Palantir’s Karp says Sanders will regret asking for 50% of AI companies. Complete citizenship is coming.
The TL;DR
Palantir’s Karp predicts perfect AI in two years. He says Sanders’ 50% proposal would seem limited. Trump, Sanders, and Karp agree that this change is coming.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp says nationalization of AI companies is coming, and that Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal for 50% public ownership would seem limited. “In two years, they won’t think that Bernie Sanders is improving,” Karp told CNBC on Wednesday: “They’re going to be like, ‘Bernie Sanders, you only want 50%? What is this 50%?’”
Karp said he had spent six months secretly warning top AI executives about the threat. “Tthe momentum is on the side of the people who want to nationalize them,” he said. He described himself as “continuous card carrying” and argued that the most important political decisions in the country will be driven by whether politicians understand AI.
The forecast reaches the political area in terms of saturation. Sanders outlined his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund legislation, which would impose a one-time 50% tax on stock, not profits, from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Trump said he plans to meet with AI company leaders to discuss some form of public ownership, which he called “working with the American public.” The two sides disagree on almost everything else.
“The question is not whether AI will change the world, it will change,” Sanders said in a video this month.The question is who will manage and control that future.“Trump said at the White House: “If we do that, society will be much richer, the people of our country.“
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Not everyone in Trump’s orbit agrees. David Sacks, former White House AI and crypto czar, warned that Republicans who replace Sanders will regret it. “Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but they should think hard about how the regulations they are flirting with will be used against them in the future when a Democrat administration is in power,” Sacks wrote.
Karp framed the debate differently. He said Americans are asking what will happen to them as AI eliminates jobs, “and the answers are not all good or bad.“He predicted that the US would need”retrain and recycle” and he said it is better to do that than Europe.” He did not say how Palantir, which sells AI to governments and the military, would be affected by nationalization.
The bipartisan consensus on public ownership of AI is surprising. Last year, the idea of the US government taking equity stakes in AI companies would have been dismissed. Now a Socialist senator, a Republican president, and a defense contractor CEO all agree it’s possible. The disagreement is about how much and how fast.
Whether any of this happens depends on legislation, which has not yet been introduced, and whether AI companies voluntarily contribute equity, as OpenAI proposed with its Public Wealth Fund idea. But Karp’s prediction is the most extreme version yet from the sitting CEO: not 10%, not 50%, but full ownership, and within two years.
