Palantir CEO Criticizes OpenAI, Anthropic Token Model

Palantir CEO Alex Karp criticized OpenAI and Anthropic's token-based pricing model on CNBC, claiming enterprises face IP risks and wasted costs. The criticism coincided with Palantir's announcement of a Sovereign AI Operating System with Nvidia, offering U.S. government agencies air-gapped AI infrastructure with full data ownership.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp's attack on OpenAI and Anthropic's token-based pricing is also a sales pitch for a concrete competing product, so practitioners should weigh the substance separately from the rivalry. On CNBC's Squawk Box on July 1, 2026, Karp said "something has gone completely wrong" with how frontier labs sell models, arguing enterprises fear they will "chillax and waste my time with tokens, I'm going to get no value and they're going to get my IP." That claim of IP risk is Karp's own allegation against OpenAI and Anthropic, not an independently verified practice. The comments coincide with Palantir's June 29 announcement, with Nvidia, of a Sovereign AI Operating System that runs NVIDIA Nemotron open models on air-gapped Blackwell Ultra infrastructure for U.S. government agencies, giving customers ownership of model weights and training data on their own hardware.