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Palantir Technologies Inc. CEO Alex Karp has a colorful comparison for corporate AI deployments: pornography.
In an appearance on Thursday on the TBPN podcast, Karp argued that most companies aren’t using artificial intelligence to solve real business problems — they’re using it the way someone scrolls an adult site at 2 a.m.
Karp claims that Palantir has developed an internal product specifically designed to break enterprises of what he calls “token maxing” — the compulsive overconsumption of AI tokens that looks like work but delivers nothing.
The internal name isn’t something he’d say on air, but the concept he described freely: a tool to wean companies off what he called “the masturbation thing.”
“People are just, like, sitting there all day… enterprises are, like, ‘Okay we believe this will create value, but we cannot have people just checking the weather with it, just rearranging deck chairs on their personal Titanic,’” Karp said.
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Karp and the hosts riffed on the idea of AI as a “tool-shaped object” — something that looks like productivity from the outside but functions more like a compulsion.
The technology feels useful because, in certain narrow tasks, it genuinely is, which is exactly what makes the addiction hard to break.
“One more dashboard, one more time. It can’t hurt that much. I know my doctor says I shouldn’t do it, but it’s like that, right?” Karp said.
The underlying argument is serious even if the framing isn’t.
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Frontier AI Companies
Enterprises are burning large budgets on AI that isn’t solving actual problems, and the frontier companies selling them tokens aren’t helping, Karp argues. The enterprises actually deploying the technology, once past the hype, increasingly don’t.
“The large language model frontier companies are super charismatic with investors,” Karp said. “I’ll give you some news: they’re super not charismatic with enterprises.”
His sales strategy for Palantir reflects the gap. Rather than competing head-to-head with OpenAI or Anthropic for enterprise mindshare, Karp said he tells prospects to go spend time with the frontier players first — and call him when they’re done.
“Don’t even call. Don’t come talk to us. There’s a frontier company. Go spend two days with them. And if you’re lucky, after you’re done, I’ll let you in my door. They’re like clamoring.”
Photo: Andrii Yalanskyi / Shutterstock
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