Citrini, the founder who spooked the market with his prediction of AI threats, has sold the company. What's next?

James van Gelden is the founder of Citrini Research, an independent investment and research firm that caught investors’ attention earlier this year with a grim forecast of AI’s impact on the economy, has sold the company to SemiAnalysis, a firm specializing in research on the semiconductor sector and AI. Van Gelden and SemiAnalysis CEO Dylan Patel confirmed the deal to Bloomberg, though they did not disclose the amount.

Under the terms of the deal, van Gelden will remain CEO of Citrini Research for the time being. “I’m looking forward to what the future holds for independent investment research,” he said. Separately, van Gelden plans to launch a new fund, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg; he declined to comment on the matter himself.

Citrini Research is based in New York, and its research on the Substack platform is read by approximately 260,000 subscribers. SemiAnalysis was founded in 2020 and has since become one of the industry’s leading sources for research on the semiconductor sector.

Patel explained that the rationale behind the deal was a desire to modernize the approach to financial research. “Research is changing, and the way firms have historically conducted it is outdated, slow, and inaccessible to a broad audience,” he said. According to him, van Gelene has “the largest financial business—Substack.” The goal of the deal is to scale up the research of both SemiAnalysis and Citrini—and to become one of the leading research firms in an era when this work is accessible not only to traditional institutions but also to independent authors, Patel added.

Citrini Research drew attention in February following the publication of its report , “The Global Intelligence Crisis of 2028, ” which described a hypothetical scenario in which the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence leads to mass layoffs of knowledge workers and triggers a deflationary cascade, pushing unemployment above 10% and causing the stock market to crash. The publication triggered a real sell-off in U.S. stocks, with software developers’ stocks hit the hardest. Van Gelden himself admitted that the market’s reaction caught him off guard: “If I had known that stocks would react to this report, I wouldn’t have made [this study] free,” he said.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor