Faith in big tech companies and artificial intelligence is low, very low — just 15% of Americans trust AI companies to make decisions about the technology’s development and use per an Anthropic + YouGov poll from Dec. 2025.
Many are understandably worried about the rise of AI will mean a handful of technocrats having all of the power and money.
But, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, the Miami-based software company that builds AI platforms for governments and private companies, doesn’t think that’s where things will — or should — head.
“We cannot have a society where all the value goes to 2,500 people sitting in Silicon Valley. That just will not work, and no one’s going to put up with it.” Karp said at a company boot camp last week.
Palantir is offering a different approach and an entirely different narrative for how AI can benefit humans — not make them subservient to it.
Instead of companies outsourcing their corporate data to a handful of frontier labs — major developers such as Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic — and creating what Karp has described as “vassal states of the language labs,” Anthropic sees a brighter future where small and large companies alike have “AI sovereignty.”
Rather than businesses paying fees to use a frontier lab’s AI technology — and being at their mercy if they raise prices — Palantir’s approach is to implement AI tools that companies own so they control the tools and their data.
“Your data, your model, not ours, not someone else’s, you’re not handing it over to anyone else,” Kevin Kawasaki, Palantir’s Head of Business Development, explained to me.
Over the last few months, Palantir has pushed this idea of sovereignty more aggressively, unveiling a nine-point manifesto and even launching a boot camp showing customers how they will get AI tools without giving away data.
The efforts undercut the doomer narrative and fatalism — pushed by some AI leaders, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — that AI will take over and unemployed humans will be reliant on handouts, if we don’t all die in an extinction event before then.
That’s not the reality on the ground, according to Lead Palantir Architect Chad Wahlquist
“You actually talk to the nurses, the factory floor workers, the people that actually use AI to do their job that are on the ground, it is a far different story than what is being led by prominent AI labs the fear tactics.”
In addition to providing tools companies can use that the company owns, Palantir is also working to put an end to “token-maxing” — pushing customers to use and pay for more and more AI.
Companies such as OpenAI, for example, make more money when customers buy more tokens to process more data.
“Everyone else is focused on consumption. That’s how they get paid,” Wahlquist said.
Palantir, by contrast, says it makes more money when customers buy more tokens to process more data. “We get paid on outcomes. That is the core differentiator about us to everyone else,” Wahlquist said.
Palantir is known for working with the American government and it sees its approach as fundamentally more American.
“Sovereignty means you own the right to run your business,” Kawasaki said. “If an AI lab can access your data, train on it, and sell that model to your competitors, you’re not running your business. You’re renting it.”
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