Palantir posted the highest revenue growth rate in its history in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. U.S. commercial revenue jumped 133%. The company raised its full-year guidance by 10 points. By any operational measure, things are going well. And yet Alex Karp walked onto CNBC’s Squawk Box and started criticizing the entire foundation of the AI business model.He wasn’t talking about Palantir’s competitors in the traditional sense. He was talking about the companies whose technology his own platform runs on top of. “I’m not throwing shade at them,” he told viewers, “but something has gone completely wrong.”What Karp said about OpenAI and Anthropic on live televisionThe problem, in Karp’s telling, is tokens. The way OpenAI and Anthropic sell AI access, metered by token consumption, has created a dynamic he says enterprises are increasingly fed up with. “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,” Karp told CNBC.When co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin said “that sounds like shade,” Karp pushed back: “No, no. This is reporting.”More AI:The new Chinese AI model rattling U.S. tech investorsAnthropic restores access to Mythos 5 for select organizationsSoftBank CEO offers stinging critique of Musk’s AI betHe said customers are shifting away from what he called “tokenmaxxing” toward open-weight models that deliver similar output at a fraction of the cost. The ROI conversation is changing. Enterprises are asking harder questions about what they are actually getting for what they are spending, and a lot of them are not liking the answer.Palantir’s stock rose 8% that day. Before the interview, the company had published a 9-point “AI sovereignty” manifesto on X, setting the philosophical stage for what Karp was about to say publicly.Why Karp says data ownership is the real AI fightThe deeper argument Karp made was about control. Enterprises and governments, he said, want to own their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. The word he kept coming back to was ownership. “They want to know they own the means of production. It’s not being transferred to someone else.”That framing extended into territory that goes well beyond enterprise software. Karp said it would be “insane” to hand battlefield or government applications entirely over to AI labs, effectively outsourcing sensitive decisions to a small group of Silicon Valley companies operating by consensus.To illustrate where he thinks the market is going, Karp pointed to Palantir’s expanded partnership with Nvidia, announced the same week, to build custom AI models for U.S. government agencies. “What aligns me with Nvidia… is what the technical customers want, which is control over their compute, their models, their data stack and their alpha,” he said on CNBC.Palantir’s Q1 2026 numbers and what they say about Karp’s thesisKarp is making this argument from a position of real business momentum. Palantir’s Q1 FY2026 revenue came in at $1.63 billion, up 85% year over year, the highest growth rate in company history. U.S. commercial revenue hit $595 million, up 133%. Adjusted operating margin expanded to 60% from 44% a year earlier.On the earnings call, Karp said Palantir’s Rule of 40 score had hit 145%, which he called a feat matched only by Nvidia, Micron, and SK Hynix. Management raised annual revenue guidance to 71% growth, ten points above the prior quarter’s forecast. U.S. commercial remaining deal value, meaning the potential value of contracted business yet to be recognized as revenue, reached $4.92 billion, up 112% year over year.Token-cost fatigue is showing up at real companies. Uber capped employee spending on agentic coding tools, including Claude Code and Cursor, at $1,500 per month after burning through its AI budget in four months, according to 24/7 Wall St. That is exactly the dynamic Karp is describing. The token model works until it doesn’t, and for a growing number of enterprises, it has already stopped working.
Karp’s argument, if it holds up, has implications beyond Palantir’s own stock.Ludovic/Getty Images
The Palantir valuation problem Karp’s swagger can’t quite solveThe business is accelerating. The stock is down 28.67% year to date. Those two facts sitting next to each other tell you what the market’s actual concern is, and it isn’t whether enterprises want control of their data.Palantir closed at $126.79 on July 10 and trades at a forward P/E near 91. That multiple requires an enormous amount of future growth to be baked in and delivered. Even with 84.7% revenue growth, investors have spent most of 2026 asking whether that rate is sustainable or whether the stock got too far ahead of the business during last year’s AI enthusiasm.Michael Burry disagrees. Scion Asset Management disclosed a put position tied to 5 million Palantir shares in its Q3 2025 13F, filed November 3, 2025. At the time, that represented an underlying notional of roughly $912 million, as TheStreet reported. 13Fs don’t show strike prices, expiration dates, or whether the position is still open. But betting against $912 million worth of Palantir shares is not a casual trade.What Karp’s OpenAI and Anthropic critique means for AI investorsKarp’s argument, if it holds up, has implications beyond Palantir’s own stock. The token model underpins how OpenAI and Anthropic generate most of their enterprise revenue. If large customers are genuinely moving toward open-weight models and demanding more control over their infrastructure, that changes the growth assumptions for the closed-model AI companies more than the market has so far priced in.The counterargument is that Karp has an obvious commercial incentive to talk down token-based AI, since Palantir positions itself as the alternative. His numbers are real, but so is his motive. The enterprises he claims are frustrated may still be signing large contracts with OpenAI and Anthropic behind closed doors while also exploring Palantir’s approach on the side.What July 1 made clear is that the business model debate inside the AI industry is getting louder, and the people doing the criticizing are no longer just academics or short sellers. They are CEOs running companies posting 84.7% revenue growth, with enough market credibility to move their own stock 8% with a single television appearance.Related: Palantir doubles down on national security with Nvidia AI alliance