‘Big Short’ Investor Steve Eisman Says AI Companies Want to ‘Manufacture a Crisis’

Steve Eisman, the investor who got famous for betting against U.S. housing before the 2008 crisis, is treating the current AI doom talk as a business move, not a warning siren. On Thursday, he told CNBC that the leading AI firms have “no moats” and are trying to “manufacture a crisis.”

That argument is increasingly shared by another Big Short name: Michael Burry. He has said LLMs are not AI and won’t become AGI, and he’s argued that open-source models and Chinese rivals are eating into the edge of OpenAI and Anthropic. In Burry’s telling, the fear speech is also handy marketing ahead of some of the biggest stock listings Wall Street has seen.

The pressure inside the industry has become hard to miss. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon left over safety concerns, and roughly 1,100 employees across OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google later called for development to slow down. The CEOs themselves have amplified that tone: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk have all backed caution.

Eisman’s read is simpler and colder. He says the companies want tougher regulation because it could harden the market around a small number of players and replace the old moat with a legal one. He also says the competitive picture is getting worse for them, with “tokenmaxxing” fading and open-weight models taking market share.

He’s been trimming his own AI exposure, and he sees OpenAI and Anthropic as the “Achilles’ heel” of the trade because so much of the industry depends on their success. He was especially pointed about Anthropic, which has already confidentially filed for an IPO: if the risks are so grave, he asked, why not postpone the listing?