AI could ruin everything – at least according to one recent report. But don't base your future plans on it just yet.

If the current AI boom succeeds, it could completely crash the global economy, says "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" report, also known as the "CitriniResearch Macro Memo from June 2028," which has gone viral in the last 24 hours.

The authors of the report claim it's not "AI doomer fan-fiction," but a look at left-tail risks in AI that are currently going unexplored. Left-tail risks are a data science term for low-probability, high-impact negative outcomes. So, before we dive into the list of the catastrophic outcomes from this report, keep in mind that these are not predictions, but worst-case scenarios.

Here's what the report warns against during the 2026-2028 timeframe:

• Reflexive AI adoption: Agentic solutions reach widespread enterprise adoption, and companies massively cut white-collar jobs and invest in more AI solutions.
• "Ghost GDP" distortions: Productivity soars on paper, but income shifts from human labor to compute. So while GDP looks strong, consumer spending starts to collapse.
• Intelligence displacement spiral: When white-collar layoffs spread, high earners pull back discretionary spending and draw down their savings.
• Private credit and ARR contagion: AI undercuts the economics of SaaS companies that make up a big chunk of public markets. When recurring revenue erodes, it causes a chain of events that leads to defaults, regulatory scrutiny, and stress to the financial system.
• Prime mortgage fragility: Mortgage holders in tech-heavy metros (San Francisco, Seattle, Austin) begin to default on loans, adding further downward pressure on the financial system.
• Policy gap vs. structural shock: Cutting interest rates doesn't work to stimulate the economy where there's large-scale labor displacement. Fixing the economy requires a bipartisan structural change to policies, such as AI compute taxes and public claims on massive profits from AI advances — and bipartisanism fails to emerge to fill the policy gap.

Our Deeper View

It's wise to consider these worst-case scenarios. Having them in mind can allow leaders, boards of public companies, and public officials to identify early warning signs and act to prevent the worst outcomes. And let's also keep in mind that there is far more optimistic research on the other end of the spectrum. For example, in its annual 2026 Big Ideas research, ARK Invest forecasted that the convergence of trends that include AI, genomics, robotics and energy will lead to a "step change in real GDP growth" that will result in 7.3% real GDP expansion in 2030. That's far above the 3.1% forecasted by the IMF, and likely overly-optimistic. The reality is likely somewhere between these two extremes, but they also paint a picture of the uncertainty and the massive risk-versus-reward possibilities engendered by AI.