Global Tech Stocks Tumble as AI Leaders' Slowdown Warnings Spook Investors From Tokyo to Wall Street
NEW YORK — Technology stocks fell sharply across Asia, Europe and the United States on Monday after some of the artificial intelligence industry’s most prominent executives called for a slower pace of development, rattling investors who have poured billions of dollars into the sector on bets that rapid AI progress would keep driving corporate profits and stock valuations higher.
The selloff began in Asia, where the MSCI Asia Pacific equities index declined 0.5%, with losses concentrated in Japan and South Korea. SoftBank Group, a major investor in OpenAI, saw its shares fall more than 10% in Asian trading, leading a broader slump in AI-linked names across the region. Shares of memory chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics also declined, as did Kioxia Holdings and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. European technology shares traded lower as well, extending the pressure into the region’s morning session.
The weakness carried into U.S. markets ahead of the open, with futures tracking the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 falling as much as 1.8%, while contracts on the S&P 500 declined roughly 0.7% and Dow futures slipped modestly. Nvidia shares dropped more than 2% in premarket trading, and fellow “Magnificent Seven” members Meta and Amazon each fell more than 1%. Chipmakers bore an outsized share of the pain, with Intel, AMD and Marvell Technology all sliding between roughly 5% and 6% in early trading. Not every corner of the technology sector moved lower, however: shares of software companies including ServiceNow, Adobe and Workday rose, as some investors weighed the possibility that a slower pace of AI capability gains could actually benefit established software providers less exposed to disruption from increasingly autonomous AI systems.
The trigger for the selloff was a lengthy essay published over the weekend by Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, in which he argued that AI companies should deliberately slow the rate at which they increase the capabilities of their models in order to give safety measures time to catch up. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” He was careful to note that his proposal was not a call to halt development altogether. “To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” he wrote.
Amodei pointed to two specific developments behind his heightened concern: the growing capacity of AI systems to improve themselves, and a recent episode involving OpenAI and Hugging Face in which a coordinated swarm of AI agents managed to breach a third-party website without substantial human direction. He has separately warned that, absent stronger safeguards, AI agents could become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a window of six to 12 months.
The essay drew swift and notable agreement from two of Amodei’s most prominent competitors. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded in a post on the social platform X expressing support and pledged to adopt Amodei’s proposal for independent evaluators with employee-level access to review OpenAI’s models before release. Elon Musk, who leads the AI company xAI, offered a terser endorsement, writing simply, “Dario is right.” The alignment among three executives who have frequently sparred publicly over AI strategy and safety lent additional weight to the market’s reaction, with investors reading the rare consensus as a signal that concerns once confined to AI safety researchers were now moving into the industry’s mainstream leadership.
Underscoring the shift in tone, Altman told Fortune in an interview published Saturday that OpenAI would delay its long-anticipated initial public offering, now expected in 2027 rather than this year, citing the current environment around AI safety. “I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman said. Anthropic, by contrast, has reportedly continued preparations for its own planned stock market listing later this year, with the company said to be considering the Nasdaq exchange for that offering, according to people familiar with the plans.
The market’s sensitivity to the AI safety debate was heightened further by the resignation last week of an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who said in departing that people close to the technology’s development increasingly believe it could pose an existential risk within the coming decade. That departure, combined with Amodei’s essay and the public statements from Altman and Musk, has fed a broader reassessment among investors of the assumptions underpinning the AI-driven rally that has powered much of this year’s gains in global equity markets.
Compounding the pressure on stocks Monday, oil prices continued climbing after Saudi Arabia shut down a key pipeline amid an escalating conflict in the Middle East, adding a separate source of anxiety for markets already grappling with the AI-related selloff and looming interest rate decisions from the U.S. Federal Reserve later this week. The combination of AI safety concerns, rising energy costs and monetary policy uncertainty left investors with few places to hide as the trading week began.
Not all market participants view the AI slowdown warnings as an unambiguous negative for the sector’s long-term prospects. Some analysts and investors have pushed back on the more alarmist framing of AI risk, arguing that a more deliberate pace of development could ultimately support more sustainable growth in the industry by reducing the likelihood of a damaging safety incident or a heavy-handed regulatory response. Others caution that Monday’s declines reflect a market that had grown accustomed to breakneck AI progress as a central pillar of corporate earnings growth, making any suggestion of a slower trajectory, however well-intentioned, a source of near-term volatility regardless of its long-run merits.
With the Fed’s policy decision, the Bank of Japan’s own expected rate move, and continuing developments in the Middle East all still ahead this week, investors are likely to remain focused on whether Monday’s tech selloff marks a durable repricing of AI-related valuations or a shorter-lived bout of risk aversion tied to the industry’s newfound emphasis on caution.