The first two months of the year have seen static stock markets following anemic economic growth in the final months of 2025. But in the past few weeks, the dominant theme in finance land has been fear. That isn’t unusual. Wall Street often oscillates between hope and fear, euphoria and despair. What’s new is the source of that fear.
Artificial intelligence has become the market meme du jour, the inevitable focus of discussion about the future of the economy, individual companies, and jobs and wages. AI today is like the web in the 1990s: a stand-in for every tech dream and doomsday scenario. Start-ups seeking to raise money highlight how AI will change their industry and disrupt established players. Public companies proclaim AI investments designed to gain competitive advantage or confidently tout how the technology doesn’t threaten their business model. And investors watch it all with a creeping dread.
In the past weeks, fear has been the big theme. Nassim Taleb, the man who coined the term “black swan,” warned that investors are ignoring massive risks of bankruptcies, especially among software companies. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said the bank is undertaking a “huge redeployment” of employees “displaced” by AI.
A report by Citrini Research, which has a popular Substack newsletter, was the biggest match to the dry kindling of panic. Its “scenario” envisioned multiple industries on the verge of fatal disruption by “agentic AI,” leading to economic implosion by 2028 not just in the United States but also in countries such as India, whose export-services sector could be completely replaced. As businesses shed jobs, as software companies go bankrupt, as everything from delivery apps to the mortgage industry is supplanted by AI agents doing the same work at almost no cost, Citrini pictured a future of 10 percent unemployment, plunging government revenue, 40 percent stock market declines and no end in sight.
That report by a relatively unknown firm followed a higher-profile piece by Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, which is one of the industry leaders along with OpenAI, Alphabet, X and Meta. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) Amodei was more measured and also more thorough in considering the impact of artificial intelligence — for the future of war and weapons, for the future of work, for the future of government and for the future of a free society, as well as outcomes we can’t fully imagine. But his tone was no less urgent — and no less certain that most of us are underestimating the risks.
As these predictions arrived, traders were executing a stunning sell-off of not just multibillion-dollar tech companies but also consumer companies like Zillow and DoorDash. These were not small corrections: Salesforce and Oracle both fell more than 30 percent in a matter of weeks. Workday was dropped than 45 percent percent. The cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike plunged more than 25 percent.
Stocks go up and down all the time. But the level of trepidation in the financial and corporate worlds has reached a fever pitch, and these market gyrations reflect a desperate and likely futile attempt by investors to game out the future. The problem is that there is no way to confidently do that with a technology revolution as new and hard to pin down as AI.
It’s certainly noteworthy that some of the most intense warnings are coming from people immersed in the technology and building the models. Still, those concerns have been percolating for a while; only in the past few weeks have their anxieties significantly moved markets.
And it’s often the case that those most proximate to a new technology become the most paranoid about the risks. Think of nuclear scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer over the creation of the atomic bomb. Or those charged with counterterrorism after the shock of 9/11 or tasked with predicting the contours of an epidemiological crisis in 2020.
As the canard goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get you. But simply because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s probable. That line can get blurry to those in the trenches.
None of the above is meant as investment advice. Some companies undoubtedly will have their business models fatally undermined by AI. That’s been true of every emergent technology for centuries. Maybe the companies above are canaries; maybe they are one-off cases; maybe they will adapt and thrive. No one knows — including those most in the business of knowing.
But I think we can say this much with confidence: Panic rarely yields positive results, and doomsayers are almost always wrong. Temperamentally, some of us will stare hard at that word “almost.” But truly, while nightmare scenarios may get clicks, what good do they do? If AI is coming for everything, it’s probably too late to do much about it. If it’s not, panic is a distraction that can create its own unnecessary harms.
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