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The ongoing tech sell-off in the United States, ironically driven by the larger AI thematic itself, continues to define February CY26 thematics, and again overnight we saw International Business Machines, or IBM, drop a record amount – the steepest it’s ever dropped in one session.
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I have already written earlier this month the tech trade is under pressure from the AI trade, so in a way, the tech sector is kind of cannibalising itself.
You can see the impact in FAANG ETFs, in software stocks like Salesforce and Adobe – among the first victims – and you can see it in other parts of the S&P 500 where money is suddenly showing up.
U.S. firm Truist’s CIO, Keith Lerner, told Yahoo overnight that, in as simple terms as really possible, U.S. investors are selling off tech.
That’s no surprise, though it should be noted that microchip makers (or semiconductors if you prefer) are resilient; many investors who consider themselves smart money are also looking for stocks that might benefit from a humanoid robot boom, but that’s neither here nor there.
IBM a symbolic crownfall
At any rate, Lerner’s suspicions are backed up by IBM’s overnight price action on the U.S. indexes. The NYSE-listed legacy tech icon, responsible for inventing floppy disks, hard drives, encryption, and programming languages, has had its worst evening since the original tech bubble burst – pre-GFC.
A lot of the recent pain is coming from the AI company Anthropic, who have an AI program called ‘Claude,’ that appears to be leading the race to create ‘AI Agents,’ or, ‘agentic AI.’
Agentic AI is basically the next evolutionary step after large language models (LLMs) like DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Gemini – in other words, probably-overpowered chatbots.
These programs, on paper, can go off and make code on their own, fulfil white-collar roles like sales management and creative design, and compete with existing software.
Threats differ, depending
For some stocks that have been scalped, like Adobe and Salesforce, the idea is agentic AI could replace human staffers, meaning less revenue for those two from other businesses buying their software on SaaS contracts.
For others, Claude poses the risk of outright competition – if, e.g., these agents can make their own software, what’s to stop them from recreating another Palantir?
But we’re seeing the panic seep into stocks for everything else. The consumer discretionary, tech and financial sub-indices of the S&P 500 remain negative YTD, showing how far and how quickly fears are growing.
(All of this faith in a future where AI changes everything seems to be overlooking the fact that OpenAI intends to burn through over US$100B in cash in the next year without becoming profitable.)
However, the market obviously thinks Anthropic might have more of a clear business model, to be fair to those panicking.
Sensational report stokes flames
It is interesting to note that an analytically-minded piece of speculative sci-fi fiction from a research outfit in the U.S. also helped to tank the price of Mastercard and other financials overnight, so long as you accept this report was so widely disseminated, pretty much all of Wall Street read it, which is a consensus view.
One point to the pen over the sword. The culprit today? A fresh blog post called “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” posted by Citrini Research.
It’s a speculative blog post written in the year 2028 outlining a black swan market collapse retrospectively looking back to 2024, explaining how the AI disruption helped to collapse the share of labour GDP, and, eventually. the mortgage market.
This blog post puts into Wall Street-ese the fears most critics have long espoused, but the language it uses (and the time it was published) appear to have combined to actually make tech bulls pay attention.
The authors posit AI will create a ‘Ghost GDP’ where massive amounts of money are going into data centres and the operation of AI hardware creates a false economy that doesn’t actually go back to workers.
In that scenario, the economy overall collapses because workers aren’t buying discretionary goods anymore. That means no money for Walmart, no money for credit card providers, no money going to households, no money into banks, and finally, no money into mortgages.
It’s a compelling read. And while it’s entirely speculative, what I think is most interesting is that the market appears to agree that it’s possible.
And remember: The wisdom of crowds is often a powerful force.
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