AI-linked stocks sold off in premarket trading on Monday after tech leaders called for a slower approach to developing powerful artificial intelligence.
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Tech stocks slipped in premarket trading Monday after a weekend of increasingly dire warnings about AI.Nvidia was down 3% in premarket trading, while SpaceX shares fell 0.6% and Google was off 0.7%. Nasdaq 100 futures pointed to a 1.6% decline at the open, suggesting the selling could extend across large-cap tech.The weakness followed a weekend in which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged AI companies to slow the "reckless" pace of development, warning that increasingly capable AI agents could eventually cause severe economic damage.The call gained backing from some of the industry's biggest names. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX boss Elon Musk all supported Amodei's proposal to pace frontier AI development.Altman said OpenAI would match Anthropic's commitment to embed outside evaluators in the company to assess its safety practices.
Investor concerns were also sharpened by Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic who resigned last week, saying the rival labs were "gambling with our lives" in their race to build self-improving AI.The market reaction was particularly severe in Asia, where chipmakers and AI-infrastructure suppliers have been major beneficiaries of the AI boom.SoftBank, one of OpenAI's largest backers, closed down almost 11%. South Korea's volatile and tech dominated Kospi index fell 3%, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing shares dropped 2%.Memory-chip names were among the biggest losers in US premarket trading. SanDisk is poised to fall 9%, Intel by 4%, and Micron by 5%.
