# Alex Karp — AI "haves and have-nots" > [!quote] "We've also seen, unfortunately, that there's a real hesitance to adopt these kind of products in the West outside of America, and the two places leading here are China and America. What we're seeing in America is so widely divergent. And so the non-adopters, the have-nots, are hoping for a catch-up function." > — Alex Karp, Palantir Q4 2025 earnings call, February 3, 2026 ## Context On Palantir's Q4 2025 earnings call — reporting 70% year-over-year revenue growth to $1.407 billion and a Rule of 40 score of 127 — [[Alex Karp]] cast the global economy as a widening split between AI "haves" and "have-nots." He named Canada, Northern Europe, and Europe in general as the laggards, contrasting them with adoption in China, America, and parts of the Middle East. Inside companies, Karp and [[Palantir]] CTO [[Shyam Sankar]] described the same divide: firms committing to AI at scale are "defining the future of their industries," while the "AI have-nots" still dabbling in pilots are "fighting for survival in the present." Karp also warned that non-adopting countries would feel "a real pressure to move to the left and right politically, very far," because "the way you deal with this when you don't have an answer to a question, you come up with ideologies that make no sense." The framing echoed [[Second Trump Administration]] rhetoric on the AI race delivered at that month's [[World Economic Forum]] meeting in Davos, where Karp was a speaker. ## Why this matters This is the clearest articulation of the defense-tech right's winner-take-all theory of AI: a small set of "haves" — nations and firms that buy and deploy advanced AI at scale, with Palantir positioned as the supplier — pull permanently ahead, while everyone else is consigned to "fighting for survival." It reframes a commercial sales pitch as civilizational destiny, and it converts Palantir's own capacity constraints (Karp conceded the company "really doesn't have the bandwidth to do anything that's difficult outside of America") into a moral verdict on the countries it isn't serving. It also folds neatly into the broader [[AI Arms Race]] narrative: the same haves/have-nots logic Palantir applies to enterprise adoption maps onto the US–China contest the company invokes to justify defense work. The framing conspicuously ignores legitimate reasons for slower or more selective adoption abroad — stronger privacy and civil-liberties regimes, preferences for sovereign or domestic vendors — treating Palantir's success in a uniquely favorable US-defense market as universal proof of others' failure. ## Verification - **Reporting:** [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-europe-canada-falling-behind-ai-adoption-haves-have-nots/) (Nick Lichtenberg), Feb 4, 2026. - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed; public Q4 2025 earnings call. The contiguous passage above is Karp's own words; the "AI haves" / "AI have-nots" labels and the "defining the future of their industries" / "fighting for survival in the present" fragments are also his, quoted by Fortune from the same call. ## Related quotes - [[Alex Karp - scare enemies and kill them]] — earlier earnings call, Palantir's purpose. - [[Alex Karp - heads cut off]] — same earlier call, on DOGE and disruption. - [[Mike Novogratz - AI commoditizing humans]] — a crypto principal reads Karp's CNBC rant as an indictment of the AI business model; counter-receipt naming the cost.