Alex Karp
Over the course of 36 years around the enterprise tech space, I’ve heard some big bold claims aired without shame from many a CEO – and the current AI hype cycle is doing nothing to dampen down that proclivity as you might well imagine.
But I have to tip my metaphorical hat in the direction of Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, for his continuing talent to come up with some jaw-dropping assertions, the latest of which is the boast that his company’s earnings calls are not just about boring old earnings.
No, according to Karp:
Now it is the focal point of tech, society and general trends.
And this matters a lot because:
It is by far the most watched earnings call in the world. It’s the one where people come to figure out what’s going on, on the ground floor.
This is destiny-shaping stuff, folks, as Karp is quick to remind us:
Given that AI and sovereign AI is changing the universe, in our case for tremendous good, and is showing up in our numbers, people really want to have a sense of, well, what is actually happening in the world, politically, sociologically, anthropologically and, of course, financially.
People pay heed to Palantir’s earnings, not for the revenue numbers or other such data, he goes on. They’re looking for answers to deeper questions:
When people are watching this, they’re like, ‘What is happening in the market, what is happening in our society?’.
Back to (very) basics
What’s happening in the Palantir-verse starts with a re-assertion of the company’s ethos. Karp reminds us:
We support the war fighter. We are delighted that we can support the war fighter even more because we’re making so much money.
But it’s not just about the money:
We believe we have a moral imperative to be the dominant player in our industry, broadly defined, including all AI applications and the use of models, open and closed, especially training open-weight models. And that moral imperative drives every part of our business.
Such talk of moral imperatives leads to yet more philosophical ruminations of a type you certainly don’t get from most tech firms earnings updates. Karp ponders what he calls the “larger question”:
What does it mean to have a business that was built around what we believed – and believe now – is the most important mission in the world, supporting our war fighters, bringing them home, where even a year ago, two years ago, people, even [those] involved inside Palantir, viewed the core value of our business economically.
He strips things back to basics again, going back to the company’s origins:
We built products that would protect civil liberties and stop terrorism for the very simple reason that you don’t want to do one or the other. If you don’t stop terrorism, you’re going to get a radical fringe on the right. If you stop terrorism without rights, none of us want that.
You could say it’s an anti-terror product or you could say it’s a product for social cohesion. Our products are built to avoid war, meaning the adversary knows that they will have such pain inflicted upon them that, in fact, it’s not worth going to war, and also to create social cohesion because we’re going to bring back our troops healthier, safer, non-damaged and that makes our society much more effective.
Left or right?
Now, if by this point you’re forming your own opinion on which side of the political bed Karp sleeps, he’s got more food for thought for you:
I would say, as a person, – not as, like, Palantir – I grew up as a leftie. I don’t actually like war. I want to avoid war. I do not support wars. Sometimes they are necessary, and when they are necessary, America and its allies need the very, very, very best tools. We have competitors, adversaries and enemies out there. They need to know our stuff works. The way to stop a war is for them to know these things work.
Getting that general message across has been a battle in its own right, it seems:
Part of the problem that we’ve had in AI discussion in this country is we do have a rival and adversary on the battlefield. I happen to respect their culture quite a bit, China, but it is us or them. And they have a dynamic, interesting super high IQ scaled culture that is doing exceedingly well at AI. And we’ve got to make sure we’re the leaders.
And somehow, we have to drag our European and other allies with us, which is going to be hard because they’re going to have to also learn how these things work.
My take
All of that is pretty much the Palantir party line as we know it and it’s tempting to shrug it off with a combination of baffled amusement and detached derision. Slagging off the Europeans, for example, is a tediously familiar and increasingly tired Karpian theme.
But then he adds something new, raising the prospect of the need for “a real interaction with the leaders of the sovereign movements”, and not “some fake bureaucratic thing made up by people who have no idea what they’re talking about and think you can regulate these things like a telecom industry”, by which I can only assume he means the European Commission?
Given the current rise of hard right wing political movements across Europe and their nationalistic anti-European Union beliefs, suddenly some of this commentary takes on what many might feel is a more uncomfortable note, intentional or otherwise.
But then I don’t imagine fears or doubt from the likes of me factor greatly into Karp’s thinking here as I imagine you’re either with him or you’re wrong. As he points out in relation to AI overall:
This is a market that is growing so rapidly, we don’t need the people who aren’t convinced. We really don’t.
Although that said, he is ready to go into the Washington establishment and put people right where needed when they don’t see the right way of doing, it seems:
Certain agencies didn’t want to adopt, and we knew the war fighters would die if they didn’t adopt, so we went to convince them.
As a go-to-market strategy it seems to be a winning formula. Growth in the US Government sector was up 96% year-on-year for the latest quarter.
Interestingly, throughout all of the firm’s latest pronouncements, none of the execs on show, Karp included, fell in line with President Donald Trump’s repeated diktat that everyone must now call AI SI – Super Intelligence – and the former designation is being banned.
Palantir definitely got the memo on that one – Karp was at the AI leaders luncheon with Trump on the back of which the decree was issued! – but seems to be ignoring it.
So far, Palantir hasn’t had the kind of aggressive punishment treatment from Trump that Anthropic has had for defying his wishes. Maybe it will yet, maybe it won’t. Maybe Palantir’s presence in the US public sector is so hardwired now that it’s beyond such chastisement? As Karp notes:
Once you go Palantir, you don’t go back.
Actually that particular boast might be about to be put to the test. In the UK, there’s a lot of scuttlebutt about the firm losing its controversial contract as part of the NHS’s £330 million Federated Data Platform. The UK Government could exercise a break clause in February next year and amid highly vocal concerns from critics of all political hues, the new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has been said to look on this idea favorably.
However that plays out, Karp is clearly confident of the firm’s direction of travel in its domestic market:
At this point in the US, the market for us is insatiable. And it’s insatiable and growing and growing and growing.
So it seems this focal point of societal debate will rumble on and on. As noted, it’s tempting to find this braggadocio amusing from a distance, but personally I fear the joke is wearing rather thin.
And, you know, it was never a very funny joke to begin with…