Palantir CEO criticizes OpenAI and Anthropic for overselling AI to businesses

Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC’s Squawk Box on July 1 and did something unusual for a tech executive: he publicly torched the business models of the two most prominent AI companies on the planet.

His targets were OpenAI and Anthropic, and his complaint was blunt. Their token-based pricing models, Karp argued, have been “completely, irresponsibly oversold” to enterprises that are now stuck paying escalating costs with little to show for it.

Palantir’s stock climbed 7.77% following the remarks.

The case against token-based AI pricing

Karp described a growing frustration among businesses that feel they’re paying for tokens that create no value while simultaneously risking the loss of their intellectual property. Companies feed proprietary data into these models, pay handsomely for the privilege, and then worry about who actually controls what the model learned from their information.

He even coined a term for the phenomenon he’s criticizing: “tokenmaxxing.” The word borrows the suffix from crypto and fitness culture, where it implies obsessive, often irrational maximization of a single metric. In this case, selling as many tokens as possible regardless of whether the customer is actually getting results.

Palantir’s alternative pitch

Palantir has entered a partnership with Nvidia focused on promoting open-weight models, which are AI systems where the model weights are publicly available and enterprises can run them on their own infrastructure. The key difference from closed models like those offered by OpenAI and Anthropic: the business retains full control over its data and the model itself.

Karp was notably diplomatic about at least one of his rivals. He said he appreciates private discussions with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, stopping short of making the critique personal. The criticism was aimed squarely at the business model, not the individual.

A pattern of pointed commentary

This isn’t Karp’s first time making waves with public statements about AI responsibility. In June 2026, he warned against executives who boast about AI-driven layoffs, arguing that such comments are both callous and strategically foolish.

What this means for investors

The 7.77% pop in Palantir’s stock tells part of the story. Karp’s remarks did not trigger any notable movements in crypto or token markets, suggesting the critique was received as a tech industry story rather than a digital asset one.

The Nvidia angle is worth watching closely. The chipmaker has a financial interest in seeing open-weight models proliferate, because those models need to run on somebody’s hardware. The Palantir-Nvidia partnership aligns both companies’ incentives in a way that could shape how enterprise AI evolves.

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