The question came from the back of the room, and it was blunt: if Washington decided one day that Europe should not have access to the software it uses to plan a war, could someone in Virginia turn it off? Louis Mosley, the Palantir executive who runs the company’s business in Britain and Europe, said no. Not him, not the U.S. government, not anyone at headquarters.
Mosley, an executive vice president at Palantir, made the statement on Oct. 22, in remarks reported by Reuters. Neither Palantir nor the U.S. government can remotely disable the Maven Smart System used by NATO, he said, and customers keep full operational control of the system they run.
The reassurance was aimed at a specific anxiety. European governments have spent two years re-examining how much of their defence and intelligence stack runs on American software, and the prompt was practical: Ukraine’s access to Starlink service has been restricted at points during the war, and European officials noticed.
Maven Smart System is the commercial product that grew out of the Pentagon’s Maven project, which uses machine learning to identify targets and objects in satellite and drone imagery and to speed the distribution of intelligence across units. NATO began fielding the system across its command structure, and Palantir has described it as one of its largest defence programmes in Europe.
The architecture matters to the argument. Palantir says the system is deployed inside customer environments, including classified networks operated by the customer, with data remaining under the customer’s control. A vendor that cannot reach the deployment cannot flip a switch on it. That is a technical claim, and it is checkable in a way that a contract clause is not.
The political claim is harder. A customer can run the software and still depend on the vendor for updates, patches, model retraining and the integration work that keeps the system useful. Dependence of that kind does not require a kill switch to matter. It requires only that the supplier be somewhere else, and that switching suppliers take years.
“The kill-switch question is the easy one,” said a European defence procurement official who has negotiated software contracts with U.S. vendors. “The hard one is what happens when you want to change the model, and the only people who know how it was trained are on a call in Denver.”
European capitals have begun writing that concern into policy. Germany has pushed domestic and European software into defence procurement, France has tied military AI funding to local suppliers, and the European Commission has made sovereignty a criterion in its defence industrial programmes. None of those efforts produce a working intelligence system quickly.
Palantir, meanwhile, has been expanding in Europe. The company moved its European operations through London and has signed defence and health contracts in Britain, Germany and Scandinavia. Its European business is smaller than its U.S. business, but it is the part of the company most exposed to the political mood.
Mosley’s statement is also a sales argument. Every European ministry now asks some version of the question, and the answer a vendor gives becomes part of the tender file. Saying that a foreign government has no technical route into a customer’s deployment is the strongest version of the answer available, and it is easier to give if the deployment is genuinely on-premise.
Skeptics note that the claim rests on descriptions of the architecture that outside auditors rarely verify. Export-control rules still apply to the software’s origin, and U.S. law reaches a company’s conduct regardless of where the servers sit. A vendor that cannot technically disable a system may still be barred from supporting it.
For NATO, the calculation is different from a national ministry’s. The alliance buys through its own procurement agency, runs its own networks, and has an interest in systems that multiple members can use without each one negotiating separately. A tool that interoperates across 30-odd militaries is worth more than one that does not, even if it comes from a single American supplier.
The war in Ukraine has made the trade-off concrete. Targeting cycles that once took days now take minutes in part because commercial software sits inside the loop, and European militaries that want the same speed face a choice between building it themselves and buying it from a company whose government has its own foreign policy.
Palantir’s answer to that trade-off is to be more local: hire European staff, host in Europe, sign with European primes, accept European oversight. The company has been building that story for several years, and Mosley’s remarks are part of it.
What the reassurance does not resolve is what happens if the two governments disagree. A European customer can hold the software and still lose the updates, the models and the engineers who make the system work. That scenario does not require a kill switch, only a decision in Washington that support should stop.
For now, the systems run and the contracts hold. The questions European procurement officers are writing into their next tenders will be more specific than the one asked on Oct. 22, and the answers will be judged not by what a vendor says about switches but by what a ministry can prove it controls on the day it needs to.
