Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) shares surged in Thursday's premarket session after DA Davidson upgraded the software company to Buy and raised its price target to $175. The stock was up 4.67% at $131.60, according to market data.

The upgrade comes amid a flurry of activity from Palantir's leadership, including a pointed critique of the AI industry's pricing models and a major partnership announcement with NVIDIA.

Karp Takes Aim at Token-Based Pricing

During an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday, CEO Alex Karp unloaded on the token-based pricing models used by frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. He argued that rising costs are pushing enterprises toward open-weight models to protect their competitive advantages.

"Something has gone completely wrong," Karp told CNBC, adding that executives fear losing their intellectual property. He described the prevailing enterprise mindset as, "I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens," warning, "I'm going to get no value and they're going to get my IP."

The Burry Factor

Karp's comments come months after Scion Asset Management founder Michael Burry stirred the pot in April, stating that privately held Anthropic was "eating Palantir's lunch" in corporate AI deployments. In an April 8 post on X, Burry cited corporate spending data from tracker Ramp to argue that Anthropic's scalable API model offers an easier, more intuitive solution for businesses compared to Palantir's implementation platform.

Karp's critique seems to directly address that competitive pressure, framing the choice as one between short-term convenience and long-term control over data and intellectual property.

NVIDIA Partnership and AI Sovereignty

Beyond the pricing debate, Palantir this week expanded its partnership with NVIDIA Corp. (NVIDIA) to build custom AI models for U.S. government agencies. Discussing the collaboration, Karp stated, "What aligns me with NVIDIA… is control over their compute, their models, their data stack and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production."

On Wednesday, Palantir published a nine-point AI sovereignty manifesto on X, emphasizing that data retention and controlling weights are essential for preserving enterprise value. The message aligns with Karp's broader argument that enterprises should not cede control of their most valuable assets to third-party AI labs.

Analysts Weigh In

Industry observers noted that Karp's comments struck a chord with enterprise customers. Futurum Equities Chief Market Strategist Shay Boloor posted on X on Wednesday that Palantir's message reflected enterprise demand for ownership, security, and control over their data stacks "instead of handing their edge to frontier labs."

Meanwhile, Moor Insights & Strategy CEO Patrick Moorhead stated that Karp voiced concerns few will say publicly regarding the risks businesses face when relying entirely on frontier AI models.

With DA Davidson's upgrade and a clear narrative around AI sovereignty, Palantir appears to be positioning itself as the safe choice for enterprises that want to keep their data close. Whether that message resonates enough to fend off competition from Anthropic and others remains to be seen, but for now, investors seem to be buying in.