Michael Burry says AI leaders' calls for a slowdown are 'self-serving' — and humanity has 'nothing to fear'

Michael Burry, the investor of "The Big Short" fame. Bloomberg/Getty Images Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and other AI chiefs are calling for slower development of the technology following fresh warnings that it could annihilate us all. Michael Burry says they're just helping themselves.The investor of "The Big Short" fame said in a late Sunday post on X that it was "self-serving" for the bosses of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies to push for a slowdown.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. 1. LLMs are not AI and won't be AGI. There is nothing AI to slow down. 2. Competition is coming up fast, slowing benefits…— Cassandra Unchained (@michaeljburry) September 14, 2026 Burry listed four reasons why:He doesn't view AI chatbots as the path to artificial general intelligence so there's "nothing" that needs its progress curbed.A slowdown "benefits incumbents" and hampers smaller rivals.Hailing AI as so powerful it's an extinction-level threat fuels the "hype & puffery" that feeds public offerings.An intentional slowdown provides "cover for real uncontrollable slowing growth."On his Substack, Cassandra Unchained, Burry said that Anthropic and OpenAI's top brass have backed a slowdown "to increase the perception of their power before their IPOs."He also 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.Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Burry weighed in after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging his peers to "slow the pace" of AI advances to give risk prevention "time to keep up."OpenAI's Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk, and Alphabet's Demis Hassabis all posted in support of Amodei on X. Amodei issued his call for cautious progress after former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said the two frontier AI labs are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."Another Anthropic researcher, Evan Hubinger, echoed Coxon and said he puts the chances that AI will "kill all humans" at over 10% within the next decade.Yet there's huge pressure from Wall Street and Washington for AI titans in the US to keep marching ahead.Investors reacted to the prospect of slower growth by selling AI stocks on Monday. Nvidia, the world's most valuable public company and a key supplier of AI chips, slid 3% in premarket trading, while peers including Intel, Micron, and SK Hynix slumped more than 5%.President Trump said over the weekend that "very negative forces" were responsible for the apocalyptic chatter, the worst "won't happen," and 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.The investor, known for his prescient bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble, has sounded the alarm on overinvestment in infrastructure, aggressive accounting, hidden debt, and circular transactions in the AI space. Read next Theron Mohamed is a London-based correspondent on the International team at Business Insider. His coverage spans finance, investing, wealth, markets, and the economy.Theron joined BI in 2019 as a reporter at Markets Insider and rose to the rank of correspondent before moving to the Trending team then the broader International team. He previously covered tech, media, and telecom stocks for Investors Chronicle magazine and had a brief stint on the Financial Times' Data team. He interned at the Wall Street Journal in New York where he primarily wrote for Heard on the Street.Theron has freelanced for The Independent, The Telegraph, WIRED, and several smaller publications. He holds an undergraduate degree in geography from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.Theron often covers Warren Buffett, Michael Burry, and other elite investors. He also writes about the world's wealthiest people and shares financial advice from all manner of rich and successful people.Email Theron at tmohamed@businessinsider.com and follow him on X @theron_mohamed. Tech AI OpenAI More Anthropic Sam Altman Elon Musk IPO ChatGPT