Major AI Leaders Call for Development Slowdown as Tech Stocks Tumble

Stocks in artificial intelligence companies and chipmakers plummeted Monday after influential industry leaders issued an unprecedented joint call to deliberately slow the pace of AI capability development, citing escalating safety risks. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier" on Saturday arguing that AI firms are advancing too rapidly relative to their ability to understand and control the systems they build. "Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in endorsement, adding that his company would adopt Amodei's proposed safeguard of granting third-party evaluators employee-level access to verify safety practices. Elon Musk echoed the sentiment within days, creating an unusual alignment among three prominent but stylistically disparate technology figures.