Tech stocks opened sharply lower Monday after a weekend of increasingly dire warnings about AI. Nvidia extended its premarket slide at Monday's open, trading down 4% shortly after 9:30 a.m. ET, with SpaceX also down 1.9%. The wider Nasdaq was down over 1% at the open.
The weakness followed a weekend in which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged AI companies to slow the "reckless" pace of development, warning that increasingly capable AI agents could eventually cause severe economic damage. The call gained backing from some of the industry's biggest names.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX boss Elon Musk all supported Amodei's proposal to pace frontier AI development. Altman said OpenAI would match Anthropic's commitment to embed outside evaluators in the company to assess its safety practices.
Investor concerns were also sharpened by Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic who resigned last week, saying the rival labs were "gambling with our lives" in their race to build self-improving AI. The market reaction was particularly severe in Asia, where chipmakers and AI-infrastructure suppliers have been major beneficiaries of the AI boom.
SoftBank, one of OpenAI's largest backers, fell 14%. South Korea's volatile and tech-dominated Kospi index fell 3%, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing shares dropped 3.2%. Memory-chip names were among the biggest losers at market open. SanDisk, Intel, and Micron all fell around 6%.
The downturn comes amid broader concern among investors and analysts that the AI rally has pushed some valuations ahead of the profits the technology has generated so far. Those questions loom large for Anthropic as it prepares for a potential US listing this year.
The company is reportedly on track to post adjusted operating profit for a second consecutive quarter.