Palantir CEO has a blunt verdict on OpenAI and Anthropic

Hillary Remy

Sun, July 12, 2026 astatine 6:37 PM CDT 5 min read

Palantir posted the highest gross maturation complaint successful its past successful the archetypal 4th of fiscal twelvemonth 2026. U.S. commercialized gross jumped 133%. The institution raised its full-year guidance by 10 points. By immoderate operational measure, things are going well. And yet Alex Karp walked onto CNBC's Squawk Box and started criticizing the full instauration of the AI concern model.

He wasn't talking astir Palantir's competitors successful the accepted sense. He was talking astir the companies whose exertion his ain level runs connected apical of. "I'm not throwing shadiness astatine them," helium told viewers, "but thing has gone wholly wrong."

What Karp said astir OpenAI and Anthropic connected unrecorded television

The problem, successful Karp's telling, is tokens. The mode OpenAI and Anthropic merchantability AI access, metered by token consumption, has created a dynamic helium says enterprises are progressively fed up with. "The basal presumption among enterprises successful this state is I'm going to chillax and discarded my clip with tokens, I'm gonna get nary value, and they're gonna get my IP," Karp told CNBC.

When co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin said "that sounds similar shade," Karp pushed back: "No, no. This is reporting."

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He said customers are shifting distant from what helium called "tokenmaxxing" toward open-weight models that present akin output astatine a fraction of the cost. The ROI speech is changing. Enterprises are asking harder questions astir what they are really getting for what they are spending, and a batch of them are not liking the answer.

Palantir's banal roseate 8% that day. Before the interview, the institution had published a 9-point "AI sovereignty" manifesto connected X, mounting the philosophical signifier for what Karp was astir to accidental publicly.

Why Karp says information ownership is the existent AI fight

The deeper statement Karp made was astir control. Enterprises and governments, helium said, privation to ain their compute, their models, their information stack, and their alpha. The connection helium kept coming backmost to was ownership. "They privation to cognize they ain the means of production. It's not being transferred to idiosyncratic else."

That framing extended into territory that goes good beyond endeavor software. Karp said it would beryllium "insane" to manus battlefield oregon authorities applications wholly implicit to AI labs, efficaciously outsourcing delicate decisions to a tiny radical of Silicon Valley companies operating by consensus.