AI Bubble About to Burst? Three Giants Rarely Unite to Call for Slowing AI Development

Author: Wall Street News

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted a call for the global AI industry to proactively slow the pace of frontier model development, which was subsequently publicly endorsed by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Altman also told Fortune magazine that OpenAI will not proceed with an IPO plan this year, citing that "going public now would be unwise given the current safety landscape."

The sudden shift from pursuing extreme growth to emphasizing safety and slowing down has triggered a chain reaction in the trading community. Early market indicators show that after the "AI slowdown" news broke, related assets on the HyperliquidX platform fell accordingly, with OpenAI and Anthropic dropping 7% and 2.8% respectively.

Multiple market observers and investors have issued warnings on social media, concerned that the news will have a significant impact on AI-related stocks such as Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD on Monday. Jason, a well-known tech investor on X platform, directly posted that "AI stocks will fall more than 10% in early Monday trading," and said Amodei's blog post "single-handedly unraveled the AI trade."

Market Sentiment Under Pressure, "AI Trade" Faces Reassessment

The market is facing a potential reset of valuation models. User preetkailon stated that current market pricing is entirely based on massive AI spending and sustained high-speed growth. If the pace of AI development indeed begins to slow, investors will have to rethink these expectations. He advised investors to closely monitor AI-related companies such as Nvidia, AMD, and Marvell on Monday, and warned against blindly chasing highs in the current market environment.

However, there is still disagreement on whether fundamental demand will sharply decline as a result. User The AI Investor believes that existing models already have sufficient productivity to drive unprecedented demand for inference computing:

"Even if AI model development slows, the substantive impact on computing demand is relatively limited. The bigger shock right now will be concentrated on market sentiment and panic, rather than actual business fundamentals."

Valuation Logic Shifts, IPO Plans Hit Snag

There is an inherent contradiction between the call to slow down and the public market's thirst for high growth, which is precisely the core reason OpenAI is delaying its IPO. CNBC reporter Deirdre Bosa pointed out that this is not surprising, but rather an inevitable outcome of the narrative: when OpenAI and Anthropic themselves admit that commercial pressures push AI companies to develop too quickly, it becomes harder for them to justify themselves in the public market.

Public markets bring additional pressures, including growth expectations, quarterly reports, and stock prices that fluctuate every second. Bosa said that telling investors "we need to slow down growth" is an extremely difficult narrative for a public company:

"While safe development may be more important than maximizing wealth creation, these companies' current massive private valuations, capital needs, and huge return expectations are all built on rapid advancement."

User David Chie raised the question of whether "slowdown" means slowing growth or slowing frontier model training. Bosa emphasized that these companies' valuations are largely tied to continued progress in frontier technology, especially in a competitive landscape where open-weight models are close behind. Slowing frontier development would directly undermine the foundation of their high valuations.

Capex Slowdown or Expectation Management?

Beyond safety considerations, the trading community remains scrutinizing of the potential commercial motives behind this rare three-party alliance. User Jason Choi noted that Anthropic has always been outspoken about safety, but the timing of proposing a specific slowdown plan at this moment is itself worth questioning.

There is an inherent contradiction that needs to be clarified: explicitly slowing frontier model development objectively gives competitors time to narrow the capability gap—which is a form of self-weakening for companies that rely on technological leadership to support high valuations. So why did the three parties still choose to speak out jointly? A more persuasive interpretation is:

This move is essentially corporate-level "IPO expectation management" and provides an option for future capital expenditure (capex) cuts. Against the backdrop of increasingly massive AI infrastructure investment, slowing down under the pretext of safety may help these highly valued startups alleviate the financial pressure of continuous cash burn.

"We are proactively slowing down for safety" is far more acceptable to the market than "we can't afford to keep burning cash."

Of course, safety and commercial motives are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But for investors, what really needs to be judged is: is this "slowdown" a genuine inflection point in AI development, or a narrative restructuring that benefits the giants themselves? The answer may begin to emerge in Monday's market performance.