Alex Karp runs a company that sells software to the government for amounts of money that would make a defense contractor blush. His product does things nobody can quite explain. His customers pay anyway. This is the dream.
Now he's mad at OpenAI and Anthropic for charging too much per token. The man who perfected the art of enterprise software pricing—where a single contract requires three lawyers and a blood oath—thinks AI companies have gone too far. He calls it "tokenmaxxing." He says something has gone completely wrong.
What went wrong is that other companies learned how to charge like Palantir charges. They saw the playbook. They ran it back. Karp watched his own greatest hits album get covered by a band he doesn't like.
His complaint is that sky-high token costs are forcing companies toward open-weight models. Companies want efficiency now. They're done paying by the word like they're sending telegrams in 1922. Karp thinks this is a problem. For him it probably is.
OpenAI charges enough per token that CFOs started asking what a token actually is. Nobody could answer. The bills kept coming. Eventually someone did the math and realized they were paying more per paragraph than a freelance writer charges per article. The writer has health insurance. The API does not.
Anthropic joined the party. Same model. Different name. Higher price. Enterprises nodded and signed anyway because the fear of missing out on AI is stronger than the fear of explaining the budget to shareholders.
Karp wants efficiency. He wants open-weight models. He wants companies to stop lighting money on fire every time someone asks ChatGPT to write a haiku. This from the guy whose company name sounds like a fantasy novel villain and whose software demo requires a security clearance.
The real tragedy here is that Karp's right, but only because he's accidentally describing his own business model and doesn't realize it makes him the villain too.
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