Palantir CEO Alex Karp has accused leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, of encouraging businesses to become increasingly dependent on their models and computing infrastructure, describing the trend as an attempt to “drug addict” enterprises to a future controlled by frontier AI labs. Speaking to CNBC, Karp argued that companies adopting AI at scale could end up spending heavily on models and compute while losing control over the technology and economic value generated from their own operations. “We have people trying to drug addict us to a future they believe they control,” Karp said. His criticism centres on what he describes as excessive spending on AI tokens and compute, questioning why businesses should pay for large volumes of AI usage if the spending does not translate into measurable improvements or give them greater control. “Why would we tokenmaxx... pay people for something that's not useful and then not control the means that allow us to advance our business while keeping the value of the business inside?” Karp said. He painted a stark picture of the future he believes some frontier AI companies are promoting, including businesses becoming less profitable, workers losing jobs and competitors gaining an advantage. Karp specifically mentioned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, saying he has spent significant time with Amodei and his team. Palantir has backed open-weight models, which can allow organisations to run and adapt AI systems with fewer restrictions than relying entirely on closed commercial models.