Palantir's Europe head warns the region is 'missing the boat' on AI just as it did with the internet

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.