The artificial intelligence boom has become a central pillar of the U.S. economy, with AI capital expenditures and related tech investments accounting for roughly 50% of U.S. gross domestic product.
S&P 500 earnings are expected to surge 34% in 2026, more than double the 15% growth forecast at the start of the year, largely driven by the AI investment wave.
That level of earnings growth is historically unprecedented outside of post-recession recovery periods, underscoring just how significant the AI boom has become to markets.
Against that backdrop, a viral social media post over the weekend sent a jolt of fear through Wall Street investors and rattled confidence in the AI trade.
Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher, published a post on X stating: “I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly.”
Coxon’s post continued: “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. Do not underestimate the power of this technology.”
He added: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”
The post accumulated 170 million impressions in five days and drew responses from figures including Senator Bernie Sanders, who argued that world leaders should ban superintelligence.
Prominent podcaster and entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David also weighed in, tweeting that “Monday could be a bloodbath for the stock market” in the post’s immediate aftermath.
David Sacks, former AI Czar for the Trump Administration, was among those urging skepticism, pointing out several suspicious metrics surrounding the post’s sudden viral explosion.
Sacks noted that Coxon had never previously tweeted, making it highly unlikely that an unknown user would generate more than 100 million impressions on a first post.
Within 15 minutes of publication, AI safety groups had heavily amplified Coxon’s thread, and reports indicate Coxon had only worked at Anthropic for approximately three weeks.
The All-In team further speculated that, with midterms approaching, the fear-mongering could be a coordinated effort by top AI firms to influence regulation and lock in monopoly status.
The regulatory capture theory gains additional context from NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) recently acquiring open-source AI leader Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, a deal that could threaten the business models of closed frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL).
President Trump also moved to downplay AI risks, stating: “We’re leading China on AI, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”
Key AI-linked stocks including Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD), and CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) remain on close watch as investor sentiment continues to process the fallout from the viral post.
Analysts broadly agree that while potentially orchestrated doom narratives can create short-term market volatility, the underlying fundamentals supporting the AI trade remain firmly intact.
