Billionaire Michael Burry: Anthropic Is a Serious Threat to Palantir Stock

Billionaire Michael Burry is a former hedge fund manager best known for betting against the housing market ahead of the financial crisis in 2008. Those events were chronicled in the best-selling novel The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.

Last November, Burry made waves on Wall Street when he disclosed a substantial short position in Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR). CEO Alex Karp responded by blasting Burry in a CNBC interview. "I think what is going on here is market manipulation."

Burry has since closed his hedge fund, but he remains bearish on Palantir. Last week, in a now deleted X post, he said Anthropic was "eating Palantir's lunch." He cited Anthropic's explosive sales growth as proof that its products are the easier, cheaper, and more intuitive solution for integrating AI into business processes.

Here's what investors should know.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Anthropic: The AI start-up behind Claude Cowork

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence (AI) research company found in 2021 by former OpenAI employees who left over safety concerns. Its product ecosystem has four main pillars.

1. Claude is a conversational assistant.

2. Claude Code is an agentic tool for software developers.

3. Claude API is an application development platform.

4. Claude Cowork is an agentic tool for knowledge workers.

In April 2026, Anthropic said its annual revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion, more than tripling from $9 billion at the end of 2025. Revenue growth has accelerated significantly since the company released Claude Cowork in January. Cowork uses plugins to automate tasks across a range of disciplines, from finance and sales to analytics and engineering.

Anthropic closed its most recent funding round with a post-money valuation of $380 billion. That means the company is valued at roughly 13 times its most recent annualized sales figure, which is not unreasonable. Meanwhile, Anthropic expects its sales to increase faster than 100% annually to reach $150 billion by 2029.

Unfortunately, most retail investors have limited options in terms of getting exposure to Anthropic, but two funds are worth consideration. The KraneShares Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF has 3% of its assets in Anthropic, and the Ark Venture Fund has 3.5% of its assets in Anthropic. Alternatively, investors could wait for the Anthropic IPO, which is likely to come later this year.

Palantir Technologies: A leader in enterprise AI tools

Palantir helps customers across the public and private sectors manage and make sense of complex data. Its analytics software products, Gotham and Foundry, integrate information into an ontology, a digital twin that serves as a decision-making framework. The ontology is powered by machine learning models that become increasingly proficient as the system captures more data.

In 2024, Forrester Research ranked Palantir as a leader in artificial intelligence platforms, saying the company had quietly become one of the largest players in the market. In 2025, Forrester recognized Palantir as a leader in AI decisioning platforms, praising the company for its capabilities, overall strategy, and positive customer feedback.

Palantir reported strong fourth-quarter financial results that beat estimates on the top and bottom lines. Revenue increased 70% to $1.4 billion, the tenth consecutive acceleration, and non-GAAP net income soared 79% to $0.25 per diluted share. The company also achieved an unprecedented Rule of 40 score of 127%.

Here's the big picture: Palantir has a strong position in the AI platforms market, but the company is growing much slower than Anthropic. Palantir was founded more than 20 years ago and its annual revenue run rate just hit $5 billion. But Anthropic was founded five years ago and its annual revenue run rate has already surpassed $30 billion.

Also, Palantir builds powerful analytics tools, but its software is very complex because it needs an accurate ontology to function properly. It takes time and resources to create and maintain an ontology. Anthropic offers a much simpler solution. Its plug-and-play AI tools automate work across the enterprise without the need for users to build underlying data infrastructure.

So, should Palantir shareholders be worried? Wedbush analyst Dan Ives doesn't think so. He slammed Michael Burry's social media post as a "fictional narrative" and called Palantir the "epicenter of the AI revolution." But I think the answer lies between the two extremes. Anthropic may not be an existential threat to Palantir, but it has clearly been the bigger AI winner to date.

Trevor Jennewine has positions in Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.