Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC on Sept. 17, 2026, that civil and criminal liability, not new regulation, is the "first line of defense" against dangerous AI. Karp said companies developing the technology should face civil and criminal penalties if AI causes the damage their CEOs warn of, and that AI labs pushing for regulation actually want nationalization to shield themselves from customer lawsuits. His comments follow a five-day-old industry split: Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Elon Musk back slowing AI development, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg argue market forces already keep it safe. Amodei's Sept. 12, 2026, slowdown call split AI's CEOs after he warned AI capabilities were improving too quickly for researchers to understand and control. Altman said he agreed with Amodei that the frontier must be paced, and Musk said Amodei is right. Huang countered that safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one, and that market forces are already there, with no need for new laws or regulations. Zuckerberg said trust and alignment are becoming the most important capabilities differentiating agents and models, and that any lab not focusing on alignment will fall behind.