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Palantir's CEO Just Called Out OpenAI and Anthropic
Submitted by Chris Markoch. Posted: 7/7/2026.
Key Points
- CEO Alex Karp told CNBC that enterprises risk losing their competitive data advantage by relying on frontier AI models like OpenAI or Anthropic.
- Critics, including Michael Burry, argue Karp is talking his book amid PLTR's 25% decline in 2026, but Palantir's earnings have not shown lost business.
- Karp projected $15 billion to $18 billion in free cash flow within two years, though PLTR still trades below its 200-day EMA of $143.43.
- Special Report: SpaceX is offering you shares. Don't take them.
Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) is not known to shy away from controversial topics. But when it comes to frontier large language models such as Anthropic and OpenAI, Palantir has generally been more restrained.
That changed in a recent CNBC interview with Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp. In the interview, Karp said what the company’s business model has suggested for years: the real AI trade isn't the foundation model layer, but the application and integration layer built on top of it.
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Drilling costs were cut in half in 18 months. Google signed a 15-year contract. Bill Gates reversed his position and committed $100 million. When Congress rewrote energy tax credits, this was the one source that kept them through 2033. The company behind it has been operating for sixty years.
See the company that just rewrote the DOE's timelineKarp remarked that enterprises want to "own the means of production" instead of "transferring their alpha" to OpenAI or Anthropic. In plain English, he was warning that an enterprise's competitive edge — its alpha — is its data.
If that data runs through another company’s API, the enterprise is renting a moat, not building one.
The bigger concern is what happens if those companies use the data they acquire to work against the enterprises they do business with. According to Karp, that is not a concern with Palantir.
How Frontier AI Models Could Become Enterprise Competitors
When an enterprise pays a frontier model company, it is essentially buying the ability to bolt a chatbot onto its workflow. In that arrangement, the value and pricing power flow to the model maker. In the process, the enterprise gives up exclusive control over that data.
With Palantir, a company is buying Ontology and AIP to embed AI directly into its own proprietary data and decision-making. The value of that data stays in-house.
The threat Karp is describing isn't hypothetical. Enterprises that route proprietary data through a frontier model risk handing over their know-how, trade secrets, and competitive edge to a company that may eventually compete with them directly.
That risk is becoming harder to ignore. For an enterprise, real data safety means maintaining control over its own data, model weights, and compute resources. Without that control, a frontier lab can absorb a company's proprietary knowledge and repurpose it into its own product.
Anthropic's expansion into vertical-specific offerings illustrates the pattern. Categories once served by independent developers building on top of Anthropic's models are increasingly being served by Anthropic itself. The model maker sees where value is created on top of its platform, then moves in to capture it directly.
The logic is straightforward: a company with a dominant model can use that position to expand into adjacent, high-value verticals over time. It's the same dynamic Karp is pointing out. If enterprises hand over proprietary data, they may be arming their own future competitor.
Is Alex Karp Defending Palantir or Highlighting a Real AI Risk?
Critics of Karp’s statement say he is simply talking his book. Some investors view the frontier models as a direct threat to Palantir’s business. Michael Burry went so far as to say that Anthropic was “eating Palantir’s lunch.”
The criticism carries more weight with PLTR down 25% in 2026 and approximately 35% below its all-time closing high around $207 in November 2025. The argument is that Karp is trying to prop up the stock by discrediting the competition.
However, the crux of Karp’s argument is what many analysts have been saying for months. Palantir operates at a different layer of the AI stack. Its role is to orchestrate the application layer through its Ontology, which is agnostic to whatever large language model (LLM) enterprises choose to use.
A more relevant critique is that foundation model companies are moving downstream too, through custom GPTs and enterprise tooling, so the distinction between layers may blur over time. However, Palantir’s earnings reports to date don’t indicate that the company is losing business. In fact, the opposite appears to be true.
Can Palantir's Long-Term Growth Outlook Justify PLTR's Valuation?
Palantir will continue to face concerns about its valuation. No matter how much the company grows, many investors believe that there is too much future growth priced into PLTR.
So far, betting against that future growth hasn’t been a good bet. But what comes next? According to Karp in the interview, Palantir has “...more business than we can supply. [...] 2 years out, you can see 15 ... 18 billion dollars of free cashflow.”
That will fire up the skeptics. However, in 2022, Karp announced a 2025 revenue target of $4.5 billion. In 2025, the company’s full-year revenue was $4.475 billion. Like it or not, Karp has a history of backing up forecasts that first look audacious.
That strengthens the case for owning PLTR over the long term. However, in the near term, PLTR's chart tells a story of stalled momentum, not a full recovery. The stock still trades below its 200-day EMA of $143.43, a level that continues to act as resistance.
