Alex Karp was right: you don’t own your data

Alex Karp isn’t crazy, and he isn’t just talking his book.

On July 1, the Palantir CEO went on CNBC and asked the right questions about model providers: who owns the data, where is it cached, is anything transferred back to the provider.

Too many people focused on his style and missed his point – they are stealing your alpha.

OpenAI and Anthropic tell commercial customers they will not train on their data.

After I recently moved my company off Anthropic, following a Supply-Chain Risk designation, I read the actual agreements and found a hole big enough to drive the entire AI industry through.

The OpenAI Services Agreement says: “OpenAI will not use Customer Content to develop or improve the Services, unless Customer explicitly agrees to such use.” Reasonable, until you check the definitions.

“Customer Content” means the Input and the Output.

“Input” is what the customer sends the model.

“Output” is what comes back based on the Input.

Here’s why that’s vaguer than it sounds.

The hidden tokens Early large language models generated answers token by token without scaling their effort to the difficulty of the question.

Humans don’t work that way.

Ask someone what 2 + 2 is and they’ll answer instantly.

Ask them to plan a family reunion, and they’ll think it over first.