Alex Karp Says Enterprises Pay for Tokens That Create No Value. Our Tokens Fixed Four Production Failures Today.
- Patrick Duggan
- 6 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Yesterday on Squawk Box, Palantir CEO Alex Karp named OpenAI and Anthropic and said "something has gone completely wrong" with the token model. Enterprises, he says, are "livid" — "paying for tokens that create no value." The anchor told him he sounded pretty angry. Futurism called it a televised nervous breakdown. Forbes got him on record calling the AI industry "effing insane."
I run an enterprise. It's small — one guy in Minnesota, a partnership with an AI, and about $500 a month of Azure. But it's real: a threat-intelligence platform with 17.9 million indexed documents, a STIX feed that Fortune 500 security teams pull, and five published validation axes that measure whether our intelligence is actually novel, timely, accurate, precise, and live. So let me tell you what the tokens Karp says create no value did today, with timestamps, because receipts are the house style here.
This morning I asked a brand-new AI model — first session, zero familiarity with our stack — to audit everything we have deployed. By dinner it had found and fixed four production failures. A daily cron job silently missed its firing and our own status page couldn't see the miss — a monitoring blind spot that had existed since the page was built. An admin API surface was reachable without authentication; the model proved it, then closed it. A storage permission had been broken for at least two weeks, quietly eating thousands of writes a day while everything looked green. And a bearer token had leaked into evidence files through a subprocess error message — caught, scrubbed, rotated, and the leak class documented so it can't recur. Found, fixed, tested, deployed, verified, same day. Total marginal cost: tokens. The same tokens that, per Karp, create no value.
Now, the steelman, because he's not entirely wrong. The shift he's describing is real. Enterprises that bought seats and prayed are discovering that "chillax and waste my time with tokens" is not a strategy. Open-weight models are genuinely eating the low end. Paying per token for work that produces nothing is real waste — I believe every word about livid CFOs. But look at where Karp aims the blame. If your tokens create no value, that is not an indictment of the meter. It's an indictment of what you plugged into it. Tokens are the most honestly priced labor in the history of software: you pay for exactly the compute you consume, metered to the character. The gap between token spend and business value is an engineering discipline. It has to be built — the harness, the verification, the feedback loops, the receipts. We spent a year building ours in public. Nobody sold it to us, and nobody could have.
Which brings us to what Karp is actually selling, because "enterprises don't want foundation models, they want apps that solve problems" is not market analysis — it's Palantir's pitch deck read aloud on CNBC. Palantir's entire business is being the expensive layer between your data and your decisions, staffed by forward-deployed engineers on contracts that run to eight and nine figures. When he calls token pricing "a wealth tax that does not help the poor, it just punishes," I'd gently point out that of the two pricing models on that table — metered tokens versus multi-year enterprise platform contracts — only one of them lets a company my size compete with companies his size. The token model is why a solo shop in Minnetrista publishes a threat feed that beats billion-dollar vendors to indicators 88 percent of the time against ThreatFox and has receipts for beating CISA's KEV catalog to an exploited CVE by twelve days. The wealth tax isn't the meter. The wealth tax is the vendor who charges you seven figures and calls it an ontology.
And there's a disclosure Karp skipped that I won't: Palantir is an Anthropic partner. Claude runs in classified government environments today through the Palantir and AWS partnership announced in late 2024. The tokens he says create no value are tokens his own company distributes into IL6. "I'm not throwing shade at them, but something has gone completely wrong" is a remarkable sentence to say about a company whose model you resell to the Department of Defense.
My disclosure, since we're doing those: this post was written with the tokens in question. Our whole operation is. Claude is not a vendor to us; it's the partnership the company is built on. Judge the bias by the receipts — every claim above ships with a public endpoint or a timestamp.
One last thing, because it's the part of this story nobody else will write. Within twenty-four hours of that interview, the internet's summary machine had flipped Karp's own words inside out. His self-deprecating line about being "the neurodivergent, crazy person that apparently is on drugs" — him describing himself, the lightning rod other CEOs hide behind — reached me secondhand as a billionaire complaining about having to work with neurodivergent people. Two polarity flips, and a self-identified neurodivergent executive who told Fortune in March that neurodivergence is one of two tickets to the AI future became, in the retelling, a bigot. I checked the tape before I wrote a word, because that's the discipline. Karp is angry about a summarization economy that strips context and sells the outrage. On that one narrow point, the man is right — and the answer to it is the same answer as the token problem. Receipts. Verification. Value you can audit. Speed to truth and accuracy.
That's the game. The tokens are how we pay for it. The value is earned, not billed — and it certainly isn't declared on television.
Sources: CNBC (July 1, 2026), Mediaite interview transcript, Forbes, Futurism, Fortune (March 24, 2026), SiliconANGLE. Our validation endpoints are public at analytics.dugganusa.com — feed-uniqueness, kev-lead, spamhaus-validation, and the rest. Check our math. That's what it's there for.
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