A Citrini Research report that warned of a doomed economy due to AI has been partially blamed for a sell-off in software and payments stocks on Monday.
Citrini’s “Global Intelligence Crisis” report has amassed over 22 million views on X alone, discussing how AI agents could drive corporate profits so high that human labor could become increasingly redundant, triggering a recession.
It also outlines a chilling June 2028 scenario, in which the Standard & Poor’s 500 is down 38% from its all-time high, unemployment is over 10%, private credit is unraveling and prime mortgages are cracking — all while AI didn’t disappoint, exceeding every expectation.
AI, credit card stocks tank
Computing and AI company IBM saw its largest single-day drop in 25 years on Monday, tumbling 13.1% to $223.35, while Microsoft, Oracle and Accenture fell 3.21%, 4.57% and 6.58%, Google Finance data shows.
Credit card platforms Visa, Mastercard, and American Express also fell 4.5%, 5.77%, and 7.2%, as Citrini said private credit and software-backed loans would face cascading defaults.
Investor anxiety was compounded by warnings from renowned risk theorist Nassim Taleb, who said AI could make some software companies bankrupt, while Anthropic said its Claude Code tool can modernize software written in the COBOL language, which handles large transactions for many governments, banks and airlines.
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Anthropic’s findings appeared to affect IBM’s share price directly, as COBOL is mostly run on IBM’s systems.
Citrini said the rise in agentic AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex will drive the broader economic shift, reducing the need for human labor and forcing companies to reinvest savings into ever-more capable AI, essentially creating a feedback loop that accelerates workforce displacement and a decline in consumer spending.
Tech entrepreneurs say AI agents aren’t worth the costs yet
However, three multimillionaire tech investors recently said the high costs of deploying AI agents still don’t justify replacing many humans, who can perform tasks just as well, more cheaply.
Tech investor Jason Calacanis said he is spending $300 per day to run a single AI agent despite it only operating at 10% to 20% of full capacity, while Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya noted the same problem and said his AI agents need to be at least twice as productive as employees to justify the costs.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban said the economic-constraint argument of AI agents raised by Calacanis and Palihapitiya was the smartest counterargument that he had seen to AI replacing humans.
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