Palantir's revenue jumped 93% in the second quarter and Alex Karp raised guidance across the board, then used his shareholder letter to accuse rival AI labs of trying to "colonize" the very enterprises paying them.
Palantir reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $1.94 billion, beating Wall Street's $1.8 billion estimate. That's 93% year-over-year growth. The company released the figures on August 3, and CNBC confirmed them. U.S. commercial revenue, the business Karp has spent years insisting would prove Palantir isn't just a government contractor, grew 149% year-over-year to roughly $764 million. U.S. government revenue climbed 90% to about $809 million. Adjusted earnings came in at 41 cents a share against a 35-cent estimate.
The company didn't just beat, it raised. Palantir lifted its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to a range of $8.150 billion to $8.158 billion, implying 82% annual growth. It also pushed its U.S. commercial guidance above $3.424 billion, or 134% growth, according to the earnings release filed with the SEC. GAAP net income hit roughly $1.1 billion, a 55% margin and 225% growth from a year earlier. Karp told investors the company's Rule of 40 score, a standard measure combining growth and profitability, reached 155%. Shares jumped as much as 13% in after-hours trading to around $142, according to Fortune. The stock had been down roughly 30% for the year heading into the print.
Karp called it an "otherworldly" quarter. Then he picked a fight with the industry that made his own company's stock rip higher.
The Marxist broadside #
In the same shareholder letter announcing those numbers, Karp wrote that "there are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business," a line first reported by TechCrunch. He wasn't describing Palantir. He meant the frontier AI labs, the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world, that build the large language models Palantir's own platforms often sit on top of. "Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners," Karp wrote.
His argument, stripped of the philosophy-seminar phrasing: enterprise clients hand these labs their data to fine-tune a model. In doing so, Karp says, they're "paying for the right for them to migrate your IP, your know-how, your expertise to their model, so that they can build a competitive business that doesn't require your business or people." Karp went further, accusing the labs of believing they're "superior to you" and that they "deserve to colonize your enterprise." It's a strange line to draw the same week your own earnings depend on enterprises trusting an AI vendor with exactly that kind of access.
Karp isn't new to this kind of talk. He holds a PhD in social theory from Frankfurt, and CNBC has previously catalogued his shareholder letters ranging from New Testament references to Nixon. But this one lands differently, because it's aimed squarely at competitors Palantir is racing against for the same enterprise AI contracts. Frankly, the framing does real work for Palantir's sales pitch: don't hand your data to a model-builder who might eat your business. Hand it to us instead. Our whole model is built on staying inside your walls, not absorbing what's inside them into a product you'll later compete against.
Karp also told CNBC he expects the current pace of growth to continue for at least another 18 months. That's a claim investors will get to test against results four times a year, whether he likes it or not. He's made bold predictions before and been right often enough. Even after a rough first half of 2026, the stock still trades on his word almost as much as on the numbers.
Strategy, not hypocrisy #
None of this means Karp is wrong about the risk he's naming. Enterprises really have been asked to share proprietary data with model providers who compete in adjacent markets. That tension is one of the more serious unresolved questions in enterprise AI right now. But it's worth noticing who's raising it and when. Palantir just posted its best quarter as a public company. Its stock jumped double digits on the back of AI-driven demand. And its CEO used that exact moment to tell the industry it operates in that its business model is exploitative. That's not hypocrisy so much as strategy, dressed up as ideology.
What happens next is simpler to track than the philosophy. Palantir now has to grow into guidance that assumes 82% revenue growth for the full year. It set that bar for itself in public, on the record. And it did so the same week its CEO picked a very public fight with everyone else trying to sell the same customers on AI.
Also read: Hugging Face CEO Says China Is Now Winning the Open Model AI Race • AWS Bets on Superblocks to Make Vibe Coding Safe for the Enterprise • Palantir Stock Soars After Revenue Jumps 93% on AI Demand