AI-linked stocks slide after tech bosses call for slowdown in ‘reckless’ development
AI-linked stocks tumbled on Monday after the bosses of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX called for a slowdown in AI “reckless” development, citing fears the technology could soon run out of control.
Shares in the semiconductor designer Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company – were down 3.3% by market closing in New York City, while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) slid 4% and Micron Technology and Sandisk shares slumped by 5%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index fund was down 0.5% by the end of the day.
The sell-off came after the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed at the weekend for the AI industry to “slow down”.
However, Donald Trump dismissed calls to increase controls on AI as a “sick conspiracy”.
In a social media post on Monday, the president wrote: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!”
The president added that his administration had “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!)”.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”, he wrote.
Trump offered a similar assessment when he called Nvidia chief, Jensen Huang, while the executive was on stage at an AI conference in California on Monday.
“It’s a hoax,” Trump said via speaker phone to the audience. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world. That’s not going to happen.”
The UN security council, meanwhile, is planning to hold a meeting on AI next week as international concern rises, Agence France-Presse reported on Monday.
Shares in SoftBank, a Japanese investor that is a big backer of OpenAI, slumped 13%, while the South Korean Kospi stock index, which relies heavily on chipmakers that supply AI companies, dropped by 3%.
Shares in the big global microchip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dropped 1.2%.
In Europe, shares in the Dutch tech manufacturer ASML, Europe’s biggest company by value and an important supplier for the semiconductor industry, slumped by 6%.
There was, however, a rally in shares that have been threatened by the rise of AI, including the advertising group WPP, which rose by 5% in London, and the analytics business Relx, which was also up 5%. The latter had suffered a sharp fall earlier this year after Anthropic launched a suite of new data and automation tools.
Amodei has said that “building too fast is reckless”, warning that a swarm of AI agents could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet” in future.
His claims have been disputed by some experts, but on Monday investors began to price in a slowdown that would make it harder for the industry to pay for hundreds of billions of dollar in investments in AI infrastructure.
The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, the Google DeepMind chief, Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX boss, Elon Musk, all posted support for Amodei’s essay on slowing AI development, titled “We Must Pace the Frontier”.
