He urges companies to maintain absolute control over model weights.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: A company does not just want a clever model answering questions inside a polished interface. A serious technical customer wants control over the data, prompts, system access, and the workflow that creates value.
Positive users back Alex Karp's call for enterprise control over AI models, data, and compute as the right approach, while negative users insult him personally and accuse Palantir of greed or scamming.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
Legacy Media types are calling this Alex Karp interview a “crash-out” so that’s your first clue that he is actually saying something extremely insightful. He is articulating what real “AI safety” looks like in the enterprise.
Not abstract alignment research or certification by a government-run DMV for AI. Real AI safety for businesses is the ability to control their own data, model weights, and compute — so a frontier lab can’t hoover up their proprietary knowledge and turn it into their next product.
As Karp explains, technical customers want “control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it’s not being transferred to someone else.”
Don’t think that can happen? Just look at Figma. According to The Information, Anthropic “blindsided” its then-business partner with the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s founder said Anthropic had not been “consistently honest” with them. Anthropic’s chief product officer had even served on Figma’s board until three days before the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s stock has fallen sharply this year while Anthropic’s valuation has surged.
This isn’t an isolated example. Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, and of course Claude Code — each expanding into categories previously served by companies building on top of their models. The pattern is consistent: watch where value is being created, then move in directly. Dominate the model layer, then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.
Dario has argued that open source models powerful enough to compete with Anthropic are “dangerous.” But dangerous to whom? Not to enterprises that want to retain control over their data and workflows. Dangerous to a business model that benefits from customers having few real alternatives at the model layer.
As Karp exposes, true enterprise safety isn’t trusting that a lab’s future roadmap won’t include your business. It’s retaining the ability to choose — at the model layer — who gets to see and use your alpha.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what customers actually want, the real business of frontier labs, and the importance of open source models:
“What the technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it's not being transferred to someone else.”
"Who owns the data? Are the prompts secure? Is this being transferred to you?"
"If it was so valuable, and I can make you a billion dollars, wouldn't I say I'll make you a billion dollars and I want 30%? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
Alex expressed what I have empirically seen with my clients.
They are angry with OpenAI and they are angry with Anthropic.
One reason I have 9 Fortune 500 clients, all by referral is the utter cluelessness of AI labs in messaging, marketing and pricing.
I sensed the anger building during the “Sam is fired” days. I for a call from the CTO of one very large public company asking if the OpenAI is trustworthy after firing the CEO and still not to this day explaining why. In their real world no one gets this type of pass.
The disconnect from those AI companies is so massive it is a comedy. Each time Sam or Dario speak they cause more division with their customers who yes sometimes have to use their products but can’t wait to leave.
This is not a good place to be.
Now you can love or not love Alex and question his motives, but he is accurate, corporate America is angry with AI companies and rightly so.
They have no clue how to help companies wisely use their products. I know this because I get paid ONLY IF I can show them. The AI companies force tokenmaxxing and don’t understand it will be their undoing. I get paid ONLY IF I can get more done with less, much less like 10% or less.
The chickens will come home to roost be for the IPOs.
The arrogance has an expiration date and it is past do.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what customers actually want, the real business of frontier labs, and the importance of open source models:
“What the technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it's not being transferred to someone else.”
"Who owns the data? Are the prompts secure? Is this being transferred to you?"
"If it was so valuable, and I can make you a billion dollars, wouldn't I say I'll make you a billion dollars and I want 30%? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
half of tpot looking at this post like
Our thoughts on the importance of AI sovereignty.
1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future. Sovereignty is the precondition for choice. Relinquishing sovereignty transfers the future choices of your institution to others, who are likely to exploit it for their gain and your loss.
2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones.
3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence. The pursuit of high token usage incentivizes disposable scripts over robust software — with the addictive feeling of false progress. There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.
4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs.
5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha.
6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants. Techno-politicization is the wellspring of false sovereignty. Techno-politicization drives decisions that seem to reduce dependency, but ultimately limit agency — especially on the battlefield in the West.
7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right. Listen to those closest to the problems, not those speaking most compellingly about them.
8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered. Institutions facing existential threats do not have the luxury of making technical decisions based on political preferences.
