Citadel's Ken Griffin says AI is 'almost certainly' a bubble, cites in-house gains

Companies are taking a hard look at the bill

Griffin's skepticism came down to cost. He described corporations taking a hard look at their AI bills, including invoices from providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. According to the report, many of those businesses were finding it difficult to point to clear productivity gains from the money they'd spent.

He noted that companies were wrestling with two problems at once (the steep cost of AI and the uncertain timeline for any return on investment). His remarks came after a stretch of market volatility that included a selloff in semiconductor stocks tied to AI infrastructure firms.

Griffin isn't a pure bear, though.

Inside Citadel, a different picture

Over the past year, Griffin has moved from skepticism about AI's near-term impact toward openly acknowledging its capabilities, per Crypto Briefing. He pointed to substantial productivity improvements inside Citadel driven by agentic AI systems. These are tools built to carry out multi-step tasks with less supervision, rather than answering one question at a time.

The biggest number came from Griffin. He said Citadel's internal AI tools had cut the time required for certain high-level finance research from 6-8 weeks to 2-3 hours. Citadel estimates it manages approximately $68 billion in assets, according to the same report.

The case for entrepreneurs

Griffin's optimism didn't stop at his own firm. He suggested AI could open a golden era of entrepreneurship by lowering barriers for new entrants, which he said could increase competition across markets.

Both views came out of the same talk, delivered back to back. On one side, Griffin warned about the investment cycle and corporate buyers who can't yet show a payoff from their spending. On the other, he described the technology itself as a source of productivity at Citadel and an opening for new businesses to compete with established players.