Will a stock exchange halt trading for >24 hours with a cause widely attributed to AI before 2025?

Resolved: No

Comments

johnnycaffeine · on Jan 8, 2025

This question resolves as No. The closest event I could find was a stock sell-off caused by a deepfake, but it did not cause any trading halts.

citizen · on Nov 25, 2024

AI is a search-engine add-on, right?

citizen · on May 23, 2024

Checked the fine print for the definition of "major".

"Major stock exchange" is defined as a top 10 exchange by monthly trading volume, including NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE, and a major exchange in each of China, India, South Korea, and Hong Kong.

Those exchanges do shut down on occasion when trading becomes irrational. The shutdown may be 15 minutes, or the rest of the trading day, or other durations.

From Wikipedia, illustrative examples:

On March 9, 2020, the Dow Jones fell by 7.79% (2,013 points) on fears of the COVID-19 coronavirus and falling oil prices, and the S&P 500 triggered a market shutdown for 15 minutes just moments after opening. Three days later on March 12 and again on March 16 early trading again tripped the level-1 circuit breaker when the markets dropped over 7%. On March 18 the breaker was triggered again at one in the afternoon, several hours after trading opened.

Closure is based upon swings in a whole index. How could AI, in 2024, cause indices to drop so far that an exchange would close FOR A DAY? I think an exchange could close early, but they're going to open the next business day. They can then close again if a problem persists.

dschwarz · on May 23, 2023

While I think this is one of the more likely near-term AI disaster scenarios, I think financial exchanges are some of the most robust systems in the entire world. People are trying to take advantage of their tiny flaws all the time, and rarely does anything come of it.

Even if weak AGI agents are trading all the time, I imagine the markets would look relatively normal. So most of my 15% probability is in AI systems going completely haywire in a way that is hard for anyone to disable.