What's wrong with Palantir? How investors see the stock

Military software company Palantir was supposed to be the stock for the current geopolitical moment, but its poor performance over the past year speaks to deeper disruptions happening in technology as a result of artificial intelligence. The iShares IGV tech software ETF is down about 14% since the beginning of the year, but Palantir – the third largest weighting in that ETF – has suffered more, sliding nearly 33% in the same period. Like the rest of the software business, Palantir has been facing a general threat from AI that has weighed on valuations across the sector. The company, led by CEO Alex Karp, has also had some sky-high expectations to live up to, including triple-digit price-to-earnings and enterprise value-to-sales multiples over the past several quarters, both of which are now trending down. But the real problem with the stock, analysts say, is fear about AI's increasing ability to handle the data-heavy workloads that Palantir specializes in. PLTR YTD mountain PLTR year to date. Looming specter "I think there is this specter hanging out in the future of Anthropic being able to do everything or OpenAI being able to do everything," John McPeake, senior research analyst at Rosenblatt, told CNBC on Friday. "It's having [someone] say, 'Create me a Palantir,' and it'll magically appear. That's not too much of an exaggeration. These large language models are perceived as code generators that can do anything. …