Michael Burry Says AI Safety Warnings Are Self-Serving IPO Hype

Investor Michael Burry has accused leading artificial intelligence companies of using safety warnings as a strategic tool to mask slowing growth and generate hype ahead of major initial public offerings. The famed short-seller, known for his bet against the housing market before the 2008 financial crisis, outlined his argument in a post on X on Monday, September 14, 2026. Burry's critique targets recent calls from AI leaders to slow the development of frontier AI systems. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday, September 12, urging a slower pace of capability gains and proposing independent evaluators be given access to AI labs. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly endorsed Amodei's position. In his post, Burry presented four counterarguments. He stated that large language models are not true artificial intelligence and will not achieve artificial general intelligence, so there is nothing genuinely dangerous to slow down. He argued that a pause would benefit current market leaders by preventing competitors from catching up.