Famed investor Michael Burry, the man who called the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse, is accusing the biggest names in artificial intelligence of manufacturing fear about their own products to rig the regulatory landscape ahead of lucrative public offerings.
Burry took to X over the weekend to tear into the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major AI firms, arguing that their sudden chorus of warnings about the dangers of AI development amounts to little more than a coordinated marketing campaign. The investor, whose bet against the housing market was immortalized in the Hollywood film The Big Short, framed the executives' calls for a slowdown as a convenient cover story for companies whose growth may already be stalling on its own.
The broadside landed as AI stocks took a beating to start the week, rattled by a weekend of essays and social media posts from industry leaders who, just months after filing for initial public offerings, now say the technology they are selling may be moving too fast. For Burry, the timing is no coincidence. It is a tell.
The New York Post reported that Burry posted a series of sharp criticisms on X, zeroing in on what he sees as a gap between the executives' public hand-wringing and their private financial incentives.
"Let's all take a moment to understand how self-serving it is for OpenAI, Anthropic and other execs of big hyperscalers to talk of slowing things down."
He did not stop there. Burry argued that the warnings are a form of pre-IPO salesmanship, companies talking up the power of their own products under the guise of caution.
"IPOs need hype & puffery; 'we are so awesome it could become dangerous' is hype & puffery."
Burry also challenged the foundational premise of the fear campaign, arguing that large language models, the technology behind products like ChatGPT, do not qualify as true artificial intelligence and will never achieve artificial general intelligence, the theoretical threshold at which machines could match or exceed human reasoning across all domains. In his words: "LLMs are not AI and won't be AGI." He said there is "nothing AI to slow down."
The investor has previously warned that the rush to pour billions of dollars into AI resembles the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, when speculative investment in internet companies outpaced any realistic path to profitability. That comparison carries weight coming from someone who built his reputation, and his fortune, by spotting exactly that kind of disconnect between Wall Street enthusiasm and economic reality.
Burry's accusation gains force from a simple fact: both OpenAI and Anthropic submitted IPO filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this summer. The companies are positioning themselves for public listings that could value them at staggering sums, listings that depend on investor confidence in the transformative, even world-altering potential of their technology.
Yet the same executives now urging caution are the ones who stand to benefit most from the hype. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on his personal website on Saturday arguing that the progress of improving AI model capabilities should be slowed down. The essay came from a company that, as the Post noted, has spent months stoking fears about potential AI doomsday scenarios while simultaneously raising enormous sums of capital to race ahead of competitors. Nvidia has reportedly eyed a massive anchor stake in Anthropic's forthcoming IPO, underscoring the sheer scale of money flowing toward the company even as its leadership counsels restraint.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Amodei's essay on X, writing: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier." Altman also told Fortune on Friday that a public listing amid current AI concerns would come at an "ill-advised moment," and said OpenAI would delay its IPO. No new timeline was given.
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceXAI, endorsed Amodei's position with a two-word post on X: "Dario is right." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also backed the slowdown, calling for "the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal." Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis had already called in July for a US-led global AI watchdog to review the most powerful models.
The skepticism is not limited to investors. Senior figures in the Trump administration have pushed back hard against AI executives' calls for government regulation, framing the effort as a bid for regulatory capture, an arrangement where the companies being regulated effectively write the rules that govern them.
Vice President JD Vance put the concern bluntly:
"I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a trojan horse."
David Sacks, a technology adviser to President Trump and the former White House AI and crypto czar, posted on X on Saturday with a direct challenge to the industry's stated motives. "Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic," Sacks wrote. President Trump himself joined others in dismissing what the Post described as "so-called AI fear-mongering." Trump has previously accused Amodei of pushing an AI safety "conspiracy" that ultimately benefits China.
Bill Gurley, a prominent venture capitalist and frequent critic of top AI firms, told the New York Times that any regulatory framework must be insulated from the companies it governs. "If we're going to regulate, it can't be anyone they know, and they can't write the rules," Gurley said.
Not everyone in the AI industry accepted the criticism quietly. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark publicly defended AI safety frameworks, arguing they are a strategic necessity for maintaining America's competitive edge over China. Fox News reported that Clark compared AI safety standards to existing consumer safety regulations, such as those governing children's toys, and warned that a major AI accident could trigger sweeping restrictions that would ultimately harm U.S. competitiveness.
"How you keep being ahead is you make sure that you don't roll the dice on public safety," Clark said. He denied that Anthropic's safety advocacy is financially motivated or tied to its potential public offering. "The worst time to react to an exponential is when it's too late," he added.
Clark's argument, that safety standards protect the industry from a catastrophic backlash, is not unreasonable on its face. But it does not answer Burry's core charge. The question is not whether AI safety matters in the abstract. The question is whether executives who stand to pocket billions from IPOs are the right people to decide how much regulation their own industry needs, and whether their sudden alarm is driven by genuine concern or by the calendar on their SEC filings.
The Trump administration finalized a voluntary framework for evaluating new AI models in August, though details of the plan have not been publicly released. That gap, a framework exists, but nobody outside the government knows what it says, leaves the regulatory landscape undefined at the exact moment companies are jockeying for position. OpenAI recently launched its GPT-6 Astra model amid safety concerns that even its own leaders could not fully dismiss, a move that sits uneasily alongside Altman's newfound call for pacing.
Burry made his name by recognizing that the financial establishment had a vested interest in ignoring the risks it was creating. In the mid-2000s, banks packaged bad mortgages into complex securities and sold them as safe investments. The people selling the product had every incentive to downplay the danger, until the market collapsed and taxpayers picked up the tab.
His read on AI carries the same structural logic. Companies that have raised enormous sums and filed to go public have a direct financial interest in making their products sound as powerful, and as potentially dangerous, as possible. A product so advanced it might threaten civilization is, by definition, a product worth an astronomical valuation. The warning is the advertisement.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical stakes continue to rise. White House officials have accused Chinese firms of stealing Anthropic's most advanced model, adding urgency to the debate over whether slowing American AI development hands an advantage to foreign competitors.
Whether Burry is right that the current AI boom is another bubble remains to be seen. But his core observation is hard to argue with: when the people asking for the brakes are the same people selling the car, it pays to check the odometer yourself.