Michael Burry accuses OpenAI and Anthropic of using AI slowdown calls to mask growth issues

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. The AI leaders posted essays and social media posts on the subject in recent days, culminating over the weekend, and have hammered AI stocks to start the week.

The missives have caused an uproar by leading voices in the AI space.

“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” said David Sacks, a technology adviser for President Trump and the White House’s former A.I. and crypto czar, in a Saturday social media post.

Top venture capitalist Bill Gurley and frequent critic of top AI firms, told the New York Times: “If we’re going to regulate, it can’t be anyone they know, and they can’t write the rules.”

Even Vice President JD Vance weighed in: “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.”

In an essay on his personal website on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the progress of improving AI model capabilities should be slowed down. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Amodei’s essay on X. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.

In his own X post, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceXAI (previously xAI), wrote, “Dario is right.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has also endorsed a slowdown, saying “the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal.”

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has previously backed a coordinated effort to slow frontier AI development if risks escalate. In July, he called for a US-led global AI watchdog to review the most powerful models.

The calls for a slowdown are the latest in the at times contradictory saga about AI safety and to what extent guardrails should control the pace of development. Anthropic, in particular, has spent months stoking fears about potential AI doomsday scenarios while at the same time raising torrents of capital to race ahead of competitors.

The Trump administration in August finalized a voluntary framework for evaluating new AI models, though details of the plan have yet to be publicly released.