European countries need to acknowledge that a degree of reliance on US technology is inevitable, said Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir Technologies Inc.’s UK and Europe operations, following moves by some governments in the region to reconsider their use of the company’s data analysis products.

“Europe is going to have to accept some dependency” on the US, at least for the short term, Mosley said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Brussels.

Mosley argued that the continent was even more reliant on China for its industrial needs. “You can’t manufacture drones without magnets. Magnets come from China,” he said. “You have chokepoints in the hardware realm that don’t get discussed nearly as much as the choke points in the software realm.”Now valued at more than $480 billion, Palantir provides customized software to the US and allied governments, with its products used by civilian agencies, spy services and police forces and militaries around the world. In 2025, NATO’s military branch reached a deal with Palantir to deploy its Maven Smart System, which uses artificial intelligence for surveillance and targeting.

Mosley described Maven as “a massive enabler of lots of European defense and European technology, which, without being connected to Maven, is less valuable to Europe,“ and suggested more could be done with NATO on data sharing and integration.

Yet Palantir’s ties to Europe have been strained since President Donald Trump’s return to office last year put a chill on transatlantic relations and created headwinds for US tech giants. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has cultivated a close relationship with the Trump administration and sought to project a muscular pro-America image.

That’s helped make the company an epitome of America’s technological dominance for European leaders, who are now voicing their desire to reduce reliance on US companies and steer more work to local firms in a bid for greater tech sovereignty.

In June, France said its domestic intelligence agency would end its contract with Palantir in favor of a domestic provider, while the company’s work on the UK health system has drawn criticism from the British parliament. That has in turn opened the door to European startups to fill the void, although Mosley largely brushed off any concerns.

“The more competition there is, the sharper the evaluation of what works and what doesn’t,” Mosley said. “What we need is competition that happens in reality between two products that are using real data on a real problem.”Compounding those challenges is a raft of proposed European Union regulations aimed at untethering the continent from foreign technology providers. The bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, is spearheading a “tech sovereignty package” whose flagship Cloud and AI Development Act would restrict the ability to handle sensitive government data to fully EU-controlled cloud and software providers.

The Act is still being negotiated, but the consensus among European lawmakers is that the most delicate information should be technically impossible to access for foreign powers — including the US.

Mosley acknowledged that some larger Western European countries had recently soured on Palantir’s products. Yet he said that other countries, including Ukraine, remained committed to working with the company.

“The further East you go, the more engaged the customers are and the more serious they are about standing up their Palantir capabilities,” he said. “If you were to talk to the Ukrainians, all the experience I’ve had there for the last four or five years is you need stuff that works, and you need it because if you don’t, you’re dead. And the questions around sovereignty are secondary.”