Palantir Boss Louis Mosley: Keir Starmer "Gets" AI, "You Could See In His Eyes"
11 min read
In a bid to boost growth, Labour has thrown open government’s doors to controversial US tech firm Palantir. In his first ever sit-down interview, Palantir’s UK chief Louis Mosley tells Sophie Church how it is revolutionising the work of government departments. Photography By Dinendra Haria
While on a flying visit to President Donald Trump in Washington in February, the Prime Minister made sure for one more stop: to the offices of Palantir – the US tech firm reforming UK public services through AI.
Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir UK, met Keir Starmer that day. “You could see in his eyes that he gets it,” he tells The House from Palantir’s London office, in his first sit-down interview since joining the tech giant eight years ago. “The ambition is there – the will is there.”
The Prime Minister has described AI as the “defining opportunity” of the age. With economic growth at a standstill, Labour has rested its hopes of becoming an “AI superpower” in Palantir’s hands.
Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by Silicon Valley billionaire and JD Vance mentor Peter Thiel to provide big data and surveillance support to military, intelligence and police agencies.
Named after JRR Tolkein’s all-powerful ‘seeing stones’ in Lord of the Rings, Palantir has been used by the US military for intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, by US and UK spy agencies to track public internet data, and by Trump to power immigration raids – and has been denounced by left-wing thinkers in the process.
I’ve spent time with [John] Healey... I think he gets this just as much as the Prime Minister does.
In 2023, the government awarded Palantir a £330m contract to manage NHS data, facing opposition from the British Medical Academy, patient groups and privacy campaigners.
But its rate of adoption since has been startling. Palantir is now being used across the NHS, Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Metropolitan Police to untangle and make sense of large data sets.
Already, Palantir has cut the time it takes for a police force to search details of a suspect by 95 per cent. It has helped the US Department of Defense make a “100x” – or 100 times – efficiency boost in its military strike plans; 20 people are now required to do a job that used to take 2,000.
The House can reveal Palantir has turned its hand in the UK to streamlining processes in HS2.
“We have actually been working there for a while now – the best part of a year,” Mosley says. “Generally, construction is a sector that’s quite relatively speaking behind the tech curve. It’s not really an early adopter of technology. But what that does mean is the opportunity is just even bigger. The impact that you can have is huge.”
Unsurprisingly, Palantir found HS2 in bureaucratic breakdown: information exchanged in PDFs by email, sign-off from each project partner required, administrative mistakes being made. “That is an extreme clerical burden which actually leads to a lot of delays,” Mosley says.
Palantir is now working with EKFB, one of the four consortia working on HS2, giving them a hawk’s eye view of this process.
“Think of it as a giant Gantt chart,” he says, referring to the management tool that provides a visual timeline for a project. “But then you can start to layer in AI to start to automate parts of this process and augment the people who are stuck in the middle of that process and struggling with it.” The savings Palantir is making for HS2 are in the “tens of millions”, Mosley says.
Palantir has also recently started work in local councils, he reveals. On starting the job, the company found children’s care workers spending up to 80 per cent of their time doing administrative tasks, and only 20 per cent devoted to care.
“By giving them our technology, and specifically the AI components – which allow them to automate a lot of the admin burden – they can flip that on its head. They’ve now got much, much more time to spend with families and children than they historically did,” he says.
Originally supporting defence organisations, Palantir has been employed by the MoD for a decade – and now works across all areas of the armed forces.
“I’ve spent time with [Defence Secretary John] Healey,” says Mosley. “I think he gets this just as much as the Prime Minister does.”
With Trump pulling US support for Ukraine, the use of ‘Project Maven’ – a Pentagon-led initiative deploying Palantir software in Ukraine to identify the locations of Russian equipment – could be in doubt.
Palantir is now working with the MoD to develop an equivalent version of Project Maven. The UK is “absolutely on that journey”, says Mosley cryptically. While the UK has given its own name to Project Maven, Mosley is unable to reveal it at this stage.
However, he is quick to stress there have been “no changes” to how Palantir is being used in Ukraine since Trump returned to the White House: “It hasn’t affected anything we do.”
So, there have been no terse conversations between Palantir’s US and UK offices over Trump?
“No, it’s been geopolitical. We’re so deep under the sea that the storms on the surface, you don’t really notice them,” he says, swirling his hand and pointing upwards.
“We’ve been working on the assumption that if Trump won there would be a big push for peace, and it would therefore be likely that some sort of ceasefire emerges at some point,” he says.
“But the timeline is so unpredictable, as we’re seeing. If the war stops, then the way in which our software is being used would change. But if anything, the need for it might grow. So, no, fundamentally we don’t really see any change there.”
Mosley confirms Palantir is still using its satellite network MetaConstellation in Ukraine. Starlink, Elon Musk’s brand of satellites, is also still “very heavily used”.
With Musk holding Starlink to ransom in Ukraine, shares in Paris-based satellite group Eutelsat – which acquired the UK’s OneWeb in 2022 – have soared in recent weeks. Still, OneWeb only has around 630 satellites in orbit; Starlink has more than 11,000.
