Palantir CEO has a blunt verdict on OpenAI and Anthropic

Palantir posted the highest revenue growth rate in its history in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. U.S. commercial revenue jumped 133%. The company raised its full-year guidance by 10 points. By any operational measure, things are going well. And yet Alex Karp walked onto CNBC's Squawk Box and started criticizing the entire foundation of the AI business model.

He wasn't talking about Palantir's competitors in the traditional sense. He was talking about the companies whose technology his own platform runs on top of. "I'm not throwing shade at them," he told viewers, "but something has gone completely wrong."

What Karp said about OpenAI and Anthropic on live television

The problem, in Karp's telling, is tokens. The way OpenAI and Anthropic sell AI access, metered by token consumption, has created a dynamic he says enterprises are increasingly fed up with. "The basic view among enterprises in this country is I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens, I'm gonna get no value, and they're gonna get my IP," Karp told CNBC.

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

He said customers are shifting away from what he called "tokenmaxxing" toward open-weight models that deliver similar output at a fraction of the cost. The ROI conversation is changing. Enterprises are asking harder questions about what they are actually getting for what they are spending, and a lot of them are not liking the answer.

Palantir's stock rose 8% that day. Before the interview, the company had published a 9-point "AI sovereignty" manifesto on X, setting the philosophical stage for what Karp was about to say publicly.

Why Karp says data ownership is the real AI fight

The deeper argument Karp made was about control. Enterprises and governments, he said, want to own their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. The word he kept coming back to was ownership. "They want to know they own the means of production. It's not being transferred to someone else."

That framing extended into territory that goes well beyond enterprise software. Karp said it would be "insane" to hand battlefield or government applications entirely over to AI labs, effectively outsourcing sensitive decisions to a small group of Silicon Valley companies operating by consensus.