OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the artificial intelligence market is in a bubble, according to a report from The Verge published Friday. 

“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told a small group of reporters last week.

“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes,” he was quoted as saying. 

Altman appeared to compare this dynamic to the infamous dot-com bubble, a stock market crash centered on internet-based companies that led to massive investor enthusiasm during the late 1990s. Between March 2000 and October 2002, the Nasdaq lost nearly 80% of its value after many of these companies failed to generate revenue or profits. 

His comments add to growing concern among experts and analysts that investment in AI is moving too fast. Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio and Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok have all raised similar warnings.

Last month, Slok stated in a report that he believed the AI bubble of today was, in fact, bigger than the internet bubble, with the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 more overvalued than they were in the 1990s. 

In an email to CNBC on Monday, Ray Wang, CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research, told CNBC that he thought Altman’s comments carry some validity, but that the risks are company-dependent. 

“From the perspective of broader investment in AI and semiconductors… I don’t see it as a bubble. The fundamentals across the supply chain remain strong, and the long-term trajectory of the AI trend supports continued investment,” he said. 

However, he added that there is an increasing amount of speculative capital chasing companies with weaker fundamentals and only perceived potential, which could create pockets of overvaluation. 

Many Fears of an AI bubble had hit a fever pitch at the start of this year when Chinese start-up DeepSeek released a competitive reasoning model. The company claimed one version of its advanced large language models had been trained for under $6 million, a fraction of the billions being spent by U.S. AI market leaders like OpenAI, though these claims were also been met with some skepticism.

Earlier this month, Altman told CNBC that OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue is on track to pass $20 billion this year, but that despite that, it remains unprofitable. 

The release of OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 AI model earlier this month had also been rocky, with some critics complaining that it had a less intuitive feel. This resulted in the company restoring access to legacy GPT-4 models for paying customers.

Following the release of the model, Altman has also signaled more caution about some of the AI industry’s more bullish predictions.

Speaking to CNBC, he said that he thought the term artificial general intelligence, or “AGI,” is losing relevance, when asked whether the GPT-5 model moves the world any closer to achieving AGI. 

AGI refers to the concept of a form of artificial intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that a human can — something that OpenAI has been working towards for years and that Altman previously said could be achieved in the “reasonably close-ish future.“

Regardless, faith in OpenAI from investors has remained strong this year. CNBC confirmed Friday that the company was preparing to sell around $6 billion in stock as part of a secondary sale that would value it at roughly $500 billion. 

In March, it had announced a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation, by far the largest amount ever raised by a private tech company. 

In The Verge article on Friday, the OpenAI CEO also discussed OpenAI’s expansion into consumer hardware, brain-computer interfaces and social media. 

Altman also said that he expects OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on its data center buildout in the “not very distant future,”  and signaled that the company would be interested in buying Chrome if the U.S. government were to force Google to sell it. 

Asked if he would be CEO of OpenAI in a few years, he was quoted as saying, “I mean, maybe an AI is in three years. That’s a long time.”

Six Senate Democrats on Friday released an open letter asking President Donald Trump to reconsider his decision to allow tech giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to sell AI semiconductor chips to China in exchange for 15% of revenue from the sales.

The letter — signed by Senators Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Mark Warner, D-Va.; Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Christopher Coons, D-Del.; and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — was in response to an Aug. 11 announcement by Trump that Nvidia and AMD would pay the U.S. government a 15% cut of revenue from chip sales to China in exchange for export licenses.

“Our national security and military readiness relies upon American innovators inventing and producing the best technology in the world, and in maintaining that qualitative advantage in sensitive domains. The United States has historically been successful in maintaining and building that advantage because of, in part, our ability to deny adversaries access to those technologies,” the letter states.

“The willingness displayed in this arrangement to ‘negotiate’ away America’s competitive edge that is key to our national security in exchange for what is, in effect, a commission on a sale of AI-enabling technology to our main global competitor, is cause for serious alarm,” the letter continues.

