Reason why Michael Burry believes market crash stopping OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs would benefit humanity
Michael Burry, the American investor who was made famous by The Big Short, has shared his belief that a major market crash could be beneficial if it means putting a stop to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic going public.
Taking to social media, Burry revealed that the potential event actually could ‘benefit’ humanity.
On X, formerly Twitter, the hedge fund manager wrote: “For the benefit of humanity, the markets should tank hard and prevent the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs.”
This prompted another user to reply: “OpenAI and Anthropic are loss minters. The moment they IPO, they'll massively lose value overtime. Their only sensible path is acquisition by the US government as its strategic tools. With government acquisition, they'll still lose value, in fact faster, but they'll be safe.”
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To this, Burry shared his thoughts on why it might be good if the IPOs are stopped, saying: “These are companies that are going suck up and then destroy TRILLIONS of dollars of capital, and that will be the least of the damage they do.”
His comments come as investors continue pouring enormous sums of money into AI companies and the infrastructure needed to develop increasingly powerful models.
OpenAI and Anthropic both heavily depend on access to capital in order to fund computing infrastructure, chips, data centers and the expansion of their AI systems, with a public listing potentially giving either company access to a much larger pool of investors and capital.
However, it doesn’t look like this will happen for OpenAI anytime soon after CEO Sam Altman revealed that the firm has no plans to do so this year.
Speaking to Fortune, Altman explained: “I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that.”
Anthropic’s IPO prospectus
Anthropic’s planned stock market debut could also be set to shine a light on just how expensive the AI boom has become.
The firm’s recent IPO prospectus revealed that Anthropic generated nearly $4.6 billion in revenue last year, which is roughly a 12-fold increase from the previous year.
However, that growth came with enormous spending, as the company spent a whopping $7.33 billion on computing and infrastructure alone, over half of its total operating expenses.
Anthropic reported an operating loss of $8.06 billion for the year, compared with $2.98 billion in 2024, with the prospectus also revealing the scale of Anthropic’s future commitments as the AI firm expects to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cloud computing, infrastructure and related obligations as it continues to expand its systems.