European tech stocks hit six-week low as calls for AI slowdown worry investors – business live
European tech stocks hit six-week low as calls for AI slowdown worry investors – business live. Skip NavigationMarketsBusinessInvestingTechPolitics & PolicyVideoWatchlistInvesting ClubPROLivestreamMenuEvery weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street.
What happened
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial newsAI-linked stocks fall after tech bosses call for slowdown in ‘reckless’ developmentAI CEOs say they need to slow the pace of development. But will they? The Guardian view on controlling AI: humanity cannot outsource its survivalCompanies threatened by the march of AI are seeing their share prices rise this morning! RELX, the analytics group, are up 4. 2% and leading the FTSE 100 risers. Earlier this year its shares tumbled after the Claude chatbot added new data and automation tools. Continue reading. . .
AI infrastructure stocks led the market lower on the uncertainty created by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's weekend essay calling for an industry-wide slowdown in the advancement of new AI models. After apocalyptic warnings about the threats posed by AI, leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s calls to ‘slow the pace’Facing a public uproar over Anthropic researchers’ repeated warnings that artificial intelligence could kill all of humanity by 2030, the AI company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, issued a proposal at the weekend to slow down the technology’s advancement to ensure public safety.
Photograph: Dado Ruvić/ReutersAnalysis‘Too little, too late’: critics perplexed and suspicious of AI leaders’ call for a slowdownRobert Booth UK technology editorFrom the Trump administration to AI experts, plans by the Anthropic boss to boost safety have spawned a largely negative response OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back slowdown on ‘reckless’ AI development Editorial: controlling AI – humanity cannot outsource its survival The safety debate that ignited when whistleblowers last week warned that the most advanced AI poses an existential threat to humanity should come with a health warning: side effects include whiplash.
Outside technology, the market rotated into traditional defensive stocks that are less tied to the broader economy and the data center buildout. AIPolicyReportIs Big Tech’s AI slowdown a safety pact or a cartel? Major AI companies want to ‘pace the frontier’ — but their proposed solutions need real teeth. by Hayden FieldSep 14, 2026, 10:59 PM UTC Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty ImagesAIPolicyReportIs Big Tech’s AI slowdown a safety pact or a cartel?
The wider picture
A. has that, in spades! ” He also called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while Huang was onstage at a conference — Trump told the crowd on speakerphone that recent concerns about AI were a “hoax” and that “the robots will not be taking over. ”As for concerns that regulation could hold back other companies or open source developers, calls for slowdowns have been almost exclusively aimed at big frontier AI labs defined by exact size metrics, many industry experts told The Verge.
One X user wrote, “If I am going to die at the hands of killer AI, I want it to be American, not Chinese. ”Redwood Research’s Shlegeris said it wasn’t in the best interest of neither the US nor the Chinese government to pursue AI development in a “reckless” way, adding that “it would not be unprecedented levels of international coordination. ”“[People are] taking for granted that China won’t cooperate,” Johnston said, adding, “This is an issue so serious and so widespread that it seems like it’s in everyone’s interest to coordinate on it, in the same way it was in both the US and Russia’s interest to coordinate on nuclear de-proliferation. ”On Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun did push back on the calls for a slowdown, calling it “fearmongering. ”The Midas Project’s Johnston and Redwood Research’s Shlegeris both said that even in the absence of Chinese cooperation, it’s still vital to encourage US coordination.
And for the Tech Oversight Project’s Haworth, the slowdown presents an opportunity to “position ourselves as the compass for how AI technology can be developed and used. ” She sees arguments to the contrary as part of a familiar playbook. TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 takes place October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, bringing 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders together for three days of startup-building, fundraising, networking, product discovery, and dealmaking. Attendees come to find customers, investors, partners, talent, and the technologies shaping what’s next.
Join 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 from October 13–15 and explore 300+ startups across all industries showcasing in the Expo Hall, six industry stages, high-impact networking including AI-powered matchmaking, and Startup Battlefield 200. While lawmakers and the tech industry consider how to address growing fear and distrust of AI, many of the hurdles impeding comprehensive AI regulation remain the same as before last week’s apocalyptic declarations from a young Anthropic researcher. Perhaps there were reasons to be hopeful after a bumpy week: at least the AI companies were talking about a slowdown before anyone got badly hurt.
What has been reported
Stocks were trading near their lowest levels of the session as the 10-year Treasury yield topped 5% — a key psychological level and one that has not been breached since October 2023. Oil prices paring their Monday gains also took some pressure off stocks. Even if new guardrails against AI model advancement are put in place, a temporary slowdown could allow the supply chain to catch up to demand. Amazon would probably be rallying, too, if it didn't have such a large retail component to its business.
These defensive companies are better positioned to hit their numbers if a Fed rate hike slows the economy than the high-flyers in tech, which is why we like them from a diversification standpoint. There are no major economic releases on Tuesday, either, as the Fed kicks off the first day of its policy meeting. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust, including META, GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN, CRWD, PANW, JNJ, LLY, KMB, COST. ) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade.
An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX head Elon Musk loosely agreed over the weekend to slow down AI development, skeptics spotted an ulterior motive immediately.
What happens next
The AI titans had declared that their aim was to “pace the frontier,” signing on at least partially to a proposal for embedding third-party auditors, regulating domestic labs, and reaching a global slowdown agreement. “The industry as a whole needs new champions,” said Nick Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University and the Department of Homeland Security’s former director of emerging tech policy. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote, adding that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is “acting responsibly” and rather “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. ”Dire warnings about AI aren’t anything new inside the industry, but Coxon’s letter seemed to break containment.
You need to slow down. ’”Kokotajlo said that after years of people “yelling at them to do this” — including more than 1,000 AI lab employees signing a public letter from July, which called for a slowdown in AI development after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident — the CEOs are “now bowing to that pressure and also claiming credit for it, [although] not rightfully. ”Overall, a handful of sources told The Verge they believe that the verbal agreement made by the AI leaders is a step in the right direction.
The larger tech industry has spent years getting ahead of regulation by lobbying for its own preferred rules or promising self-regulation. For the AI industry, Reese said, “the hammer may not come in this administration, but I think if there were a Democratic administration after the next election, there would be a really good possibility. ”That kind of regulation would be vital, said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project. Kokotajlo’s AI Futures Project, for instance, proposed AI labs giving auditors access to their compute budget — and pledging to decrease their compute budget for research significantly, which would then slow down AI advancement and allow other AI labs to catch up. (Amodei’s essay already called for AI labs to allow external third-party auditors — like METR, Apollo, and Redwood Research — to embed within their organizations to some extent and potentially be able to flag, and blow the whistle on, problematic findings. )“If I am going to die at the hands of killer AI, I want it to be American, not Chinese. ”Arguably the single biggest challenge to an AI slowdown can be summarized in one word: China.
The report has been compiled by The Daily Waves using information reported across cnbc.com, theverge.com, techcrunch.com, theguardian.com. Details are presented according to the information available at the time of publication and may change as authorities, organisers or other relevant parties provide updates.