Evidence is mounting that artificial intelligence is helping the richest people and cities pull further ahead.

Sam Altman, the chief executive who unleashed ChatGPT on the world, has called artificial intelligence an “equalizing force” that will “collectively lift us all up.”

But evidence is piling up that the AI boom may instead be widening the gap between America’s economic aristocracy and everyone else.

Data shows that the people making the most use of AI are concentrated in richer urban areas, while disadvantaged regions have lagged behind. Affluent Americans are on a spending spree thanks to investment portfolios fattened by an AI-addicted stock market. And some economic experts are warning that AI could widen the income gap between American workers and business owners that has caused anxiety for a decade.

The developments are sparking concerns from top economists, hedge fund titans and left-wing politicians that AI may be building a powder keg of inequality with potentially disruptive political consequences.

“When wealth concentrates and disaffection spreads, booms end badly,” top executives from Bridgewater Associates, a prominent hedge fund, wrote last week. They called for the government to tax use of AI and redistribute AI wealth to everyone.

Behind the concern is an ominous history: Some influential economists assess that while recent technology revolutions created more jobs than they destroyed, they also widened inequality by walloping middle-class workers and enriching corporations and higher-income professionals. What happens if another inequality-sparking technology collides with already historically large U.S. income gaps and an economically pessimistic American public?

“AI may create many more billionaires and also reduce the real incomes of many households (as automation did for blue-collar workers),” Daron Acemoglu, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics for studying prosperity gaps between countries, said in an email. “I am genuinely afraid that it would threaten social peace and the very foundations of democracy.”

Rich growing richer

Inequality long predated AI, and the future is not yet written for the technology or its influence on American prosperity. About half of American adults and roughly 1 in 5 U.S. businesses use AI technologies, but AI hasn’t yet shaken society or raised unemployment.

But people are pointing to early signs of AI-related divides between haves and have-nots — perhaps most notably in who is and isn’t using the technology.

Workers and businesses in economically advantaged parts of the United States are harnessing AI the most, according to research from sources such as the AI start-up Anthropic, the Brookings Institution and Oxford Economics. Those places include the San Francisco Bay Area and the cities and regions surrounding New York, Washington and Seattle. Use of AI on a per-person basis is lowest in states including Mississippi, West Virginia and North Dakota, Anthropic data shows.

While it’s common for new technologies to be adopted first by higher-income people and regions, Mark Muro at Brookings said that AI could ossify the existing gap between America’s regional economic winners and losers. For decades, he said, “superstar” cities and regions have leaped ahead as they reaped the biggest gains from an increasingly digital U.S. economy.

“We’ve seen this movie over and over,” said Muro, a senior fellow at the Washington think tank. “AI will likely reinforce the existing unevenness of the U.S. economic map.”

Recent data from Anthropic, which publicly releases some information on how people use its Claude chatbot, shows that less-affluent U.S. regions are catching up in AI usage. Muro also said that businesses and communities with higher AI use could lose jobs faster if companies replace workers with technology.

There’s also a clear gap in who’s getting rich from AI mania in the stock market.

A jump in stock prices for AI-related companies accounts for the vast majority of gains in the S…P 500 stock index this year, according to the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Because the top 20 percent of U.S. households by income own nearly 90 percent of the country’s stock market wealth, Federal Reserve data shows, they’re the ones benefiting most.

The psychological boost people are getting from those stock gains — a phenomenon known as the “wealth effect” — is affecting the spending habits of more affluent Americans, said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.

His firm’s data shows that over the past three years, spending growth among the richest 20 percent of U.S. households is about three times the rate of the bottom 80 percent. Essentially, Zandi said, AI wealth is giving affluent Americans the freedom to spend on fun products and activities like new clothes and eating out, while inflation is eroding the purchasing power of everyone else.

Zandi said the entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the spending of richer Americans going gaga on AI-connected stock gains. But he also believes that the spending gap between richer households and the masses — which predated AI — is one reason for Americans’ dissatisfaction with the economy.

“‘Nuts’ would be one word to describe it,” Zandi said. “AI is driving the spending train and the broader economic train.”

Pitchforks on the horizon

Some economists and researchers are also worried that AI could worsen the prosperity gap in the United States known as the “labor versus capital divide.” That’s the split in national income between workers on one side and business owners and people who make money from their assets or investments on the other.

This year, just over half of the country’s total economic output went to worker paychecks and benefits, according to Commerce Department data. It was the smallest slice of national income going to workers in 79 years. Meanwhile, the share of the economic pie is growing for corporations and people who profit from investment gains.

Economists fiercely debate the causes and size of that divide, which opened up long before AI came on the scene, but most of them believe that the gap has been widening for decades, especially since 2020.

Now a growing number of economic researchers believe that AI could make it worse — and even lead to worker uprisings.

Acemoglu and two collaborators recently released a draft research paper describing theoretical scenarios in which AI-related job destruction and inequality trigger revolts if they further reduce workers’ share of national prosperity.

Other economists, including Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, say it’s counterproductive to speculate about the economic consequences of such a new technology.

Strain said AI could help reduce inequality. There are also signs that AI may be helping far more ordinary Americans start their own businesses, thanks to chatbots helping with legwork such as marketing and paperwork.

Two economics PhD students at Harvard University, Guy Lichtinger and Seyed M. Hosseini, recently sketched out the possibilities of AI leading to either a utopian future of shared prosperity or a wildly unequal economy.

In an in-progress research paper, they say that AI could make rich people and companies even richer, including by making top-tier professionals like lawyers more valuable and pushing down prices for services they disproportionately buy, such as financial services. But Lichtinger and Hosseini also write that AI could be a great equalizer, if less-experienced and middle-income workers become more productive and AI reduces prices for things they buy.

Whether that vision of shared prosperity comes to pass largely depends on how lawmakers respond to AI’s effects on the economy, the duo said in an interview. “In the end the government is responsible,” Lichtinger said.