9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right. A track record of correctness is the best and only signal for future correctness. Judging something as right or wrong based on who you like is exceedingly misguided.
unlikely alliances form people discover previously unthinkable ideological priorities The world unites against the Avengers level threat
Palantir's CEO just exposed Sam Altman and Dario Amodei for robbing every Fortune 500 company.
Within two minutes, Alex Karp took the entire frontier AI industry apart on national television.
His exact words:
"Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID. They are paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business."
He literally said the entire frontier AI business model is intellectual property extraction dressed up as a subscription.
Then he also destroyed the pricing model with a single question that Silicon Valley still refuses to answer:
"If it was so valuable, let's say I can make you $1 billion tomorrow. Wouldn't I say I'll make you $1 billion and I want 30 percent? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
That question breaks the industry.
If OpenAI and Anthropic's models truly delivered the productivity gains the labs claim, they would take equity or a share of the profit they generate. They would not sell access by the million tokens.
Token pricing is itself the CONFESSION that the product cannot produce reliable value at scale. If it did, they would price for the value. But they price for the compute because that is what they are actually selling.
Karp went even further...
He called the entire arrangement "a wealth tax that does not help the poor. It just punishes."
American businesses are transferring the alpha of their operations, meaning the workflows, the customer data, the strategy memos, the internal models that make them competitive, directly into the training pipelines of a handful of Silicon Valley labs. Once those labs retrain, the customer's own edge becomes the next enterprise product sold back to their competitors.
And the part the AI industry does not want anyone thinking about:
Every enterprise running its confidential documents, its customer conversations, and its financial models through a frontier model is potentially teaching that model HOW to replace them.
The vendor collects the token fee AND the compounding intelligence about that customer's business. That is the mechanism. And that is why Karp used the word "stealing."
He claims this is why every executive he meets is furious in private and silent in public. Nobody wants to be the CEO who called out the labs and then discovered their next competitor was built on their own leaked workflows.
The entire AI industry has been priced for perfection on one assumption:
That frontier labs produce durable, defensible value that justifies infinite compute spend.
But Karp just told us that the customers do not believe that assumption anymore. They believe they are being taxed without benefit, watched without consent, and copied without recourse.
The moment enterprises stop believing, the whole valuation stack shakes.
AI sovereignty isn’t optional.
Don’t give away your alpha so easily. Protect it as much as you can.
Open source models are critical and should be an important part of any individual’s, organisation’s, or country’s AI strategy.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what customers actually want, the real business of frontier labs, and the importance of open source models:
“What the technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it's not being transferred to someone else.”
"Who owns the data? Are the prompts secure? Is this being transferred to you?"
"If it was so valuable, and I can make you a billion dollars, wouldn't I say I'll make you a billion dollars and I want 30%? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
@PalantirTech The full version:
@PalantirTech
@PalantirTech Your software is used to target and kill innocent people in Gaza and Lebanon.
You’re a satanic death cult.
Much of the genocide is on you.
@DavidSacks Alex Karp and @DavidSacks are singing my same tune now! I love to see it guys. Data ownership and sovereign AI should be a national security priority. Open source models on confidential computing are essential national AI infrastructure and why @AlphaCompute is focused on it.
Full Palantir "manifesto" here 👇👇👇
People have been saying. If you want to solve this a govt or industry wide consortium to build open weight foundation models would be an easy answer
Palantir's CEO just exposed Sam Altman and Dario Amodei for robbing every Fortune 500 company.
Within two minutes, Alex Karp took the entire frontier AI industry apart on national television.
His exact words:
"Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID. They are paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business."
He literally said the entire frontier AI business model is intellectual property extraction dressed up as a subscription.
Then he also destroyed the pricing model with a single question that Silicon Valley still refuses to answer:
"If it was so valuable, let's say I can make you $1 billion tomorrow. Wouldn't I say I'll make you $1 billion and I want 30 percent? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
That question breaks the industry.
If OpenAI and Anthropic's models truly delivered the productivity gains the labs claim, they would take equity or a share of the profit they generate. They would not sell access by the million tokens.
Token pricing is itself the CONFESSION that the product cannot produce reliable value at scale. If it did, they would price for the value. But they price for the compute because that is what they are actually selling.
Karp went even further...
He called the entire arrangement "a wealth tax that does not help the poor. It just punishes."
