Vocal AI critic Ed Zitron says that OpenAI is the heart of the broader AI bubble, arguing that the ChatGPT maker has swelled to such a degree that it is the AI market's Lehman Brothers. "Its failure would be a watershed moment — the Lehman Brothers of the AI bubble," he wrote. Zitron, a public relations specialist, published a deep dive in his newsletter last month on OpenAI's finances. "The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 came at the perfect time for a tech industry that had run out of ideas," he wrote in a post on July 15. "The existence of OpenAI justified an era of mania and opulence," he added, noting that OpenAI is also the reason its biggest competitor, Anthropic, exists. "The only reason this has kept going so long is that OpenAI has yet to collapse," he wrote. Zitron does not have a prediction for how or when OpenAI could go bust, but he sees it being a watershed event that will upend markets rallied around the AI trade. If OpenAI were to stop paying infrastructure companies like CoreWeave and Oracle, Zitron theorizes those firms would be unable to service their own debts.