Michael Burry slams OpenAI, Anthropic for 'self-serving' calls to slow AI

Famed investor Michael Burry slammed leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic and other tech giants for orchestrating a “self-serving” call to slow the pace of AI development – joining tech bigwigs, President Trump and even the Chinese government in panning so-called AI fear-mongering.

Burry – the short-seller lionized in Hollywood blockbuster The Big Short for calling and profiting from the subprime mortgage crisis circa 2008 – wrote on X: “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.”

Burry said AI juggernauts s calls to hit the brakes were cover for real uncontrollable slowing growth as AI labs struggle to maintain the stratospheric growth they experienced earlier in the AI boom. A cooling period would help as IPOs look to be pushed out, Burry noted.

He also panned the negative drumbeat coming from AI leaders as regulatory capture – where the leaders in a space use regulations and slowdowns to thwart up and coming competition. He framed the calls for a slowdown as a marketing ploy ahead of massive IPOs for the AI giants.

“IPOs need hype puffery; ‘we are so awesome it could become dangerous’ is hype puffery,” Burry wrote. Burry previously warned that the current rush to pour billions of dollars into AI resembles the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s.

OpenAI and Anthropic both submitted IPO filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this summer.

Altman said OpenAI would delay its IPO, telling Fortune on Friday that a public listing amid the current AI concerns would come at an ill-advised moment.

Burry in his post argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence and thus there is “nothing AI to slow down,” adding LLMs are not AI and won t be AGI. AI fears have largely focused on AGI, a state of technological progress in which machines will posses human-level intellectual capacity and could theoretically cut humans out of the loop in consequential decisions or pose a risk to humanity because they could outsmart humans.

Burry s statements come after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk have called for greater government oversight of AI and for the development of the new technology to happen slower.