There are signs of stabilization: the MACD has turned positive after months in negative territory, signaling early bullish momentum following the June lows near $106. But until PLTR reclaims its 200-day EMA, the longer-term trend remains bearish. Karp's comments may be helping sentiment, but the charts show a stock that is still looking for confirmation.
Costco’s Secret Growth Engine May Be Running Out of Gas
Submitted by Dan Schmidt. Posted: 6/28/2026.
Key Points
- Costco's comparable sales growth was significantly inflated by high gas prices, with fuel-adjusted comps running roughly 4 to 5 percentage points below reported figures.
- COST shares fell more than 10% from their May 19 all-time high of $1,096 as gas prices retreated, breaking below the 50-day moving average in early June.
- Bulls point to Costco's 90% membership retention rates as a durable growth driver, but the stock's 46x forward earnings valuation leaves little margin for a slowdown.
- Special Report: SpaceX is offering you shares. Don't take them.
The Iran war caused many price spikes across the commodity spectrum, and consumers felt one every time they needed to fill up their tanks. Gas prices are posted at nearly every intersection and street corner, serving as a painful daily reminder of diminishing purchasing power.
But one company that turned garbage into gold during the spike was Costco Wholesale Corp. (NASDAQ: COST).
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Download your free copy of Your First Trade Playbook todayRising numbers on gas price signs became flashing billboards for the company, which sells gas at razor-thin margins to entice new sign-ups and drive store traffic.
However, retail gasoline prices have started to pull back from their late-May highs, and front-month RBOB gasoline futures have fallen even more sharply.
That suggests the fuel-price tailwind Costco enjoyed may be nearing an end, even if the full effect has not yet shown up at the pump.
Can Costco continue drawing record numbers of members, or will oil and gas price normalization limit the impact of its traffic-driving strategy?
Fading Macro Tailwind Forces Results to Stand on Their Own
The charts for the average retail gas price and the COST share price have been mirror images over the last month. COST notched its latest all-time high of $1096 on May 19, the day after gas prices peaked in the United States.
But now the stock is down more than 10% from that high, and the gas-driven growth tailwind is starting to fade.
The key question is whether Costco’s recent growth reflects durable store-level demand or a temporary boost from higher fuel sales. Comparable sales, or comps, help answer that because they measure sales at stores open for more than one year, excluding the noise from new openings and closures. On the surface, Costco’s trend looked powerful, with comps rising 9.4% in March, 11.6% in April, and 12.5% in May on a year-over-year (YOY) basis.
But the headline numbers need context. Costco also reports comparable sales excluding the impact of gasoline prices and currency fluctuations, and those adjusted figures showed a more moderate trend. Excluding those factors, comps rose 6.2% in March, 7.8% in April, and 8.0% in May. That still points to healthy demand, but it also shows how much the fuel-price environment helped amplify Costco’s reported sales growth.
Record-high gas volume did indeed drive organic sales growth, but the rate of that growth appears to be approaching a ceiling.
The bear case is fairly simple: the gas tailwind is fading, and comp sales growth will likely have peaked by the time June numbers are released.
The bull case is that these new ‘recruits’ have become part of a membership base that consistently reports 90% retention rates, and this added membership revenue, combined with margin growth from declining gas prices, will show the stock is still worth its premium valuation.
However, that valuation continues to weigh on the stock, which now trades at about 46x forward earnings.
Stock May Have Found Short-Term Bottom, But Momentum Remains Weak
It’s already been a tumultuous year for COST shares following a parabolic run in early January.
The stock’s long-term technical outlook remains positive, but certain indicators are wavering in ways they hadn’t shown yet in 2026. The 50-day moving average had been a strong support level for the stock price ever since it surpassed the 200-day moving average in March, forming a bullish signal known as a Golden Cross. The share price traded in a tight range for two months following the Golden Cross, but other indicators, such as the Relative Strength Index (RSI), confirmed that the trend remained bullish and that buyers were in control.
As gas prices approached their peak in mid-May, COST shares broke out of their tight range and soared to a new all-time high. But the reversal came just as quickly as the breakout began. Once gas prices started retreating, so did the COST share price, which fell below the 50-day moving average during a volatile first week of June. The RSI dipped below the bullish threshold of 50 during the drawdown, and the price is now testing the 200-day moving average for the first time since early February.
The stock has found new support at the 200-day moving average, but this price action looks more like a digestion period than a buyable bottom. The gas tailwinds are starting to unwind, and Costco will need to post blowout earnings numbers to prove it’s still worth paying 46x forward earnings for a stock with retailer margins.
An RSI move back above 50 will likely be the first clue that buying momentum has resumed, and the stock will need to push back above the 50-day moving average before any sustained breakout can occur.
The market will get a better read on how quickly the gas tailwind is fading when June sales figures are released in the first week of July, but the holding pattern for COST investors is likely to continue until the next earnings report drops on Sept. 24.
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