Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and other semiconductor companies saw their share prices decline during premarket trading on Monday. The drop follows a call from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for the artificial intelligence industry to deliberately slow the pace of model capability gains.
In a Saturday essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," Amodei warned that rogue AI agents could form a massive botnet and cause hundreds of billions in damage within six to 12 months. To mitigate this risk, Anthropic announced it would give external evaluators employee-level system access. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk backed the proposal, with OpenAI committing to similar third-party testing.
The market reacted to the warning by repricing the AI trade. Nasdaq-100 futures fell 1.5%, while S&P 500 futures lost 0.6%. In Asia, SoftBank closed nearly 11% lower, and South Korea’s Kospi sank 3.3%, driven by a 6.4% drop in SK Hynix Inc. In Europe, ASML Holdings N.V. fell 6%, and NVIDIA Corporation dropped roughly 3% on unusually heavy premarket volume.
The semiconductor selloff reflects a fear that slower model development could reduce demand for training chips, memory, networking equipment, and data-center capacity. Conversely, the strongest buying appeared in companies positioned to protect enterprises against increasingly capable AI systems. CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWD), SailPoint, Inc. (NASDAQ: SAIL), and Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: PANW) each gained roughly 5.1%. ServiceNow, Inc. (NYSE: NOW) rose 4.9%, alongside HubSpot, Inc. (NYSE: HUBS).
Pre-market movers included Marvell Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL) down 8.0%, Vertiv Holdings Co (NYSE: VRT) down 7.9%, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co (NYSE: HPE) down 7.7%. Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) was down 6.6%.