Senators also warned that selling advanced AI chips — specifically Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips — to China could help strengthen its military systems, a claim that Nvidia denies.

In a statement to CNBC, a Nvidia spokesperson said: “The H20 would not enhance anyone’s military capabilities, but would have helped America attract the support of developers worldwide and win the AI race. Banning the H20 cost American taxpayers billions of dollars, without any benefit.”

The letter from Senate Democrats also requests a detailed response from the administration by Friday, Aug. 22, regarding the current deal involving Nvidia and AMD, as well as any similar arrangements being made with other companies.

“We again urge your administration to quickly reverse course and abandon this reckless plan to trade away U.S. technology leadership,” the letter states.

A request for comment from the White House and AMD was not immediately returned.

Despite Trump allowing chip sales to resume, it has already become clear that China isn’t welcoming Nvidia back with open arms, instead urging tech companies to avoid buying U.S. companies’ chips, according to a Bloomberg report.

“We’re hearing that this is a hard mandate, and that [authorities are actually] stopping additional orders of H20s for some companies,” Qingyuan Lin, a senior analyst covering China semiconductors at Bernstein, told CNBC.

In a separate report, The Information said regulators in China have ordered major tech companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, to suspend Nvidia chip purchases until a national security review is complete.

— CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report

Do not go public. Do not acquire or be acquired. Software must work.

These are the first three of the 10 commandments splashed across bathrooms and breakrooms at Epic Systems’ sprawling 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin, just southwest of Madison. 

It’s not the wackiest part of working at the health-care software giant. Once a month, most of the company’s 14,000 employees pack into an underground auditorium called Deep Space for a mandatory staff meeting, which some jokingly refer to as “work church.” Executives go over company news and objectives. They also lead a grammar lesson, such as whether it’s OK to end sentences with a preposition and when to use “who” or “whom.”

Epic’s CEO is 82-year-old Judy Faulkner, who started the company in a Wisconsin basement in 1979 and has helmed the enterprise ever since. En route to building a business with $5.7 billion in annual revenue, Faulkner has kept significant distance from her tech peers, both physically and otherwise. Epic is about 2,000 miles east of both Seattle and Silicon Valley, and the company has never taken money from venture capitalists.

“I’ve described her as a female cross between Bill Gates and Willy Wonka,” Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial Health, said in an interview. The hospital system is an Epic customer, Dickson said, adding that he’s known Faulkner for around 20 years.

While Wonka is, of course, a fictional character, Gates for many years was the world’s wealthiest person, thanks to his enormous stake in Microsoft, before donating his way to 14th on the Forbes billionaires list. At the top of the leaderboard is Tesla’s Elon Musk, followed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Faulkner ranks 430th, with an estimated net worth of $7.8 billion, based on what Forbes says is her 43% ownership of Epic. The publication lists Epic as among the five largest private U.S. tech software and services companies by revenue. 

Epic is best known for its dominance in electronic health record, or EHR, software. An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. About 42% of acute care hospitals in the U.S. use Epic, putting it way ahead of Oracle Health, which is in second place at 23%, according to an April report from Klas Research. Oracle acquired its way into the market with the $28 billion purchase of Cerner, a deal that closed in 2022. 

Epic says its technology is used in 3,300 hospitals and 71,000 clinics and by 325 million patients worldwide. Starting Monday, thousands of health-care executives will descend on Epic’s corporate headquarters for the company’s Users Group Meeting, one of its largest annual on-campus events.

As ubiquitous as Epic’s technology is across much of the health-care sector, doctors, hospital administrators, startups and patients have their share of complaints about the software’s user experience and its interoperability, or ability to work with other tools.

“With half a million or so clinicians using Epic, there will be some who find it easy and some who find it difficult,” an Epic spokesperson said in a statement.

Some folks might question Epic’s commitment to its third commandment, but there’s no doubting the company’s allegiance to the first one.

