Palantir CEO Calls the AI Industry 'Marxist' After Record $1.9B Quarter

Palantir rode the artificial-intelligence boom to its best quarter ever — and then its chief executive used the results call to fire a broadside at the AI labs he says are trying to "colonize" corporate America.

The Numbers

The company reported $1.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 93% from a year earlier, according to results covered by TechCrunch on August 3. Profit reached $1.1 billion — "more profit in a single quarter than we did in total revenue in the same period the year before," CEO Alex Karp wrote. The results cap a year in which AI demand has pulled Palantir's defense-and-enterprise software into the mainstream.

The 'Marxist' Remark

On the earnings call with analysts, Karp described the frontier AI industry as "Marxist," arguing that OpenAI and Anthropic-style labs want customers to hand over their data, prompts, and workflows in exchange for models that will eventually compete with them. Palantir, by contrast, sells model-agnostic software that lets governments and enterprises keep control of their data and their AI "exhaust" — the prompts, orchestration, and context their systems generate.

"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," Karp told analysts.

Why It Matters

Karp is not alone in pushing the "bring your own model" message. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has spent recent weeks urging enterprise customers to run multiple models to reduce costs and avoid lock-in, and warning that AI labs are not trustworthy custodians of agent orchestration. The debate cuts to the heart of the AI economy: will enterprises rent intelligence from a handful of labs, or will they assemble model-agnostic stacks on their own infrastructure?

What's Next

Palantir's results show the model-agnostic pitch is selling: the company's US commercial business has grown for years as governments and enterprises adopt its AI platforms. Whether Karp's rhetoric — aimed squarely at the labs' consumer and enterprise products — changes how CIOs buy AI remains to be seen. Watch the next round of earnings from both Palantir and the frontier labs for signals.