Palantir $PLTR stock fell as much as 8% on Thursday after “Big Short” investor Michael Burry wrote in a since-deleted X $TWTR post that Anthropic is “eating Palantir‘s lunch” in enterprise AI.
Burry cited data from corporate spend tracker Ramp to argue that Anthropic is capturing “73% of all new enterprise spending.” He also contrasted the two companies’ growth trajectories, saying Anthropic jumped to $30 billion from $9 billion “in months” and that it took Palantir “20 years” to get to $5 billion.
Using Ramp’s March AI Index, Benzinga put overall business AI adoption at an all-time high of 47.6%. Close to a quarter of Ramp’s customer base spent on Anthropic, a dramatic jump from just one in 25 a year ago. When companies make a first direct choice between Anthropic and OpenAI, the data found that Anthropic wins roughly seven out of 10 of those contests.
At the core of Burry’s critique is what he sees as a fundamental flaw in how Palantir earns its revenue. Rather than selling a scalable software product, the company embeds engineers inside client offices — sometimes for months — to keep the company’s systems running. Palantir‘s own annual filing labels this work under professional services, meaning customers are effectively paying for human labor.
Anthropic’s model works differently. Its API can be dropped into existing workflows without any on-site staffing or prolonged implementation.
“PLTR can have government, which is low margin and small,” Burry wrote.
Benzinga reported that Burry has put options on Palantir that expire in 2027 — contracts that, per regulatory disclosures, cover approximately five million shares on the downside. His broader case against the stock frames Palantir as a glorified systems integrator whose AI narrative depends on external foundation models. In his words, the company “has no real AI software of its own.”
A standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon over safety guardrails for autonomous weapons systems prompted the Trump administration to designate the AI lab as a supply-chain risk. The order cascaded to federal contractors — Palantir among them — requiring Claude to be pulled from their technology stacks. Reuters, as cited by Yahoo Finance, reported that Palantir was compelled to excise Claude from Maven Smart Systems, the company’s digital assistant for military commanders, and undertake a rebuild of affected sections of the platform.
Palantir has otherwise posted strong results in recent quarters. The company reported $1.4 billion in fourth-quarter 2025 revenue, up 70% year over year, with U.S. commercial revenue rising 137% to $507 million. It guided for roughly $7.2 billion in full-year 2026 revenue. The stock still trades at about 142 times expected earnings, the third-highest multiple in the S&P 500.
Burry’s short position against Palantir was first disclosed in the third quarter of 2025, when Scion Asset Management filed regulatory disclosures showing put options valued at roughly $912 million against the stock.
