Palantir CEO Alex Karp said the artificial intelligence software company’s business customers are “dissatisfied” with how Frontier Labs is operating.
“It’s not just the men and women on the street who are dissatisfied with Frontier Laboratories, it’s every company that we do business with,” he told CNBC’s Sarah Eisen on Wednesday.
He said many customers believe these companies don’t understand their business and only care about “token maxing,” or burning up AI tokens to demonstrate productivity.
As companies put more AI into their workloads and model costs rise, the accelerating costs are raising alarm on Wall Street and raising concerns about efficiency.
“It’s not that large-scale language models aren’t important to the world,” Karp says. “It’s the implementation that will be worth it. Definitely within the next seven years.”
Karp’s comments come as two of the largest language modeling companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, take steps to go public. The Sam Altman-led ChatGPT maker secretly filed for an initial public offering on Monday, a week after Anthropic.
He told CNBC that most of Anthropic’s public projects are “run on Palantir.”
Karp said that while he often disagrees with CEO Dario Amodei, his co-founder is a “very important person” who will lead “a cutting-edge frontier model company.”
Mr. Karp has gained attention in recent years for his outspoken political views, having previously donated to the campaigns of former Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden, and more recently working with President Donald Trump’s administration.
In October, Palantir’s communications director Lisa Gordon called the company’s political shift “alarming.”
President Trump also praised Palantir with the company’s ticker symbol and invested in the company’s stock on Truth Social. The company donated to last year’s parade commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. military’s founding. Palantir, along with other tech giants, is also on the list of donors to President Trump’s White House ballroom project.
In 2024, months after the Palestinian militant group Hamas killed about 1,200 people, Karp told CNBC that some of his strong political views, such as support for Israel, led to employees leaving Palantir.
Karp claimed Wednesday that he is a “Trump progressive” who wants a better life for the poor.
He also expressed dissatisfaction with the politicization of AI and believes the technology will shape some of the most important political decisions in the United States.
“You can’t argue with blue or red,” he said. “This is a great revolution, and there are opportunities that are unique to America, and there are dangers in this revolution.”
