5 reasons Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks says AI is no longer a ‘Bubble’ but a ‘Substitute’

Three months ago, Howard Marks, co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, wrote a memo asking whether artificial intelligence was a financial bubble. He has come back with a follow-up, and the answer is no longer tentative. In a memo titled ‘AI Hurtles Ahead,’ released February 26, 2026, Marks and Oaktree lay out a striking case: AI has crossed from productivity tool to autonomous agent, and the world has not yet caught up with what that means.

The memo, written partly in collaboration with Anthropic’s AI model Claude, covers AI’s technical foundations, recent capability jumps, what it means for investing, and why the social consequences could be more destabilising than anything technology has done before.