Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the engine of global markets, but one of the world’s most powerful financiers is warning that it could also expose capitalism’s deepest fault lines. BlackRock’s billionaire CEO Larry Fink is arguing that unless governments and companies change course, AI risks turning a three-decade build-up of inequality into what he calls capitalism’s next big failure. His message is blunt: the technology is transformative, but the system it plugs into is already unstable.
Fink’s critique lands with particular weight because BlackRock has been one of the loudest champions of AI as a growth driver, even as its own research highlights a more fragile backdrop of softer labor markets and stretched asset prices. I see his intervention less as a sudden change of heart and more as a recognition that the same forces powering record profits could, without guardrails, hollow out the middle of advanced economies.
The inequality time bomb behind the AI boom
Larry Fink has been unusually explicit about the structural problem he thinks AI is about to magnify. He argues that, “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies that wealth has not been shared with the wage-earning majority.” That diagnosis, rooted in the post–Cold War era of deregulation and globalization, frames AI not as a clean break with the past but as an accelerant for a model that already channels gains to asset owners rather than workers, a pattern he has tied directly to the last generation of policy choices in advanced economies.
When Fink warns that AI could be capitalism’s “next big failure,” he is not talking about a speculative tech crash, he is talking about a social contract that no longer works for most people. He has described a trajectory in which the technology “is going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits,” making “a few people much richer and most people poorer,” a stark summary of how he expects the gains from automation to be distributed if nothing changes. That view, delivered as AI adoption races ahead, amounts to a warning that the system’s next failure will be political as much as financial.
Davos stage, Davos audience: a warning to the winners
Fink chose the World Economic Forum in Davos as the stage for this critique, a venue that gathers the very executives and policymakers who have benefited most from the model he is questioning. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he framed AI as the ultimate test of whether capitalism can spread prosperity beyond its traditional winners, telling that audience that the current trajectory of profits without broad-based wage gains is unsustainable. In his own words, “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall” the system has delivered extraordinary aggregate wealth, but he argued that elites now need to confront directly how little of that has reached the wage-earning majority, a point he pressed in Davos.
His comments also carried a more personal rebuke to the global establishment. In a separate appearance, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said global elites have lost the public’s trust, a striking admission from the head of the world’s largest asset manager that the legitimacy of the current order is eroding. He linked that erosion to a pattern in which, when markets wobble or governments panic, “they call BlackRock,” a line that underscored how concentrated financial power has become and how that concentration can weaken long-term economic stability, as he put it in a warning about trust.
AI as both growth engine and social risk
What makes Fink’s warning more than rhetoric is that BlackRock’s own investment outlook is built on AI as a defining force for markets. In its 2026 strategy, the firm argues that artificial intelligence remains the central driver of its macro view, with AI-related investments influencing not just individual companies but entire sectors and national strategies, a trend it expects to intensify through the end of the decade. At the same time, that outlook stresses that the macro backdrop is “constructive but not without challenges,” pointing to softer labor markets and elevated asset valuations as reasons investors need to be more selective, a tension laid out in BlackRock’s 2026 outlook.
Fink has been equally clear that he does not see an AI “bubble” in the classic sense. In a recent interview, he dismissed concerns that the sector is wildly overvalued, arguing instead that AI represents transformative growth potential for the global economy. He pointed to BlackRock’s scale, with approximately $11.5 trillion in assets under management, as a vantage point from which to judge that the technology is still in the early stages of reshaping productivity and profits, a case he made while dismissing bubble concerns. The paradox is that the same forces he celebrates for investors are the ones he fears will deepen inequality if left to run on autopilot.
White-collar jobs, public anger and the politics of AI
One reason Fink’s warning has cut through is that he is focusing on white-collar workers who long assumed they were insulated from automation. He has urged companies to address AI’s impact on white-collar jobs and wealth inequality head-on, arguing that the technology will not just replace factory roles but also reshape professional services, finance and even management. At Davos he framed this as a test of corporate responsibility, telling CEOs that if they use AI primarily to cut headcount and boost margins, they will be repeating the pattern that has defined much of the last generation, a critique he sharpened in his Davos remarks.
Public sentiment is already shifting in ways that could make that pattern politically explosive. Research highlighted by Follow Polly Thompson shows that a poll of workers and citizens points to deep skepticism that capitalism, as currently practiced, is spreading the wealth, and similar doubts that AI will do any better. That polling, cited in coverage of Larry Fink’s critique, suggests that Every new wave of technology is now filtered through a lens of mistrust, with respondents telling Polly they are not convinced that the gains will reach them even if they Enter new training programs or Sign up for reskilling schemes, a mood captured in the poll findings.
Debt, distrust and what Fink wants to change
Fink’s AI warning is also intertwined with his anxiety about macro risks that could collide with technological disruption. He has flagged America’s national debt, now topping $37 trillion, as a threat to the U.S. dollar’s status and to global financial stability, arguing that such a burden leaves less room for governments to cushion workers if AI-driven unemployment spikes. In a widely shared clip, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is heard sounding the alarm about that $37 trillion figure while noting that when America or other governments panic, they call BlackRock, a reminder of how central his firm has become to crisis management and how exposed it would be if public trust continues to erode, as he warned in his debt comments.
At the same time, BlackRock is trying to position itself as a guide through the AI transition rather than just a beneficiary. The firm’s investment institute has stressed that AI will fuel growth but that investors need to be more selective across regions and sectors, highlighting both opportunities and vulnerabilities in its latest global outlook. Internally, figures like Ibrahim Kanan, BlackRock’s Head of Core US Equity, have argued that AI investment will evolve in 2026, with investors cooling on some big tech names and backing areas like energy infrastructure that support the compute boom, a shift he outlined in a discussion of Why AI Investment will Evolve that credited Ibrahim Kanan.
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