Demand for AI products “is growing faster than any product in human history,” journalist Bethany McLean said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast.

But, McLean cautioned, “There’s still no way to know if it’s there’s going to be enough demand to pay back all the debt as it starts to come due.”

McLean has written books about the accounting scandal at Enron Corp. in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008, both of which inform her view of the extraordinary amount of investment in AI, she said on the podcast, recorded at the 2026 Berkeley Fall Forum on Corporate Governance.

“The risk to me is that is that the more complex a financing structure is, the more room there is for nasty surprises,” McLean said. “You can’t see from the outside into these complex structures to know what the trigger is that is going to cause a problem.”

And, she added, “Because OpenAI and Anthropic are still private, you also can’t see into their finances enough to be able to do the numbers.”

The circular financing of the AI buildout adds to opacity.

“The risk with that sort of thing is always if you pull one piece of it, then a lot of stuff starts to unwind that you don’t see until that one piece gets pulled,” she said.

Listen to the podcast with Bethany McLean below:

More podcasts from The Deal are available on iTunes, Spotify and on TheDeal.com.