Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's call to slow the pace of frontier AI development triggered a global sell-off in chip and tech stocks on Monday. Nasdaq futures pointed to a lower open in New York.
Amodei's essay landed just as markets were reassessing how much AI infrastructure spending they can sustain, and semiconductor makers took the brunt of the reaction first.
Chipmakers absorb the sharpest losses
Intel and AMD both fell over 4% in the sessions after Amodei published his essay. Memory chipmakers Micron and SanDisk dropped between 3.9% and 4.5% over the same stretch. The iShares Semiconductor ETF declined roughly 2.8%, a broad gauge for the sector.
The sector was already fragile before the essay landed. Semiconductor stocks had already shed more than $1 trillion in market value earlier in 2026 as investors grew nervous about the pace of AI capital spending.
Asian and European tech benchmarks slide
South Korea's KOSPI dropped 3.7% when trading opened Monday. Chipmaker SK Hynix slumped 5.75%. SoftBank fell as much as 13% in Tokyo after OpenAI's Sam Altman said the company will not go public this year.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dropped 1.2% in Taipei. Europe followed the same pattern: the Stoxx Europe 600 Technology index fell 2.3%, its lowest level since 31 July.
French materials supplier Soitec dropped 12.8%, leading the sell-off. Germany's Aixtron fell 9.3%. Chipmaker Infineon dropped 7.45%.
ASML shares slumped about 4.5% as the photolithography-equipment maker felt the pullback in AI-linked demand.
Wall Street braces for a red open
Amodei's essay, titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," laid out a three-step plan built around independent safety evaluators, industry-wide coordination on safety standards, and international agreements. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both backed the call for a slower pace. But the Nasdaq is expected to fall 1.4% when it opens Monday, according to AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould.
The caution also hit private valuations. IG's OpenAI Pre-IPO market-cap contract dropped to $1.57 trillion, a pullback of about $70 billion from the contract's $1.64 trillion high reached after OpenAI released Astra on 3 September. According to the Guardian, Altman said in an interview published over the weekend that a stock market float this year would be "ill-advised".
Analysts note the long-term demand story for chips has not fundamentally changed, since enterprise adoption of current AI models and inference workloads still require significant infrastructure regardless of how frontier development paces out.
Sources: The Guardian, Crypto Briefing
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