Palantir CEO Alex Karp calls AI competitors Marxist

Palantir’s CEO thinks frontier AI labs are using client money to capture the means of production.

After posting $1.9 billion in quarterly revenue—up 93% year-over-year—Palantir CEO Alex Karp attacked big model builders in TechCrunch. In his shareholder letter, Karp claimed major AI labs act with Marxist overtones, taking enterprise cash while absorbing client expertise into their own models. Palantir, which made $1.1 billion in quarterly profit selling software that keeps company prompts and data under client control, says businesses are paying labs to colonize their own industries.

Why it matters: Karp is pointing out a real conflict in enterprise software. Companies pay labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, only to watch those vendors launch competing tools in healthcare, legal, and design. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has pointed to the same pattern. Palantir’s pitch is simple: use model-agnostic AI, but keep your data so your vendor cannot replace you.

Philosophy PhDs rarely pull in $1.1 billion in single-quarter profit, but this one is using social theory to win enterprise deals.