'Big Short' Michael Burry: Company A's prospectus reveals 'catastrophically fragile' systemic risk in the AI boom

October 28 — "The Big Short" prototype figure Michael Burry stated via his Substack account that Anthropic's recently disclosed IPO prospectus (S-1) reveals catastrophic and fragile systemic risks across the entire AI boom, not just Anthropic alone. His main reasons are as follows:

1. Massive compute commitments: Anthropic has signed approximately $537 billion in compute/infrastructure purchase and lease agreements (mainly from Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Broadcom, etc.), with pending transactions (including with SpaceXAI and others) potentially adding tens of billions more, bringing the total scale potentially close to $800 billion. This is roughly 12 times its current annualized revenue run rate (about $65 billion), and also far exceeds 20 times trailing 12-month revenue.⁠

2. Circular and interconnected financing structure: The supercomputing giants simultaneously play multiple roles as Anthropic's "lenders, suppliers, channel partners, and shareholders". The financing arrangements are simply "garish and audacious." This high degree of interconnection looks like a safety net during an upcycle, but once growth pauses or turns downward, the entire ecosystem becomes extremely fragile. He compared it to vendor financing during the dot-com bubble.

3. Growth is already slowing + costs are accelerating: Quarterly revenue growth slowed from about 144% in the previous quarter to about 46%, while compute costs rose sharply (about 78%). Michael Burry pointed out that the S-1 data mainly runs through June 30 and does not fully reflect changes in the developer ecosystem in Q3 and afterward, and that "nothing can change my overall view."

Michael Burry believes that Anthropic's structure can function while AI continues to grow at high speed, but any significant slowdown could trigger a chain reaction or even a collapse. He emphasized that the risk lies in the system's "circularity and connectivity," rather than merely technical issues.