Palantir CEO Alex Karp says Trump has a point about the AI race: ‘there’s a real hesitance to adopt these kind of products in the West’
Palantir’s fourth-quarter earnings call turned into a geopolitical broadside as CEO Alexander Karp blasted Canada and much of Europe for falling behind in the artificial intelligence race, casting the global economy as a looming conflict between “AI haves” and “have-nots.”
Speaking after Palantir reported 70% year-over-year revenue growth to $1.407 billion in the fourth quarter and a Rule of 40 score of 127, Karp argued that the company’s performance exposed a widening gap between countries and institutions willing to overhaul themselves around advanced AI software and those content to tinker at the margins.
Noting that Palantir’s U.S. business grew 93% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, with America now accounting for 77% of total revenue, Karp asked hypothetically, “what do bombastic numbers like this mean?” It’s actually bad news that Palantir is “doing things unlike any other company has done,” he argued, because it raises another question: “this obviously has import for the world. And what does it mean for the world?”
Karp as Davos Man 2.0
Echoing rhetoric from the Trump administration on display at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos (where Karp was a speaker), the Palantir CEO offered a withering critique of the companies failing to adopt AI. “We’ve also seen, unfortunately, that there’s a real hesitance to adopt these kind of products in the West outside of America, and the two places leading here are China and America,” he said. “What we’re seeing in America is so widely divergent. And so the non‑adopters, the have‑nots, are hoping for a catch‑up function.” Good luck, he seemed to say, asserting that Palantir’s earnings are a “breakout function” that mean “the way in which we view value is obviously no longer relevant.”
The value being created by Palantir is “so large and so disproportionate that you can create a company that seemingly is exploding in terms of growth and quality of growth.” Then he named names, saying that Palantir sees adoption, sometimes wide-scale, of advanced AI platforms in parts of the Middle East and in China, but “lack of adoption in Canada, Northern Europe, and in Europe in general.” Just look at France, he said, a one of the countries with “the clearest idea of the problem.” France has no alternative to solving this adoption problem and has been forced to keep signing new deals with Palantir. In December 2025, to that point, France renewed a three-year contract with the French intelligence services.
“One of the things you’re gonna see in Northern Europe, Canada, and other places is a real pressure to move to the left and right politically, very far,” Karp said. “Because the way you deal with this when you don’t have an answer to a question, you come up with ideologies that make no sense, and you try to implement them.”
To be sure, Karp’s framing ignores that Palantir itself has chosen to concentrate capacity on the U.S. and “doesn’t have the bandwidth” for more complex international work. It also dismisses legitimate reasons for slower or more selective adoption: European and Canadian regulatory regimes place a higher weight on privacy, civil liberties, and vendor diversity, with many governments preferring sovereign or domestic solutions in critical infrastructure. It also treats Palantir’s success in a uniquely favorable US defense‑centric market as if it were universal proof that countries like Canada and those in Europe are failing on AI simply because they are not buying his platform at scale. Different jurisdictions are entitled to pursue AI on their own timelines, with their own safeguards and mixes of vendors.
Analysts on Wall Street, as they are prone to do with such a hot stock, sided with Karp’s version of events. Bank of America Research, for instance, argued that Palantir’s blowout earnings constitute a “warning to slow adapters” on AI: “the clock is ticking.” Exponential growth is on display here following Palantir’s intentional actions on how to go-to-market, develop products, and be an enabler of AI-decision making, BofA wrote. If companies really want to be “AI companies,” analysts added, they need to provide real results. Allowing that the market’s relationship with AI companies “continues to be volatile,” BofA sees this set of results cementing Palantir’s place “as one which will survive and thrive in the chaos.”
The haves and have-nots
Inside companies, Karp and President Shyam Sankar described a similar split between AI “haves” and “have‑nots.” Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Taylor said some customers are now signing initial deals of $80 million to $96 million within months and rapidly expanding usage, citing examples of utility and energy clients whose annual contract values quadrupled or quintupled in 2025. Taylor framed those customers as “AI‑native enterprises” that start with large commitments and quickly scale to thousands of users and hundreds of use cases.
“Our customers aren’t tentatively trying AI; they’re committing to it at scale,” Taylor said, adding that Palantir’s top 20 customers now generate an average of $94 million each in trailing 12‑month revenue, up 45% year-over-year. Karp argued that these firms are “defining the future of their industries,” while those still dabbling in pilots—the “AI have‑nots”—are “fighting for survival in the present.”
BofA noted how embedded Palantir is becoming in the corporate space, with an ever-expanding list of mentions of earnings calls, with 17 unique mentions this quarter up from seven a year ago, and a new high of 38 total mentions, up from 25 in the year ago quarter.
Karp’s remarks came as Palantir leaned heavily into its role as a key supplier of AI-enabled systems to the U.S. government and defense sector. The company highlighted a U.S. Navy contract worth up to $448 million to modernize the shipbuilding supply chain and described its “Ship OS” and “warp speed” industrial tools as part of a broader re‑industrialization push in American defense manufacturing. Sankar said usage of Palantir’s Maven defense AI platform is at “all‑time highs,” with the system supporting simultaneous real‑world military events and being pushed out to more combatant commands and edge environments.
For now, Palantir’s capacity constraints and surging U.S. demand give Karp little incentive to soothe ruffled feathers abroad. He said the company “really doesn’t have the bandwidth to do anything that’s difficult outside of America” and questioned whether European procurement systems are even “load‑bearing” enough to buy “the best product” if it means favoring U.S. vendors over domestic champions.
At times, Karp sounded almost pitying about his European competition. “To believe you can go and build companies without this is supremely dangerous,” Karp said of orchestrated, production‑grade AI systems. “How do you even perform at half this level Is going to be a real question for tech companies and a real question for countries. Can we produce companies that are producing what we produce in a quarter in a year?”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com