Technology shares fell in premarket trading on Monday following a weekend of increasingly severe warnings about AI.
At roughly 7:30 a.m. ET, Nvidia and SpaceX were each down 2% in premarket trading. Nasdaq 100 futures indicated a 1.4% decline at the open, hinting that selling could spread through large-cap technology stocks.
The drop came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged AI companies over the weekend to slow the “reckless” pace of development, warning that increasingly capable AI agents could eventually inflict serious economic damage.
His call was endorsed by some of the sector’s biggest leaders. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and SpaceX chief Elon Musk all backed Amodei’s proposal to moderate the pace of frontier AI development.
Altman said OpenAI would follow Anthropic’s pledge to bring in outside evaluators to review its safety practices.
Concerns among investors were further intensified by Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher who left last week and said the rival labs were “gambling with our lives” in their pursuit of self-improving AI.
The market response was especially sharp in Asia, where chipmakers and suppliers of AI infrastructure have been major winners from the AI boom.
SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s largest backers, closed nearly 11% lower. South Korea’s volatile, technology-heavy Kospi index dropped 3%, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing shares fell 2%.
Memory-chip companies were among the biggest decliners in US premarket trading. SanDisk and Intel were both set to fall 6%, while Micron looked likely to decline 5%.
The selloff comes as investors and analysts express growing concern that the AI rally has carried some valuations ahead of the profits the technology has produced to date.
Those questions are particularly significant for Anthropic, which is preparing for a possible US listing this year. The company is reportedly on pace to record adjusted operating profit for a second straight quarter.
Want more Themoneytimes in your news feed?
Add Themoneytimes to Google so our reporting is easier to find when you’re searching for what matters.