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SE Steve Eisman Steve Eisman Investor known for betting against the subprime mortgage market before the 2008 financial crisis, a story told in Michael Lewis's book The Big Short.

“AI won't cause extinction, but these two CEOs are creating massive damage.”

The Real Eisman Playbook · September 2026

“AI won't cause extinction, but these two CEOs are creating massive damage.” — Steve Eisman, The Real Eisman Playbook

This is Eisman's verdict on the slowdown push, arriving at the end of a long argument that Amodei and Altman cannot afford to slow down and do not intend to. It lands right after he distinguishes lying to investors, which he calls old-school Wall Street fraud, from lying to politicians. The damage he has in mind is concrete: data-center regulation becoming a local election issue and the public coming to fear the product.

The Real Eisman Playbook · 2026-09-18 Listen to the episode → More from Steve Eisman →

Transcript

The Real Eisman Playbook Around 19:43 into the episode
Steve Eisman

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Speaker 3

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Steve Eisman

…they are fomenting hysteria, thereby inviting the federal government to regulate the industry. I think they believe that via that regulation, they can create moats that will foster an AI duopoly. That's what's really going on. It's ugly. Lying has unintended consequences. It's one thing to lie to investors. That's old school Wall Street fraud. Lying to politicians can disrupt the entire economy. AI won't cause extinction, but these two CEOs are creating massive damage. At this point, this gambit looks like it's a complete failure. President Trump stated this week that he has no interest in regulating AI. So I bet the entire doomsday slowdown narrative is going to disappear very quickly. However, the damage is done. Data center regulation is the centerpiece of many local elections. And now people actually fear and believe that the product being created in the…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from The Real Eisman Playbook

“Sam's roadmap has got to be, number one, have no regulation. … His top choice is no regulation. His second choice is very weak regulation that doesn't impair him. And his third choice is regulation that cuts the ladder so no one else can compete with him.” — Gary Marcus, The Real Eisman Playbook “Serious governments like the U.S. government tend not to intervene in their own debt market. That's the sort of thing you find more often in struggling emerging markets.” — Krishna Guha, The Real Eisman Playbook