Wall Street has come alive to the threat from AI to broad swaths of white-collar work, indiscriminately wiping billions of dollars off stocks in sectors from wealth managers to insurance brokers and property services.
After new AI tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and Google’s Project Genie triggered last week’s sell-off in software companies and video games developers, this week investors have begun to fret about how soon automation could spread beyond the tech industry itself.
Traders have seized on developments by little-known start-ups, triggering waves of selling for shares of incumbent players in the traditional financial services industry and beyond, from Charles Schwab to CBRE. Trucking stocks joined the selling on Thursday over threats to their freight brokerage businesses.