Palantir Technologies co-founder and CEO Alex Karp said Thursday the core problem in Silicon Valley is the attitude among tech executives that they want to be separate from United States regulation.

"You cannot create an island called Palo Alto Island," said Karp, who suggested tech leaders would rather govern themselves. "What Silicon Valley really wants is the canton of Palo Alto. We have the United States of America, not the 'United States of Canton,' one of which is Palo Alto. That must change."

"We'd rather be regulated as a foreign island than be a part of the United States proper," he told Andrew Ross Sorkin from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Government oversight has become a renewed topic in Silicon Valley this month, after Apple refused to provide a "backdoor" to password-protected iPhones used by the shooting suspect who killed three people in December at the Pensacola Naval Air Station before being fatally shot.

Attorney General William Barr said last week the tech company failed to provide "substantive assistance," a claim that Apple denied. Apple said it provided law enforcement with the suspect's iCloud data. President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up his pressure over the refusal, telling CNBC that he's "very strong on it."