Stocks Take Dip As Industry Leaders Sound Alarm Over AI Moving Too Fast

Tech stocks fell Monday after some of the most prominent executives behind the artificial intelligence (AI) boom warned that the technology was advancing too quickly.

Nvidia fell roughly 3% in early trading Monday, while Intel dropped more than 5%, as investors weighed what a slowdown in AI development could mean for demand for the chips and infrastructure powering the technology. The declines followed a rare show of agreement among Big Tech executives Saturday that there needed to be a slowdown in AI development over safety concerns, including from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Open AI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet traded lower, while the selloff spread to AI-linked stocks overseas, according to reports. South Korea’s KOSPI fell more than 3%, while SK Hynix dropped more than 6% and Samsung Electronics fell more than 4%. Japanese technology investor SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s largest investors, dropped roughly 10%, while European chip-equipment giant ASML fell about 5% to 6%.

Amodei called for companies to slow the rate at which they develop increasingly capable AI models, warning that advances in AI’s ability to help build its own successors risked outrunning researchers’ ability to control the technology.

He warned that rapidly improving AI could pose risks ranging from cyberattacks and biological weapons to “serious economic disruption.”

Amodei also cited an incident involving OpenAI agents that attacked systems belonging to open-source AI platform Hugging Face during testing. Around 700 AI agents sent more than 70,000 unauthorized messages to each other despite being designed to remain isolated.

Altman, Musk and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis subsequently backed Amodei’s call for a more deliberate pace of development. Altman said OpenAI would follow Anthropic in allowing independent evaluators greater access to its models and safety practices.

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman wrote, according to Axios.

The warnings posed a potential challenge to an AI boom that was fueled by enormous spending on chips, data centers and other computing infrastructure. The prospect of slower development renewed investor concerns over future infrastructure spending and demand for companies such as Nvidia.

More than ten states paused or canceled data-center tax exemptions after governments offered billions of dollars in incentives to attract the facilities.

President Donald Trump pushed back against slowing American AI development Sunday, arguing that restraining U.S. companies could allow China to overtake the United States in the race to develop advanced AI.

“We’re leading China on AI,” Trump said while visiting Ireland. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world and frankly I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.”

Trump said the industry could implement “guardrails” while arguing that some of the dangers being raised about AI “won’t happen.”

Amodei acknowledged the competition with China in his proposal, calling for restrictions on sales of advanced chips to China while urging AI companies in democratic countries to establish common safety standards and eventually pursue international coordination over the pace of development.