The Executives’ Meeting of East Asia-Pacific Central Banks has published an assessment of artificial intelligence’s economic and financial implications, warning that its effects may emerge through multiple simultaneous shocks and complex feedback loops rather than a single disruption. The note examines productivity, investment, labor markets and inflation, alongside risks to financial stability and findings from a 2025 survey of AI use by member central banks. AI could support long-term growth through productivity gains and is already driving data center investment, technology production and exports. Near-term productivity effects remain limited and uneven, while labor displacement, skills mismatches and widening income disparities could weaken consumption. Investment demand and higher technology import costs may initially add to inflation, before lower production costs potentially produce disinflationary effects over time. Financial stability risks include corrections in AI-related asset prices, rising corporate leverage, correlated trading, model opacity, cyber threats and dependence on a small number of AI and cloud providers. Common models and providers could amplify disruptions, herding and procyclical market behavior, supporting a systemwide supervisory approach alongside institution-level oversight. As of 2025, about half of member central banks used AI for general tasks, and some were extending it to economic forecasting, market news aggregation and other specialized functions. Most had established frameworks or guidelines addressing information leakage, bias, hallucinations, copyright, model and third-party risks, generally retaining human oversight. The note calls for greater attention to transparency, explainability, audit and assurance, as well as continued sharing of practices, threat intelligence and cross-border cyber incident coordination among members.

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