Palantir wants to dominate AI. Anthropic spent 43 times as much on R&D in Q3.

In its third-quarter earnings call, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said his company has a “moral imperative to be the dominant player in our industry.” Palantir plans to get there in part by post-training open-weight models, such as NVIDIA’s Nemotron, on customers’ operational data, building on research that AI labs and open-weight model developers paid for. Anthropic, which Karp described as a symbiotic commercial partner, spent 43 times as much on R&D last quarter.

Karp waved off the idea that Palantir needs to win over skeptics. D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria, citing Anthropic’s S-1, noted that about half of Anthropic’s customers work with the lab directly and asked how Palantir persuades CEOs who aren’t yet convinced. “We really cannot satiate demand,” Karp said. “So this is a market that is growing so rapidly. We don’t need the people who aren’t convinced.”

Palantir shares fell 3.13% to $178.34 during Monday’s regular session, ahead of the earnings release, then dropped another 2.64% to $173.64 in after-hours trading as of approximately 7:26 p.m. Eastern, according to Google Finance. Other major technology stocks also showed losses for the day: Microsoft fell 2.83%, Meta 1.34%, NVIDIA 1.26% and Broadcom 1.18%.

The earnings follow a brutal stretch for technology companies in late October. Alphabet shares fell 12.6% on October 29, the company’s worst day on record, and Intel plunged 28.6% the following day after a disappointing profit forecast. Microsoft opened a voluntary exit program reportedly covering about 60,000 employees, roughly 27% of its workforce. So-called neocloud companies were already under pressure: By October 26, CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN had each lost more than 30% for the month amid concerns about their debt-funded expansion.

Karp opened his remarks by calling it “by far the most watched earnings call in the world.” He and Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar used the call to critique the broader AI market, questioning the value of rising token consumption and frontier labs’ approach to enterprise productivity. Karp said customers were tiring of “token raw usage, lightweight companies reselling tokens, software companies that are reselling tokens and it counts as revenue.” Karp continued: “People are just tired of it.”

Karp also suggested that early investors in AI companies have a blind spot. “It’s hard to see the reality when you’re getting rich on something that’s not actually working the way you think it is.” In industry, he added, people realize they need Palantir once AI “gets real.”