“Why would anyone nationalize us? We’re so likable. We’re creating so much value,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp told executives and investors on Thursday — then immediately warned that major AI companies nonetheless risk being nationalized. Karp said he has spent six months privately warning top AI executives about the danger and that the momentum has shifted toward people pushing for government control.
Karp’s public alarm came days after Senator Bernie Sanders published a guest essay on Monday outlining what he called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, a proposal that would impose a one-time 50 percent tax on stock — not profits — of the largest AI firms and pay the proceeds into a federal fund. Sanders named OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI as among the companies the levy would target.
The stakes are concrete. Karp said the threat is already advancing: “The momentum is on the side of people who want to nationalize them,” he warned, arguing that lawmakers who do not fully grasp the technology may move toward ownership or control rather than narrow oversight. Sanders reinforced the political pressure by criticizing President Trump’s AI executive order as voluntary and saying it “does almost nothing to protect Americans.”
For an industry that has prized private control, the idea of a government stake is a sharp break. Karp urged fellow executives to stop treating the problem as a lobbying exercise and instead openly address AI’s societal risks and strategic value. He told peers earlier this year that displacing white‑collar workers while alienating the military would make nationalization likely — a warning he first delivered to Silicon Valley in March.
The contrast between the companies’ public appeal and the political threat is the story’s friction. Karp returned to that tension Thursday: his half-year of private warnings, he said, met largely with dismissal from executives. At the same time he acknowledged how much value and public goodwill the sector has generated — a feature that makes the idea of nationalization seem incongruous even as political forces push in the opposite direction.
Those political forces now have a concrete policy to rally around. Sanders’ proposal would levy a one-time 50 percent charge on stock of qualifying firms and funnel the proceeds into a federal fund described in his essay as built on “the collective knowledge of humanity.” The named targets — OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI — are among the best-known private labs driving recent advances, and Sanders framed his plan as a way to capture public value from technologies developed with broad social inputs and economic spillovers.
Karp’s standing makes his warning notable. Palantir’s stock has climbed more than 141 percent over the past year, and Karp’s personal net worth is roughly $14.3 billion. He is speaking not as an outsider but as a CEO whose company sits at the intersection of private contracts, government customers and strategic technology. That position, he suggested, gives him a perspective on how political sentiment can move from regulation to control.
The immediate gap is political: Sanders is expected to introduce legislation soon, but how much traction a 50 percent stock tax would find in Congress is unresolved. Karp’s choice to go public after months of private outreach underscores a second gap — whether the industry will shift from denial to a more candid, collective response that could blunt political appetite for ownership.
If executives continue to treat the risk as an abstract rhetorical problem or a matter for lobbyists, Karp’s argument implies, lawmakers may have little incentive to settle for modest oversight. His warning boils down to a choice for the industry: acknowledge and regulate the technology internally and publicly, or leave policymakers with the kind of hard statutory remedy Sanders has proposed. That choice, not some distant inevitability, is the immediate consequence the sector must face.
