In the early hours of February 5, 2026, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, sending shockwaves from Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Software stocks plummeted despite strong earnings. Even Bitcoin tanked as investors fled to stable assets.
The Anthropic news signaled a broader threat: AI models are pushing into the application layer, destroying moats and forcing companies to rethink business models. If that feels familiar, that’s because we have been here before. In November 2022 ChatGPT made investors question even whether companies like Google had a future. In January 2025, China’s DeepSeek challenged the entire American approach to AI, which relied on costly cutting-edge hardware. The stocks of AI-powerhouses like NVIDIA took a beating. To say that both Google and NVIDIA have been doing fine since then would be an understatement. But this is not the reason why the recent panic is overblown.
Technology companies are driven by two types of cycles. The classic macroeconomic business cycle – recession, recovery, expansion, and slowdown – and various technology cycles. The latter ones describe phases of technological progress, hype, and adoption. Technology cycles are longer and eventually more important for investors. While the macroeconomic mood can cause hefty share price swings and temporarily limit access to capital, its impact is comparably short-lived. Moreover, in the tech world the macro often has little impact on the bottom line. Corporations will always spend on laptops for their employees and they will keep their firewalls up, no matter how the GDP is doing and what the FED decides.
But why do these AI shocks occur so frequently and are they a warning sign? The answer lies in an unfavorable overlapping of the market cycle and the technology standardization cycle. During all of the three AI shocks the American economy has been perceived near the end of an expansion phase with a looming slowdown. Tech stocks react very strongly to slowdowns and recessions, which is why investors have been nervous about them. Up to this day the fear of an AI bubble is specter on Wall Street. Technologically, on the other hand, GenAI has been in the phase of competition and ferment ever since ChatGPT launched it onto the world stage. This phase is marked by intense rivalry, frequent entry and exit of firms, and rapid, often chaotic, product changes. Every emerging technology passes through this stage but it is rare that both the macroeconomic environment as well as the technological dynamics are in an utter state of uncertainty. Add to this the gargantuan AI spending of companies of all hues and it is clear why investors get jittery and why market chatter about software carnage leads to massive sell-offs.
