More than a dozen of the biggest players in the technology industry in the United States have submitted “risk factor” reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) warning that artificial intelligence (AI) could pose a threat to company finances.
These risk reports are a standard practice and detail the internal concerns regarding the potential drawbacks of investing resources and money into emerging technologies such as AI.
According to a report from Bloomberg, the companies issuing these warnings include Adobe, Dell, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, Palo Alto Networks, Uber, and several others.
The purpose of these warnings, filed as risk reports, is to protect a company from legal liability for foreseeable risks. They are submitted to the SEC to ensure they are available for disclosure to investors.
For example, Microsoft’s report indicates that its development and use of AI could expose it to copyright infringement lawsuits. Adobe expressed concerns that new AI products could threaten the market viability of Photoshop, while Meta warned that its AI tools could potentially be used to spread misinformation.
Despite the warnings from the big names in the technology sector, investment in AI stocks, particularly those of market leaders Nvidia and Microsoft, has reached record highs, resulting in the world’s first three trillion-dollar companies.
In the world of cryptocurrency, there have also been significant developments in 2024. Regulatory clarity provided by the U.S. government has driven many of the year’s positive trends. One notable example is the approval of the world’s first Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund in January.
However, despite this progress, the cryptocurrency community’s overall sentiment on social media suggests that the industry’s expectations for regulatory certainty in the U.S. have not been met.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently criticized the lack of regulation and clarity in the crypto industry in a post on the decentralized social media platform Warpcast. He attributed the emergence and prominence of “useless” coins with “vague” narratives to the lack of transparency from coin developers, leading to a reluctance to label them as securities.
From this perspective, it appears that creators in the crypto world are discouraged from being transparent about the potential risks for investors and users, as well as the viability of their products and services.
By applying the logic that cryptocurrency and blockchain organizations should be treated more like their big tech counterparts, it could result in a reduction of the types of crypto firms that Buterin criticizes as being “useless.”
Tech Giants Such as Microsoft and Google Caution That AI Poses a Potential Threat to Business