From Epic’s early days, Faulkner has been averse to the idea of running a public company and what she’s called the “tyranny of the quarter.” She said she came to that view after researching public companies and reading shareholder comments. 

“They were vitriolic, in many cases, because the only thing they were looking at was return on their investment,” Faulkner told CNBC. “Sometimes, there’s a lot more than that.”

Without the benefit of public stock, Faulkner’s wealth doesn’t multiply at the same rate as that of her fellow tech founders and CEOs. She’s fine with that. 

Faulkner, who rarely grants interviews, agreed to sit down for a half-hour chat with CNBC at Epic’s headquarters, where office buildings are themed, with many inspired by fiction, including “The Wizard of Oz,” “Alice in Wonderland” and the Harry Potter stories.

The interview took place in the Andromeda building in a conference room called The Cottage, which is connected to her office. Two of the walls are plastered with quotes such as “The geek shall inherit the Earth” and “All lasting business is built on friendship.” Faulkner’s dog Tundra, a fluffy Samoyed, also made an appearance.

After running Epic for the past 46 years, Faulkner has amassed her fair share of admirers and critics, with some in the latter camp even taking Epic to court.

But Faulkner continues to flout conventional business practices and has built Epic, despite its flaws and complexities, into the most powerful technology company in U.S. health care. 

Reflecting on her approach to leadership and decision-making, Faulkner said, “Just have the guts to do what you know is the right thing to do.” 

CNBC spoke with two dozen Epic customers, former Epic employees, industry experts and people close to Faulkner for this article, some of whom asked not to be named in order to speak freely. Details about Faulkner’s personal, educational and professional history were obtained from Faulkner directly, her Epic website testimonials, Epic, obituaries, news reports and publicly available records.

Faulkner and her two siblings grew up in Erlton, New Jersey, now a part of Cherry Hill. Her father, Louis Greenfield, was an independent pharmacist who ran his own store, complete with a soda fountain. Her mother, Del Greenfield, was a peace activist who was involved with the South Jersey Peace Center and the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared in the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in preventing nuclear war. 

“Sometimes when I do something that’s tough, I think of my mother, who went to jail in her 80s for protesting at a nuclear arms site, and I think, ‘I’m my mother’s daughter,'” Faulkner said. 

Faulkner’s parents, who both died in 2007, are honored at Epic’s campus. Employees can get ice cream at Lou’s Soda Fountain, while Del’s Nobel Prize certificate hangs in the hallway across from The Cottage.

Faulkner discovered a love of math as a seventh grader, when her teacher would leave puzzles on the blackboard each day, she said in one of her testimonials, the short stories and anecdotes she shares once a month on Epic’s website. She earned her undergraduate degree in math from Dickinson College in 1965.

After learning how to program during a summer job, Faulkner then enrolled in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s nascent computer science program and was in graduate school there until 1970.

At UW–Madison, Faulkner took a course about computing in medicine that was taught by a pioneering physician, Dr. Warner Slack, one of the first people to recognize the promise of the technology within health care.

Faulkner began working with Slack and his team, and she was tasked with developing a system that could keep track of patient information over time. She eventually built what would become the kernel for Epic, though it took years of urging from potential users before she would actually launch the company in 1979. In the interim, she taught college-level computer science.

When Faulkner finally opened Epic for business, she did so with a small amount of cash from some colleagues at an initial valuation of $70,000. Now the company is worth many billions of dollars, though estimates of its valuation differ.

Some of the original shareholders eventually sold their stock back to the company.

“They got very good returns,” Faulkner wrote in a testimonial.

“It was a five-minute meeting — perhaps the shortest in history,” Immelt said, according to a report from Healthcare IT News. The report said he’d also considered buying Cerner.

Faulkner confirmed the encounter with CNBC.

“Others have asked to come and persuade us, and I’ve heard our staff say to them, ‘Just leave your car running,'” she said.

