<div id="readability-page-1"><div><div><p><span>Author: Xiao Yanyan, Jinshi Data</span></p><p>On Wall Street, growing fears about artificial intelligence are battering the stocks of companies that may become its disruptive targets, sparing neither small software companies nor large wealth management firms.</p><p>The latest sell-off erupted on Tuesday when a little-known startup, Altruist Corp., launched a tax strategy tool, causing shares of Charles Schwab Corp., Raymond James Financial Inc., and LPL Financial Holdings Inc. to fall by 7% or more.</p><p>This is the worst drop for some of these stocks since the market crash triggered by the trade war last April. But this is just the latest example of the &#34;sell first, ask later&#34; mentality—which is rapidly gaining dominance and fueling anxiety about AI potentially disrupting entire industries as hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI begin to translate into commercial products.</p><p> “Any company with a potential disruptive risk is being indiscriminately sold off,” said John Belton, a fund manager at Gabelli Funds. For the past few years, advancements in AI technology have been at the forefront of Wall Street, with tech stocks leading the rally. As this surge has pushed stock prices to record highs, questions have lingered about whether it's a bubble about to burst or whether it will trigger a productivity boom that reshapes the American business world. But since the beginning of last week, a series of AI product launches have triggered a clear market shift. Investors are no longer focused on picking winners, but are quickly trying to avoid holding any company facing even the slightest risk of being replaced. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” said Will Rhind, CEO of Graniteshares Advisors. “Last year’s story was that we all believed in AI—but we were looking for use cases, and now it’s causing disruption as we keep finding seemingly more powerful and compelling use cases.” The software industry has been plagued by concerns about AI for some time. Last week, as Anthropic PBC's new tool triggered a sharp drop in stocks across sectors such as software, financial services, asset management, and legal services, these concerns began to spread more broadly to other sectors. The same fears battered U.S. insurance brokerage stocks on Monday after online insurance marketplace Insurify launched a new app using ChatGPT to compare auto insurance rates. On Tuesday, wealth management stocks became the next victims, dragged down by Altruist's Hazel product (which helps financial advisors develop personalized strategies for clients). </p><p><img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://img.jinse.com.cn/7433719_watermarknone.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" width="544" height="607" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://img.jinse.com.cn/7433719_watermarknone.png"/></p><p>Jason Wenk, CEO of Altruist, said he was surprised by the scale of the stock market reaction, which wiped billions of dollars from the market capitalization of several investment firms. But he said it sent a strong signal about the competitive threat his company poses.</p><p>“People are starting to realize—the architecture we used to build Hazel can replace any work in wealth management,” he said in an interview.</p><p>“Typically, these tasks are done by the entire team. Now, AI can effectively do these tasks for just $100 a month.” AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have made solid progress in software engineering with products that help developers streamline and debug code processes, and are now entering other industries. However, many questions remain about how this technology will be adopted. Take the banking industry, for example, which has periodically faced challenges from e-services and other technologies, but which have ultimately failed to diminish its dominance. Gabelli fund manager Belton is one of those on Wall Street who has shifted from fears of an AI bubble to skepticism about its impending disruption of much of the economy. “Every industry has winners and losers,” Belton says. But he adds, “One rule of thumb is that technological disruption often takes longer than expected to materialize.” This pullback may also reflect widespread anxiety about the stock market’s dramatic rise in recent years, driven by AI spending sprees and an unusually resilient U.S. economy. This has led to overvaluation and made investors more sensitive to fears of a reversal. “As soon as they send out a signal that the market perceives as somewhat negative, the stock drops 10%, which would never happen in a market that isn’t currently trading at those levels,” said Lane of Graniteshares. For Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, the anxieties about AI losers that have been battering parts of the market over the past week are premature. He said it’s too early to say exactly what the impact will be. “We can try to extrapolate how AI will change the world five years from now, but we just don’t know,” he said. “The market is trying to make judgments about this when we’re still at the very beginning of this infancy.”</p></div></div></div>

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<p>On Wall Street, fears surrounding artificial intelligence are leading to a widespread sell-off of stocks, affecting both small software firms and large wealth management companies. The recent decline was triggered by Altruist Corp.'s launch of a tax strategy tool, causing significant drops in shares of major financial firms. Investors are increasingly adopting a "sell first, ask later" approach, fearing potential disruptions from AI. While some experts express skepticism about the immediate impact of AI, concerns about overvaluation and market sensitivity are contributing to the current volatility.</p>

Wall Street is gripped by "AI phobia": an indiscriminate sell-off is spreading.