Elon Musk says AI is the only way to fix the $40 trillion U.S. debt crisis—but a new study says even the most optimistic scenario won’t fill the hole

In the great debate about rebalancing the United States’ debt to its economic growth, the optimists suggest that expanding the economy is preferable to cutting federal spending. It would certainly be less painful. Indeed, Space X founder CEO Elon Musk has suggested that the productivity gains thanks to AI may be the only way to save Uncle Sam from his growing debt burden—$39.5 trillion at the time of writing.Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has long been a debt hawk, even if it meant going against President Trump on the matter. Musk told the Nikhil Kamath podcast last year that AI and robotics used on a large scale is “pretty much the only thing that’s going to solve the U.S. debt crisis.” But new research from Brookings, authored by Ben Harris, Neil R. Mehrotra and William Overcash, suggests that while AI-driven economic growth might meaningfully shrink fiscal deficits, it is still unlikely to bridge the gap “even in more optimistic scenarios fully.” The suggestion that AI could be the silver bullet for a fiscal crisis is understandable, the trio writes, owing to the active capital expenditure into the transformative technology thus far, as well as “the unharnessed capacity of the technology to boost productivity.” Indeed, AI investment has continued at such a pace this year that it’s taking even Wall Street analysts by surprise. For example, BNP Paribas lifted its near-term U.S. GDP growth estimates earlier this year on the back of capex announcements indicating a larger impulse from the AI buildout than the banking giant had expected. While they estimated that growth for all of 2026 will stay the same at 2.6%, the markets team highlighted that on a Q4/Q4 comparison of this year to last, growth would be 2.6% rather than the 2.1% previously estimated. Likewise, AI—even in its early years of testing and adoption—seems to be having an impact on output. A June study from The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) found t