Michael Burry Says Anthropic’s IPO Filing Changes Nothing About His AI Bear Case — Flags Financial Risks Beyond The Tech

Burry said the prospectus misses developer-market changes and the pullback in tokenmaxxing.

• Michael Burry acknowledges AI is improving but remains concerned about financing, leverage, and infrastructure spending.
• He flagged chip-demand risks, memory supply, and mismatches between funding timelines and investments.
• Anthropic filed for a Nasdaq listing under ANT on Monday without setting an offering price or share count.

“The Big Short” investor Michael Burry said Anthropic’s IPO filing has not changed his bearish view of the AI trade, adding that even improvements in the tech do not resolve his concerns about financing, infrastructure spending and growth.

Burry’s skepticism contrasts with retail enthusiasm for Anthropic on Stocktwits, where sentiment was ‘extremely bullish’ amid ‘extremely high’ message volume, even in a dimmer broader market: the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) and SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust (DIA) drew ‘bearish’ sentiment amid ‘normal’ message volume, while the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) saw ‘extremely bearish’ sentiment amid ‘high’ message volume.

Better AI Doesn’t Ease Burry’s Financial Concerns

“There is a lot here but nothing that changes my view,” Burry said in his Substack chat about the prospectus. “There is so much more going on than this s-1 addresses.” 

Burry’s comments came after a reader asked whether advances in large language models (LLMs) had changed his view of the tech. “Everyone since 2024/5 said LLMs will hit a wall/plateau but it really didn’t and is still exponentially improving. The narrative is still strong and continues to fuel further buildouts and investment,” the reader said.

“My view in a nutshell is that the tech is improving and that has nothing to do with any short thesis,” Burry replied. He then laid out the financial and industry risks driving his position.

“I am looking at the financing, the insurer shell leverage in it, the inability to plug in the latest chips floating demand for earlier chips, the dram capacity repurposed for HBM is not gone and will return with a vengeance, compression and SLM proliferation on open weight models, the fundamentals behind not just companies but the deals they are doing,” he said.

His concerns span borrowing and deal structures, chip demand, memory supply and the spread of smaller, more efficient models. 

Burry also flagged mismatches between financing timelines and the investments being funded, before returning to the distinction between technological progress and growth.

“I have never said that LLMs would stop improving,” he said. “I think they are already being used more efficiently and that trend will continue, to the detriment of their growth rate.”

What Burry Says Anthropic’s Filing Leaves Out

On Anthropic specifically, Burry said that the prospectus did not reflect recent changes in the developer market. “The end of q2 and during q3 a lot changed in the developer landscape, and that is not in this prospectus,” he said.

He also questioned how the filing addressed a pullback in tokenmaxxing, or efforts to maximize AI token consumption. “Overall slowing of growth is not attributed to a decline in tokenmaxxing but I did not expect that to be mentioned,” Burry said. “The Information reported Meta’s Claude Code users fell from about 60,000 to 30,000 after the tokenmaxxing clampdown.”

The remarks build on his earlier criticism of AI valuations. In a previous post on X, Burry said that Anthropic’s valuation could buy 78 profitable S&P 500 companies, including Domino’s, Clorox and lululemon. He had also called for markets to fall before the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. “For the benefit of humanity, the markets should tank hard and prevent the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs,” he said.

In September, Burry said he had brought forward his expected timeline for an AI downturn and replaced outright short positions with bearish put options. “If the spending stops or slows, it all comes apart,” he said then. 

Anthropic Opens Its Books Ahead Of IPO

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, filed for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT on Monday, without setting an offering price or share count. The filing offers a closer look at its rapid growth and financial demands. Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026 but reported an $80.7 billion net loss, largely driven by a non-cash accounting adjustment tied to convertible financing. Its operating loss narrowed to about $693 million.

The prospectus also outlines large, multi-year computing commitments and warns of slower growth, security threats, and potentially harmful AI behavior. Meanwhile, competition from customers’ own tools is adding pressure. Meta’s Claude Code users reportedly fell from 60,000 to 30,000 amid layoffs and a shift toward its internally developed alternatives.

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