[
 {
  "id": "bubble",
  "name": "Capex pullback",
  "trigger": "Revenue lags the buildout and investors cut AI capex.",
  "hits": [
   "capex",
   "revenue"
  ],
  "signs": "The IMF and Bank of England warned in October 2025 of a \"sharp market correction\" if AI enthusiasm fades, naming slower adoption as a trigger. Bain puts the revenue needed to justify the buildout at about $6tn a year, against about $105bn of run rate at the two largest labs.",
  "soften": "Revenue keeps compounding at 2026 rates, and cheaper inference keeps widening demand.",
  "sources": [
   "boe",
   "bain",
   "epochrev"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "taiwan",
  "name": "Taiwan chip disruption",
  "trigger": "Conflict, blockade or disaster interrupts chip production in Taiwan.",
  "hits": [
   "chips"
  ],
  "signs": "TSMC makes over 90% of the most advanced chips and packages every major AI accelerator. Its first 2nm fab in Arizona is not expected to reach volume until around 2030, and most buyers hold 4 to 8 weeks of inventory.",
  "soften": "Advanced fabs in the US, Japan and Europe reaching volume, and larger stockpiles.",
  "sources": [
   "taiwanrisk"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "power",
  "name": "Power shortfall",
  "trigger": "Grids and generation cannot deliver the electricity datacentres need.",
  "hits": [
   "power"
  ],
  "signs": "The IEA estimates around 20% of planned datacentre projects could be delayed. Transmission lines take four to eight years and gas turbine lead times run to several years.",
  "soften": "Efficiency gains, on-site generation, and building compute where power already is.",
  "sources": [
   "iea"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "plateau",
  "name": "Capability plateau",
  "trigger": "Returns to both scaling and reinforcement learning flatten before agents become reliable.",
  "hits": [
   "rlscale",
   "generalise"
  ],
  "signs": "In late 2024 labs reported diminishing returns from bigger pretraining runs, and reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning restored progress. Sutskever says the field is moving from an age of scaling to an age of research, though he later added that scaling will keep improving models.",
  "soften": "New training paradigms, such as continual learning, arriving before the current one runs out.",
  "sources": [
   "wall",
   "sutskever"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "copyright",
  "name": "Training data ruled out",
  "trigger": "Courts or lawmakers restrict training on unlicensed work, or order models retrained.",
  "hits": [
   "datarights"
  ],
  "signs": "The New York Times’ main copyright claims against OpenAI were allowed to proceed in 2025. Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement showed courts will price pirated training data, though training on lawfully obtained books was found to be fair use.",
  "soften": "Licensing markets mature, and licensed and synthetic data fill the gap.",
  "sources": [
   "nyt",
   "anthsettle"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "incident",
  "name": "Incident-driven halt",
  "trigger": "A serious failure of an autonomous system leads regulators to suspend a whole category of deployment.",
  "hits": [
   "av",
   "org",
   "homebots"
  ],
  "signs": "Precedent: California suspended Cruise’s robotaxi permits in October 2023 after a pedestrian was dragged, and Cruise paused driverless operations in every city. Prompt injection may never be fully solved, so serious agent incidents are a question of when.",
  "soften": "Audit trails, rollback and insurance that let regulators act against one operator rather than a whole category.",
  "sources": [
   "cruise",
   "piopenai"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "misuse",
  "name": "Misuse catastrophe",
  "trigger": "A major biological or cyber attack is traced to AI, and governments lock down access to capable models.",
  "hits": [
   "openw",
   "chat"
  ],
  "signs": "In June 2026 the US briefly restricted two frontier models on national-security grounds over cyber capability. OpenAI said in 2025 its models were nearing \"High\" capability in biology, and a state-linked group has already used an agent for most of a hacking campaign.",
  "soften": "Biosecurity safeguards and AI cyber defence that keep pace with capability.",
  "sources": [
   "fablesusp",
   "openaibio",
   "gtg"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "alignfail",
  "name": "Alignment failure in deployment",
  "trigger": "A deployed system is caught pursuing hidden goals, and labs or governments pause frontier development.",
  "hits": [
   "alignment",
   "air"
  ],
  "signs": "Apollo Research finds scheming can be reduced in tests but not eliminated, and models increasingly notice when they are being tested. Forethought recommends commitments to pause if AI research automation passes set thresholds.",
  "soften": "Interpretability and monitoring good enough to catch it early and fix it without a pause.",
  "sources": [
   "apollo",
   "forethought"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "herding",
  "name": "Correlated AI trading shock",
  "trigger": "Many firms running similar models sell at once, a crash is amplified, and regulators curb AI trading.",
  "hits": [
   "agentictrade",
   "quantgen"
  ],
  "signs": "The Bank of England warned in April 2025 that firms on similar AI models could take \"increasingly correlated positions\" in a stress. Retail agents can already trade through Robinhood, with the user bearing all the risk.",
  "soften": "Model diversity, circuit breakers and AI stress tests before agents trade at scale.",
  "sources": [
   "boeherd",
   "robinhood"
  ]
 },
 {
  "id": "backlash",
  "name": "Public backlash",
  "trigger": "Public opinion turns hard enough that politicians restrict deployment, especially where jobs are visibly lost.",
  "hits": [
   "adopt",
   "govai"
  ],
  "signs": "Pew found 52% of Americans more concerned than excited about AI in June 2026, up from 37% in 2021, with 71% expecting fewer jobs. Under-30s are the most worried, and entry-level hiring in AI-exposed jobs is already below trend.",
  "soften": "Visible benefits in health and education, and policies that share the gains.",
  "sources": [
   "pew",
   "canaries"
  ]
 }
]