By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
Monday morning, and the men who built the AI boom stood up and told everyone to ease off the gas. By afternoon, investors had already hit the brakes for them.
Shares in SoftBank, the Japanese investor bankrolling much of OpenAI's expansion, slumped 13%. South Korea's Kospi index, stacked with the chipmakers that supply AI data centers, dropped 3%. The selling spread across Asia and was expected to reach the Nasdaq later in the day, according to The Guardian.
The trigger: bosses at Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX backed a call for a slowdown in what they termed "reckless" AI development, citing fears the technology could run out of control. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has pushed this line for weeks, even as his own company courts investors ahead of a stock market debut that could value it near $2 trillion, according to CNBC.
That contradiction hasn't gone unnoticed. CNBC's Jim Cramer questioned Amodei's "slowdown manifesto" this week, noting the CEO keeps raising alarms that would, if heeded, hit the valuations of the very companies fueling the AI trade — including his own. Cramer said Amodei raises real points, but warning publicly while raising money privately is the kind of mixed signal that makes traders nervous.
Separately, a former Anthropic employee's viral warning that AI could threaten humanity has amplified the story further, Fox News reported, though the network noted the White House and other critics are questioning the motives behind the sudden wave of alarm.
Whatever the motive, the market reaction was real money leaving real accounts. For workers whose retirement funds are stacked with tech and chip names, a 13% one-day slide in a bellwether like SoftBank isn't an abstraction — it's the balance on the next statement.
Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian, CNBC and Fox News.
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