Semiconductor stocks dropped Monday after Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei issued a public plea urging the industry to “slow down the AI industry.”
OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) CEO Sam Altman echoed the warning, and even Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk voiced his agreement with the cautious message.
Despite the high-profile pushback from AI leaders, Wall Street analysts are maintaining that development and capital spending will continue without meaningful interruption.
D.A. Davidson tech analyst Gil Luria told Yahoo Finance on Monday: “Nobody’s actually slowing anything down.”
Luria was openly skeptical of the warnings, saying of calls from Anthropic and OpenAI executives to “pace the frontier” of artificial intelligence development: “I just doubt their motivations… they’re demanding regulation to stifle competition.”
Even in a scenario where AI development did decelerate, Luria argued that the major hyperscalers would remain in a strong financial position regardless of any slowdown.
“Let’s say they did overbuild over the next year or two,” Luria said. “They can just sit on that, absorb the extra capacity, and their cash flow will actually skyrocket.”
Capital expenditures from Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Meta, and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) have expanded sharply, totaling $293 billion across just the first two quarters of 2026.
Meta posted the most aggressive acceleration, with capital expenditure up 58% quarter over quarter, while Amazon and Google also ramped their AI infrastructure commitments substantially.
Combined, the four technology giants are now on pace to spend nearly $600 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, according to AlphaSpace data.
Nancy Tengler, CEO and chief investment officer of Laffer Tengler Investments, captured the prevailing sentiment among investors, saying: “The AI genie is out of the bottle,” and adding, “The technology has already spread across sectors.”
President Trump rejected calls for guardrails on AI models, pointing to the United States’ competitive position against China in the global AI race.
Giuseppe Sette, co-founder and president of Reflexivity, said that with China actively competing, “we don’t expect any major slowdown” in AI development, reinforcing the view that geopolitical pressure is keeping spending at full throttle.
Sette also addressed any potential pullback in AI stock valuations, stating plainly that “that’s simply a buying opportunity,” signaling continued confidence among market observers despite the cautionary voices from within the industry itself.
