Remember Michael Burry? The guy who shorted the housing market and became a movie star? Well, he’s back with a hot take that’s going to ruffle some feathers on Wall Street.
His latest thesis: Anthropic is eating Palantir’s lunch. And honestly? The data backs him up.
Here’s the setup. Palantir has been the darling of the AI crowd for years—government contracts, fancy data analytics, the whole nine yards. But Burry just dropped a truth bomb on X: Anthropic’s valuation jumped from $9 billion to $30 billion in a matter of months. Palantir? It took them 20 years to hit $5 billion. Let that sink in.
The reason is almost embarrassingly simple: Anthropic built something businesses actually want to use. Their Claude AI is the “plug and play” solution that lets companies integrate AI into their operations without needing a PhD in machine learning. It’s intuitive. It’s cheap. It works. Revolutionary concept, right?
The numbers tell the story. According to Ramp’s March 2026 analysis, nearly one in four businesses on their platform now pays for Anthropic. A year ago? It was one in 25. That’s not growth—that’s a stampede. Meanwhile, OpenAI saw its largest single-month decline since they started tracking this stuff. Anthropic is now capturing 73% of all new enterprise AI spending. Seventy. Three. Percent.
Burry’s not wrong about the government contracts thing—Palantir’s got those locked down tight. But here’s the kicker: he doesn’t think that matters anymore. The real money is in the private sector, where businesses are voting with their wallets, and they’re voting for Claude.
Think about it from a business perspective. You’re a mid-sized company that needs AI. Do you want to hire a team of specialists to implement some complex government-grade data platform? Or do you want to plug in Claude and get to work? The answer is obvious, and it’s why Anthropic is winning.
This isn’t just Burry being contrarian either. He’s actually short Palantir, so he’s got skin in the game. And he’s not alone—short-seller Andrew Left has also bet against Palantir and is bullish on Databricks, another private AI company that’s following a similar playbook to Anthropic.
The broader lesson here? In the AI arms race, simplicity and accessibility are winning over complexity and government connections. Anthropic figured out what businesses actually need, built it, and now they’re taking market share at an insane pace. Palantir’s got a moat, sure, but it’s looking more like a ditch these days.
Whether you’re an investor or just someone watching the AI drama unfold, this is the real story: the market is shifting, and it’s shifting fast. Anthropic’s got the momentum, and Palantir’s got the problem.
