Palantir CEO Alex Karp launched into an extended, heated broadside against the leading AI labs during an appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box on Wednesday, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of extracting value from enterprise customers while delivering little in return, at one point declaring that they are "stealing the weights and alpha" of his business.
Karp appeared on the show to discuss Palantir's expanded partnership with Nvidia, which will see the company integrate Nvidia's Nemotron AI models into its Sovereign AI platform, giving government agencies and enterprise customers a way to deploy AI while retaining control over their own data and model weights. The interview quickly turned into a sweeping critique of Palantir's rivals in frontier AI.
Karp said enterprise clients are privately furious with the token-based pricing model used by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, characterizing their frustration as, "I am paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business, and they're creating a wealth tax that does not help the poor, it just punishes." He added that "every single person at this table is gonna be paying a wealth tax only to punish us," in an apparent reference to proposals, including one Anthropic has floated, for a fund or dividend to support workers if AI-driven unemployment rises sharply.
When co-anchor Becky Quick told Karp, "You sound pretty angry," he shot back, "No, this is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me," and urged viewers, especially investors, to call CEOs privately and ask whether they agreed with what he was saying on air.
Karp went on to frame the issue in national security terms, questioning whether government and critical infrastructure operators should trust frontier labs with sensitive data and model control. "Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley? That is effing insane," he said.
He named OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei directly, saying, "there's nothing more fun than debating Dario in private, so I'm not throwing shade at them, but something has gone completely wrong, and 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." When co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin pushed back that the comments sounded like shade at competitors, Karp insisted, "No, no. This is reporting."
