The Big Short investor argued Anthropic is outpacing Palantir at a fraction of the time. The stock fell 7% before he pulled the post.
British tech sector followers waking up on Friday are looking at a Palantir Technologies share price that closed down 7.3% on Thursday in New York, shedding close to $23 billion in market value after a single post on X from Michael Burry.
He's the hedge fund manager made famous by the 2008 financial crisis bet depicted in The Big Short.
Burry has since deleted the post, but the damage was done.
What Burry said
The Scion Asset Management founder argued that AI startup Anthropic is effectively eating Palantir's lunch, pointing to Anthropic's growth from $9 billion to $30 billion in annual recurring revenue in a matter of months. Businesses, he said, are pivoting toward easier, cheaper and more intuitive solutions.
His sharpest line: "It took $PLTR 20 years to get to $5 billion."
This is not a new position for Burry. Around September 2025 he disclosed a significant short on Palantir through long-dated put options, and he has been consistently bearish on the company since.
The structural argument
Burry's case rests on how Palantir actually makes its money. The company sends its own staff, known as Forward Deployed Engineers, to live and work inside client offices for months at a time. Its own 10-K filing categorises much of this under professional services, meaning Palantir is in large part charging for human labour rather than selling a scalable software product.
Anthropic, by contrast, offers an API that companies can integrate quickly without embedding a team of consultants. As AI model providers build direct relationships with enterprise customers, Palantir's position as the intermediary becomes harder to defend.
The Pentagon complication
The argument was complicated further by events in early March. Following a dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over AI safety guardrails, the Trump administration banned the startup from federal systems. Palantir, which had built Anthropic's Claude into its Maven Smart System used by the US military, was ordered to remove it and rebuild parts of the platform.
That episode cut both ways. It showed how embedded Anthropic had become inside Palantir's own government contracts, while simultaneously removing it. Palantir now has to demonstrate it can fill that gap.
What the bulls would say
Palantir's defenders argue the two companies occupy different parts of the market. Palantir provides the secure operational infrastructure for defence and health systems; Anthropic provides the reasoning engine. They are not direct competitors in the way Burry implies.
Palantir is also heavily exposed to US government spending, which is not going away. But Burry's point is that government work is low margin, and always was.
The stock was down a further 0.25% in overnight trading after the close. Full context will emerge when Palantir reports earnings. Until then, Burry's deleted post is doing plenty of work.