As the India edition of the AI Impact Summit gets underway in New Delhi, stock markets opened nervously in the red after Friday’s selloff, before moving into the green. The AI ‘scare trading’ could continue well into this week as well, given the question marks that loom over India’s IT services industry leaders’ readiness for this disruption and whether the productivity unlock promised by new AI tools would end up upending the core business of India’s tech majors. Even as the markets get over some of the concerns over the India-US tariff cloud, the AI disruption story is now perhaps the biggest factor that continues to worry markets.
AI ‘scaretrading’
The biggest question is to what extent can IT services companies retain their edge in the age of artificial intelligence, given the unveiling of tools such as GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic less than a fortnight ago that then led to a global tech sell off. This was prompted by heightened fears that these new generative AI tools could frontally hit India’s $300 billion IT services industry. Analysts at JP Morgan flagged investor concerns that Indian IT firms could miss growth targets as AI pushed clients to reallocate spending, even as they were quoted by Reuters as saying that it might be “overly simplistic” to assume that AI can automatically generate enterprise grade software and replace the value IT services firms create across the cycle. Meanwhile, top leaders of Indian IT companies attending the AI Summit assert that all of the current productivity unlocking in the tech sector is still happening with humans in the loop, even though the extent of human involvement in this process could progressively go down.
Overblown fears?
So, are the fears overblown? According to Matt Shumer, the CEO of OthersideAI: “The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology”. Shumer has spent six years building an AI startup and investing in this space.
For years, AI has been improving in an incremental manner. Some spurts here and there, but each big crest being spaced out enough so that the impact could be absorbed by the industry, and markets. Beginning in early 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster.
On February 5, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude).
When OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex, in the technical documentation, the start-up said this: “GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations.” This meant that the AI helped build itself, according to Shumer.
So, it’s now come to a point where AI is intelligent enough to meaningfully contribute to its own improvement. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI is now writing “much of the code” at his company, and that the feedback loop between current AI and next-generation AI is “gathering steam month by month.” According to Amodei, we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”
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That, in the longer term, is something that is spooking stock markets around the world.
Tech slide
On Friday, India’s IT shares recorded their worst week since March 2020, losing about $50 billion in market value in a rout sparked by worries about the impact of AI on the sector. The sell-off deepended after a tech-led slide on Wall Street overnight, where concerns about shrinking margins hit heavyweights such as Apple, Reuters reported.
This week could also see choppy trade, even as markets could be nervously eyeing the announcements at the AI Impact Summit.