Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn’t hold back in interview as he rails against AI industry
Palantir Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Alex Karp appeared to go into meltdown mode during an interview with CNBC today where for 20-odd minutes he went off script after being asked to discuss his company’s ongoing deal with chip maker Nvidia Corp.
The conversation turned to the AI industry where he lambasted the U.S. government’s relationship with leading AI firms and railed against AI tokenization that he claimed has left enterprise customers feeling frustrated. He called the high prices being charged a “wealth tax” on businesses.
Speaking about the government’s reliance on OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC concerning the development of AI for military and national security applications, he asked, “Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley? That is effing insane.”
“And by the way,” he went on, explaining that “every single enterprise in this country” despite their apparent reticence on the subject, are upset with the “nerds” of Silicon Valley. His meltdown then hit a high point when he alleged that some of those nerds were “on drugs”, adding that he, of course, was abstinent from such substances. “It starts with the billionaires…every single person at this table is going to be paying a wealth tax.”
