Michael Burry, who famously bet against the 2008 housing bubble, now says the AI boom is about to pop — bad news for stock investors, banks, and anyone with a retirement account.

• Burry has shifted to riskier bets against AI stocks, signaling he thinks the crash comes sooner than he first expected, possibly within months.
• The stock market looks healthy only on the surface: just five big tech names drove almost all of the S&P 500's recent gains.
• AI companies have borrowed heavily to build data centers, and banks have lent them hundreds of billions — so a stumble in AI could hit the banking system.
• Revenue from AI is still mostly a promise, and economists at Capital Economics say the numbers look stretched, like the dot-com era.
• OpenAI leadership has floated the government acting as "insurer of last resort," which looks like planning for a taxpayer bailout before the trouble even starts.

Outlook: One bad earnings quarter from a big AI name could be enough to start a wider market selloff, with the reckoning expected before next summer.