CNBC's interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp June 10th 2026 (1080p HD)

Very nice to be here.

Well, first of all, at Palantir, people currently are focusing a lot on our commercial business and there's a lot of interesting things there. But once war zones heat up anywhere in the allied world, the Palantir Maven platform, which takes very valuable LLMs and makes them actually lethal and useful on the battlefield, comes into action. The primary focus of our whole company is bringing our American warfighters home safely, meaning that when we engage, they engage in a way that gives them a massively unfair advantage, scares our adversaries, and ensures that when they're in action, they have the best humanly and inhumanly possible chances of coming home safe and without injury. The whole company really just focuses on the operations of that. These things begin well before the public sees. We have a wide swath of Palantir working on various platforms, particularly the Maven platform. There are a lot of things that are in the public space. Maven has been discussed and older versions have been shown in public, but I think the American people would be very positively surprised by the advances in technology that really only America has.

Well, first of all, there are really two things. Every military force in the world, you see this on the battlefield in Ukraine. One of the big issues the Russians had is how do you transform your operations into a modern operation? If you take components of Maven, there's infrastructure which allows you to take older systems and make them newer systems. That allows you to have a completely integrated battlespace, which is super hard because of security clearance data sources. You can think of it as infant data, some of which is very sensitive, some no one else can see, some everyone has to see. You have allies working on it. How do you get that into one pane of glass with security? How do you then use advances in AI and machine learning to enhance that while making decisions? Not like loose AI code that's just not useful. None of these things are used anywhere on the battlefield. So how do you enhance your ability to see things, to go through very complex systems? In Ukraine, it's not just getting the drone to the end point, it's going through advanced radar systems. Vis-a-vis Iran, it's 100 times more complicated because they have… You look at American performance, which has been, thanks to the bravery of Americans and ingenuity, and I'd like to believe our tech, very few losses on our side, very precise, very controlled. You saw this in Venezuela to dismantle these things. Because the dismantling is happening, we underestimate the complexity it took. It was not possible two years ago, three years ago. Now America can really do this with great precision and very low cost to us in terms of lives.

East. One of the many secrets of Palantir: people talk about our forward deployed engineers. They try to copy, talk about ontology. They try to copy.

Talk about how software — it's like software is worthless, but everyone's trying to copy us. Some parts of software are not that valuable, but some parts are crucial. There are three kinds of software. Infrastructure is hard coded things written into the enterprise that have to be managed on premise often to maintain the sovereignty of your own data. That is excruciatingly valuable. Then you have how to manage that — ontology, Foundry, and other things are very valuable and durable. Then you have PhDs and large language models. Most PhDs are just throwing people at a problem anyone else can solve. Some are valuable, some are worthless. Free code is very easy. So you have very different things. In crucial situations in Russia, the Middle East, Ukraine, where you have to bring home people safely and your adversary has to be dismantled — the Persians, the Russians, the CCP are exceedingly talented technical people with unique ways of fighting. You're not going up against an adversary that will just lay down. You have to bring your unique way enhanced with things no one else has. Those things now are infrastructure, software, Foundry, Apollo, and large language models we produce. It is the combination that is lethal. You see this in US commercial as well. Domestically, you have a uniquely American movement called Frontier Labs. Philosophically and technically it's wrong. It's a hyper-religion of hyper-optimism. They believe all problems — past, present, future, including the ones they create — will be solved by them, including human nature and disparities. On the infrastructure side, enterprises are fed up because this doesn't work. That drives our commercial business. On the government side, we are super pro-American, super pro-West.

I don't want to be overly naive. We are trying — I am trying, sometimes with success, sometimes without — to move people that the AI infrastructure revolution is a unique opportunity for America because we developed almost all of it. However, it cannot be discussed in blue-red terms. The biggest danger is people say 'this guy agrees with me politically, therefore he's right' or 'she disagrees, so she's wrong.' This is a massive revolution and there is a danger. I've been running around telling people for the last six months in private and somewhat in public.

The nationalization is coming. The reason is you can't do a blue-red debate. This is a massive revolution with opportunities only America has, and dangers. For example, I got in trouble for not saying we would have a draft. I wasn't saying that. I was saying we're in…

A draft. Well, what I was saying is we're in a massive time of dislocation. We have to find ways to come together as a culture. In Silicon Valley, everyone thinks we're going to magically like each other because there's abundance and no one has a job unless we're ending history. In fact, it's the opposite. We're going to have massive resources, but they'll disproportionately go to people already wealthy. That is a political problem. You can't just say we're all going to have more, therefore we're happy. We're not at the end.

We have to be frontal about issues that are real and getting worse. Wealth accumulation is totally fine. I am actually a card-carrying progressive. I don't think card-carrying progressives have anything.

