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The central bankers just said 'AI bubble' -- AI Brief June 30
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The BIS just said the quiet part out loud: “bubble.” · Illustration: Artificially Intimidating
Good day, humans. The grown-ups are getting nervous. The Bank for International Settlements — the central bank for central banks, the institution so cautious it makes your accountant look reckless — looked at the AI spending boom and reached for the word “bubble.” Meanwhile a U.S. senator wants your future AI agent to legally work for you instead of the highest bidder, Groq clawed back $650 million after Nvidia gutted it, and A24 took Google’s money. Let’s get into it.
The AI Boom Just Got a Bubble Warning
BIS Annual Economic Report 2026
What happened: The Bank for International Settlements — the Basel-based “central bank for central banks” — used its Annual Economic Report (out June 28) to warn that the AI investment boom carries real systemic risk, flagging a possible “investment bust” if returns disappoint and singling out the opaque “circular financing” deals knitting together chipmakers, cloud providers and AI labs.
Why it matters: When the world’s most conservative financial body says the quiet part out loud, it’s worth a pause. The BIS isn’t predicting a crash tomorrow; it’s saying the plumbing connecting Nvidia, the hyperscalers and the labs is murky enough that a stumble in one corner could ripple into the wider economy.
What everyone’s saying: Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal framed it as the establishment finally pricing in AI downside (a free write-up ran at PYMNTS). Everyone seized on “circular financing” — the merry-go-round where a chipmaker funds a lab that buys its chips and rents them from a cloud it also backs.
My read between the lines: The BIS didn’t say “bubble” because it thinks AI is fake. It said it because the financing looks like a row of giants holding each other up by the collar — impressive until someone lets go. Earlier this week we covered how GLM 5.2 gutted AI pricing; that’s the demand side. This is the supply side quietly asking who actually pays for all this compute.
📖 Further reading: Thanks to Apple, Your Favorite AI Tool Is a Dead Tool Walking — if the BIS is worried about the money, this is the case that the product economics were never going to justify the valuations.
Whatever the BIS makes of AI’s balance sheets, the work on your desk is still real — and still piling up. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, so it actually does the job: pulls the weekly report, builds the dashboard, ships the campaign draft, even writes the code. Not a chatbot you babysit — a coworker who delivers. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →
A Senator Wants Your AI Agent to Actually Work for You
Whose side is your agent really on? · Illustration: Artificially Intimidating
What happened: Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) released a discussion draft on June 29 of the AI AGENT Act, which would impose a “duty of loyalty” on consumer AI agents — legally barring an agent acting on your behalf from quietly favoring the developer, platform or advertiser pa