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.” Although he often disagrees with CEO Dario Amodei, he said his co-founder is a “very important person” who has followed suit.
Karp has gained attention in recent years for his outspoken political views, most recently working with President Donald Trump’s administration and previously donating to the campaigns of former Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden.
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.
Karp told CNBC that other strong political views, including support for Israel, led to employees leaving the tech company in 2024, months after the Palestinian militant group Hamas killed about 1,200 people.
Karp told Eisen on Wednesday that he is a “pro-Trump progressive” who wants a better life for the poor.
Karp also expressed frustration with the politicization of AI, saying he 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.”
