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The Death Cross
The 2025–2026 trillion-dollar repricing of the software industry — when AI market capitalization overtook SaaS capitalization — read through Nye's framework as a geopolitical repricing of what constitutes strategic advantage, not merely a sectoral market adjustment.
The Death Cross is the name Wall Street gave to the projected 2027 intersection of two valuation curves: the descending line of SaaS companies and the ascending line of AI market capitalization. The repricing that began in early 2026 was the visible financial signal of a deeper shift. Workday fell 35 percent in the first eight weeks of 2026. Adobe lost 25 percent. Salesforce dropped 25 percent. When Anthropic published its blog post on Claude modernizing COBOL, IBM suffered its largest single-day decline in more than a quarter century. A trillion dollars of market capitalization vanished in weeks. Read through Nye's framework, this was not merely a sectoral adjustment. It was the market repricing of what constitutes strategic advantage in the AI era — a shift from hard-power metrics of technical production capacity to soft-power metrics of institutional ecosystem quality.
In The You On AI Field Guide
You On AI analyzes the Death Cross as a