A hypothetical piece of AI disaster porn has triggered a real-life market dip for a handful of US mega-firms, including Uber, Mastercard and American Express, with investors rattled by the prospect of a near future in which autonomous agents crash the global economy.

Stressing that its doomsday report is “a scenario, not a prediction”, US-based intelligence firm Citrini Research painted a grim future of mass unemployment, mortgage market freefall, and extreme wealth concentration that destabilises the wider economy. And all within the next two years.

Citrini’s now-viral report, framed as a fictional narrative looking back on past events, depicts an economy subsumed by AI cost-cutting, where companies turn to autonomous agents for tasks once handled by SaaS platforms, and anyone can spin up a personalised app to take care of everything from managing taxes to ordering pizza. 

Dubbing this a “negative feedback loop with no natural brake”, the report speculates that by 2028, most white collar workers will be forced to the gig economy to make ends meet, while AI firms will rake in billions at the expense of devastating traditional industries.

Despite its imaginative bent, the report touched a nerve with investors, with CNBC reporting that the paper was specifically cited on Wall Street trading floors for falling prices among software and payments firms. 

Firms named in Citrini’s worst‑case scenario suffered in the market, with American Express and Mastercard shares falling by 7% and 6% respectively, while Uber was down more than 4%.  

More striking, however, was IBM’s 13% decline on Monday, a drop which dragged down the Dow with it. 

Despite not being spotlit by Citrini’s thought piece, IBM was the latest victim of the Anthropic effect, after the AI firm claimed its Claude Code tool can rebuild the COBOL programming language, the foundation of IBM’s mainframes.

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IBM’s fall followed earlier market jitters for several leading cyber firms, including CrowdStrike and SentinelOne, after the release of Anthropic’s latest AI security tool, a plugin similar to those that sent legal and software firms reeling earlier this month.

Notably, Citrini’s gloomy scenario starts with the real-life “step function jump in capability” of agentic coding tools in late 2025, systems that, in the paper’s scenario, triggered the near collapse of the tech vendor and SaaS ecosystems, and a “knife-fight” on pricing.

Given that we have seen the first evidence of AI’s chilling effect on the stock market, and that Citrini’s paper ends with worldwide spikes in homelessness, crime, and poverty, the question now is how seriously policymakers and business leaders will take these early warnings.