ARK’s Cathie Wood Rebuts Citrini AI Thought Piece, Predicts Opportunities After Near-Term Disruptions

In a post on X on Tuesday, CEO of ARK Invest Cathie Wood said the firm is forecasting that AI will lead to a productivity boom, contribute to growth, and lower inflation.

• Short-term dislocations and frustrations should give way to great opportunities if people harness AI’s capabilities correctly, Wood said. 
• On Monday, Citrini Research and Alap Shah, Co-Founder and CEO at Littlebird, posted a thought experiment, suggesting that agentic AI could disrupt the economy in the near future.
• This week, Anthropic announced Claude Code’s COBOL capabilities, saying that the AI could help modernize COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years.

American investor and CEO of ARK Invest, Cathie Wood, challenged a recent thought piece from Citrini Research that suggested artificial intelligence would disrupt the global economy in the next two years.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Wood said ARK Invest is forecasting that AI will lead to a productivity boom, contribute to growth, and lower inflation.

“ARKInvest is forecasting that AI will cause an explosion in entrepreneurial activity, a productivity boom, an acceleration in real GDP growth, and much lower than expected inflation,” she said.

Wood also noted that short-term disruptions would give way to better opportunities “IF individuals harness powerful AI tools to solve problems and create new markets.”

Citrini’s Assertion

On Monday, Citrini Research and Alap Shah, Co-Founder and CEO at Littlebird, posted a thought experiment on Substack, suggesting that agentic AI could disrupt the economy, primarily employment and the stock market, in the near future.

The experiment proposed that unemployment rates would rise to 10.2% and the S&P 500 would slip 38% from its Oct. 2026 highs by June 2028. It also predicted that initial margin expansions, earnings growth, and higher stock market performance would lead to a real wage growth slowdown and eventual collapse of the consumer economy.

Market Movements

A growing concern among investors about AI disruptions has impacted stock markets in recent days.

Last week, Anthropic announced a new security feature in Claude AI that it said would be able to scan code for vulnerabilities and suggest targeted fixes much faster than humans, causing a selloff in cybersecurity stocks.

On Monday, Anthropic announced Claude Code’s Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) capabilities, saying that the AI could help modernize COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years, causing shares of IBM to tumble more than 13%.

Meanwhile, U.S. equities were in green on Tuesday at the time of writing. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), which tracks the S&P 500 index, was up by 0.72%, the Invesco QQQ Trust ETF (QQQ) climbed 1.09%, and the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust (DIA) increased 0.86%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 (NDX) edged up 1.09% at the time of writing.

Retail sentiment around the S&P 500 ETF on Stocktwits was in the ‘bearish’ territory.

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