Citrini's AI doom report sees software, payment stocks tumble

A new report by Citrini Research has been partially blamed for a software and payments stock sell-off on Monday, where it outlined extreme scenarios in which AI could severely disrupt the economy, from wiping out a sizable share of the workforce and slashing consumer spending to threatening the $13 trillion US mortgage market.

Citrini was little-known up until Monday, when its “Global Intelligence Crisis” report amassed over 22 million views on X alone and discussed how AI agents could drive corporate profits so high that human labor could become increasingly redundant and trigger a recession.

The report lays out 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.

Source: Citrini

Citrini said the term “Ghost GDP” could emerge, describing it as output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the “real economy.”

“A single GPU cluster in North Dakota is generating output previously attributed to 10,000 Manhattan office workers,” Citrini theorized in a potential June 2028 scenario.

The result: a massive white-collar layoff, far less consumer spending and a recession, Citrini said.

The macroeconomic uncertainty from AI and other issues, such as US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, has not been taken well in the crypto market over the past few months, with Bitcoin (BTC) falling nearly 50% from its $126,080 all-time high in early October, while safe havens like gold continue to rise.

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 be used to 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.

IBM’s share price tanked over 13% on Monday. Source: Google Finance

Citrini said the rise in agentic AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex will drive the broad 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 consumer spending decline.

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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