Palantir's CEO Says OpenAI Wants to Be Nationalized. OpenAI Already Filed to Go Public.
Alex Karp says the AI labs' apocalypse talk is a pitch for a government bailout, not a safety warning. He made that case a month after OpenAI's own CFO told staff an IPO is coming in 2027 — and OpenAI had already quietly filed the paperwork Karp says it's too scared to file.
Explain Like I'm 5 — the whole thing in plain language.
Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, said something striking on CNBC in September 2026: he thinks OpenAI and Anthropic don't actually want to go public. Instead, he thinks they're scaring everyone about how dangerous their AI is on purpose, so they can go to the government and say "take us over, we're too risky for regular investors." His reasoning: if AI causes real harm to real people, the lawsuits could be so big no public company could survive them, so getting the government to own part of the company and shield it from lawsuits is actually the smart move.
Here's the problem with that theory. OpenAI had already filed the paperwork to go public three months before Karp said this, and OpenAI's own finance chief had already told employees, on the record, that the company plans to be public in 2027. So the idea that OpenAI is secretly avoiding going public doesn't match what OpenAI has actually done.
It's also worth knowing that Karp isn't a neutral bystander here. Palantir sells software to governments that helps them control and oversee AI — so more government involvement in AI is good for Palantir's business. And some reporters have pointed out that when OpenAI and Anthropic eventually do go public, big investors might sell other tech stocks, including Palantir's, to buy in — giving Karp a business reason to want those IPOs to look risky or not happen at all.
The honest way to think about this: Karp's underlying legal point (huge AI harms could create lawsuits too big for a company to survive) is a real, serious question nobody has answered yet. But his specific claim that OpenAI is hiding from the public markets is something you can just check, and when you check it, it's already false.