AI Safety Calls From Amodei and Altman Spark Market Selloff and Trump Backlash

A wave of public calls from top AI executives to slow frontier development rattled markets on Monday and ignited a sharp political confrontation with President Trump. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the industry "must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," citing capabilities outpacing control. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman aligned with that view, saying development should be "paced." Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark added that AI kill switches may need to become a mandatory requirement, noting most labs already have ways to pull the plug.

The statements triggered a broad sell-off in AI hardware names. Marvell fell 7%, Broadcom dropped 4%, Nvidia pulled back and Micron declined 5%, while the Nasdaq 100 slipped as the 10-year Treasury yield touched 5%. Cybersecurity stocks moved sharply in the opposite direction, with CrowdStrike surging roughly 15% as investors reasoned that AI safety concerns directly expand its addressable market. Beaten-down enterprise software names also caught a bid, with C3.ai climbing 7%, UiPath rising 8% and SoundHound AI gaining 5%. Adobe added 4.2%.

Trump, who had met privately with Altman just days earlier, rejected the safety framing in a Truth Social post, calling the idea of AI "taking over the World, destroying Humanity" a "HOAX" comparable to the Russia and impeachment controversies. He argued that AI and data centers would be "the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History, Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet," and warned that regulation could undermine American leadership. Vice President Vance separately dismissed AI CEOs' requests for oversight as "a bit of a Trojan horse." Investor Michael Burry, alongside venture capitalists David Sacks and Bill Gurley, called the slowdown calls self-serving, and Wall Street analysts broadly expressed doubt that any real pullback in development was likely.

Microsoft separately published a 37-page draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct, with its AI CEO stating that "AI must be subordinate and always in service of people." US senators were also reported to be weighing legislation that would require AI companies to formally commit to catastrophe prevention. Hewlett Packard Enterprise offered a counterpoint to the gloom, reporting record quarterly revenue of 12.2 billion dollars, up 34%, beating estimates, raising full-year guidance, and announcing a new 3.5 billion dollar AI inferencing deal alongside an expanded Oracle partnership.