AI company shares plunge globally after warnings of slowing AI development over safety concerns
Despite the pressure on Wall Street, gains in many non-AI stocks helped limit the market’s losses. A mid-session drop in oil prices also had a positive effect, and the S&P 500 fell 0.3% as more stocks in the index advanced than declined.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 116 points, or 0.2%, at 2:02 p.m. Eastern Time, and the Nasdaq Composite was down 0.1%, having recovered most of its 1.3% loss earlier in the session.
AI stocks have been under pressure for some time now, amid concerns that their prices have risen too much during the excitement surrounding the technology. Fears rose to a new level over the weekend after one of the industry’s most prominent figures, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, called for a deliberate, global slowdown in AI development .
He cited security concerns, including the risk that artificial intelligence could become capable of coordinating a swarm of agents that could take control of the entire internet within the next six to 12 months.
Nvidia fell 2.8%
Nvidia, a company whose profits have risen sharply as its chips are used to train artificial intelligence models, lost 2.8%.
The company was the biggest detractor to the market due to its sheer size. SpaceX, which gets some of its business from AI, rose 0.4% after Elon Musk said over the weekend that he agreed with Amodei.
SoftBank Group, the Japanese giant that is a major investor in OpenAI, fell 10.7 percent in Tokyo after Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, also backed the idea of a slowdown. Altman also said in an interview with Fortune magazine published on Saturday that OpenAI would likely wait until next year to sell its shares on Wall Street. That could delay a major influx of money for SoftBank and other early investors in OpenAI.
South Korea’s stock market fell 3.3%
In South Korea, the Kospi index fell 3.3%, amid losses recorded by its two most important companies, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
In the United States, President Donald Trump has downplayed the need for his administration to control the development of artificial intelligence. He has said he is concerned about the possibility of the United States losing its advantage to China in the global competition and that victory in this competition would help manage the risks posed by the technology’s development.
Even though numerous voices inside and outside the AI industry have called for a slowdown in development to protect humanity, Trump stated on his social network on Monday that the only “protective barrier” that artificial intelligence needs “is a STRONG AND INTELLIGENT PRESIDENT (with a high IQ!), and the USA has one in abundance!”.
Several software companies that had previously fallen on concerns that rivals using artificial intelligence could hurt their businesses helped limit losses on Wall Street on Monday. Intuit, the company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks, rose 5%. Autodesk, whose software is used by designers, climbed 8%, while Adobe shares gained 4.7%.
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