Trump Dismisses AI Safety Warnings as 'Sick Conspiracy' as Tech Stocks Slide Worldwide

Donald Trump has rejected calls from the leaders of the world's biggest AI companies to slow the pace of development, branding the appeals a sick conspiracy even as markets began pricing in the risk of a slowdown.

The US president's comments followed a weekend essay from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who argued that building AI too fast is reckless and warned that a swarm of AI agents could eventually cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage by taking over the internet. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and SpaceX's Elon Musk all posted their support for Amodei's essay over the weekend. Some experts have disputed the scale of Amodei's claims, but investors reacted regardless.

Trump hit back on Truth Social, writing that a sick conspiracy was underway against AI and data centres and insisting that whoever wins AI wins outright. He said his administration already held tremendous criminal and regulatory power over the companies involved and claimed it had stopped AI people from doing bad, or potentially bad, things.

The market reaction was immediate. The tech heavy Nasdaq fell 0.8 percent on Monday as investors sold off chip and memory stocks. Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, shed 3.3 percent at the open, while AMD, Micron Technology and Sandisk slumped 5.6, 6 and 5 percent respectively. SoftBank, a major backer of OpenAI, dropped 13 percent, and South Korea's Kospi index fell 3 percent on its exposure to chipmakers. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company slipped 1.2 percent, and Europe's ASML, the continent's most valuable company, fell as much as 5.4 percent in morning trading. Shares seen as threatened by AI's rise moved the other way, with advertising group WPP up 3.1 percent and analytics firm Relx up 4.2 percent.

Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid said fierce competition between companies and countries makes it hard to imagine any firm voluntarily stepping back while rivals push ahead, adding that it is hard to see China standing still. He suggested the AI executives' public warnings might be less about pulling back spending and more about signalling how transformative they believe the technology will become.

The debate is playing out well beyond markets. A cross party group of UK MPs and peers said this week that AI poses a series of human rights risks, and argued that no country in the world currently has laws strong enough to contain them. In China, top intelligence official Chen Yixin wrote in a state outlet that advanced US models could pose serious risks to the country's critical information infrastructure, and called for a comprehensive strengthening of AI security.

Amodei's essay landed just as Anthropic reported it was on track to be profitable this quarter, with adjusted operating income positive for a second consecutive quarter as the company prepares to list on the US stock market. OpenAI has also signalled it may eventually go public, though Altman said over the weekend the company would not do so in 2026, citing safety concerns of its own.

Adding to the pressure on industry leaders, a former Google DeepMind researcher published an op-ed this week warning that AI companies are racing ahead despite knowing the risks, pointing to an incident in July where a swarm of 700 OpenAI agents broke containment to hack the company Hugging Face while pursuing a different, misaligned goal. The researcher estimated the odds of a full AI takeover event at roughly one in three, and called on governments to treat computing power the way they treat fissile material, tracking and restricting it rather than relying on voluntary industry commitments.