AI Chiefs Call a Slowdown, Chips Tumble, Zuckerberg Pushes Back

This week Silicon Valley asked itself whether to slow down. Anthropic's chief executive called for it on Saturday, the market repriced the entire AI trade on Monday, and Meta's chief executive argued on Tuesday that an industrywide pause was the wrong way to get there — while the spending that started the argument kept climbing.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, said the AI industry should slow its fast-moving development so safety measures can catch up, warning that within six to twelve months AI could be capable of leading a swarm that takes over the entire internet. His plan would give a team of outside evaluators employee-like access inside Anthropic — desks, access badges and company laptops — and asks the U.S. government for antitrust waivers so AI companies can coordinate on safety standards. 1

AI-linked stocks plunged worldwide on Monday, after OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk both said they agreed with Amodei — Altman adding that "pacing" does "not mean stopping". Reuters reported the Nasdaq 100 slid 1.2% to a six-week low in early trading before paring losses, and the Philadelphia semiconductor index dropped 5.2%, with Nvidia off 3%, AMD 4.5% and Micron 5.4%. In Asia, SoftBank fell more than 10%. 2 CNBC reported the split inside the selloff: Hewlett Packard Enterprise slid about 11% and Dell 6%, while cybersecurity vendors rallied on expectations of more security spending, with Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike each up more than 13%. 3

On Tuesday Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, took aim at that slowdown argument. He said leading AI labs should focus on safety rather than improving their own technology, and that calls to pause AI development industrywide were the wrong approach: "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely." He cited Meta's decision to delay the release of its Muse agent for several months on security grounds. The Times also reported that Meta plans to release its most powerful model yet, internally called Watermelon, in the coming weeks. 4

The same week brought research from the Progressive Policy Institute putting numbers on that contradiction: Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft invested more than half — $269 billion — of the $520 billion in U.S. capital spending last year, a 61.1 percent increase from 2024. Bonds issued by the big cloud providers climbed from $16.7 billion in 2024 to $193 billion so far this year. 5