As Claude disrupts stock market, Anthropic researcher warns ’world is in peril’

Frank DeMatteo

Thu, February 12, 2026 at 6:59 AM GMT+9 3 min read

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Investing.com – If you’ve been watching the stock market lately, one pattern has become impossible to ignore: nearly every sector now feels vulnerable to artificial intelligence. What began as a disruption in software has rapidly spread outward — hitting brokerage firms, insurance companies, real estate, customer service, education, and beyond.

Over the past several weeks, hardly a trading day has passed without a notable sell-off tied to fears of AI-driven displacement. Investors are no longer asking if industries will be affected by AI, but how fast and how deeply.

At the center of much of this anxiety is Claude, the large language model developed by AI startup Anthropic. Praised for its reasoning ability and rapid improvement cycle, Claude has increasingly been viewed not just as a productivity tool, but as a direct competitive threat to entire business models.

Yet while Claude’s capabilities continue to unsettle markets, a far more sobering signal emerged from inside Anthropic itself.

This week, Mrinank Sharma, a PhD researcher at the company, announced on X that he was resigning — and he didn’t leave quietly.

“Today is my last day at Anthropic,” Sharma wrote, adding a chilling assessment: “The world is in peril.”

Importantly, Sharma was careful to say that artificial intelligence alone is not the singular danger. Instead, he described what he called a “poly-crisis” — a convergence of overlapping threats unfolding simultaneously.

“AI, bioweapons, and other risks are not isolated,” Sharma explained. “They are part of a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”

In his view, humanity is approaching a dangerous imbalance — one where technological power is accelerating faster than society’s ability to wield it responsibly.

“We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world,” Sharma wrote, “lest we face the consequences.”

Perhaps most striking was his reflection on the internal challenges of working at the frontier of AI development. Despite Anthropic’s public emphasis on safety and alignment, Sharma said he repeatedly witnessed how difficult it is — both personally and institutionally — to ensure values truly guide decisions.

“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote.“I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most — and throughout broader society too.”

Sharma’s departure lands at a moment when confidence in AI governance is already fragile. Governments are scrambling to regulate systems they barely understand, corporations are racing to deploy increasingly powerful models, and financial markets are struggling to price in the speed of disruption.

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For investors, Claude represents efficiency, automation, and margin expansion — but Sharma’s warning underscores a deeper concern: that the same forces driving explosive innovation may also be eroding the guardrails meant to keep it in check.

As AI continues to redraw industries and destabilize markets, Sharma’s exit raises an uncomfortable question: if researchers on the inside are this alarmed, are the rest of us moving too fast to notice what’s being left behind?

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