Softbank’s shares fell more than 10% in Asia, leading a slump in major artificial intelligence-linked stocks across global markets on Monday amid growing calls for a development slowdown from leading labs like Anthropic and OpenAI amid warnings that rapid development of the technology may pose an existential threat to humans.
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Key Takeaways
- U.S. futures were down early on Monday, led by a 1.9% drop in the tech-heavy Nasdaq futures index.
- AI chipmaking giant Nvidia’s shares fell 3% in the premarket to $211, while chipmakers AMD, Intel and Qualcomm’s shares fell 5.76%, 6.20% and 5.12%, respectively.
- Shares of memory chipmaker Micron, which have surged more than 240% since the start of the year amid an AI-driven demand boom, fell 5% to $926.
- The Tokyo-listed shares of Softbank, which owns a 13% stake in OpenAI, slumped more than 13% before ending the trading day at ¥5,839 ($37.80)—more than 10.7% down from last week’s close.
- South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index also fell more than 3.2%, as shares of memory chipmakers Samsung and SKHynix—whose earnings have soared amid the AI boom—fell 4% and 6.3%, respectively.
- In Europe, shares of Dutch semiconductor giant ASML, which manufacturers the machines used to produce chips, fell 4.53%.
Forbes Valuation
According to our estimates, the net worth of Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and CEO of SoftBank Group, fell by more than $8 billion to $72.5 billion amid Monday’s rout. Son fell from 27th to 29th on the list of the world’s wealthiest people and is now the fourth richest Asian on the list, behind India’s Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani and ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming.
What Do We Know About The AI Slowdown Push?
Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO and billionaire Dario Amodei urged leading AI firms to deliberately slow the pace of frontier model development and warned that an unchecked push to build more advanced models without proper safety guardrails could threaten the global internet infrastructure. Amodei’s call gained support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI founder Elon Musk, two key rivals of Anthropic. In a blogpost titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei warned that cutting edge AI models were advancing significantly faster than expected and efforts to make them safe haven’t kept up. Amodei warned that continuing at the current pace of development could lead to autonomous bots taking over the entire internet within six to 12 months. Altman backed Amodei’s remarks in an X post, and both companies agreed to improve third-party monitoring of their models. Musk tweeted, “Dario is right,” but stopped short of making the same commitments on behalf of his company SpaceXAI.
Key Background
Amodei’s post came a few days after an ex-Anthropic researcher made a viral post on X, warning about AI-driven human extinction after quitting the company. The researcher, Jacob Coxon, raised his concerns in a series of X posts accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of not acting responsibly by “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He added that people building AI believe it could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” and this was not a “marketing stunt.” Evan Hubinger, the alignment science lead at Anthropic, reshared Coxon’s X posts and wrote that he and his colleagues “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” and said he personally thinks there is more than a 10% chance of it happening in the next decade.
Crucial quote
OpenAI president Greg Brockman appeared on an episode of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that aired early on Monday to discuss the slowdown push. Brockman clarified that the slowdown push his company is talking about is focused only on frontier models. “When we’re talking about pacing…We’re really talking about the sprint here. We’re talking about these massive supercomputers that are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of capital expenditure. It’s a very small number of players, and it’s a very different kind of scale.”
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