Steve Eisman of "The Big Short" fame thinks the artificial intelligence trade is near a "tipping point," but he's not ready to outright bet against it yet.

"I've gotten much more conservative in my own portfolio. We have shorted against the box a whole bunch of our positions, so that our risk is much, much, much lower. But I'm not, like, net short any," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday.

Eisman's primary concern pertains to the frontier algorithm models, which are exploiting a climate of fear around their technologies, he believes, in order to set up a competitive regulatory moat against more cost-efficient products and to obscure some faltering fundamentals. Bigwigs in the tech industry have issued similar warnings.

Anthropic left its latest revenue figures blank in its initial IPO filing, but Eisman believes they will show a significant deceleration from the prior quarter. Other figures in the report point to capital efficiency issue, he said.

The ratio of revenue-to-equipment-expense was 2.08 in the second quarter and 1.7 in the third, marking a significant change in trajectory, Eisman said, citing an analysis he'd been given.

Yet, Eisman said he was scared to make a definitive bet against the AI trade because of how intertwined it is with the market as a whole, calling it "impossible" for the technology sector to be siloed away from the broader equity market and the rest of the economy.

"So much of the market is on the other side, and it's still reading tea leaves. I think we're getting closer. I think the numbers from Google scared people," he said.

Alphabet's stock tanked after reporting earnings on Wednesday, following a big pullback in its core advertising business as AI queries supplant internet search across its various products.

Google executives said Wednesday they were running experiments to figure out what to do about it.

"It's worth noting the strong growth in AI mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we are seeing in AI mode," Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, said. "Our ad experiments have shown promising results."

Portions of Anthropic's recently filed S-1 struck Eisman as "extremely negative" in light of the fact that it didn't contain many metrics for the upcoming quarter that would give a clearer picture of the company's financial situation.