Palantir CEO says AI labs want to 'colonize' enterprise data

Alex Karp's campaign against frontier AI labs is as much a pitch for Palantir's business model as it is a warning to corporate clients.

During the company's second-quarter earnings call Monday, the CEO and cofounder said leading AI labs could absorb enterprise data, intellectual property, and expertise into their models, then use that to compete with the same customers. "They deserve to colonize your enterprise," Karp said, characterizing what he described as the labs' attitude.

Enterprise companies, Karp argued, are handing over their data and expertise to outside AI providers in exchange for tokenized interactions that produce little lasting value. He called the dynamic "tokenmaxxing" – or "token self-pleasuring," as he put it on the call. The remarks echo comments from July, when Karp said AI models had been "irresponsibly oversold" and that business leaders privately worried they were giving up their "alpha" – their competitive edge – with little in return.

Palantir has branded its alternative "AI sovereignty," a term for keeping enterprise data and workflows under the customer's control while remaining free to swap in different AI models. The message landed in a quarter that showed the company's strongest growth in years.

Palantir reported a 93% year-over-year revenue increase, driven largely by its U.S. business. U.S. commercial revenue jumped 149%. The company raised its full-year revenue outlook to roughly $8.15 billion, up from about $7.65 billion. Its stock rose about 15% in after-hours trading Monday.

Karp said customers should retain "maximal control" over their operations and prevent their "competitive advantage" from becoming training data for future models. The framing serves Palantir's own interests. Palantir does not build a frontier model. It sells the software and engineering work that connects existing models to an enterprise's data and operations.

"Palantir has been the clearest counterexample to the claim that enterprise AI doesn't scale past pilots, and accelerating growth makes that harder to argue with," Jacbon Bourne, an analyst at Emarketer, wrote. "What it doesn't settle is whether AI eventually collapses the software layer Palantir occupies, which has weighed on its stock price this year."