AI-linked stocks suffered significant losses this Monday, after technology sector leaders made an appeal for a slowdown in technology development. Dario Amodei, leader of Anthropic, asked companies to slow down their efforts, an appeal supported by Elon Musk of xAI and Sam Altman of OpenAI. Sam Altman also revealed there will be no stock market listing this year for security reasons. In pre-market trading on Wall Street, Nvidia and AMD fell 3%, while Meta and Amazon fell more than 1%. In Europe, ASML fell 6%, Infineon more than 8% and Siemens Energy more than 7%. In Asia, Softbank fell more than 13% and TSMC fell more than 1%.
Technology leaders justified the appeal with concerns about AI risks, with Amodei warning that, in the next 6 to 12 months, AI agents may be capable of causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Anthropic specialist Jacob Coxon wrote that "people building AI genuinely believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Sam Altman considered human extinction risks "unacceptable." Morgan Stanley bank believes AI spending will exceed 1.2 trillion dollars by 2027.
China has already reacted to the warnings, considering that American executives are trying to instill fear. Guo Jiankin, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that "instilling fear, confrontation and competition will only create disruptions to the global AI process." An editorial in the state-backed Global Times criticized Amodei's essay as "taken from the Cold War playbook," arguing it aims to slow down Chinese efforts. Donald Trump also responded, downplaying the warnings and considering them "very negative forces," arguing that the US must maintain leadership in the industry.
Deutsche Bank questioned whether these warnings are the first signal that the extraordinary AI investment cycle will moderate, considering such a hypothesis unlikely as long as the competitive race between companies and countries remains intense. Anthropic is set to go public, with the operation scheduled for October, and Nvidia could be one of the main investors. According to Charu Chanana of Saxo Bank, the warnings may weigh on AI and chip stocks, whose valuations assume strong demand and great speed of technological progress.
