Palantir on Monday said its enormous profits and astonishing revenue growth were driven by the realisation of the threat posed by vegetarian and, quite possibly, Marxist frontier AI labs.
Several European countries have moved to oust Palantir from public service contracts over sovereignty concerns, but the drive for more control over AI models was fuelling the company’s success in the US enterprise market, it said.
The NASDAQ-listed company's shares soared as it reported big jumps in its second quarter numbers, with gains of some 15% in after-market trading.
In a letter to shareholders, CEO Alex Karp ascribed the company's success to a revolution in the way the world is approaching AI.
"Every organization in the world is awakening to the risks of handing the creators of the language models the keys to their institutions, of letting the models loose within their homes," he wrote.
He also wrote of "Marxist overtones" in the AI business, saying that "many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners."
In a call with analysts and in interviews, Karp used more lurid language. He described unnamed frontier AI labs as a "tiny group of people living in a tiny place that somehow believes because they eat vegetables and they don’t support war fighters, that they deserve to have the total means of production of this country."
Karp’s recent vocal distrust of the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI does not appear to have impacted demand from its enterprise customers, in the US at least.
