Citadel’s Ken Griffin Says Market Is ‘Almost Certainly’ in Middle of AI Bubble

Watching Whether AI Capital Spending Turns Into Real Returns

Anthropic IPO Hinges on Proving AI Is Essential Across Industries

After Once Calling AI ‘Garbage,’ Griffin Strikes a More Positive Tone

Ken Griffin, Citadel’s chief executive officer and one of the hedge fund industry’s biggest names, said in a Bloomberg interview on October 20 that the market is “almost certainly in the middle” of an artificial intelligence bubble.

Speaking at Citadel’s Future of Global Financial Markets conference in New York, Griffin said there is deep concern over whether companies’ huge spending on AI will translate into real profits.

“Not every company in America has the same ability to create value through AI models,” he said. Companies will soon be looking at bills from Anthropic and OpenAI and asking how AI can improve productivity, he added.

Still, Griffin stressed that an AI bubble would not mean technological innovation has failed. Referring to the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, he said the companies that survived it went on to dominate markets decades later. He added that he wished he had kept holding Amazon stock.

On AI agents, Griffin said they could open up new opportunities for small businesses and founders. He said the “bulldozer” of AI agents is filling in the pond of traditional management and work practices that once surrounded existing businesses. For entrepreneurs, he added, that could create an opportunity for a new golden age.

On Anthropic’s initial public offering, Griffin said its success will depend on proving that AI models are essential across every industry. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 20 that Anthropic could spend an additional $750 billion over the next several years to secure more computing resources. Wall Street has recently raised concerns that Big Tech’s AI-related capital spending is excessive.

Griffin’s latest remarks suggest a more positive view of AI’s long-term growth potential than he had expressed in the past. He has long taken a sharply critical stance on the technology. Earlier this year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he described AI as “garbage.” In May, at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he said that thinking about hopes for AI’s achievements was “depressing.”

Lee Mi-a, Hankyung.com reporter mia@hankyung.com