On Monday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp reiterated his concerns that AI frontier labs are unreliable for businesses.

The CEO, who is well-known for his philosophy studies and holds a PhD in social theory, suggested in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder correspondence that such capitalists are the ones who led to the emergence of Marxist socialism.

“Our business has Marxist undertones and overtones,” he stated in a communication to shareholders about Palantir’s stellar quarter. “There are those, including many involved in creating large language models, who aim, whether knowingly or not, to seize the means of production from their supposed partners.”

To clarify, AI labs have not edged Palantir out of the marketplace. On the contrary, the soaring adoption of AI has enabled Palantir to attain unprecedented success. For its second quarter, the firm disclosed $1.9 billion in revenue, an increase of 93% compared to the same quarter last year, and $1.1 billion in profit, “more profit in a single quarter than we had in total revenue during the same period the prior year,” he noted.

During the quarterly conference call with analysts on Wall Street, he elaborated on his analogy, heavily utilizing a form of “tech bro patriot” slang that is prevalent in defense tech firms. (Palantir’s top management is entirely male.)

He questioned during the call whether companies are willing “to invest in a future” where your job aids your “adversaries in winning, and everyone who does win is a small, select group inhabiting a tiny place that mistakenly believes that because they consume vegetables and refrain from supporting military personnel, they deserve to control the total means of production in this country? And the rest of us should simply sit by and absorb the costs of that revolution, which we are funding.”

In contrast, Palantir offers model-agnostic AI and analytic software to governments and businesses, enabling organizations to manage their data as well as their AI “exhaust,” which includes their prompts, orchestration, and context.

“How are we financing it? In the enterprise setting, people engage in token self-indulgences… at real costs similar to other forms of self-indulgence,” he remarked. “You are paying for the right for them to transfer your IP, your know-how, your expertise to their model, allowing them to develop a competing business that doesn’t rely on your business or personnel. And why are they doing this? It’s driven by what they perceive as moral justifications. They consider themselves superior to you. They believe they are entitled to colonize your enterprise.”

Despite the harsh language, he is emphasizing a fundamental argument that is being increasingly echoed elsewhere, including by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

This theory highlights the considerable list of firms that collaborated with or funded Anthropic and OpenAI while these AI labs initiated similar ventures including design tools, healthcare operations, legal, and drug discovery.

The reality is that none of these companies are economic villains or heroes — no more than any other for-profit businesses are. With the rapid growth of AI and the swift market changes, there is evidently space for all, as Palantir’s results demonstrate.