Treasury warns AI boom poses systemic financial risk
U.S. Treasury career analysts flagged AI's entrenchment as a systemic risk: a downturn would cascade through equities, private credit, data-center debt and utilities. The ECB and UK regulators moved in parallel—October 31 deadline for European banks to stress-test AI exposure, and four cloud giants (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Oracle) now face systemically-critical firm oversight.
The issue maps the same risk at smaller scales: Meta embedding face recognition in everyday glasses, Big Tech reshaping jobs rhetoric, and the first audits of AI's impact on students, doctors and government operations.