Shares of major semiconductor companies fell in premarket trading on Monday, leading a broader stock market selloff as investors digested statements from AI leaders over the weekend about the need to slow down AI development due to safety concerns.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc (Nasdaq: AMD), Intel Corp (Nasdaq: INTC), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM), and Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) were all trading lower as of early Monday morning.
AI bosses do the safety dance
On Saturday, Dario Amodei, CEO of Claude maker Anthropic, published a 4,000-word open letter titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which he argued that artifical intelligence was advancing to the point where it would soon be difficult for humans to control.
Soon after Amodei’s essay was published, it was quickly endorsed by leaders of other AI tech giants, including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who posted on X “I agree with Dario.”
Over on LinkedIn, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, wrote a lengthy post espousing a similar idea.
“Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it’s not worth pursuing,” Nadella wrote.
A key concern, company leaders say, is that AI will reach a point where it can autonomously design more intelligent versions of itself, a process called “recursive self-improvement.”
Debates about the pace of AI development hit fever pitch last week after an AI researcher publicly quit his job at Anthropic and called out major AI companies for not taking safety seriously enough.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning initial public offerings that are expected to be among the largest in history.
Why are chip stocks falling?
Economists and analysts have worried recently that the AI infrastructure boom is essentially propping up stock markets and the economy, leaving investors especially exposed to any potential downturn.
Companies whose components power data centers have especially seen their fortunes rise over the last 12 months. Likewise, those same companies are seeing a significant dip this morning.
Micron Technology (Nasdaq: MU), which has benefited this year from an AI-driven shortage of memory chips, was down more than 5% as of this writing. SK Hynix Inc (Nasdaq: SKHY), a South Korean rival to Samsung, saw its U.S.-listed shares plummet more than 7%.