Citadel Founder Ken Griffin Says AI Investment Bubble Is Nearly Certain, Remains Bullish on Long-Term Innovation

Citadel founder Ken Griffin said an investment bubble has very likely formed in the artificial intelligence industry, while remaining optimistic about the technology’s long-term impact on innovation.

Bloomberg reported on October 21 that Griffin told the Future of Global Markets conference in New York that investors are almost certainly in the middle of an AI bubble. Companies still do not clearly understand how much capital they need to commit to AI or how deeply the technology will reshape the broader economy.

Concern has been growing on Wall Street that the AI industry’s massive capital spending may take longer than expected to turn into actual profits and productivity gains. Griffin said U.S. companies vary widely in their ability to generate tangible value from AI models, and need to show productivity improvements that justify what they are paying OpenAI and Anthropic.

Anthropic’s prospective initial public offering has emerged as a key test of investor enthusiasm for AI. The company is poised to publicly file its IPO paperwork within weeks and plans to use the proceeds for semiconductors, data centers and talent recruitment. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic could spend as much as $750 billion on additional computing infrastructure in the future.

Griffin said Anthropic must prove to investors that its AI models are essential across a range of industries if it is to succeed over the long term. At the same time, he said technological breakthroughs that fundamentally reshape the economy have often been accompanied by investment bubbles, meaning the current froth does not undermine AI’s long-term growth potential.

He said AI is weakening the competitive advantages of incumbent companies and threatening white-collar jobs, while also expanding opportunities for new businesses to emerge. The spread of AI could open a new era of entrepreneurship and company formation in the U.S., he said.

Griffin pointed to the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s as an example, saying companies that survived went on to dominate markets for decades. He added that he wished he had held onto Amazon shares at the time, suggesting that long-term winners could emerge in AI after the bubble is unwound.