Europe has advanced much more slowly.
Mosley points to ASML as the exception. The Dutch chip-equipment maker is one of the few European tech champions from the internet era. He said its scale shows where value sits in tech. For him, AI will matter even more than the internet did. But European companies remain cautious. Many treat new technology as risky by default and wait for others to move first, he said. That attitude, he warned, could leave the region behind again.
What Palantir sells to governments and companies
Palantir provides a governance and ontology layer that helps governments and companies deploy large language models and agents. Its customers work in healthcare, industry, and defense. Mosley described the company as a proxy for how quickly an economy adopts AI. Palantir does not tie customers to one model. They can use OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, open-weight models, or Chinese systems, and fine-tune them on their own data. That flexibility is part of its pitch.
The company is also controversial. Opposition in the U.K. and Europe often centers on its defense and law enforcement work. Palantir has supplied surveillance software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Donald Trump. It has also supplied targeting systems to the Israel Defense Forces. Campaigners have objected to its role in public services, including the U.K.’s National Health Service, on ethical grounds. Mosley said the loudest criticism tends to focus on Gaza and Trump. He called that a distraction from domestic needs. He asked whether politicians would tell a voter they must wait longer for a hip operation because a supplier has unrelated foreign contracts.
AI spending decisions now
The debate matters because governments and companies are making AI buying decisions now. If Europe waits too long, Mosley suggests, the consequences could look like the internet years. The U.S. might again capture most of the value. Europe might keep strong research and talent but lose the commercial layer. That is not guaranteed, of course. Regulation, public opinion, and defense spending could all shift the path. Still, Mosley’s warning puts a clear question to European leaders: treat AI as a core economic project, or keep treating it as a risk to manage later.