When the first question addressed to Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, at the company’s annual meeting of shareholders on Saturday came from “Warren of Omaha,” it seemed that a sharp remark highlighted how Warren Buffett, the investment legend who led the conference for sixty years, continued to have an indelible influence even outside the day.
But this was more than just a company inside joke.
Abel told the audience that the episode, which included a video of Buffett appearing on a microphone in a black suit, did not include the participation of the former CEO (who was officially in the audience). Instead, it was a deepfake — a technologically generated avatar that looked and sounded like Buffett — created to illustrate the cybersecurity risks made possible by recent advances in artificial intelligence.
“Here’s the interesting thing: That was done without input from Warren. We were able to find that out with the information that was available and replicate those actions and that voice,” Abel told the crowd.
Deepfake Warren Buffett imitated the real Oracle of Omaha’s voice and tone, and threw in a few details that sounded real, like being 95 years old and liking Cherry Coke.
Although Berkshire Hathaway is a company with a $1 trillion market cap and $400 billion in cash on hand, the threat of an AI-augmented cybersecurity breach is a greater threat than market volatility. Abel said the company takes risks seriously.
“The reality is that’s what we’re dealing with when we think about Berkshire and how we have to protect it every day,” he told shareholders.
Buffett himself had raised the specter of technology advancing to the point where deepfakes were sophisticated enough to fool intelligent viewers – including himself – before. At Berkshire’s 2024 meeting, he spoke about his encounter with an immersive video that was true enough to understand how someone could be tricked into sending money to a scammer.
While he acknowledged that AI could be useful, he expressed serious concerns about how it could be exploited by cybercriminals.
AI makes it easy for fraudsters to impersonate people by combining voice and videos created with publicly available data, like the kind Berkshire used to deepfake Buffett. According to one estimate, the number of AI-powered scams will explode by more than 1,200% in 2025 alone.
“I think that, as someone who doesn’t understand the negative side of it, it has great potential to hurt and greatness,” Buffett said last year.
Adam Patti, CEO of VistaShares, says it’s a good sign that Abel is attuned to the risks and possibilities of AI in Berkshire’s various businesses.
“Deepfake is a small consequence of what’s to come,” he told Money. “It’s a global arms race… I think we’re really going into the unknown, and that’s the biggest danger in the world. We need to be able to identify what’s real and what’s not.”
