'Something has gone completely wrong': Palantir CEO rants on live television about his problems with the AI business model: 'Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?'

Palantir CEO Alex Karp was recently interviewed by CNBC, where he gave an impassioned decry that the current AI market is not working, urged other panellists to call up CEOs and test his hypothesis, and made clear that his nervous energy was not in any way related to any substance usage. Yeah, it's a strange one, alright.

Palantir is a software company all in on AI, and one of the core surveillance providers for ICE, among others. It has seen criticism for its involvement in wider government surveillance and facial recognition systems, and AI is one of the key ways it has managed to grow in this field. CEO Alex Karp spoke to CNBC after it was announced that Palantir and Nvidia would be working together on open models for use in US agencies.

In the interview, Karp argues that the current model of companies largely getting value from consumers by selling tokens is the wrong method. "Something has gone completely wrong. And the basic view among enterprises in this country is 'I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens. I'm going to get no value, and they're going to get my IP."

Effectively, he argues that the best use of AI is in closed environments, not on a per-token basis where you don't know where your data is going.

"We need to rebuild trust, and that trust is going to happen where everyone gets to ask and answer basic questions. Who owns the data, where is it cached, are the prompts secure, is this being transferred to you?"

here is the entirety of Palantir CEO Alex Karp's televised nervous breakdown this morning on CNBC pic.twitter.com/gzD8debrKBJuly 1, 2026

He goes on to argue that the real value is in an AI model, plus an application layer, plus compute. Karp argues the model itself is only one step in the chain. "Let's say I could make you a billion dollars tomorrow, wouldn't I say 'I'll make you a billion dollars, and I want 30%?'" He continues, "Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

Karp argues models "have been completely irresponsibly oversold" right now, and the sell is "it's dangerous for everyone, which is why I can give it to all your adversaries, but I can't give it to the Department of War, or I can't safely give it to an enterprise in this country without being certain that the alphabet business could transfer to this model tomorrow"

Karp also talks a lot about AI's usage in warfare and how it shapes the battlefield.

"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, every single enterprise in this country, in private, a lot of them don't want to speak in public because it gets outsourced to the neurodivergent, crazy person that apparently is on drugs. The one thing I don't do."

Karp is told by the interviewer that he sounds pretty angry when he's speaking about this, and he responds, saying, "This is the voice of American Business that is being channelled through me. And I'm telling you it is absolutely a problem for this country."

Karp argues it's not just him who sees the problem. In the full extended interview not currently present on YouTube, he turns to the guests on the program and urges them to ring up a CEO or two and ask if they're livid about the state of AI. "They're twice as livid as me".

Be right back, just going to call up a couple of CEOs. Unfortunately, Gabe Newell has not been returning my calls, so I will have to hit up my buddy Zuckerberg instead.