Technology stocks around the world fell on Monday, after a chorus of senior executives at artificial intelligence companies called for slowing down the rapid pace of development of the transformative technology.
Futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell nearly 2 percent ahead of the open of trading in New York. Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta and other companies at the forefront of the A.I. build-out posted declines premarket.
South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index, which is heavily influenced by two chip suppliers for A.I. data centers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, fell more than 3 percent. Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, fell 1.2 percent. Japan’s main stock index also declined, with SoftBank, a major tech investment firm, shedding more than 10 percent.
In Europe, semiconductor stocks like ASML of the Netherlands and Infineon of Germany fell sharply.
The tech industry has been the engine powering global markets to repeated new highs in recent years as advances in A.I. have moved faster than investors initially expected.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published a long blog post on Saturday calling on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of rapidly advancing models at the so-called frontier of development.
Those models, he wrote, have already begun to build the next generation of artificial intelligence, in what is known as “recursive self-improvement.” That raises the risk that the technology will become an autonomous cybersecurity threat, even threatening “serious economic disruption.”
“A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute,” Dr. Amodei said. As one remedy, he said he would hire third-party “evaluators” who would “verify adherence to safety practices and commitments.”
The post was endorsed by Elon Musk, who runs Space X, which also houses his A.I platform, x.AI; Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI; and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind.
“I agree with Dario,” Mr. Altman said, adding that he would also hire third-party “evaluators” to oversee OpenAI’s safety practices.
SpaceX, which is publicly traded, fell about 2 percent in premarket trading on Monday. OpenAI and Anthropic are both expected to list publicly in the future. But Mr. Altman of OpenAI said in a recent interview with Fortune that “right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.”
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on Fox News on Sunday that the steps Mr. Amodei suggested in his blog post were “pretty sensible.”
But despite the rare show of allegiance among the tech leaders, President Trump said that he would not want to see a slowdown that could give China the opportunity to move ahead of the United States on A.I.
“Whoever wins with A.I. wins,” said Mr. Trump on the sidelines of a golf tournament held at one of his courses in Ireland over the weekend.
China’s rapid progress in open-source A.I. models, which rival those from Anthropic and other industry leaders and are available for other developers to use and build on, has split Silicon Valley. In his call for coordination of safe A.I. development, Dr. Amodei said there should be restrictions on chip sales to China and a crack down on the improper harvesting of data from A.I. systems by Chinese companies.
“If we execute these measures well,” he added, “I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3-5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important.” He also said that the United States and other democratic nations should work to get China to accept limits the speed of A.I. developments, although given the stakes “there will likely be stark limits on what can be achieved.”
On Monday, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, told reporters in a briefing that “hyping up various threat narratives, engaging in confrontation, and resorting to malicious competition will only disrupt the global A.I. governance process and serve the interests of no one.”
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
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