A global selloff in artificial intelligence stocks gathered pace on Monday as investors reacted to calls from the leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI for the industry to slow its "reckless" pace of development — raising questions about whether the massive capital spending behind the AI boom can continue at its current scale.
The selling started in Asia and spread to Europe before US markets opened. SoftBank, the Japanese investor and one of OpenAI's biggest financial backers, slumped 13%, among the heaviest single-day falls in the company's recent history. South Korea's Kospi index, which leans heavily on chipmakers that supply AI companies, dropped 3%. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's dominant contract chipmaker, fell 1.2%. For more context on this story, see our ongoing artificial intelligence updates.
In Europe, shares in ASML — the Dutch supplier whose lithography machines are indispensable to advanced chip production, and Europe's most valuable company — fell as much as 5.4% in morning trading. Futures tracking the Nasdaq pointed to a decline of roughly 1.3% for the tech-heavy index at the US open, according to The Guardian, and Reuters later reported Nasdaq futures down 1.72%, with S&P 500 futures off 0.70% and Dow futures marginally lower at 0.18%.
The repricing began Sunday evening, when Dow futures lost about 180 points, S&P 500 futures slipped 0.5% and Nasdaq 100 futures fell 1.2%, CNBC reported.
The Trigger: Tech's Own Leaders Urging the Brakes
What makes the selloff unusual is its origin. This was not an earnings miss or a macro shock — it was a wave of warnings from AI's most powerful executives themselves.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on September 12 titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing that "building too fast is reckless" and warning that an uncontrolled swarm of AI agents could inflict hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX and xAI founder Elon Musk all publicly endorsed the call. Altman went further, committing to embed outside evaluators within OpenAI to verify its safety practices.
Investors read the statements two ways: as a genuine signal that frontier labs see mounting risks, and as a potential prelude to regulation or voluntary limits that would slow the spending cycle. That spending — hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers, chips and power infrastructure — has been the engine of the AI trade. As The Guardian noted, markets began pricing in a slowdown that would make it harder for the industry to justify that level of investment.
Chipmakers were hit hardest because their revenues sit furthest downstream of lab spending. Reuters reported that chipmakers fell while some software stocks climbed, a rotation that suggests investors see slower model development hurting hardware suppliers before it dents software adoption.
The Other Side of the Trade: AI's Disrupted Rally
In a striking inversion, companies often cast as AI's victims rallied. Advertising group WPP rose 3.1% and analytics business Relx climbed 4.2% in London trading. Relx had earlier suffered a sharp fall this year after Anthropic launched a suite of data and automation tools seen as a threat to analytics providers. If AI progress slows, the logic goes, disruption of incumbent business models slows with it.
Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank's head of global research, cautioned against overreading the executives' appeals. "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 wrote, per The Guardian. "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."
Reid added that the competitive race between companies and countries remains so intense that "it is difficult to imagine firms voluntarily stepping back while rivals continue to push ahead," and that "it is hard to see China standing still."
Macro Headwinds Compound the Jitters
The AI anxiety arrived alongside other pressures. Oil prices jumped, adding inflation risk just as traders prepared for a week that includes a US Federal Reserve meeting and a Bank of Japan decision — a combination The Wall Street Journal described as amplifying the selloff in AI-related stocks worldwide.
There was also a notable contradiction at the center of Monday's move. While investors marked down AI-exposed names on slowdown fears, Anthropic itself told investors its adjusted operating income would be positive for a second consecutive quarter, according to the Financial Times — a profitability milestone for the company as it prepares for a US stock market listing.
In other words, the company that sparked the selloff by urging restraint is, by its own account, one of the few AI labs making money. Whether the market treats that as reassurance or irony may determine how quickly the AI trade stabilizes in the days ahead.
For now, the world's most crowded trade has been reminded that its biggest promoters are also its most prominent skeptics — and that when they speak in unison, capital listens.
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