Warren Buffett calls AI scamming the next big 'growth industry'

While the rest of Wall Street is busy calculating just how much money generative AI can squeeze out of the enterprise, Warren Buffett took the mic to remind everyone about the dark side.

Speaking at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, the legendary investor delivered a blunt warning about the technology's destructive power.

"If I was interested in investing in scamming, it's gonna be the growth industry of all time," Buffett said, pointing out how AI is effectively powering an unprecedented wave of digital deception.

The ultimate growth industry

Buffett's skepticism stands in sharp contrast to the frenzy gripping the markets.

Since the AI boom kicked off in late 2022, Wall Street has rallied behind hardware and platform giants, driving Nvidia shares up 507% and Meta Platforms up 275%.

Yet Buffett highlighted a far grimmer use case: AI's ability to effortlessly create hyper-realistic, misleading media designed to divert money to criminals.

Scammers are already using real-time voice cloning and deepfakes to generate fabricated videos and photos, impersonating friends and family members to steal cash or sensitive credentials.

Buffett didn't pretend to be a technologist. In typical self-deprecating fashion, he called himself "someone who doesn't understand a damn thing about it," while acknowledging its massive potential for both good and extreme harm.

A genie that won't go back in the bottle

Buffett went a step further, comparing AI's emergence to the dawn of the atomic bomb in the 20th century.

He recalled how the development of nuclear weapons let a dangerous genie out of the bottle, one that has caused terrible outcomes and whose sheer power continues to terrify him.

"I don't know any way to get the genie back in the bottle, and AI is somewhat similar," Buffett said.

He noted that the AI genie is already partly out, that somebody will inevitably push it forward, and that society will simply have to deal with whatever future unfolds.

Why it matters

Buffett's remarks cut straight through the tech industry's breathless sales pitches.

For everyday consumers, this isn't an abstract corporate dilemma. AI-enabled impersonation makes baseline trust on the internet fundamentally fragile. When bad actors can clone a child's voice or a boss's face in seconds, the cost of defense falls entirely on ordinary people.

For the AI industry, having one of the world's most revered capital allocators compare your core technology to nuclear weapons is a massive public relations and regulatory headache. It gives regulators and cautious enterprise buyers even more ammunition to demand aggressive safety rails, strict watermarking, and tighter liability laws.

We think Buffett's take is refreshingly grounded. Silicon Valley tends to measure progress solely by benchmark scores and market caps, but illicit industries adopt cheap, capable tools just as quickly as legitimate startups. When the barrier to creating believable fiction drops to zero, fraud becomes the most scalable business model in the room.