American businesses are transferring the alpha of their operations, meaning the workflows, the customer data, the strategy memos, the internal models that make them competitive, directly into the training pipelines of a handful of Silicon Valley labs. Once those labs retrain, the customer's own edge becomes the next enterprise product sold back to their competitors.
And the part the AI industry does not want anyone thinking about:
Every enterprise running its confidential documents, its customer conversations, and its financial models through a frontier model is potentially teaching that model HOW to replace them.
The vendor collects the token fee AND the compounding intelligence about that customer's business. That is the mechanism. And that is why Karp used the word "stealing."
He claims this is why every executive he meets is furious in private and silent in public. Nobody wants to be the CEO who called out the labs and then discovered their next competitor was built on their own leaked workflows.
The entire AI industry has been priced for perfection on one assumption:
That frontier labs produce durable, defensible value that justifies infinite compute spend.
But Karp just told us that the customers do not believe that assumption anymore. They believe they are being taxed without benefit, watched without consent, and copied without recourse.
The moment enterprises stop believing, the whole valuation stack shakes.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: A company does not just want a clever model answering questions inside a polished interface. A serious technical customer wants control over the data, prompts, system access, and the workflow that creates value.
Palantir? the open weights company?
Our thoughts on the importance of AI sovereignty.
1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future. Sovereignty is the precondition for choice. Relinquishing sovereignty transfers the future choices of your institution to others, who are likely to exploit it for their gain and your loss.
2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones.
3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence. The pursuit of high token usage incentivizes disposable scripts over robust software — with the addictive feeling of false progress. There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.
4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs.
5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha.
6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants. Techno-politicization is the wellspring of false sovereignty. Techno-politicization drives decisions that seem to reduce dependency, but ultimately limit agency — especially on the battlefield in the West.
7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right. Listen to those closest to the problems, not those speaking most compellingly about them.
8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered. Institutions facing existential threats do not have the luxury of making technical decisions based on political preferences.
9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right. A track record of correctness is the best and only signal for future correctness. Judging something as right or wrong based on who you like is exceedingly misguided.
@tekbog
@twistartups @Jason ….March 2022
this is true and bodes very well for gdp growth
and also why a certain lab is gunning so hard for regulatory capture
In open and sufficiently competitive markets, tokens cannot be priced according to the value they create. This is not because tokens fail to generate value, but because competition drives their price toward the marginal cost of production.
If you are calling this a 'crash-out' then you have never worked for a company that believes its data is sacred. And that's like 99% of all companies.
If anything, this is a highly entertaining filter on reality or the ground truth. Like a great Ingstagram filter.
Legacy Media types are calling this Alex Karp interview a “crash-out” so that’s your first clue that he is actually saying something extremely insightful. He is articulating what real “AI safety” looks like in the enterprise.
Not abstract alignment research or certification by a government-run DMV for AI. Real AI safety for businesses is the ability to control their own data, model weights, and compute — so a frontier lab can’t hoover up their proprietary knowledge and turn it into their next product.
As Karp explains, technical customers want “control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it’s not being transferred to someone else.”
Don’t think that can happen? Just look at Figma. According to The Information, Anthropic “blindsided” its then-business partner with the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s founder said Anthropic had not been “consistently honest” with them. Anthropic’s chief product officer had even served on Figma’s board until three days before the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s stock has fallen sharply this year while Anthropic’s valuation has surged.
This isn’t an isolated example. Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, and of course Claude Code — each expanding into categories previously served by companies building on top of their models. The pattern is consistent: watch where value is being created, then move in directly. Dominate the model layer, then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.
Dario has argued that open source models powerful enough to compete with Anthropic are “dangerous.” But dangerous to whom? Not to enterprises that want to retain control over their data and workflows. Dangerous to a business model that benefits from customers having few real alternatives at the model layer.
As Karp exposes, true enterprise safety isn’t trusting that a lab’s future roadmap won’t include your business. It’s retaining the ability to choose — at the model layer — who gets to see and use your alpha.
@tekbog Palantir legitimately looks like a scam company. They throw buzzwords around without any idea what they mean. Would love to hear from someone who has ever used one of their products because I can't imagine they are many steps above dog shit.
@PalantirTech #proudpalantard
