The boom in artificial intelligence risks widening inequality, with only a handful of companies and investors likely to reap its financial rewards, the BlackRock chief executive, Larry Fink, has said.
The boss of the $14tn (£10.4tn) asset manager used his annual letter to investors on Monday to highlight potential hazards around the exponential growth in AI, which has attracted rapid investment and become, he said, “central to strategic competition” between global powers such as the US and China.
“The massive wealth created over the past several generations flowed mostly to people who already owned financial assets,” Fink said. “And now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale.”
He warned that the AI boom risked accelerating a trend where leading companies pulled ahead while others struggled to keep pace.
AI-focused tech stocks have made significant gains in recent years – the market leader, the chipmaker Nvidia, is now valued at $4.3ttn.
Fink said companies with the data, infrastructure and funding to deploy AI on a large scale “are positioned to benefit disproportionately”. That could end up exacerbating a gulf between the rich and the poor, he said.
“History suggests that transformative technologies create enormous value – and much of that value accrues to the companies that build and deploy them, and to the investors who own them,” Fink said.
“That is not unusual, and none of this is inherently problematic,” he added, noting that the winds had often shifted with technological change.
However, “the broader question is who participates in the gains,” Fink warned. “When market capitalisation rises but ownership remains narrow, prosperity can feel increasingly distant to those on the outside.”
Fink’s comments come weeks before BlackRock is expected to disclose his pay for 2025. He was given $30.8m a year earlier, prompting concern among some shareholders, with only 67% approving the eye-watering package last spring.
“One thing is clear,” Fink added in his letter. “AI will create significant economic value. Ensuring that participation in that growth expands alongside it is both the challenge and the opportunity.”
However, there are also growing concerns of an AI investment bubble, with some experts warning that the industry’s rapid growth mirrored the conditions that led to the dotcom crash.
The Bank of England in October warned there were growing risks of a “sudden correction” in global markets linked to soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies.
There has been increased scrutiny of various multibillion-dollar deals, including circular investments between leading AI companies. That has included cases where Nvidia has invested in a company that later bought Nvidia chips, sparking some fears that the AI industry is on riskier footing than its backers are willing to admit.
Fink stopped short of offering a direct solution to AI’s impact on inequality but urged more people to start investing in stocks rather than focusing on home ownership to build wealth.
The BlackRock boss said rising housing costs and stricter lending rules had made it tougher to own a home, while taxes, insurance and maintenance resulted in lower returns for those who managed to get on the housing ladder.
“It’s hard not to empathise with people dealing with this,” Fink said. “If you no longer believe your job is a path to success, believe that you can’t afford a home, or believe that even if you can, it won’t build a lot of wealth, then the economy doesn’t feel like it’s working for you. No country can prosper if that’s how its citizens feel.”
Instead, the boss of the asset manager – which charges a fee to help people invest – said people should be turning to financial markets to grow their wealth
“If prosperity is increasingly being created in the capital markets, part of the answer is to make sure more people are invested in them,” he said.
“That doesn’t diminish the real challenges around housing affordability or the fact that earnings for many households have not kept pace with asset values,” Fink added. “It simply means a critical part of the solution is bringing more people into the capital markets – so they can share in the growth already taking place, not just watch it from the sidelines.”
