Palantir (NYSE: PLTR) CEO Alex Karp on Wednesday slammed the token-based pricing model used by OpenAI and Anthropic, as rising costs push enterprises toward lower-cost, open-weight models. "Something has gone completely wrong," Karp told CNBC's "Squawk Box," adding, "I'm not throwing shade at them."
After the anchor said his comments "sound like shade," Karp responded, "No, no, no. This is reporting."
The billionaire businessman said the prevailing enterprise mindset has become, "I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens," warning, "I'm going to get no value and they're going to get my IP."
Enterprises Pivot From Tokenmaxxing to ROI
Amid the shift, enterprises are moving away from tokenmaxxing and toward return on investment, increasingly adopting lower-cost open-weight models or building their own tools.
It's a familiar theme. Karp made similar remarks on a June podcast, warning that enterprises are "token maxing," or overusing AI without meaningful productivity gains. He said frontier labs are "super charismatic with investors" but "super not charismatic with enterprises."
Even Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged the trend last month, "I'm a tokenmaxxer too, it's addictive." He urged employees to avoid using frontier models "for non-frontier problems" as infrastructure costs climb.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya echoed that concern the same month, estimating enterprises could pay $105,000 a month for GPT-5.5 Pro compared with just $2,740 for DeepSeek R1. He said the pricing gap between open and closed models remains "enormous."
During his appearance, Karp also cautioned the industry shouldn't underestimate China's accelerating AI progress.
Nvidia Deal Anchors 'AI Sovereignty' Push
The comments follow Palantir's expanded partnership with Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) this week to build custom AI models for U.S. government agencies.
Karp, talking about this during the interview, said, "What aligns me with Nvidia... is control over their compute, their models, their data stack and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production. It's not being transferred to someone else."
On Tuesday, ahead of the interview, Palantir also posted a nine-point "AI sovereignty" manifesto on X criticizing tokenmaxxing and urging firms to retain control of their data.
Trading Metrics, Technical Analysis
Palantir has a market capitalization of $301.41 billion, a 52-week high of $207.52 and a 52-week low of $106.38.
The technology stock has fallen 25.10% year to date.
Price Action: PLTR closed the regular session on Wednesday up 7.77% at $125.73, according to Benzinga Pro.
With a strong Growth score of 97.69, Benzinga's Edge Stock Rankings indicate that PLTR has a negative price trend across all time frames.