Last quarter Palantir booked $1.1 billion in profit — more in three months than the entire company brought in as revenue during the same stretch a year before, a comparison CEO Alex Karp made a point of writing into his own shareholder letter. Total revenue landed at $1.9 billion, a 93% jump year over year.
He then turned that same letter into an indictment of the AI labs for Marxism.
The line that’s getting attention
“There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,” Karp told shareholders. “Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.”
A background in philosophy and a PhD in social theory is normally the kind of biographical footnote that gets cited once and dropped. In this case it carries weight. His contention is that the frontier labs are acting out the precise capitalist role that gave rise to Marxist socialism to begin with.
What he actually said on the call
Speaking to Wall Street analysts on Monday’s earnings call, Karp stretched the comparison further, in a register that sits somewhere between defense-tech keynote and rant. Were companies prepared, he asked, “to buy into a future” in which your work helps your “adversaries win, and everybody who does win is a small, tiny group of people living in a tiny place that somehow believe because they eat vegetables and they don’t support war fighters that they deserve to have the total means of production of this country? And the rest of us should just sit back and absorb the cost of that revolution, which we’re paying for.”
What followed is the passage likely to trail him for some time: “How are we paying for it? In the enterprise context, people sign up for token self-pleasurings… at real cost like other forms of self pleasure,” he said. “You are 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. And why are they doing it? It’s actually being done for what they believe are moral reasons. They are superior to you. They deserve to colonize your enterprise.”
For context: every member of Palantir’s senior leadership is male, and the language used on the call tracks a house style common across the defense-tech sector.
Strip out the rhetoric and there’s a real argument underneath
Underneath sits a straightforward proposition: hand a frontier lab your proprietary workflows and you are bankrolling a rival that will one day sell your own capability into your own market. Hardly a fringe view — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made a version of the same point.
Look for the evidence and it’s not hard to find. Plenty of companies have partnered with or written cheques to Anthropic and OpenAI even as those labs stood up business lines that ran straight into their customers’ territory: design tooling, healthcare operations, legal work, drug discovery.
Palantir sells the alternative, which is the point
None of this comes from a disinterested party. What Palantir markets is model-agnostic AI and analysis software aimed at governments and enterprises, built so the customer retains control of their data and of their AI “exhaust” — the prompts, the orchestration, the context. Every sentence of the Marxism argument doubles as a pitch for that architecture.
The numbers undercut the victim framing
Which brings up the uncomfortable bit. Palantir hasn’t been elbowed out of anything by the AI labs. Quite the reverse: the surge in AI adoption is exactly what produced those record figures.
None of these firms are economic villains or heroes, no more so than any other business chasing a profit. The market is growing quickly enough to accommodate all of them, and Palantir’s own quarter makes that case better than anything else.
For enterprise buyers, the thing worth carrying away isn’t the Marxism framing at all. It’s the contractual question sitting beneath it: find out what rights your AI vendor holds over whatever you send them, then decide if that answer sits well with you. Karp has a product to move, but he’s right that most companies have never bothered to look.