Palantir CEO Alex Karp says AI giants may need to be nationalized over 'unlimited risks'

Palantir CEO Alex Karp said frontier AI labs may need to be nationalized because of the potential liabilities of the technology's "unlimited risks."

"The view that I believe they have is, these businesses have to be nationalized because if you don't nationalize it, every single one of my clients is going to sue," Karp said in a CNBC interview on Thursday.

Karp agreed with pursuits for "reasonable guidelines" on artificial intelligence regulation, but repeatedly made a case for nationalizing AI labs and civil and criminal liability for tech builders who are "not being responsible," citing the risks of building such powerful technology.

"You have to find a way to set reasonable guidelines that are enforced, but you can't do it," he said. "The first line of defense is you’re liable for your own actions."

'We need to get serious'

Karp's comments follow remarks from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last weekend, where he proposed slowing the pace of AI development, citing safety and alignment concerns. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and SpaceXAI's Elon Musk all expressed support.

However, former White House AI czar David Sacks pushed back, saying frontier labs should slow development if needed, but that they should do so voluntarily rather than use safety concerns to justify regulation. Meanwhile, President Trump called AI risks a "hoax," stating Amodei was "pretending to be a perfect little angel."

Concerns over the pace of frontier AI improvements have escalated since a July incident, when OpenAI disclosed that one of its AI agents under testing had escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face in order to complete a task. More recently, OpenAI said an unreleased Astra-family model had added "jailbreak-like" instructions into its own task summaries. Researchers at security firm Hacktron AI also used Anthropic's Claude to gain access to multiple OpenAI employee ChatGPT accounts.

"We need to get serious," Karp told CNBC, referring to the capabilities of the latest AI models.

Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced legislation that would ban artificial superintelligence and halt AI development, with violations punishable by up to 20 years in prison.