Key points

  • Steve Eisman says the "Terminator" warnings coming out of the AI labs are nonsense. On CNBC's Squawk Box on September 17th, 2026, the investor made famous by The Big Short said the companies are "trying to manufacture a crisis" so that regulation builds the moats their businesses lack.
  • His test is simple: if the danger is real, "postpone your IPO." OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the week before that OpenAI will not go public in 2026, citing safety work. Anthropic is reported to be preparing a listing at a valuation near $2 trillion.
  • The insiders at the AI chain's public companies are selling, not buying. Form 4 filings reviewed by InsiderBuying.com show no open-market purchase at Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META) or Oracle (ORCL) in the current window.

Eisman, a former senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, was asked about a run of companies reporting that their AI agents had misbehaved. He said there is no evidence that artificial general intelligence has been reached, and that if it ever is, it is many years away.

What he thinks is really going on

"Token maxing is over, the open-weight models are taking big market share," Eisman said. In his reading, the labs "realize that there are no moats around their business whatsoever" and are nervous. A safety crisis, he argued, invites regulation that the largest players can then shape into a duopoly. Pressed on whether the labs might be sincerely worried, he said he does not know their motives.

That dependence is the part Eisman says he watches. Between the two labs, he called OpenAI "the weaker company" and said that is one reason its IPO was pushed back. He has taken some money off his own AI positions and is not adding to them.

The Hugging Face angle

Nvidia agreed on September 3rd, 2026 to buy Hugging Face, the open-source model platform, for $12.9 billion, with closing expected in the first half of 2027. Eisman offered what he called a conspiratorial reading: the deal was partly an insurance policy for the ecosystem, since a platform owned by Nvidia is less likely to sue a lab over a misbehaving agent.

What the market has done

Nvidia closed at $222.27 on September 18th, 2026, up 21% in one year and below its May 14th high of $235.74. The trade has been uneven across the chain. AMD (AMD) is up 250% in one year and Alphabet is up 38% in one year, while Oracle is down 55% and Meta is down 13% over the same year.

What the insiders did

Form 4 filings reviewed by InsiderBuying.com point the same way across the chain. Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress sold 34,918 shares for $7.65 million on September 17th, 2026, the day Eisman spoke, and Jensen Huang gifted 438,000 shares the same day. Meta product chief Christopher Cox sold 20,000 shares for $13.0 million on September 9th. Microsoft's Judson Althoff sold 10,000 shares for $4.88 million on August 5th, Amazon's Andy Jassy sold 7,478 shares for $1.93 million on August 21st, and Oracle's Michael Sicilia sold 10,882 shares for $1.52 million on September 16th.

There is no open-market purchase by an insider at any of the six companies in the window our record covers. Full records are on the Nvidia, Meta and Microsoft pages, and Insider Access members follow insider activity across the AI chain.

Informational only, not investment advice.