Alex Karp says the AI safety debate is really about nationalizing AI labs

Alex Karp weighed in on the AI safety debate during a Thursday interview.

Sean Rayford/Getty Images Alex Karp argues that AI companies are collecting intellectual property.

Karp told CNBC that AI companies could face lawsuits over the intellectual property they collect.

He said those liability risks could ultimately force AI labs to seek nationalization.

Alex Karp says there's more to Anthropic's plea for government regulation than safety.

Palantir's CEO said in a Thursday interview with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" that frontier AI labs like Anthropic are seeking nationalization to protect themselves from future lawsuits alleging they stole intellectual property.

"These businesses have to be nationalized because if you don't nationalize them, every single one of my clients is going to sue," Karp said of AI labs.

"The obvious solution is America." Karp said some of Palantir's clients have told him that their proprietary business ideas are ending up as training data for chatbots and being exposed to the wider world.

"They find out that the competitor next door has all of their output," Karp said.

A potential barrage of lawsuits, Karp said, could spur AI companies to seek government protection to shield them from liability.

"That model would require severe liability protection, and there's only one institution that can do that: the US government," he said.

Karp has previously railed against frontier labs over the issue of data protection.

In June, Palantir published a nine-point manifesto urging companies to keep their data in-house, rather than outsourcing to institutions that Palantir paints as untrustworthy.

"Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones," reads one point in the manifesto.