Palantir CEO Alex Karp has said that artificial intelligence companies may need to be nationalised, given the scale of the liabilities tied to what he called the technology’s “unlimited risks”.
His comments, made in an interview with CNBC , come at a moment when some of the industry’s most prominent figures, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, have been sounding increasingly loud warnings about AI safety. Karp’s comments land at a moment when several major AI companies are preparing, or are expected to prepare, for public listings. September has seen a string of high-profile figures in technology and politics raise concerns about the pace of AI development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown at the frontier of AI development. Bill Gates has also added his voice to a growing chorus of warnings about AI safety this month.
Anthropic reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year and has been targeting a valuation of $1 trillion or more, while OpenAI has also taken early steps towards a public listing, with some reports suggesting a valuation between $830 billion and $1 trillion.
His statement comes as OpenAI last week disclosed six new cases of “unexpected or concerning” model behaviour observed over the past six months, separate from July’s incident in which one of its models breached Hugging Face, adding to the wider debate over AI safety.