Faulkner has said in testimonials that she’s avoided buyers in order to remain independent and preserve Epic’s unique culture, and she doesn’t make acquisitions, calling them a distraction.

But no matter how much she loves her company and her job, at some point, somebody else is going to have to run Epic.

Faulkner has remained mum about who will be her eventual successor, other than to say that the person will have to be a software developer and a longtime Epic employee.

The obvious choice, according to 10 former Epic employees who spoke with CNBC, is Sumit Rana, who was named president of the company last August. The 49-year-old joined Epic right out of college in 1998 and helped build the company’s patient portal called MyChart. 

Rana, who was a toddler when Faulkner founded Epic, has been participating in more high-profile speaking engagements of late, including representing the company during the opening panel at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Quality Conference in July.

Faulkner declined to say whether Rana is the top contender for the job. 

“That’s the company’s business,” she said. “Sumit is a wonderful employee, and he would make a good CEO, but we’re not publicly announcing anything.”

While Faulkner doesn’t say much about the company’s succession plans, she hasn’t been shy about her plans for her personal wealth.

In 2015, she signed The Giving Pledge and agreed to donate 99% of her assets to charity, a decision that was inspired in part by a dinner she had with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett that year.

Buffett created The Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Gates’ then wife, Melinda French Gates, in 2010, encouraging the world’s richest people to give away the majority of their wealth. 

Following Faulkner’s pledge, she launched a family foundation called Roots & Wings with her husband in 2020. Roots & Wings provides grants to nonprofits that support low-income children and families. Faulkner’s daughter, Shana Dall’Osto, serves as executive director of the organization. 

Faulkner has been selling her nonvoting shares back to the company, giving the proceeds directly to Roots & Wings. 

“I’ve never cashed a single share for myself,” Faulkner told CNBC.

Pete Durlach, corporate vice president for health and life sciences at Microsoft, said he’s been in meetings with Epic staffers who have gotten these impromptu calls. Microsoft and Epic have been close partners for around two decades, a relationship that’s gotten tighter as cloud and artificial intelligence technologies have advanced, he said. 

“People definitely answer the phone when Judy calls,” Durlach said.

Epic doesn’t advertise or have a traditional marketing department; the company has relied heavily on word of mouth. Faulkner has also proven to be an effective salesperson. 

Ardent Health CEO Marty Bonick said that when he was debating whether to convert some of his hospitals to using Epic products, Faulkner ultimately helped sway him.

Ardent Health owns 30 hospitals and 280 outpatient care sites across six states. When Bonick joined Ardent in 2020, he said, roughly two-thirds of Ardent’s hospitals were using Epic. Bonick said he’d never worked with Epic and wanted to make sure that switching over the remainder of Ardent’s hospitals would be worthwhile. 

Bonick said he told Faulkner that he’d heard Epic’s product was expensive and difficult to implement.

“She came back with a presentation that she delivered personally, and spent probably over 90 minutes,” said Bonick, who was ultimately sold on the conversion. “I had to say, ‘OK, time out. I’ve got another meeting to go to,’ but she really was not watching the clock.”

Epic faces accusations of anticompetitive practices in two lawsuits from the past year. One was filed in September by data startup Particle Health, which alleges that Epic has used its EHR market power to “snuff out” competition in other emerging health-care markets.

Epic said in response it would “vigorously defend itself against Particle’s meritless claims.”

The second lawsuit was filed in May by CureIS Healthcare, a managed care services company that claims Epic has engaged in a “multi-prong scheme to destroy” CureIS’ business. CureIS alleges Epic has interfered with its customer relationships, blocked access to necessary data and raised unfounded security concerns, according to a complaint.

An Epic spokesperson told CNBC at the time of the filing that the company “believes in free and fair competition, and we also believe our customers are in the best position to choose the right solutions to meet their needs — whether with Epic or by adopting other products and services.” 

