Palantir chief executive Alex Karp launched a blistering attack on frontier AI labs during a CNBC Squawk Box appearance on July 1, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of extracting value from enterprise customers through token-based pricing while delivering little return.
“I am paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business,” Karp said on air. He characterized enterprise clients as privately furious with the billing model used by the two leading AI labs and said “something has gone completely wrong” with how AI is sold to businesses.
When co-anchor Becky Quick told Karp he sounded angry, he replied: “No, this is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me.” He urged viewers — especially investors — to call chief executives privately and ask whether they agreed with what he was saying.
Karp named OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei directly. “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.”
The interview was nominally about Palantir’s expanded partnership with Nvidia, which will integrate Nvidia’s Nemotron AI models into Palantir’s Sovereign AI platform — giving government agencies and enterprise customers a way to deploy AI while retaining control over their own data and model weights. Karp framed the choice as a national security issue, questioning whether critical infrastructure operators should trust frontier labs with sensitive data.
“Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley? That is effing insane,” he said.
The comments land amid a broader industry reckoning with AI costs. A Bain survey cited by Axios found that 40 percent of nearly 1,000 companies saw AI deliver cost savings of less than 10 percent after spending on it. Anthropic has floated proposals for a fund or dividend to support workers if AI-driven unemployment rises sharply, a concept Karp derided as a “wealth tax that does not help the poor, it just punishes.”
Palantir’s stock traded near US$132 (approximately £107) following the interview, valuing the company at roughly US$341 billion (approximately £276 billion).
Sources: Palantir’s Karp bashes token-based AI model as ‘completely wrong’ (CNBC, July 1, 2026); Palantir CEO Alex Karp claims AI companies are stealing customers’ data (Tom’s Hardware, July 2, 2026)