Alex Karp is right

On June 30th, Palantir, the defense-software company, posted a nine-point manifesto to X warning enterprises against "tokenmaxxing" and the folly of handing their data to someone else. The day before, it had announced an expanded partnership with Nvidia to run open-weight Nemotron models inside air-gapped, customer-owned environments. Then, on July 1st, Alex Karp, Palantir's chief executive and co-founder with Peter Thiel, went on CNBC's "Squawk Box" and spent roughly twenty minutes coming apart over the state of the artificial-intelligence business, which he pronounced "effing insane." Several outlets called it a meltdown; it was the third act of a product launch.

Mr Karp's grievance, for all the theater, was specific. Enterprises, he said, have resigned themselves to "chillax and waste [their] time with tokens," paying for output that returns nothing while surrendering their intellectual property — their "alpha," in his vocabulary — to the model makers.