Palantir CEO Alex Karp once again sounded the alarm on Monday, cautioning that leading AI labs remain too unreliable for enterprise adoption. Karp, who studied philosophy and earned a PhD in social theory, suggested in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder letter that these tech players represent the kind of capitalists that historically fueled Marxist socialism. “There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,” he wrote in the letter, which highlighted the company’s strong performance. “Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.”

To be clear, AI labs have hardly pushed Palantir out of the market—quite the opposite. The surge in AI adoption helped the company post record results. In the second quarter, Palantir reported $1.9 billion in revenue, a 93% jump from the same period last year, and $1.1 billion in profit. “More profit in a single quarter than we did in total revenue in the same period the year before,” Karp noted. During the earnings call with Wall Street analysts, he expanded on this analogy, leaning into a kind of “tech bro patriot” rhetoric common among defense tech firms. (Palantir’s senior leadership team is entirely male.)

On the call, he posed a question: are companies going “to buy into a future” where 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 by it back and absorb the cost of that revolution, which we’re paying for.”

Palantir, by contrast, provides model-agnostic AI and analytics software to governments and enterprises, giving organizations control over their data and their AI “exhaust”—meaning their prompts, orchestration, and context. “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,” Karp 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.”

Despite the sharp language, Karp is making a point that is increasingly echoed elsewhere, including by figures like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. This perspective points to the long list of companies that have partnered with or paid for Anthropic and OpenAI, while those same AI labs have launched competing ventures spanning design tools, healthcare operations, legal services, and even drug discovery. The reality is that none of these companies are economic villains or heroes—any more than other for-profit firms are. AI is advancing so rapidly, and the market shifting so quickly, that there is clearly room for everyone, as Palantir’s own results demonstrate.