Palantir: A Techy Fish Has Been Hooked and Fights Like Crazy
July 7, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
Palantir? Meh.
Sorry. I just cannot evidence the excitement many evidence for a company founded in 2003. My dinobaby recollection is that it used the lingo of intelware companies, open source software, and some orthogonal metaphors from the pen of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. The good professor was in my opinion eccentric. Keep in mind that this is among a faculty composed of other eccentrics and possibly just killer whale crazy.
A fighting Karp resists being converted to high value fast food fish sandwiches. Thanks, MidJourney. Lame, but good enough.
Palantir, the seeing stone stuff, and the injections of philosophical thinking from esteemed thinkers like René Girard, who was into me-too thinking; that is, just imitate something that works and go for it, baby. I bumped into Palantir as part of research project related to the firm that developed Analysts Notebook, one of the precursors to today’s policeware and intelware revolution. I poked around and learned that Palantir was accused of doing some me-too work related to the file format of Analysts Notebook. Well, the Karps settled and wrangled the information related to the dance moves sealed. None of the Aires de Milonga documentation. The dance steps have been disappeared.
With that, I just thought about other intelware / policeware outfits. Believe me, these companies sprout like weeds in a field in Lexington, Kentucky.
But then I spotted in my newsfeed this story:
Yep, that’s the title. I want to be clear. I did not read the “nine point post on X.” Sorry, Mr. Karp. I simply scanned the story and noted this passage:
The sharpest barb targets the frontier labs. Palantir attacks “tokenmaxxing,” the habit of spending as much as possible on AI. It calls the practice “the addictive feeling of false progress.” Heavy token use, it argues, rewards throwaway scripts over solid software. Then comes the tell: “There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.” That is a direct shot at OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest. Their businesses run on metered, per-token pricing. Chief executive Alex Karp put it more crudely in a follow-up. “Why are they charging for tokens?” he asked, if the value is really there.
My question, “Why has this pricing method hooked a Karp?”
Palantir announced that it was an AI company in a series of small printed advertisements in the Wall Street Journal. Its energetic forward deployed engineers and business development professionals worked every conduit into the US government’s procurement process. The company pooh-baahed. It lectured. It published dialectics. It fiddled the names of its “technology.” In short, it did everything possible to make its 23 year slog to fame and stock market fortune a reality.
Why is the Karp thrashing? I wish to offer several dinobaby observations:
- The current school of AI models and their pilot fish do much of the “work” that Planetarians purport to do for their clients.
- Pushback against the Palantir approach is becoming more evident in the EU and in some Hershey Chocolate type of deployments.
- Palantir, like the work my former blue chip consulting firm employer did, is wildly expensive. Value, of course, is in the eye of the beholder or in the mind of the person who bought into the sales pitch.
- Getting snagged induces stress.
Net net: The Karp is frenzied and fighting. Some fish do not thrive in the hull of a panga. I assume this is a temporary aberration from the normal operating procedure of a Palantirian. Thrashing Karp can be a net full of trouble if you get what AI mean?
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2026
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