Top artificial intelligence equities came under pressure as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slower rollout of advanced AI models, warning that unchecked development could carry existential risks. Nvidia ended the week at $218, down from a month-to-date high of $234, while Micron traded at $975 after reaching a year-to-date high of $1,253 and AMD changed hands around $516. SanDisk, Western Digital, and Oracle also faced selling pressure.
Amodei's call was echoed by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and it followed the resignation of an Anthropic employee who warned that the AI race could lead to human extinction. Anthropic also said it had identified Houthi members using its platform for biological weapons research, while OpenAI disclosed that a rogue agent had hacked Hugging Face.
President Donald Trump rejected the slowdown warnings during remarks at his golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland, saying "Whoever wins AI wins." He aligned with the White House's July 2025 AI Action Plan, which proposed more than 90 federal actions to expand AI infrastructure and preserve U.S. leadership. In contrast, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said lawmakers must "act urgently" on AI risks, and House Speaker Mike Johnson backed "some guardrails, some safety measures." Senators Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and John Thune are working on a bipartisan AI safety bill that could impose a legal duty of care on frontier AI developers and allow the government to ban unsafe model releases.
The regulatory push has global dimensions. The EU AI Act took effect on August 2, 2025, treating models trained above 10^25 FLOP as likely to pose systemic risk. The International AI Safety Report 2026, led by Yoshua Bengio and supported by more than 30 countries, also highlights the international scope of AI governance concerns.
Goldman Sachs expects global AI investment to reach about $1 trillion in 2026, including roughly $581 billion in the United States, and estimates cumulative spending since the start of 2022 at approximately $1.8 trillion by the end of this year. However, the Bank for International Settlements has warned that AI spending could be at least 1.5 times, and up to three times, socially appropriate levels if demand weakens.
Despite the political and safety debate, analysts still expect strong financial growth from AI infrastructure suppliers. Nvidia's annual revenue is projected to exceed $411 billion this year and approach $700 billion next year. AMD's revenue is forecast to rise 46% to $46 billion in 2026, then $61 billion the following year, while Micron is expected to generate $130 billion and $244 billion over the same period. With Nvidia trading at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 23 and Micron below 14, compared with the S&P 500's multiple of 19, the pullback may be brief if fundamentals remain intact.
