Palantir Technologies shares fell roughly 7% this week after Michael Burry posted on X that Anthropic is effectively “eating Palantir’s lunch.” Burry later deleted the post, but not before the remark helped knock one of Wall Street’s most closely watched AI stocks lower.
Burry pointed to Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue rising from $9 billion to $30 billion in just months and said businesses are moving toward tools that are easier, cheaper and more intuitive. He has been consistently bearish on Palantir and disclosed a significant short position through long-dated put options on the stock around September 2025.
The argument lands because it goes straight at Palantir’s business model. Burry said the company can have government, “which is low margin and small,” and argued that it took Palantir 20 years to get to $5 billion. He said the company looks more like a low-margin consulting business than a high-growth tech firm, in part because Forward Deployed Engineers live and work inside customer offices for months at a time. Palantir’s 10-K filing classifies those deployments under professional services.
Palantir has built its reputation on secure operational work for organizations such as the Department of Defense and major health systems, while Anthropic offers a plug-and-play API and the reasoning engine that powers enterprise workflows. The contrast has become sharper this year. Following a dispute over safety guardrails between Anthropic and the Pentagon, the Trump administration issued an immediate ban on the AI lab in early March, and reported that Palantir was ordered to remove Anthropic’s Claude AI from its Maven Smart Systems and rebuild parts of the platform.
That history makes Burry’s bet more than a one-day market jab. He is arguing that the AI winners are shifting toward the companies selling software that can be dropped in quickly, not customized over months inside a client’s office. Palantir still has a powerful position in government work, and some analysts say the stock’s run reflects real demand. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives kept an Outperform rating and a $230 price target, saying the company remains on a “golden path” with “unprecedented traction.” Morgan analyst Sanjit Singh called Palantir a “clear winner through the first stage of the AI cycle” and said it has posted 10 consecutive quarters of accelerating growth, though he also warned it was trading at roughly 38 times 2027 sales.
That is the real fight now. Burry is betting that Palantir’s future is being priced like software while its business still carries the economics of services. Bulls say the company is still early in a long AI cycle. The market’s 7% drop after one deleted post shows investors are not done deciding which side is right.
