Palantir made $1.1 billion in profit last quarter. That’s more money in three months than the company took in as total revenue over the same period a year earlier, a line CEO Alex Karp put in his shareholder letter himself. Revenue hit $1.9 billion, up 93% year over year.
And then he used that letter to accuse the AI labs of Marxism.
The line that’s getting attention
“There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,” Karp wrote to shareholders. “Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.”
Karp studied philosophy and holds a PhD in social theory, which is the sort of detail that usually gets mentioned once and forgotten. Here it’s load-bearing. He’s arguing that the frontier labs are behaving like the exact class of capitalist that produced Marxist socialism in the first place.
What he actually said on the call
On Monday’s earnings call with Wall Street analysts, Karp extended the analogy in language that lands somewhere between a defense-tech keynote and a rant. He asked whether companies are going “to buy into a future” where your job 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 back and absorb the cost of that revolution, which we’re paying for.”
Then came the part that will follow him around: “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,” he 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.”
Worth noting: Palantir’s senior leadership is entirely male, and the vocabulary on the call reflects a house style you hear across defense tech.
Strip out the rhetoric and there’s a real argument underneath
The claim is that if you feed a frontier lab your proprietary workflows, you’re funding a competitor who will eventually sell your own capability back to your market. That’s not a fringe position. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has voiced a version of it.
The receipts are there if you go looking. A long list of companies partnered with or paid Anthropic and OpenAI while those same labs launched businesses that overlapped with their customers: design tools, healthcare operations, legal, drug discovery.
Palantir sells the alternative, which is the point
Karp isn’t a neutral observer here. Palantir’s pitch is model-agnostic AI and analysis software for governments and enterprises, where the customer keeps control of their data and their AI “exhaust”: the prompts, the orchestration, the context. Every word of the Marxism argument is also a sales argument for that architecture.
The numbers undercut the victim framing
Here’s the awkward part. The AI labs haven’t squeezed Palantir out of anything. The opposite happened. Surging AI adoption is precisely what drove those record results.
None of these companies are economic villains or heroes, any more than any other for-profit business is. The market is expanding fast enough that there’s clearly room for all of them, and Palantir’s own quarter is the best evidence of that.
If you’re an enterprise buyer, the useful takeaway isn’t the Marxism framing. It’s the contract question underneath it: read what rights your AI vendor has to what you send them, and decide whether you’re comfortable with the answer. Karp is selling you a product, but he’s not wrong that most companies haven’t checked.
