Palantir’s slide continues, but President Trump tries to help
Investors were selling Palantir shares again on Friday, with the stock falling as much as 6% before stabilizing, thanks to an assist from the White House.
At its worst moments, the sell-off put the retail favorite on track for its worst weekly loss (more than 16%) since February 2021.
But Palantir has powerful friends: President Trump posted on Truth Social celebrating the company’s “great war fighting capabilities,” sending the stock higher, though it remained in the red.
The overall negative sentiment seems to stem from Anthropic’s powerful new AI models, at least judging from the latest epistle from Palantir bull Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities:
“Anthropic released a new product around multi-agent orchestration, which continues to add more headwinds to the software sector. While Anthropic is hitting a new scale with the company now at $30 billion [annual run rate], up from $9 billion at the start of the year, we believe this is not at the expense of PLTR’s business as the company continues to accelerate both its US commercial and government businesses.”
Of course, the specter of AI undermining of other software companies has been a well-established theme for months. And it’s clearly at play in the market on Friday, with Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Figma, and Atlassian continuing to get clocked on negative AI implications.
But the recent inclusion of Palantir among the pack of potentially replaceable software providers is newer, with the view popularized by well-followed market commentator Michael Burry’s pronouncement — since deleted — that Anthropic is “eating Palantir’s lunch,” which seemed to contribute to the downdraft for Palantir today.
Michael Burry's now-deleted X post sends $PLTR lower. 📉
— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) April 9, 2026
"Anthropic is eating Palantir's lunch," the famed investor shared. pic.twitter.com/IpGoabKIXC
The stock dove through its 50-day moving average in recent days, underscoring the sputtering momentum for what has been one of the market’s biggest winners over the last couple years. Long-term holders are still up massively, with the stock up about 1,400% over the last three years.