It’s Tolkien’s cautionary tale about technology. The palantíri are made by the goodies – by elves – but they fall into the hands of the baddies – the wizards – and they get used for evil purposes
So is Palantir considering working with OneWeb?
“We’re not yet, but I would be amazed if we didn’t,” Mosley says. “But as far as I know, it’s not quite a thing yet.”
As AI firms exert more influence over the British defence sector – US AI firm Anduril will soon open a European base in the UK, for instance – industry sources say traditional British outfits have reason to fear.
Mosely insists otherwise. “I don’t think we’re directly competitive. We actually enhance the value of what they offer, and vice versa,” he says. “Babcock use our software to manage their assembly lines and improve the efficiency of their supply chain and so on, as do lots of the primes in the US.”
Similarly, Mosley sees Palantir as a “layer of a stack” when operating alongside UK small and medium enterprises in the software space. “We will integrate with lots of existing systems that will be provided by other third parties, and then we enable lots of other software vendors and third parties to build on top of us,” he says.
Would he welcome British competitors? “We would welcome competitors of any country, apart from Russia and China.”
From its genesis, Palantir has enforced strict rules around working with adversarial countries. In 2020, Palantir Technologies chief executive officer Alex Karp said that working with the Chinese Communist Party would be “inconsistent with our culture and mission”.
Mosley bristles when asked whether Russia would be using an equivalent of Palantir in Ukraine.
“[They are] definitely not using a version of Palantir,” he says. “But I would make a pretty strong assumption that they would be trying to develop some similar capability. You’re not going to be able to stay in any fight without it in this day and age.”
Would he be concerned if Palantir fell into the wrong hands?
“Incredibly concerned,” he replies. “It’s Tolkien’s cautionary tale about technology. The palantíri are made by the goodies – by elves – but they fall into the hands of the baddies – the wizards – and they get used for evil purposes...
“It’s a constant reminder of: you’re building a very, very powerful tool, and in the wrong hands, very powerful tools can be extremely dangerous. But in the right hands, they can be used to do extraordinarily good things.”
But with some in the West associating the mythical ball with unsavoury political characters, wielding it to uncomfortable ends, can Palantir ever seem like the “goodies”?
Mosley recognises co-founder Thiel as a “controversial character”. He also accepts there were times when the company could not discuss its operations, which may have bred distrust. But with its “more transparent” work in the public sector, he hopes the company is “doing a better job of talking about what it is that we do and how we can help”.
“Shrouded in secrecy? I hope not. I mean, you’re here. We’re talking,” he adds defiantly.
For all of its mystery, Palantir looks much like any other tech company. In its Soho Square offices, all glass and exposed brick, employees wearing headphones dart between blacked-out work stations. The canteen is rammed; breakfast, lunch and dinner are all on offer.
Still, Mosley – who seems younger than his 42 years suggest – says: “We’re pretty unusual, even by tech company standards.” For starters, there are only three job roles at Palantir: deployment strategist, forward deployed software engineer and site reliability operations analyst. Or, in Palantir slang: you’re either an echo, delta or SRO.
He continues: “I’m an echo, like everyone else who’s an echo. Part of the thinking behind that is your responsibilities can change, but if I were to decide: ‘I’m fed up of managing things and worrying about the profit and loss and money or business side of it; I want to go back to building things and deploying software,’ I could do that with no loss of status.”
On average, Palantir’s London employees – who make up 25 per cent of Palantir’s total staff numbers – are in their late-20s. Around 85 per cent are software engineers or computer science specialists.
We think of them as artists, and this is an artist colony
Palantir overwhelmingly recruits from British universities, with a strict process selecting for “spikes” in potential employees’ characters.
“We go really out of our way to try and accommodate people who are very ‘spiky’, is the word we would use,” he says. “They have these spikes in certain areas that mean they’re very outside of the norm in how talented they are.”
“Soft skills, for example – those are often things that we would completely overlook if we thought the person was really brilliant,” he adds.
Following a lengthy recruitment period, only the “0.01 per cent” make it in. “We think of them as artists, and this is an artist colony. Every artist paints differently, has a different style, and you can’t be too programmatic and structured about how you get the best out of them,” he says.
If Palantir represents a veritable unknown for the public, so too could its UK chief, the grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of former F1 president Max Mosley.
When asked about his life before Palantir, Mosley responds simply: “I worked in finance.” Asked about his life outside of Palantir, he says his four children keep him busy: “I haven’t seen my friends for about a decade.”
But the work won’t be easing any time soon: Mosley confirms Palantir is looking to open more offices in the UK. “The UK is an incredible talent pool,” he says. “It really is one of only two or three places in the world where you have the volume and quality of engineering talent that’s required for an operation like ours.”
Still, with Trump’s tariffs predicted to dampen UK growth further, the Prime Minister’s wooing in Washington may have fallen flat. But Mosley insists the UK’s adoption of AI will realise an economic and electoral bounty in years to come.
“One of the biggest benefits of the UK racing ahead and using this [technology] is they will discover all of the things that still need to be built to make it really useful, then those could be UK companies, then those UK companies could become giant global tech companies,” he says. “We are just at the beginning.”
