Michael Burry, the real-life figure behind the film "The Big Short," said that if a market crash prevented the two largest artificial intelligence companies in the United States from going public, it would benefit humanity. The well-known investor posted on social platform X on Tuesday: "For humanity's sake, the market should crash sharply, thereby preventing the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic." In follow-up replies, Burry provided more details about his original post. He said these companies would "absorb" and subsequently destroy "trillions of dollars in capital," adding that this would be only the "least damage" they cause.

Burry also responded to a user's jest 鈥?the user joked about wanting to "crash the market so that Skynet can't IPO" (Skynet being the destructive AI system from the film "The Terminator"). Regardless of what broader consequences Burry envisions, the economic stakes involved for these two companies are already enormous. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month that given concerns about AI safety, an IPO in 2026 would be "unwise." Meanwhile, a prospectus showed that Anthropic might pursue an IPO after the U.S. midterm elections in November. Both companies need to invest massive amounts of capital to develop advanced models and build the computing infrastructure to support them. By going public, they could access a broader group of investors and thus obtain more ample funding.

Burry wrote on Substack this week that he is "more confident than ever" that his bearish views on artificial intelligence (AI) will be validated within the next year, which would bring forward his previously expected baseline timeline of an AI bubble bursting in 2028. The investor said that based on firm conviction, he has once again increased his short bets against a range of targets (including Nvidia, Palantir, Micron, Oracle, and the Nasdaq 100 index). Burry believes this debt-driven spending on chips and data centers is unsustainable and highly vulnerable to rising interest rates. He wrote that once spending slows, "everything will collapse." However, despite all these concerns, AI-related stocks have surged all year, repeatedly hitting record highs.