Michael Burry says the push by Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and other AI executives to slow the technology's development is "self-serving," arguing it protects incumbents and fuels IPO hype rather than addressing genuine risk. His pushback came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged peers to slow the pace of AI advances, a call that Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis all backed.
Michael Burry, the investor known for his bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble, said in a late Sunday post on X that AI company bosses pushing for a slowdown were, according to Business Insider, "self-serving". He listed four reasons on his Substack, Cassandra Unchained.
Burry lists four objections
Burry said he doesn't view AI chatbots as the path to artificial general intelligence, so there's nothing that needs its progress curbed. He also argued a slowdown benefits incumbents and hampers smaller rivals, and that framing AI as an extinction-level threat feeds the hype that supports public offerings.
An intentional slowdown, he added, provides cover for real, uncontrollable slowing growth. On his Substack, Burry said Anthropic and OpenAI's top brass have backed a slowdown to increase the perception of their power before their IPOs. He said large language models like Claude and ChatGPT won't achieve true capacity for reason, so there's nothing to fear, at least for now.
Amodei's warning and market reaction
Burry weighed in after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging peers to slow the pace of AI advances to give risk prevention time to keep up. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis all posted in support of Amodei on X. Amodei's essay followed warnings from a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher that the two labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligence, and from another Anthropic researcher who put the odds of AI killing all humans at over 10% within a decade.
Investors reacted to the prospect of slower growth by selling AI stocks on Monday. Nvidia slid 3% in premarket trading, while peers including Intel, Micron, and SK Hynix slumped more than 5%.
President Trump said over the weekend that unspecified negative forces were behind the apocalyptic chatter and that the worst outcome won't happen, adding it was paramount that the US beat China in the AI race. Burry, who pivoted from running a hedge fund to writing about his personal portfolio on Substack nearly a year ago, has criticized and bet against a slew of AI companies this year.
Source: Business Insider
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