Fitch Ratings has gathered a number of the market’s quieter anxieties into a single sentence, warning that a possible AI market correction is now emerging as one of the biggest credit risks facing the global economy.
The judgement comes in the agency’s third-quarter Global Risk Outlook, published this week, and it lands at a moment when the money flowing into artificial intelligence has grown large enough that a stumble would be felt well beyond the technology sector.
The core of the argument is about entanglement rather than any single company’s balance sheet. Equity markets, corporate bond issuance, and even headline economic growth have all leaned heavily on AI over the past year, so a reassessment of long-run returns would not stay contained.
“The scale of AI investment is such that the exposure of the economy and overall capital market to such a correction is significant,” the agency wrote, adding that the way capital markets and economies have become intertwined with AI has “created a vulnerability for credit.”
The worry has been circulating among policymakers for months, and it echoes the BIS warning that an AI bust could hit credit markets as hard as 2008.
