Artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly that even governments would struggle to stop its spread, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said.
Speaking at The Economic Club of Chicago on Wednesday, Dimon compared AI to the Industrial Revolution but said it was advancing far faster than earlier technologies, with new capabilities emerging in a matter of weeks.
“This is doing stuff today that no one would have imagined was possible literally five weeks ago,” Dimon said.
“It’s more like a tsunami. It’s rolling through the system, and you can’t stop some of it,” he added.
With AI models proliferating worldwide, including open-source systems and those developed in China and other countries, governments cannot simply halt the technology’s spread, Dimon said.
The acceleration comes amid an unprecedented AI spending boom. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta planned to spend more than $700 billion on capital expenditures this year, much of it on AI infrastructure.
Dimon, too, was optimistic about the potential payoff. He said AI could drive breakthroughs in medicine, transportation, and productivity, transforming how future generations live and work.
“Thirty years from now, they’ll probably be working four or three and a half days a week. They’ll have an income of per person of $300,000. It’ll be a great life,” he said.
However, Dimon also warned that AI agents could carry out cyberattacks around the clock or pose security risks when given access to bank accounts to make payments on users’ behalf.
“That means they are in your bank and you’re assuming they’re going to act properly on your behalf and they may not,” Dimon said.
He said businesses and governments needed to move quickly to address the cybersecurity risks posed by AI.
“You can’t stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.”
Dimon’s statement comes the same week that multiple bankers sounded warnings about rogue AI agents and their capacity to unleash chaos if allowed to proliferate unchecked.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan also told analysts in a Wednesday earnings call that the institution had hired 1,000 external consultants to shore up software vulnerabilities that top tier models like Anthropic’s Mythos exposed.
