This study examines the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption on stock price crash risk using panel data from Chinese A-share listed firms from 2001 to 2022. We find that higher levels of AI application significantly reduce crash risk, primarily by enhancing information transparency, easing financial constraints, and promoting innovation. Notably, AI improves transparency within supply chains by reducing information asymmetry between upstream and downstream firms, thereby enhancing information flow and reducing market frictions. Among AI types, machine learning proves most effective in lowering crash risk due to its data-processing and forecasting capabilities, while natural language processing and computer vision show weaker effects. The impact of AI is particularly pronounced in non-government-regulated industries and high-tech firms. Moreover, its risk-mitigating effect becomes increasingly significant over time. These results are robust to instrumental variable estimation and staggered difference-in-differences (DID) designs. These findings highlight the strategic role of AI in risk management and offer practical implications for firms and policymakers aiming to enhance transparency, financial resilience, and long-term value creation.

Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, noted in his book <The Challenge of World Poverty--A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline> that" Social inequality is clearly connected with the position, and it may best defined as the extreme lack of social mobility and the serious hamper on the possibility of free competition", " Social and economic inequality is a major cause of poverty in a country. From the perspective of planning, this means that greater equality is the prerequisite to make a country out of poverty".? Establishing a financial innovation mechanism that can meet the needs of the poor and achieving the equal status of the poor on capital gain can alleviate or even eradicate poverty. This paper describes a financial mechanism through which the poor can sell their own income rights to obtain funds for self-development so that they can get out of poverty status and an idea about establishing income rights trading markets.