Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Monday once again warned that AI frontier labs are too untrustworthy for enterprises.
The CEO, who famously studied philosophy and earned a PhD in social theory, implied in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder letter that these were the kinds of capitalists who gave rise to Marxist socialism.
“There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders about Palantir’s outstanding quarter he wrote. “Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.”
To be clear, AI labs have hardly cornered Palantir out of the market. Quite the opposite. The skyrocketing use of AI helped Palantir achieve record-breaking results. For its second quarter, the company reported $1.9 billion in revenue, up 93% over the year-ago quarter, and $1.1 billion in profit, “more profit in a single quarter than we did in total revenue in the same period the year before,” he wrote.
During the quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts, he explained his analogy further, relying heavily on a sort of “tech bro patriot” jargon common among defense tech companies. (Palantir’s senior leadership is entirely male.)
