AI industry: Warnings about superintelligence are causing price losses on the stock exchanges

Frankfurt. The warnings from the heads of artificial intelligence (AI) providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI have alarmed investors worldwide. Leading figures called over the weekend to slow down AI developments to ensure safety.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had justified this position in an essay on Saturday, receiving support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, head of competitor xAI. Investors now face a new phase of uncertainty. They reacted promptly—with significant sell-offs.

In Asia, fears of a decline in AI demand pushed down the stock prices of tech conglomerate Samsung and semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix by four and seven percent, respectively. Softbank, an investor in OpenAI, lost eleven percent.

European markets also reacted sharply. Shares of Munich-based semiconductor manufacturer Infineon were down around eight percent in the late morning. Dutch chip equipment maker ASML lost just over five percent.

Over the weekend, Altman also announced that OpenAI’s planned initial public offering would be postponed until next year. He stated in an interview with the US magazine “Fortune” that he wanted to address safety issues away from the pressure of public markets.

OpenAI and Anthropic “have significant impacts on the entire technology sector,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Evercore ISI, to news agency Bloomberg. “If both companies were to significantly cut back on their research and development spending, new hires, and investments, it could have considerable effects on financial markets.”

Investors have repeatedly had to grapple with AI-related concerns in recent years. Fears of an AI bubble have repeatedly triggered sell-offs. For a brief period, the worry dominated that AI offerings could render companies like SAP, Salesforce, and other software providers obsolete. On Wall Street, this phenomenon was referred to in April as the “SaaS-apocalypse.” However, stock prices recovered shortly thereafter.

Stephan Kemper, Chief Investment Officer at BNP Paribas Wealth Management, warned on Monday against excessive pessimism. In a recent analysis, he wrote that while the driving force of the stock market year so far is experiencing a setback on the microeconomic level, “the order backlog still provides arguments for further increasing commercial penetration.” The warnings from Amodei and Altman relate to the race for superintelligence. This refers to an AI that would surpass humans in practically all cognitive areas.

However, demand for computing power in the corporate sector and for smaller, specialized models remains high, Kemper wrote. He pointed to revenue increases of more than 53 percent at TSMC in August as well as price hikes among Chinese chip developers. This supports the thesis that the monetization of AI is “less focused on a race for superintelligence, but increasingly taking place through integration as a classic IT service provider for the broader economy.”