Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, went on CNBC on July 1st and said the enterprise AI industry has gone "completely wrong."

Palantir's CEO, live on television, telling every enterprise buying into frontier AI models that they are being played. No, here’s what these stories are not telling you, unless you’re reading between the lines. Just like any other frontier AI CEO, Karp has self interest here. He isn't wrong. But he also didn't go far enough.

Karp's argument is that the model was never the moat. What he means by that: control over your compute, your models, your data stack, your alpha. Owning the means of production, not renting it.

He is exactly right. He's also using that exact argument to sell you Palantir's new sovereign AI engine, built with NVIDIA, which launched the same week as this interview. Read that twice. The man warning you not to trust an AI vendor with your data is asking you to trust him with it instead.

Sovereignty matters way more than countries have actually realised. The US government pulling Fable five was just a glimpse and still not revolutionary enough for companies to understand how critical it is for every organisation, no longer just in regulated sectors. We have seen companies misunderstand sovereignty over and again for the last decades. Just because T-systems builds a Microsoft datacentre in Germany doesn't make German infrastructure or German companies, using that datacentre, sovereign.

With AI, the change needed is even deeper. We can no longer put everything, especially anything that’s critical to your business running, at the mercy of another vendor, no matter who they are.

Sovereignty is not something only regulated industries, regulated companies or organisations with specific threat actors should think about.

The AI models are not the moat. But neither is whoever sells you the "sovereign" infrastructure sitting on top of them. The moat is your data, and what you actually do with it. Sovereignty isn't something you buy from Palantir, or from anyone. It's something you build. On that both Palantir and I agree.