Alex Karp went on CNBC and called token-based AI pricing a "wealth tax on enterprise America."

He runs Palantir, so consider the source. But he's onto something every law firm leader should sit with.

Here's the pattern I see in legal right now.

The first wave of AI transformation has been point solutions.

The Hargoras of the world.

Really good tools, and a logical first step as firms start to re-architect legal workflows from first principles and redesign the work to be tech-enabled.

But that transformation is happening on infrastructure the firms don't own.

Every prompt a lawyer writes. Every workflow they refine. Every piece of judgment they encode into these systems.

That's the reinforcement loop between human capital and token capital, and it's the most valuable asset a firm will build over the next decade.

Right now, it's compounding in someone else's system.

I watch really smart people at really well-run firms deploy their intellectual capital into third-party platforms every day.

It feels like progress. It is progress. It's also lock-in. Switching costs grow every month until you hit a point of no return.

Karp isn't saying AI is a waste.

He's saying dependency is dangerous when you don't own what the dependency produces.

Same logic applies to legal.

Putting a ring on any vendor's finger this early in the transformation presents way too much risk.

Tools and foundation models will keep leapfrogging each other. Best-in-class today won't be best-in-class in 18 months.

Optionality is the whole game right now.

Law firms need to own the infrastructure that captures the human and token capital reinforcement loop that Satya Nadella talked about in my last post.

That's where enterprise value will accrue.

Not to the firms that adopted the most tools. To the firms that own what those tools taught them.

Control your own destiny.