The Wall Street Journal reports that the Dow Jones plunged more than 800 points. The main trigger was a viral analytical report circulating on Wall Street, detailing the economic consequences of AI development and the vulnerability of software companies.
What report crashed the markets?
It's a massive thought experiment (remember ai2027?) from the analytical boutique Citrini Research, describing a hypothetical "global intelligence crisis" scenario for 2028.
The core question: "What if AI is so good and reliable that at macro scale it becomes catastrophic?"
Their projected domino effect:
1. Intelligence devaluation. Throughout modern history, human intelligence was a scarce resource. That premium is now rapidly disappearing.
2. Office collapse. AI agent adoption triggers complete displacement of intellectual labor professions. Companies slash costs en masse, leading to unprecedented white-collar unemployment.
3. Software demand crash. Traditional SaaS companies, payment systems, and B2B services are essentially a chain of bets on growing office headcount. No white-collar workers — nobody to sell enterprise subscriptions to.
The prime example: yesterday's crash of IBM stock by 13% (worst drop since 2000). The reason: Anthropic announced that their new model can rewrite legacy COBOL code, threatening IBM's multi-billion dollar business supporting old banking systems.
Since the start of 2026, major software stocks have been falling:
— Intuit (#INTU): −46%
— Workday (#WDAY): −40%
— Salesforce (#CRM): −33%
— Snowflake (#SNOW): −28%
What this means for the future of software
Code writing is ceasing to be an exclusive service, and classic enterprise subscription models are losing their point. They'll be replaced by flexible autonomous AI agents that generate custom interfaces and functionality in real time for each specific business need.
Companies that manage to pivot from selling digital workplaces to providing computational AI ecosystems have a chance. As Nassim Taleb warns, the software sector is incredibly fragile right now, and a wave of bankruptcies is just a matter of time.