How AI agents could destroy the economy
Delivery, payments, and software stocks slid sharply Monday after Citrini Research published a report laying out the potential risks that artificial intelligence could pose to various segments of the global economy.
DoorDash Inc., American Express Co., KKR & Co Inc. and Blackstone Inc all slumped more than 8%. Shares of other companies name-checked in the article, including Uber Technologies Inc., Mastercard Inc., Visa Inc., Capital One Financial Corp. and Apollo Global Management Inc. were all lower by at least 3%.
“The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored,” a preface to the article, which was published Sunday, said. “Hopefully, reading this leaves you more prepared for potential left tail risks as AI makes the economy increasingly weird.”
Citrini Research, founded by James van Geelen, presented a hypothetical scenario set in June 2028 where AI’s disruption has caused mass unemployment for white collar workers, declining consumer spending, software-backed loan defaults and economic contraction. Still, the report notes clearly — “What follows is a scenario, not a prediction.”
Among the various outcomes discussed in this “thought exercise,” Citrini lays out a situation where the dominance of delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats are displaced by “vibe-coded” alternatives. [Continue reading…]
International Business Machines stock is getting slammed, becoming the latest victim of rapidly developing AI technology, after Anthropic’s Claude announced COBOL capabilities.
Shares of IBM fell 11% in Monday afternoon trading after Anthropic outlined a new use case for its Claude Code product: automating the exploration and analysis work that drives most of the complexity in COBOL modernization.
COBOL is a programming language used widely in business data processing, which is a core business area for IBM. COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, was developed in the 1950s and continues to powers systems responsible for large volumes of transactions, including payment processing and retail transaction systems.
In a Monday blog post, Anthropic wrote that COBOL handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. “Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government. Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year,” the Anthropic blog post reads.
“Legacy code modernization stalled for years because understanding legacy code cost more than rewriting it. AI flips that equation,” the post continued. It then explained that Claude Code can help modernize COBOL codebases by mapping dependencies across thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows and identifying risks that “would take human analysts months to surface.”
Monday’s move brought IBM shares down nearly 22% year to date.