Big Short’s Steve Eisman Says AI Giants Are Manufacturing a Crisis to Protect Their Business

Steve Eisman, the investor who famously called the 2008 housing crash, says the doomsday warnings coming out of the AI industry are a manufactured crisis designed to protect the biggest players.

Steve Eisman, the investor who called the 2008 housing crash as immortalized by the movie The Big Short, told CNBC on Thursday that AI companies raising alarms about existential risk are doing so strategically, not out of genuine concern. “They realize that there are no moats around their business whatsoever and they’re trying to manufacture a crisis,” he said. He thinks the goal is to push regulators toward rules that lock in an advantage for the industry’s largest firms. “That’s what I think is happening,” he said.

He pointed to former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned publicly over safety concerns, as one contributor to the broader apocalyptic narrative around AI. Companies see an opening in that discourse, in his telling: regulation shaped by fear of catastrophe could cement a duopoly at the top of the industry. Breitbart News recently reported that Wynton Hall, the author of CODE RED, recently unmasked the leftist “effective altruism” philosophy that guides both AI kingpins and the supposed nonprofits would would contribute to AI regulation.

Eisman also argued the investment logic behind AI spending has shifted. “Tokenmaxxing is over,” he said, referring to the push to maximize AI usage. He cited gains by open weight models as evidence the ground is moving under the biggest AI firms. “The open weight models are taking big market share. I think these companies are very nervous,” he said. Citadel Securities has made a similar point, saying rising costs have delivered a “reality check” to the AI trade and slowed its momentum. Eisman said he has recently trimmed his own exposure to AI investments.

This is not new ground for Eisman. Weeks earlier, he’d called OpenAI and Anthropic the “Achilles’ heel” of the AI movement, warning that too much of the industry rests on those two companies. “They’re such a huge percentage of the entire chain, so if something were to happen to one of those two companies, then the chain would really fall apart,” he said. Asked to weigh them against each other, he didn’t hedge: “Between the two, OpenAI is the weaker company.”

He saved his sharpest skepticism for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has called for slowing the pace of AI development, a position OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk have echoed. Anthropic is also preparing for what would be a historic IPO, and Eisman finds that timing hard to square with warnings about AI’s dangers. “When you talk about [how] we should slow down because things are dangerous, my response is ‘Really? Postpone your IPO,’” he said.