From 46m agoIntroduction: AI-linked Asian stocks slump after slowdown callGood morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.Investors are reassessing the value of companies driving the artificial intelligence revolution after several leading AI figures called for a slowdown in development for safety reasons.Shares in AI-linked companies in Asia dropped when trading began today, dragging South Korea’s KOSPI index down by 3.7%. Chipmaker SK Hynix has slumped by 5.75%SoftBank, a major AI invester, fell by as much as 13% in Tokyo after OpenAI’s chief executive officer Sam Altman said that the ChatGPT-maker won’t go public this year (SoftBank owns a stake in OpenAI).Taipei’s Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dropped by 1.2%.Traders’ optimism about AI has taken a hit after the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed for the AI industry to “slow down” – a call which was quickly backed by both Altman and Elon Musk.Amodei said “building [AI] too fast is reckless”, and warned that a swarm of AI agents could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet” in future.Although Amodie’s claims have been disputed by some AI experts, investors are pricing in a slowdown to AI development which would make it harder for the industry to pay for its rapid rollout of data centres.Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, says there is a “sour mood in the markets this morning”, explaining: