Trump rejects slowdown as UK MPs cite AI human rights risks
The Guardian reported the executives’ call came as investors began to price in a slowdown that would make it harder for the industry to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars in planned AI infrastructure spending.
Shares in SoftBank, a major Japanese backer of OpenAI, fell 13 percent in Tokyo. South Korea’s Kospi index, heavily weighted toward chip makers that supply AI companies, dropped 3 percent. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, slipped 1.2 percent in Taipei trading. Futures pointed to a 1.3 percent decline for the tech-heavy Nasdaq when U.S. markets opened later in the day.
In an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei wrote that “building too fast is reckless” and warned that a future swarm of autonomous AI agents could cause “hundreds of billions of dollars of damage” by “taking over the entire internet.” Some experts have disputed Amodei’s claims, the Guardian reported.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX chief Elon Musk posted support for Amodei’s essay on social media. Altman said he would match Amodei’s commitment to embedding outside evaluators within OpenAI to verify safety practices.
President Donald Trump rejected the slowdown call. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump told reporters over the weekend.
In London, a cross-party group of MPs and peers said AI posed a series of human rights risks and argued that no country in the world has laws sufficient to contain them.
Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid said the competitive dynamic between companies and countries made a voluntary industry slowdown unlikely. “The competitive race between companies and countries remains intense, and it’s difficult to imagine firms voluntarily stepping back while rivals continue to push ahead,” Reid said. “It is hard to see China standing still.”
Reid also suggested the executives’ warnings could be read as marketing rather than as a spending retreat. “If leading executives are openly discussing the risks of increasingly powerful systems, it could be them trying to get across how transformative they believe the technology may become and help advertise the power of their product,” he said. “Rather than signalling less spending, it could simply be that a greater share of AI investment is directed towards safety, monitoring and governance alongside the continued build-out of compute infrastructure.”
The FT report said Anthropic told investors its adjusted operating income would be positive for a second consecutive quarter, calling it a “big milestone” as the company prepares to list on the U.S. stock market this year. OpenAI has also signaled plans to go public, though Altman said over the weekend that the company would not do so in 2026, citing safety concerns with the technology.