Paulo Carvão, a researcher at Harvard, describes an American economy boosted by AI but weakened by the opacity of the financial commitments that support it.
In an op-ed published on August 19, 2026, Paulo Carvão, a senior fellow at Harvard, describes an ambivalent situation: investment in AI infrastructure is really supporting US growth — it is estimated to have contributed 1.1 percentage points to GDP growth in the first half of 2025 — while accumulating financial fragilities comparable to those of the dot-com bubble.
Its most striking figure is the gap between stated capital, about $600 billion, and some $2.4 trillion in undisclosed off-balance sheet commitments. Added to this is an extreme concentration of the market: the seven largest technology stocks alone account for more than a third of the S&P 500's capitalization.
In terms of uses, adoption is very real — 49% of American adults use chatbots, 30% of employees use them several times a week — but monetization still lags behind spending. Anthropic reported $65 billion in annualized revenue in July 2026, a considerable sum that remains disproportionate to the capital committed. Finally, Carvão points to a physical limit that is rarely quantified in financial models: available energy.
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