Investor Michael Burry stated that markets should "tank hard" to prevent initial public offerings by OpenAI and Anthropic. He argued this action is necessary "for the benefit of humanity" to stop these companies from absorbing and destroying trillions in capital.

Burry's Warning on AI Capital

Burry took to social platform X to voice his concerns about the artificial intelligence sector. He responded to a user suggesting that both companies could lose value post-listing by asserting they would "suck up and then destroy TRILLIONS of dollars of capital." He added that such financial damage would be the least of the harm caused.

The investor has previously compared current enthusiasm for AI stocks to the late-1990s dot-com bubble. He has warned that investors may be overstating the earnings potential of technology companies.

IPO Plans and Financial Disclosures

OpenAI confidentially submitted a draft registration statement for a potential IPO in June but has not set a listing date. CEO Sam Altman indicated the company is not planning to go public in 2026. Reports suggest OpenAI is seeking a $30 billion funding round at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion.

Anthropic also confidentially filed for an IPO in June. Recent reports point to a potential November listing with a valuation around $2 trillion, though terms remain unfinalized.

What the Numbers Show

Anthropic's disclosures reveal a stark divergence between revenue generation and capital expenditure. The company reported $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue against operating losses exceeding $8 billion. This indicates that current operational losses are nearly double the annual revenue. Furthermore, the company outlined hundreds of billions of dollars in future computing commitments, suggesting that the cash burn rate will remain high relative to income as it scales infrastructure.

OpenAI attributed a core cluster of a coordinated campaign to extract protected reasoning from its AI models to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi. The company stated that operators did not break encryption or compromise databases, but used thousands of requests to reproduce hidden information.

The incident involved attempts to distill capabilities through unauthorized means. Despite the sophistication of the campaign, core security infrastructure remained intact, preventing any breach of sensitive data repositories or cryptographic safeguards.

Campaign timeline and scale

The campaign began July 1 and intensified on July 24 and 25, when OpenAI recorded 16,000 requests tied to the extraction pattern from more than 4,000 users. OpenAI later identified similar activity across a broader cluster of more than 15,000 users and said it had fully disrupted the activity by July 28.

"It is unclear whether all operators we observed during the relevant time period originated from a single actor," OpenAI said in a security report on Wednesday. "However, we attribute a core cluster of the activity to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi."

Security integrity maintained

OpenAI clarified that the disruption targeted the extraction of model reasoning rather than direct data theft. The company emphasized that its encryption protocols held firm against the attempted intrusion.

• No database compromise occurred during the campaign.
• Stored user conversations remained inaccessible to the operators.
• Encryption mechanisms were not breached.

The company described the activity as "adversarial distillation," a technique in which outputs from one AI system are harvested to help train or improve another model. In one method, operators took encrypted reasoning from one conversation and prompted a model in a separate chat to decode and transcribe the concealed material.

Safety and national security implications

The concern extends beyond the theft of proprietary technology. OpenAI said extracted reasoning could allow another developer to reproduce some of a model's capabilities without maintaining the same safety protections.

"Adversarial distillation poses safety and national security risks," OpenAI said. "Extracted reasoning could be used to train another model without preserving the safeguards applied to the original model's user-facing outputs."

Response and industry context

OpenAI responded by taking action against accounts, strengthening onboarding and infrastructure checks, and expanding monitoring for connected networks. It also closed a replay-style pathway that could allow someone holding another user's encrypted reasoning to recover its contents. The company added controls designed to detect and pause streamed output that could expose protected reasoning.

The disclosure comes as leading AI developers increasingly focus on protecting the technology and training methods behind their models. Anthropic has also faced concerns around attempts to obtain or replicate the capabilities of its Claude models as competition among AI developers intensifies.

OpenAI coordinated with third-party service providers when it detected related activity moving through external platforms and shared its findings with industry peers through the Frontier Model Forum and relevant government information-sharing channels.