Palantir AI5 Apr 2025 16:11
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Palantir Boss Louis Mosley: Keir Starmer "Gets" AI, "You Could See In His Eyes"
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.
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.
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 lea