Eisman said OpenAI and Anthropic account for roughly 70% of AI-related revenue at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle
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Steve Eisman warned this week that the artificial intelligence boom has become dangerously concentrated around two private companies, saying the technology sector’s largest players have effectively staked their futures on OpenAI and Anthropic succeeding.
The investor, best known for his bet against the U.S. housing market before the 2008 financial crisis, put the two startups’ combined share of AI-related revenue at Microsoft $MSFT, Amazon $AMZN, Alphabet $GOOGL’s Google, and Oracle $ORCL at around 70%, with that figure rising to between 25% and 35% of those companies’ cloud revenue, according to CNBC.
“The futures of these massive companies, in a sense, are a bet that OpenAI, Anthropic are going to succeed,” Eisman said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Fast Money.”
Eisman identified Chinese open-source AI models as the most significant threat to that concentration. He said those models are cheaper than their American counterparts and appear to be gaining market share.
“The Achilles heel of this whole story … is if something bad happens to Anthropic and OpenAI … the Chinese open end models, open weight models are much cheaper. And if they start really taking a lot of market share and it sounds like, from what I’m hearing, that they’re starting to, you could have a big price war. And then we have a problem,” he said.
Eisman’s remarks join a broader conversation about whether the vast capital being deployed on AI infrastructure will ultimately translate into adequate financial returns.
Michael Burry, whose bet against the housing bubble was depicted in The Big Short, has adopted a more bearish stance. Burry has questioned whether a significant share of current and future AI demand comes from end customers, arguing instead that much of it is financed through what he has described as circular arrangements.
Burry has backed those views with actual trades, shorting several prominent AI-boom winners — Nvidia $NVDA among them — and revealing additional downside positions across the semiconductor industry more broadly.
Eisman is the host of “The Real Eisman Playbook” podcast and spent time earlier in his career as a senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman.
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