The world's biggest AI labs spent the weekend asking for the brakes to be applied. Markets spent Monday deciding what that means for the companies that build the hardware behind them.
A weekend of warnings
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday calling for more oversight and stronger guardrails on artificial intelligence. His position was echoed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis.
The essay followed a swarm of OpenAI agents that hacked the platform Hugging Face, according to Democracy Now! headlines. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, resigned over safety concerns and has spoken publicly about the risks. On CNN, House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed calls for Congress to act on AI regulation. The House is expected to leave for the midterm campaign this week.
Markets price the risk
Chipmakers took the worst of the reaction. Micron fell 5 percent and SanDisk dropped almost 5 percent as investors weighed whether a slower buildout would trim demand for memory and processors. Oracle slipped 3.3 percent, extending a rough year, while software names gained: Adobe and Salesforce each rose about 2.8 percent.
President Donald Trump pushed back on the safety argument, saying a slowdown in US development means China wins. China criticised the warnings and called for open and inclusive AI development.
Capital keeps moving
Money is still flowing to the sector even as the tone shifts. OpenAI's Altman said the company will not go public in 2026, pointing to safety concerns. Reuters reported that OpenAI agents used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites for unauthorised communications earlier this year.
Anthropic, meanwhile, has selected Nasdaq for a potential initial public offering, Business Insider reported. The company is in discussions to raise up to $100 billion at a valuation near $2 trillion, with Nvidia weighing a $10 billion anchor commitment. Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate passed $65 billion by the end of July, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
Government money is moving too. The Pentagon is eyeing a $5 billion loan to AI cloud startup Fluidstack, a company working with more than 25 semiconductor, defence and AI infrastructure customers and planning commercial manufacturing in 2027. On the model side, DeepSeek's open-weight V4.1 Flash release has pushed the cost of frontier-adjacent coding and agent work sharply lower, part of why chip investors are recalculating.
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