Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Tuesday that the United States may be drifting toward a destabilizing financial bubble fueled by the runaway growth of the artificial intelligence industry — and that Washington should not repeat the mistakes it made in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Speaking during a House hearing on the use of AI chatbots, Ocasio-Cortez said the rapid concentration of market gains around a small set of tech giants — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta among them — has created what she called a “massive economic bubble.” Those firms, she noted, now account for an outsized share of both stock market performance and national economic output, raising the risk that a downturn in the AI sector could ricochet through the broader economy.
“The exposure of this industry and this investment, I fear, has reached broad levels of the American economy,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Depending on the exposure of that bubble, we could see 2008-style threats to economic stability.”

Her comments make her one of the first members of Congress to publicly connect the meteoric rise of AI valuations to the conditions that preceded the subprime mortgage collapse. It also marks a new front in the growing debate over how aggressively the federal government should intervene as companies race to build expansive AI systems that require enormous computing power, vast data centers and billions in capital.
Ocasio-Cortez made clear that if an AI bubble were to burst, she does not believe taxpayers should foot the bill.

“We should not entertain a bailout of these corporations,” she said, arguing that federal resources are already stretched thin for basic social programs. “As healthcare is being denied to everyday Americans, as SNAP and food assistance is being denied to everyday Americans… we cannot be in the business of rescuing corporations that have taken on risky investments.”

Her warning came just weeks after OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, suggested the company might eventually need a federal “backstop” to support its infrastructure ambitions. Though Friar walked back those remarks and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has since said the company is not seeking guarantees, the comments fueled speculation among critics who worry that tech companies are preparing the political ground for public support if AI investment stalls.

Ocasio-Cortez also raised concerns that the drive for profitability is pushing companies to design chatbots in ways that exploit user vulnerability. She pointed to the intimate and often emotional nature of interactions people are having with AI systems — particularly young people and those experiencing mental health crises — and warned that companies may be structuring products to harvest that data.

“People’s deepest fears, secrets, emotional content, relationships can all be mined for this empty promise that we’re getting from these companies to turn a profit,” she said.

Her comments underscored a broader unease about the speed of AI adoption and the uneven distribution of its benefits. Lawmakers in both parties have expressed concern about national security risks, misinformation and the potential loss of jobs. But Ocasio-Cortez’s argument — that the threat may also be economic at a systemic level — adds a new dimension to congressional scrutiny.

For now, the warning is largely cautionary. But with AI giants pouring billions into expansion, and markets rewarding them for it, Ocasio-Cortez suggested the country may not fully understand the consequences of betting so heavily on a technology still in its adolescence.