Current Affairs Security

Europe's AI Bottleneck: How Caution Costs Continents

2026-10-13

Palantir's Louis Mosley has spent enough time watching Europe hesitate to spot a pattern. The continent missed the internet wave. It's now at risk of missing AI too. And this time, he reckons, the stakes are even higher.

Mosley, who runs Palantir's UK and European operations, made the case bluntly: the US has raced ahead on enterprise AI whilst Europe dawdles in policymaking and political hand-wringing. Two decades ago, Europe and the US had comparable GDP per capita and capital-market depth. Today? The US has extended its lead whilst European growth has flatlined by comparison. The culprit? Missing the boat on the internet economy. The sequel nobody wanted.

He pointed to ASML as Exhibit A: a semiconductor equipment manufacturer, and virtually the only major European tech success story to emerge from the internet era. One company. That scarcity says everything about where the value actually lives—in technology itself, not policy frameworks or caution.

Palantir positions itself as a barometer for AI adoption rates across different countries. The company builds what Mosley calls an "ontology and governance scaffold"—software that lets governments and enterprises deploy large language models and AI agents across healthcare, industry, and defence. It's model-agnostic, working with systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, letting customers fine-tune models on proprietary data. Useful stuff, in theory.

In practice? European corporate leaders treat AI like it's radioactive. Too new. Too risky. Better to watch from the sidelines and see what happens. Mosley characterised the stance as caution bordering on avoidance. Meanwhile, US companies are racing forward. Palantir reports strong commercial revenue growth there. Globally the company has only about 1,000 customers against a far larger addressable market of complex organisations across allied countries. Europe remains early innings—massive untapped opportunity if hesitation ever gives way to actual deployment.

But Palantir itself has become a political lightning rod. The company faces sustained opposition over its defence and law enforcement contracts: surveillance software to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, targeting systems supplied to Israel's Defence Forces. Campaigners have mounted campaigns against its involvement in UK public services, including the National Health Service, citing ethical concerns.

Mosley acknowledged the controversy head-on. Opponents regularly invoke Gaza and the Trump administration. But he reframed the political attacks as a distraction from AI's real potential—improving public productivity and service delivery. He posed a question: would a politician genuinely tell a constituent they must wait longer for a hip operation because of a supplier's unrelated foreign contracts?

The tension mirrors what happened with Bitcoin miners, he noted. Decade-long attacks over electricity consumption. Many pivoted to AI high-performance computing. Same criticism over power use. But Mosley's argument is straighter than that: yes, AI will displace some jobs. It should also free nurses and police from administrative paperwork. Raise productivity overall. Net win.

Strip away the Palantir angle and Mosley's core anxiety is sharper: Europe's biggest risk isn't bad regulation or technical hurdles. It's political failure to articulate why the technology benefits people. Without clear advocacy for AI's upside, European policymakers repeat the internet cycle. Only now, the stakes are higher and the clock is ticking faster.

Source & further reading:

Sources