CNBC’s Jim Cramer offered a blunt takeaway from Monday’s selloff: Artificial intelligence concerns have left the stock market incredibly fragile.
After the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each shed more than 1%, the “Mad Money” host urged investors to exercise caution because stocks were “just too easy to take down today.”
The reason for the early-week downturn was a post from Citrini Research over the weekend — arguing the AI boom could hurt the economy and cause unemployment to shoot up to 10% if white-collar jobs were successfully replaced by machines. The note — with the headline “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” — posed the question: “What if our AI bullishness continues to be right and what if that’s actually bearish?”
Cramer called the research a “dystopian tale,” and described “this vision of a global intelligence crisis … [as] a reach.” Instead, Cramer said there will be a lot more jobs created than destroyed as this new technology becomes integrated into the workforce. “I can’t help but grow more pessimistic … when I see how easily a piece of science fiction can crush the market as if it’s science fact,” he added.
It wasn’t just Citrini that contributed to the market’s decline on Monday. Cramer said there have been “too many worries about the power of Anthropic and OpenAI” as well.
Anthropic unveiled a new security tool to its Claude model on Friday, which put a dent in cybersecurity stocks on fears of increased competition. CrowdStrike fell 8% on Friday and another 10% on Monday. CrowdStrike is a holding in Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the stock portfolio managed by the CNBC Investing Club. Shares have dropped more than 25% year to date.
Concerns about the capabilities of OpenAI and Anthropic have been crushing enterprise software stocks, like Salesforce, for weeks. The market has been selling them on fears that AI will hurt their traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. Salesforce, another Club stock, shed 3.8% on Monday and has tumbled nearly 33% year to date.
Investors will get a chance to judge Salesforce themselves when the Marc Benioff-run company reports earnings after Wednesday’s closing bell. “With AI making each user more efficient, the thinking is that there could be a real problem here, even if it hasn’t shown up yet,” Cramer said. A more efficient workforce can lead to fewer workers. Fewer workers mean fewer per-seat licenses are needed, the lifeblood of SaaS companies.
For Cramer, Monday’s volatility raised a larger question of what’s next? He advised investors to stay the course, but to avoid any sudden moves. “Here’s the bottom line: There’s just too many things that can go wrong if we buy the wrong stocks,” he said. “Let’s be more cautious. We have to be after what we saw today.”