Bridgewater CEO Warns Unregulated AI Could Trigger ‘Societal Breakdown’ – Even As The Firm Profits From It

Artificial intelligence could displace nearly one-fifth of the US labor market, threatening profound societal disruption if left unregulated, according to Bridgewater Associates CEO Nir Bar Dea. Speaking on an upcoming episode of The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations, Bar Dea projected an 18% labor dislocation rate, noting that a technology capable of radically improving the world carries equally severe downside risks.

The stark warning aligns Bar Dea with other prominent financial executives sounding the alarm on rapid technological upheaval. Bridgewater Managing Co-Chief Investment Officer Greg Jensen – an early backer of OpenAI and Anthropic – has likened the current public underestimation of AI to the early, dismissive days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Similarly, billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones recently characterized the looming AI transition as “waiting for a Category 6 hurricane.”

Despite these existential concerns, the $100 billion macroeconomic hedge fund remains deeply committed to integrating machine learning into its core operations. In 2024, Bridgewater raised nearly $2 billion for a dedicated AI-driven fund where technology generates market insights and human analysts manage the risk. Since its launch, the fund has beaten the market while producing distinct investment theses that diverge from the firm’s traditional human traders.

“That just blows your mind thinking what the future holds,” Bar Dea said, though he cautioned that achieving an institutional edge requires more than off-the-shelf software. Profitable integration, he argued, relies heavily on proprietary training and unique data sets to combine human intuition with technological processing.

Bar Dea, a former major in the Israel Defense Forces, has transformed the 51-year-old firm since taking over as sole CEO from founder Ray Dalio in 2023 – paring down in size. Both of its flagship funds are currently closed to new investors.

Bar Dea’s is the third such warning from a hedge-fund heavyweight in three weeks. Jones, whose Skynet-style alarm we covered last year, took to the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 10 to argue AI is becoming a “third superpower” that Trump and Xi must jointly contain. Jensen followed a day later, telling Bloomberg that AI will probably have to kill people before regulators move.

Every one of these warnings comes from a firm that is long the trade. Bridgewater’s machine-learning fund is beating its human traders; Jensen holds early stakes in two of the labs; Tudor’s flagship is not short Nvidia. Which is roughly where this audience landed when the AI labs themselves started asking for regulation earlier this month: the people best positioned to profit from AI are also the ones most insistent that somebody else slow it down.