Palantir CEO Alex Karp said a growing number of businesses are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the world's leading artificial intelligence developers, arguing that many companies are moving beyond flashy demonstrations and demanding AI systems that can reliably solve real-world problems.
In an interview with CNBC, Karp said: "It's not just the man and woman on the street that is unhappy with the frontier labs, it's in private, every single enterprise we deal with." He went on to say that customers increasingly want software capable of operating within existing business systems while producing measurable results.
Karp's comments come as competition intensifies between enterprise software providers and frontier AI laboratories such as OpenAI and Anthropic. While the sector has attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in investment over the past three years, questions are mounting about whether the technology is worth the price.
Karp has been one of the industry's most outspoken critics of what he describes as unreliable AI outputs. During Palantir's recent earnings discussions, company executives repeatedly referred to the flood of AI-generated content as "slop," arguing that businesses require systems that can produce trusted, actionable information rather than probabilistic answers.
Karp even joked that companies experimenting with competing AI products would eventually "come home to Palantir" after encountering limitations in those tools.
A report from The Wall Street Journal noted that OpenAI and Anthropic are expanding beyond model development and increasingly offering products and services that overlap with Palantir's business. Analysts have also pointed to growing competition in enterprise AI deployments, where customers are evaluating whether general-purpose AI models can replace portions of traditional software platforms. Nonetheless, he offered mild praise for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as "a very, very important person," who he often disagrees with.
Karp's skepticism contrasts with the messaging coming from some leading AI developers. Earlier this month, researchers at Anthropic warned that AI capabilities are advancing so quickly that society may need mechanisms to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development.
The Palantir boss also expressed his frustration with the politicization of the discussion around AI and the technology industry. He told CNBC that "You can't do a blue-red debate" when talking about the topic. "This is a massive revolution and there's opportunities only America has, and there are dangers in this revolution."