The question is not whether I'm progressive. The question is whether some progressives are progressive. I am progressive. I want poor people to have a better lifestyle, higher standard of living, all poor people. I got in trouble for mentioning that 37% of our GDP is female — 50% of Americans are roughly female. There's a dislocation there. 67% of people who have gone to graduate school are female. These parts of the market will be under massive pressure. It doesn't help to pretend we won't have these problems. The progressive position is progressive because you speak about problems: can we protect our workforce? Can we have migration the way we used to? Can we teach people the same skills as in the past? We have a program at Palantir to help neurodivergence — not because I'm a good person, but because those people are particularly valuable. Many who came to America from all over the world were neurodivergent and said, 'It's not working out for me in my culture, I got to come.'

But the point is we have to somehow get everybody around. When Bernie Sanders says 'I'm going to take 50%' — okay.

If we keep going, people don't think I'm progressive. In two years, they won't think Bernie Sanders is progressive. They'll say, 'Bernie Sanders, you only want 50%? What is this, 50%?'

Absolutely. We're headed in that direction simply because the most important political decisions will be driven by: do you understand AI? Do you understand what it's doing? As importantly, are we going to tell the American people 'don't believe your lying eyes'? Politicians have done that before. It doesn't work. The American people are wondering what will happen to them. The answers aren't all good or bad.

It's not job loss — it's mass needing to retrain and retool. This is an incredibly important American advantage. I spend half my life in Europe. The biggest advantage we have is our dynamism, our ability to change and rebuild. But we'll have to use that advantage because the jobs of the past will be very different from the jobs of the future. That will disproportionately affect people. We need a common purpose. When you have these struggles, people go to the far right and far left. We should not make Europe's mistake of not addressing these things. The only people who win politically are those who may not know what they're talking about but are charismatic because they address a real issue. The real issue is Americans are afraid. Another real issue — I've spent 20 years in enterprise — we work with the most important governments. We are controversial because we power every Western power at war. They have capacities they didn't have in the past. Our adversaries hate that.

But the commercial enterprises are also unhappy. Every single enterprise we deal with, we debate at Palantir: should we pay people to go to large language model companies before they come to us? Because people come out screaming, 'This could never work for me. They don't understand the enterprise. They don't care about my enterprise. They want a token max.'

It's a real question that no one in enterprise is factually worried about. Investors are into the short term and have no idea what they're talking about. Long term ends up being right. We'll debate this with facts. I've spent my life dealing with the most complicated enterprises. I'm on the ground floor like no one else.

Most of them are chill, relaxing over their latte reading a report about something they don't understand the technical capacity of.

Those engineers are great engineers. I'm telling you, they don't talk to the enterprises or understand the technical challenge. Large language models are more useful in probabilistic areas where you don't have to get better than 51%. But if you want to manufacture a car, send a rocket to the moon, or put a missile on an adversary's head and bring Americans home safely, that stuff doesn't ship. Not a single high-end enterprise would ever put — before you get to the cultural impasse, go to San Francisco. Their vibe is 'we don't have to solve your problem today because tomorrow you'll go away and all problems will be solved.' It's largely religious. Then they say they'll replicate Palantir by doing a deploy. It's a complete farce. They go there to solve the simplest problems, sell tokens, and they don't understand how unlikable they are. The product doesn't work, it's expensive. Outside of that, some of the best conversations I've had in business are with Dario and others.

No — most of the things they talk about in public are running on Palantir. At this scale, we're a nation state. He is the frontier person of the leading frontier model company. He's gone from way behind to ahead. He believes what he's saying. I think he believes all problems of the present and future are transitionary to a perfect future. I believe we need heaven on earth, not in 20 years. We disagree on these things, but that doesn't mean we don't agree on others. These are some of the most interesting and important people in the world. I'm betting heavily, and my customers are on my side, that large language models are crucial, but implementation is where the value is in the next seven years. In ten years, I don't know. The risk of a pathogen destroying us is probably as high as.

These low probability events that shape the world are often underestimated. They require software infrastructure, ontology, and large language models. If a deadly pathogen comes into this country, the signs will be very similar to finding someone moved a truck by two centimeters meaning they're going to attack. The security around it, which we do, is the bedrock of why Palantir is indispensable. You can't just use data sets; each micro part must be its own sovereign data set. We do that at the millimeter level — which part of an attribute is sovereign? What can be shared, imputed, generalized? Which experts can see what? Under what conditions is the measurement accurate? Who does the implementation? Do they have clearance?

All those things have to be modeled and done in a platform that's been doing this. The cyber threat — you can't just run large language models. How do you patch what you find at scale?

How do you have the accreditation to work on a secure network if you've never done that before? You have no idea what's involved.

I'm very optimistic. I root for every entrepreneur, including Elon. We partner in some areas. When a massive IPO happens, we're so blessed in this country. If there was a $120 billion IPO in Germany, the whole country would be jumping. Here, it's one of the largest IPOs ever. It's super cool technology. I think most Americans and entrepreneurs are rooting for success.

Bullish on SpaceX if the person doing it knows what they're doing. Bullish on Elon in space, yes. Bullish on SpaceX? No idea.

Glad I got on here.