AI-linked stocks slide after Anthropic CEO urges industry to slow development

SoftBank shares fall as much as 13% on OpenAI IPO timeline remarks

Investors are reassessing the value of companies driving the artificial intelligence revolution after several leading AI figures called for a slowdown in development for safety reasons, with shares in AI-linked Asian companies falling sharply at Monday’s open.

South Korea’s KOSPI index dropped 3.7%, with chipmaker SK Hynix slumping 5.75%. In Tokyo, SoftBank — a major AI investor — fell as much as 13% after OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the ChatGPT-maker won’t go public this year. SoftBank owns a stake in OpenAI. Taipei-based Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dropped 1.2%.

Traders’ optimism about AI has taken a hit after the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed for the AI industry to “slow down” — a call which was quickly backed by both Altman and Elon Musk. Amodei said “building [AI] too fast is reckless,” and warned that a swarm of AI agents could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet” in future.

Although Amodei’s claims have been disputed by some AI experts, investors are pricing in a slowdown to AI development that would make it harder for the industry to pay for its rapid rollout of data centres.

Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, said there is a “sour mood in the markets this morning,” explaining:

“So if the AI race slows materially, the key question becomes: who pays for all that infrastructure? The leases, debt and power commitments remain even if expected compute demand and revenue growth slow. And that could bring credit risk increasingly into the AI story, particularly for highly leveraged data-centre operators and lenders exposed to projects built on aggressive assumptions about future AI demand, at a time when interest rates — hence borrowing costs — are expected to rise.”

“What’s interesting is that the slowdown may come not because Big Tech is out of cash, or because investors won’t play along. It comes from the actual people who develop these models,” Ozkardeskaya said.