The AI Essays Are Moving Markets

What It Covers

A Citrini Research essay on AI disruption triggers broad market selloffs across software, fintech, and private equity sectors on February 24, 2026, while Anthropic reveals Chinese firms trained models using Claude 16 million times, Meta commits over $100 billion to AMD chips, and ASML boosts EUV output by 67%.

Key Questions Answered

• •AI Essay Market Risk: Viral investment research can now move entire sectors — Citrini Research's Sunday post caused AppLovin, CrowdStrike, Datadog, and Expedia to each drop over 7%, a State Street software ETF to fall 5%, and private equity firms like KKR to lose 9%. Investors should monitor high-circulation AI disruption analyses as leading indicators of sector volatility.
• •COBOL Modernization Disruption: Anthropic's Claude Code targets IBM's core mainframe business by automating COBOL legacy code analysis — mapping dependencies across thousands of lines, documenting workflows, and surfacing risks in hours rather than months. IBM stock dropped 13.2% on the announcement. An estimated 95% of US ATM transactions currently run on COBOL, representing a massive addressable disruption target.
• •Chinese Model Distillation Scale: Anthropic documented over 16 million unauthorized Claude interactions by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax — with MiniMax alone responsible for 13 million prompts. Distillation allows competitors to replicate frontier model capabilities at a fraction of development cost and time, raising both competitive and US national security concerns about capabilities flowing into military and surveillance systems.
• •Meta-AMD Chip Deal Structure: Meta secured up to six gigawatts of AMD MI450 computing capacity over five years in a deal exceeding $100 billion, with AMD granting Meta warrants for 160 million shares at one cent each — roughly 10% of the company — contingent on AMD stock reaching $600 from its current $196.60. This circular financing model mirrors AMD's earlier OpenAI deal structure.
• •ASML EUV Power Breakthrough: ASML increased EUV light source output from 600 to 1,000 watts by doubling tin droplets to 100,000 per second and using two laser shaping bursts instead of one. This 67% power increase reduces chip exposure time, enabling approximately 50% more chip production per hour by 2030, widening ASML's lead over US and Chinese competitors attempting to replicate the technology.