A Very Good Monday…
Well, That Was An Interesting Monday.
AI spent the weekend talking about the dangers of AI.
By Monday morning, Wall Street had apparently picked a side.
→ CrowdStrike jumped 15%.
→ Palo Alto Networks gained 11%.
→ Okta climbed nearly 10%.
Meanwhile,
→ Nvidia fell 3%, while
→ SanDisk dropped 5% in premarket trading.
The catalyst came over the weekend, when the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI separately raised concerns about AI development moving faster than the safeguards around it.
That produced a rather unusual market reaction.
Investors sold some of the companies helping build the AI boom — and piled into companies whose business is, increasingly, protecting everyone from what comes with it.
Of course, there’s more to the story than one nervous Monday.
So, we went through the warnings, the skeptics — and the money that moved.
Let’s see.⇩
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One Weekend of Warnings…
Cybersecurity — up
→ Qualys QLYS ( ▲ 15.06% )
→ CrowdStrike CRWD ( ▲ 13.85% )
→ Zscaler ZS ( ▲ 16.53% )
→ Palo Alto Networks PANW ( ▲ 13.09% )
→ Okta OKTA ( ▲ 11.98% )
→ Fortinet FTNT ( ▲ 9.04% )
AI & chips — down
→ Nvidia NVDA ( ▼ 3.36% )
→ AMD AMD ( ▼ 4.4% )
→ Micron MU ( ▼ 5.25% )
→ Intel INTC ( ▼ 5.59% )
The thinking behind the cybersecurity rally is fairly straightforward.
If AI becomes more capable, so do the tools available to people trying to break into systems. That gives companies another reason to spend more on protecting them.
And suddenly, the same technology that has spent years driving demand for chips and data centers is creating another potential beneficiary:
the companies trying to keep it secure. ↓
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He Put Half His $9 Billion Into One Unusual AI Stock
One billionaire put over half his $9 billion fund into one unusual AI stock — then bought more shares nearly every day for 61 straight trading days.
It’s not Nvidia… a chipmaker… or a cloud giant.
Instead, it owns the assets the entire AI boom depends on…
And Trump signed emergency executive orders to protect them.
Right now it’s trading at a rare discount…
The same kind that’s previously turned $10,000 into $55,000. In just over 12 months
What Was Actually Said?↓
1| Last week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, arguing that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI was acting responsibly enough as AI became more powerful.
2| Then Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, responded with an even more striking assessment: he said he believed there was a greater than 10% chance the technology could eventually “kill all humans.”
A few days later, the CEOs entered the conversation.
→ Saturday | Dario Amodei
The Anthropic CEO published a 3,800-word essay arguing that AI capabilities may now be advancing faster than the safeguards around them.
His proposal was unusual coming from someone running one of the companies at the frontier: Slow down.
Amodei argued that labs should deliberately pace improvements to their most powerful models, giving safety research more time to catch up.
He also proposed bringing independent evaluators inside frontier AI companies, with enough access to examine models, training processes and whether companies are actually following their safety commitments.
Then came Monday.
→ Monday | Sam Altman
The OpenAI CEO pointed to two outcomes he believes the industry needs to avoid:
→ Losing control of increasingly capable AI.
→ Concentrating too much AI power in too few hands.
Altman said he agreed with the broader concerns in Amodei’s essay and argued that safety and alignment need to stay ahead of improvements in AI capabilities.
And the conversation picked up one more familiar name.
Elon Musk replied simply: “Dario is right.”
Musk pointed back to warnings he has made for years about advanced AI, including his 2023 argument that AGI could pose a greater risk than nuclear weapons.
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Not Everyone Is Buying It.
There are at least three different reasons for skepticism.
1| The market skeptic: Wedbush’s Dan Ives doesn’t think the warnings change the bigger AI spending story. His expectation: some initial weakness, followed by investors returning their attention to the roughly $5 trillion expected to be spent on AI over the next few years.
2| The consolidation skeptic: D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria raised a different possibility: tougher safety rules could ultimately favor the biggest AI labs — the companies with enough money, compute and infrastructure to comply with them.
3| The self-interest skeptic: Michael Burry was more pointed, questioning whether the warnings reflect genuine concern for humanity or could also help increase the value of the companies’ AI products.
Then there’s the timing. ↓
The IPO.
✱ Anthropic is reportedly approaching an IPO filing, while Altman has said OpenAI plans to wait until 2027 to go public, citing safety concerns.
✱ And Musk, who has endorsed concerns about AI risk, has built major bets across both SpaceX’s AI/data center division (four compute deals worth roughly $45.7 billion in annual recurring revenue as of December, with CFO Bret Johnsen recently expressing “even more conviction” in a $100 billion ARR target by year-end) and Tesla’s “physical AI” products, including robotaxis and Optimus, both slated for production expansion this year.
! The people warning about the race are, after all, still very much in it.
Global Reaction↓
✱ The United States
President Trump rejected calls for additional AI guardrails, arguing that the U.S. already has sufficient regulatory and criminal authority over AI companies.
His focus was instead on staying ahead in the global AI race:
“Whoever wins AI wins.”
✱ China
China’s Foreign Ministry pushed back on the warnings, saying “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition” could undermine global AI cooperation.
Interestingly, China’s State Security Minister issued his own AI warning a day earlier — focused on deepfakes, disinformation and cyberattacks.
What Would A Real Slowdown Mean?
That depends almost entirely on how much slowing we’re talking about.
→ Schwab’s Kevin Gordon put it simply: a gradual pullback in AI spending would be one thing.
A sharp one would be very different.
AI-related investment has become a meaningful contributor to U.S. growth, so a sudden drop in spending could ripple well beyond the companies building chips and data centers.
There’s also a market problem.
Tech already carries some of the most aggressive earnings expectations in the S&P 500.
That leaves less room for disappointment if AI spending slows before those expectations are met.
For now, though, Gordon offered an important caveat: previous worries about an AI capex slowdown haven’t really shown up in the data.
So far, the slowdown is still mostly a scenario — not a statistic.
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