Palantir chief Alex Karp blasted the token pricing behind OpenAI and Anthropic on live television Wednesday, and his company's shares climbed nearly 8%.
Key Points
- Karp said token-based AI billing leaves enterprises paying more while surrendering their data and intellectual property.
- He pushed open-weight models and full customer control as the fix for cautious corporate buyers.
- Palantir stock rose almost 8% the same session, trimming a steep decline built up over 2026.
Karp Rips Token Pricing
Karp made his case in a televised interview, telling viewers that companies pour money into tokens yet capture little real value, even as the price of each new model keeps climbing. He argued the arrangement lets the labs pocket the recurring fees while quietly absorbing a client's proprietary data, operational know-how and hard-won competitive edge over the long term. "Something has gone completely wrong," he said.
When a startled anchor said he sounded angry on air, Karp brushed the label aside and kept pressing his broader argument about wasteful enterprise spending on unproven tools. The frustration, he insisted, belonged to corporate America broadly, and it merely reached the wider public through him during the tense, combative live appearance.
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Nvidia Deal Fuels Sovereignty Push
The comments landed just days after Palantir widened its partnership with Nvidia, folding the chipmaker's open Nemotron models into secure government agencies and classified critical infrastructure. Karp tied the alliance to ownership. Technical customers, he said, want firm control over their own compute, models, data and alpha, plus real confidence that they truly own the means of production.
Palantir also published a nine-point manifesto on data sovereignty, warning companies against handing their most strategic information and internal know-how to outside providers too freely or too cheaply. Rivals sell access, while Palantir sells control.
By default, both labs say they do not train on paying customers' business data unless a client specifically chooses to opt in. Yet the deeper question is trust. Karp doubts that many firms will place mission-critical work with outside providers at all, a worry echoed as companies like Uber and Microsoft rein in costly AI tools.
Karp's Familiar AI Warning
Palantir stock had struggled for much of the year before the interview, and the rally trimmed a 2026 decline of roughly 25% even as quarterly sales kept surging. Karp praised his private, sometimes heated debates with Anthropic boss Dario Amodei as entertaining, yet firmly insisted the underlying models had been badly oversold.
None of this was new. On a June podcast Karp pressed a near-identical case, arguing that many enterprises now overuse AI heavily without ever seeing clear productivity gains for the spending. He described the frontier labs as charismatic and persuasive with investors but far less convincing to the ordinary businesses that must ultimately foot the escalating monthly bills.
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