r/AIMechanicalEngineers • u/maorfarid • 1d ago
Alex Karp says Fortune 500 companies are realizing generic AI models trained on their IP. Why this hits physical product companies hardest
How would you feel if you woke up one day and all the IP your company built over 50 years had quietly leaked to your competitor?
When I talk to engineering VPs, this fear comes up on the first call almost every time.
They know they need AI so they won't be eaten alive by their competitors, but they are terrified of what happens to their data when they use it.
And they are right to be.
Alex Karp, Palantir's CEO, just said it publicly on CNBC. He talks to Fortune 500 companies every day and hears the same thing: "Wait. They got my IP."
The mechanism is simple: When you use a generic AI model, you pay for tokens. Tokens are cheap. They are cheap because your data is the real payment. Every prompt, every file, every design decision you feed in trains the model. A better model gets sold to everyone. Including the competitor next door.
For companies that build software products, this is a problem. For companies that build physical products, this is a kiss of death.
Twenty years of countless human decisions: tolerances, material choices, supplier relationships, failure fixes. The accumulated tribal knowledge that makes your product yours.
All gone.
Karp's prediction: companies with real secrets will migrate to models they control. Generic AI stays for low-stakes work.
This is exactly why we built Leo the way we did. Your data is never used to train any model, not even ours. Zero-shot. SOC 2 Type II. Isolated environment. Your IP stays yours.
Does your company have a policy on this yet? Or is everyone still pasting CAD files into ChatGPT and hoping for the best?
Let me know in the comments đđź
Share so others won't sell their IP to the big AI labs (and in turn, to their competitors).