Palantir CEO Alex Karp calls AI industry 'Marxist' after record $1.9B quarter

Palantir CEO Alex Karp used Monday's record quarterly results to once again warn that frontier AI labs are too untrustworthy for enterprises — and this time he pushed the argument to a sharper edge.

In Palantir's quarterly shareholder letter, Karp wrote: "There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business... Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners." On the earnings call he asked whether companies are willing to "buy into a future" where their work helps adversaries win and only a tiny group of people ends up on top.

The warning came alongside blockbuster results: Q2 revenue of $1.9 billion, up 93% year over year, 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 noted. US commercial revenue grew 149% year over year, and the company raised its FY2026 revenue guidance.

On the call, Karp leaned into the tech-patriot rhetoric common among defense-tech companies, arguing that enterprises are effectively paying labs for "the right for them to migrate your IP, your know-how, your expertise to their model," so the labs can build a competitive business that no longer needs the customer.

By contrast, he stressed that Palantir sells model-agnostic AI and analytics software that lets governments and enterprises run AI while keeping control of their data and their AI "exhaust" — prompts, orchestration, and context — rather than handing digital assets to a single model vendor.

Karp's view is increasingly echoed elsewhere — most recently by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — and critics have catalogued companies that paid for OpenAI or Anthropic access only to see those labs launch competing products in design, healthcare, legal, and drug discovery.

The report also notes that none of these companies are economic villains or heroes: AI is growing so fast and the market shifting so quickly that there is clearly room for everyone — and Palantir's own results are the proof.