Epic’s competitors have also long accused the company of being territorial over its data and impeding efforts to share patient information between vendors. 

In a blog post last year, Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone in the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability.” 

Interoperability, in this case, refers to the exchange of electronic health data from one health-care organization to another. Since health data is siloed, stored across dozens of formats and protected by federal laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, it’s a complex undertaking.

Over the years, startups such as Practice Fusion and DrChrono have tried to crack the EHR market with promises of greater openness and more user-friendly products, but they have never become more than niche offerings. Some failed completely.  

Epic promotes its own interoperability tools such as Care Everywhere and EpicCare Link, which allows customers and their affiliates to exchange data with one another. Epic also participates in larger data exchange networks.

That’s where Epic’s headquarters comes into play. It’s a campus that industry executives and former employees likened to a techie’s Disney World. 

All 28 office buildings are themed. They’re clustered into mini-campuses, with names such as Prairie Campus, Wizards Academy Campus and Storybook Campus. 

The offices are designed by architecture firm Cuningham, which has also worked on projects at Disney theme parks all over the world. John Cuningham, the founder of the firm, said he’s worked with Faulkner for 30 years, and that she’s always been very involved in the process. 

Epic’s first campus, for instance, has more than 80 bathrooms, and Faulkner wanted to know the details of all of them. 

“Each one,” he said. “Light fixtures, faucets, mirrors, wallpaper, tile, sinks. I mean, I was thinking, ‘Oh, she’ll last for 10.’ She did all 85, and she still does that,” he said. 

On Epic’s grounds, a metal wizard stands in the courtyard of a castle, giant chocolate chips mark the entryway to a faux chocolate factory, and a hanging bridge leads to the company’s very own treehouse. 

Inside a building inspired by “Alice in Wonderland,” there’s a slide that takes employees into a small room where everything is upside down. It’s popular with visitors. 

“I was kind of blown away,” Warner Thomas, CEO of Sutter Health, a nonprofit health system in Northern California, told CNBC about his first trip to Epic’s campus. “I went down the slide, like everybody.”

The buildings are brimming with trinkets, ceramics, mosaics and paintings that Epic employees get to help source. Faulkner recruits a small group of volunteers to go with her to local art fairs and buy decorations for the campus. Some pieces cost thousands of dollars, according to former employees.  

Faulkner said she had just returned from an art fair ahead of her interview with CNBC.

Most employees work in person five days a week. Hours can be long and burnout is common, former employees say. In June, The Economist analyzed 900 companies across 19 industries, and found that Epic had the worst work-life balance in the software and IT services category. Several former employees told CNBC their work at Epic was all-consuming. 

Epic said the average employee works between 44 and 45 hours a week, based on monthly time sheet submissions between June 2024 and June 2025. The company said its turnover rate last year was 7%.

“People at Epic are dedicated and work hard,” an Epic spokesperson said in a statement.

Epic workers are entrusted with big projects, expected to interact directly with customers and generally take on a lot of responsibility. For some employees, that includes working alongside hospitals as they implement Epic’s technology.

“Some of these implementations really sucked,” said Brendan Keeler, a former Epic employee who frequently blogs about the company online. “So much of the success of an implementation was just a function of the politics of the hospital.”

Epic recruits the vast majority of its employees straight out of college, so its staff is relatively young. All new staffers go through extensive training, including a five-hour corporate philosophy class where they’re taught how to be a successful employee.

Faulkner said she used to teach the class by herself but that she now has help from one or two other people.

Faulkner’s influence is present in every corner of Epic’s campus, in its product and across much of the health-care industry.

“Everybody knows Judy Faulkner,” said Thomas, of Sutter Health. 

She’s still got a lot to do. The health-care industry is reckoning with rising costs, staffing shortages, the impact of AI and the Trump administration’s hefty cuts in the areas of medical science and research. 

And Faulkner isn’t ready to quit.

“It’s interesting and it’s challenging and it’s worthwhile,” Faulkner said.

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