Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC’s Squawk Box on July 1 and did something unusual for a tech executive: he publicly torched the business models of the two most prominent AI companies on the planet.
His targets were OpenAI and Anthropic, and his complaint was blunt. Their token-based pricing models, Karp argued, have been “completely, irresponsibly oversold” to enterprises that are now stuck paying escalating costs with little to show for it.
Palantir’s stock climbed 7.77% following the remarks.
The case against token-based AI pricing
Karp described a growing frustration among businesses that feel they’re paying for tokens that create no value while simultaneously risking the loss of their intellectual property. Companies feed proprietary data into these models, pay handsomely for the privilege, and then worry about who actually controls what the model learned from their information.
