When the first question directed at Greg Abel, Berkshire Hathaway’s new CEO, at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Saturday came from “Warren from Omaha,” it seemed like a tongue-in-cheek sendup highlighting how Warren Buffett, the investing legend who led the conglomerate for six decades, continued to have an indelible impact even without day-to-day leadership.
But this was more than just an inside corporate joke.
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Abel told the audience that the stunt, which included video of Buffett appearing at a microphone wearing a dark suit, did not involve the participation of the former CEO (who was legitimately in the audience). Rather, 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 with zero input from Warren. We were able to obtain that with information that's out there and replicate those actions and that voice," Abel told the crowd.
Deepfake Warren Buffett mimicked the real Oracle of Omaha’s tone of voice and cadence, and threw in a couple of realistic-sounding details, like being 95 years old and having a fondness for Cherry Coke.
While Berkshire Hathaway is a company with a $1 trillion market cap and $400 billion in cash on hand, the threat of AI-augmented cybersecurity breaches is a greater risk than market volatility. Abel said the company is taking the dangers 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.
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Buffett himself had raised the specter of technology advancing to the point where deepfakes became sophisticated enough to fool even astute observers — himself included — earlier. At Berkshire’s 2024 meeting, he spoke of an encounter with a deepfake video of himself that was realistic enough for him to understand how someone could be tricked into sending money to a scammer.
While he acknowledged that AI could be beneficial, he expressed considerable wariness around how it could be exploited by cybercriminals.
AI makes it easier for crooks to impersonate people via voice cloning and videos created with publicly available data, like the kind Berkshire used to create its deepfake Buffett. According to one estimate, the number of AI-facilitated scams exploded by more than 1,200% in 2025 alone.
“I do think, as someone who doesn’t understand a damn thing about it, it has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm,” Buffett said last year.
Adam Patti, CEO of VistaShares, says it's a good sign that Abel is attuned to the risks as well as the potential AI poses for Berkshire's various businesses.
“The deepfake is one little output of what’s coming,” he tells Money. "It’s a global arms race... I think we're really going into uncharted territory, and that is a major risk for the world. We need to be able to identify what’s real and what’s not.”
