Palantir’s Alex Karp says OpenAI will never go public – and AI labs’ only way out is to beg Washington: “Nationalize us, please”

Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn’t think OpenAI will ever go public. His reason: the legal liability hanging over frontier AI companies is so enormous that no stock market could absorb it, and the only real exit is for the government to take them over. His comments, from a CNBC interview on September 17, have been doing the rounds all week, and TechRadar picked them up today.

“You’re assuming there will be an S-1”

When asked what the risk factors would look like in OpenAI’s S-1, the filing a company publishes before an IPO, Karp dismissed the premise entirely.

You’re assuming there will be an S-1… [but] the only way to deal with this kind of liability is to go to the government and say, ‘nationalize us, please!’

Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, on CNBC

His argument is that AI labs have trained their models on huge amounts of data, including data belonging to other companies, and could be on the hook for the damage their products cause. “These businesses have to be nationalized because if you don’t nationalize it, every single one of [their] clients is going to sue,” he said, Yahoo Finance reports.

AI doom as a liability shield

Karp also offered a cynical reading of the AI industry’s safety warnings. In his view, labs talking up AI’s dangers and calling for regulation are really trying to escape responsibility for what they build.

The first line of defense is you’re liable for your own actions. So it’s a weird twist they’re asking for societal regulations to get out of the first line of defense, which is if you build a technology that can destroy 10% of the world, that has civil and criminal liability attached to it.

Alex Karp

It’s a strikingly similar argument to the one Nvidia’s Jensen Huang made in a CBS interview days later, when he said AI labs calling for a slowdown are “asking to be relieved of the laws we do have.” Huang, though, used it to wave away AI extinction fears. Karp uses it to argue that the risks, and the lawsuits, are real enough to sink the companies.

He also had a characteristically blunt warning for anyone who thinks they’re getting the better end of the deal: “If you think the other person’s the mark, you’re the mark,” Gizmodo reports.

Consider the source

Karp isn’t a neutral observer. Palantir sells AI software to governments and militaries, so a world where frontier AI ends up under government control is one where Palantir’s pitch looks pretty good.

And OpenAI hasn’t said anything to suggest it’s given up on going public. Its rival Anthropic, meanwhile, is reportedly preparing what could be the largest IPO on record. If Karp is right, somebody’s lawyers are about to have a very difficult time writing the risk factors.

Sources: TechRadar, Yahoo Finance, Gizmodo