Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR) CEO Alex Karp did not mince words at a recent industry summit. He told Silicon Valley that trying to gut white-collar employment while also cutting off the military is a fast track to having your technology seized by the government.
The remarks were delivered at the a16z American Dynamism Summit.
Karp’s Blunt Warning To The Tech Industry
“If Silicon Valley believes we’re going to take everyone’s white collar jobs AND screw the military…If you don’t think that’s going to lead to the nationalization of our technology — you’re retarded,” Karp said.
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar has also pushed back on the doom-and-gloom narrative around AI and jobs. Speaking on the All-In podcast in July 2025, Sankar argued AI gives workers “superpowers” rather than pink slips.
The comment lands at a charged moment. The AI industry is navigating mounting tension between its commercial ambitions, its workforce impact, and its complicated relationship with the U.S. defense establishment.
Anthropic CEO Had Already Sounded The Alarm On Jobs
Karp’s remarks follow a warning issued in January by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In a roughly 20,000-word essay, Amodei argued that the risks AI poses are not being taken seriously — and that a labor market “shock” unlike anything seen before is coming.
“New technologies often bring labor market shocks, and in the past, humans have always recovered from them, but I am concerned that this is because these previous shocks affected only a small fraction of the full possible range of human abilities, leaving room for humans to expand to new tasks,” Amodei wrote.
Silicon Valley’s Pentagon Feud
In late February, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to phase out Anthropic’s technology after the company refused to drop contractual limits on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security.
The Pentagon quickly pivoted to OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman announced on Sunday that OpenAI had shifted to classified Pentagon projects, calling the move urgent.
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