--- title: "As OpenAI and Anthropic Enter the Fray to 'Steal Business', Palantir's True Rivals Have Arrived" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/285824582.md" description: "OpenAI and Anthropic are replicating Palantir's core model and building competing products, causing Palantir's commercial contract booking growth to plummet from 137% to 45%. The company is essentially an AI 'refinery' rather than a model developer, with market debate centering on whether it is merely an 'expensive wrapper'" datetime: "2026-05-10T01:06:32.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/285824582.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/285824582.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/285824582.md) --- # As OpenAI and Anthropic Enter the Fray to 'Steal Business', Palantir's True Rivals Have Arrived Palantir stands at a delicate crossroads: it has transformed itself by riding the AI wave, yet it risks being submerged by that same tide. Wall Street Insights mentioned that after the U.S. market close on Monday, the 4th (Eastern Time), Palantir released impressive results, with revenue and profit both hitting historical records, and sales in the U.S. market more than doubling year-over-year. However, the company's stock price has cumulatively fallen nearly 20% this year, diverging significantly from its fundamental performance. Wall Street is betting that as large AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic accelerate their expansion, the appeal of Palantir's core software products to customers may be gradually eroded. **According to The Wall Street Journal, citing insiders, OpenAI is building a data connection and structuring platform whose functions are considered to directly compete with Palantir, and the team includes no shortage of former Palantir employees.** **Both OpenAI and Anthropic have replicated Palantir's signature 'Forward Deployed Engineer' model, embedding engineers within customer teams to drive AI implementation.** William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma stated bluntly in his latest research report: > The competitive pressure from Anthropic and OpenAI on Palantir is intensifying. ## AI Is Both the Engine and the Liability Palantir's business model is built on data integration and analysis. Palantir helps government agencies and corporate clients extract insights from massive amounts of information, supporting scenarios such as supply chain planning and military strike decisions. **The company did not achieve profitability for the first time until 2023, more than twenty years after its founding.** The rise of AI has opened a new window for Palantir: corporate clients are extensively adopting large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to process information within Palantir's data platform, directly driving its explosive revenue growth. **Since Palantir launched its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), its stock price once surged by over 2300%.** **** (Palantir officially launched its Artificial Intelligence Platform in April 2023, after which its stock price continued to strengthen) However, Palantir is not essentially an AI company. It does not develop its own models; the operational logic of AIP is to introduce third-party models to enhance its own software capabilities. In the words of Palantir employees, large language models are like crude oil, and Palantir is the refinery that processes it into usable products. **But increasingly, people believe that 'crude oil' will eventually learn to refine itself.** Some experts estimate that large language models are already capable of reproducing most of the work Palantir has done in understanding large-scale data. Jake Behan, Head of Capital Markets at investment firm Direxion, pinpointed the core of the controversy: > The debate surrounding Palantir is not about growth, but about whether it occupies an indispensable position in the AI technology stack, or is merely an expensive wrapper around increasingly cheap AI models. ## Executives Stay Tough, But Data Speaks Facing external skepticism, Palantir's management displayed its characteristic tough stance during this week's investor conference call. **Executives referred to the output of large AI labs as 'slop,' a term repeated 17 times throughout the call.** CEO Alex Karp stated: > Corporate clients can try various AI products on the market, **but most will ultimately return to Palantir.** CTO Shyam Sankar argued that cheaper open-source models actually bring more business to Palantir. He said: > The better, cheaper, and more capable the models become, the more we benefit. These labs are not our competitors; they are our supply chain. But cracks have appeared in the financial data. Palantir's U.S. commercial contract booking growth rate plummeted from 137% in the previous quarter to 45%. This disparity has raised alarms among analysts, suggesting that momentum in commercial market expansion is weakening, and the transmission effects of competitive pressure may have already begun to manifest. ## Government Moat: Deep, But Not Boundless On the government side, Palantir's barriers remain solid. Leveraging its first-mover advantage in defense and deep political resources in Washington, Palantir secured over $1.1 billion in federal contracts in the first year of the Trump administration's second term, a 70% year-over-year increase. Its command and control system, the Maven Smart System, is poised to gain 'Program of Record' status—a highly prized designation in defense contracts that implies long-term, stable funding assurance. However, even within the Pentagon, Palantir's absolute dominance is quietly loosening. **According to executives at AI startups, the Pentagon is extending AI deployment from headquarters to the front lines, and lightweight models designed for soldiers' phones or drones are often incompatible with Palantir's systems.** Palantir has begun launching new versions of Maven adapted for drones, but how far this catch-up effort can go remains unknown. Ben Van Roo, co-founder of AI defense startup Legion Intelligence, pointed out that while Maven has been successful, it covers 'only a subset of the thousands of workflows within the Department of Defense.' Broader battlefield scenarios, such as intelligence gathering and logistics support, will generate substantial AI demand outside the Palantir ecosystem. He said: > That is the main battlefield for the next decade. ### Related Stocks - [PLTR.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTR.US.md) - [PLOO.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLOO.US.md) - [PLTD.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTD.US.md) - [PLTU.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTU.US.md) - [DTCR.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/DTCR.US.md) - [PTIR.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PTIR.US.md) - [PLTZ.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTZ.US.md) - [PLT.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLT.US.md) - [CLOU.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/CLOU.US.md) - [PLTW.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTW.US.md) - [PLTG.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/PLTG.US.md) - [XDAT.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/XDAT.US.md) - [DAT.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/DAT.US.md) - [OpenAI.NA](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/OpenAI.NA.md) ## Related News & Research - [Palantir Keeps Crushing Expectations — One Analyst Says It's Barely Getting Started](https://longbridge.com/en/news/285242514.md) - [These Analysts Revise Their Forecasts On Palantir Following Q1 Earnings](https://longbridge.com/en/news/285243465.md) - [BUZZ-Street View: Palantir graduates from AI experiments to the big leagues](https://longbridge.com/en/news/285172917.md) - [Top Analysts Remain Split on Palantir Stock (PLTR) After Q1 Results. 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