Wednesday, August 20, 2025

What CEOs are saying about the alleged AI bubble

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on what CEOs are saying about the AI bubble.
The big story: Trump will provide Ukraine with air cover but not boots on the ground.
The markets: AI bubble fears fuel tech selloff.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Are we in an AI bubble? And if so, how should CEOs be thinking about that? None other than Sam Altman is opining that investors are “overexcited about AI.” Yet, as my colleague Sharon Goldman points out, Altman also says he expects to invest trillions of dollars in building out data centers in the coming years.

A man who compares his latest product launch to the Death Star isn’t one who shies away from hyperbole. Altman has repeatedly said artificial general intelligence, the period at which an AI model performs as well or better than humans at most tasks, could soon be upon us. Competitor Dario Amodei of Anthropic agrees. For some, that’s a signal to Buy Buy Buy.

Bubbles can take different forms. The dot-com bubble enveloped hundreds of startups that had people bidding for groceries and buying dog food from a sock puppet, few of whom made profits. This time around, the wealth of the many is being funneled to a few. More than a third of the S&P 500’s market cap comes from the “Magnificent Seven”—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. That’s been true for some time and, unlike many dot-com disasters, these companies show real revenue growth. I hear more concerns about their market power, not market price. Meanwhile, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are minting billionaires by the day without raising a penny in the public markets.

But Altman is onto something: Bursting bubbles are historically bad for business. Investors tend to be kind to players that are pumping up their portfolios. Attitudes change when markets crash. Disgruntled shareholders file securities class action suits, claiming they were deceived. Governments are pressured to step in to make sure the carnage never happens again. Heroes become villains and the spotlight shines brighter on issues that didn’t seem as urgent when times were good.

There’s also a nagging feeling growing among leaders I talk to that what’s great for the titans of tech might not be so great for the rest of us. In March, Altman embraced Anthropic’s “Model Context Protocol” as an open-source standard for connecting AI models to external data sources and tools. Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis soon embraced it, too.

Steve Lucas, the CEO of enterprise software company Boomi, told me yesterday that he’s suspicious of MCP, arguing, “there’s nothing that would stop a model from saying, ‘Oh, you have a nice MCP interface. Let me ask you how you work and reverse-engineer many of the functions of the application.’” That could cement their dominance, helping LLMs become the user interface for almost everything.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top news

Yes to planes, no to boots

President Trump is prepared to provide Ukraine with air cover if he can get a ceasefire, but will not commit to U.S. troops on the ground in Eastern Europe.

Musk’s new political party is on hold in favor of Vance

Elon Musk’s “America Party” is on the back burner, the WSJ reports, because Musk wants to focus on his companies and does not want to alienate Vice President JD Vance. Musk sees Vance as the MAGA successor to Trump and is afraid a third party would syphon votes from him.

Trump insults Powell, again

“Could somebody please inform Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell that he is hurting the Housing Industry, very badly? People can’t get a Mortgage because of him. There is no Inflation, and every sign is pointing to a major Rate Cut. ‘Too Late’ is a disaster!” he posted on social media. The Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium begins tomorrow.

The world’s rich are watching the Norway wealth tax debate

Norway has a wealth tax that levies a tax of up to 1.1% annually on all assets over $170,000, even if those assets are the unrealized gains from a paper valuation of a startup or the rise of unsold crypto holdings. Hundreds of Norwegian millionaires—many of them who have no income and live entirely off their assets—have fled the country to avoid the tax, the FT reports.

Bond market is worrying about “fiscal dominance”

The U.S. bond market yield curve steepened recently—meaning that long-term yields are sharply higher than short-term yields—and analysts think it’s because investors are guessing that the Fed might buckle to political demands to keep interest rates low so that the government’s debt commitments get cheaper. Such a move risks an increase in inflation.

Global selloff in tech stocks

Investors were spooked yesterday by a report from MIT that said 95% of corporate AI experiments were failures and because OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI investing may have entered a bubble era. The Nasdaq Composite declined 1.46% yesterday. SoftBank declined 9.2% on Wednesday, TSMC was down 1.69%, and Foxxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) sunk 2.16%.

Morgan Stanley: AI will affect 90% of jobs in some way

According to new Morgan Stanley research, AI will affect 90% of jobs in some way—and cut nearly $1 trillion out of the annual budget of S&P 500 companies. Those savings will mostly come from a drop in payroll expenses and the automation of certain routine tasks.

Home Depot reports earnings

Home Depot CEO Ted Decker noted that consumers are holding off on larger home-improvement projects due to concerns about the economy during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday. Despite that, the company posted solid earnings with $45.28 billion in revenue for the most recent quarter.