In Europe, semiconductor and other AI-related stocks also fell sharply in early trading. Chip equipment giant ASML<\/a> fell more than 4%, Nokia<\/a> was down around 5%, and Infineon<\/a> dropped more than 6%. Other companies with business ties to the buildout of data centers, such as Siemens Energy<\/a> and Schneider Electric<\/a>, were also lower. <\/p>\n Major stocks also fell in U.S. premarket trading. Memory chipmaker Micron<\/a> was down around 5%, Intel<\/a> dropped nearly 6%, while Nvidia<\/a> was more than 2% lower. Several other semiconductor names also fell. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft<\/a>, Amazon<\/a> and Alphabet<\/a> were all slightly lower. <\/p>\n Stock Chart IconStock chart icon Shares of Nvidia, ASML and SoftBank year-to-date.<\/p>\n The sell-off comes amid the growing debate over the risks posed by rapidly improving AI model capabilities that hit a crescendo last week after Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic who also previously worked at OpenAI, said he resigned out of concern<\/a> that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”\u00a0<\/p>\n That led to Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger responding, saying he believes that there is a greater than 10% chance AI will “kill all humans” within the next decade. <\/p>\n The posts caused a firestorm on social media and led to a response from major AI leaders. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday<\/a> penned an essay<\/a> calling for a slowdown in the pace of development of AI capabilities.<\/p>\n “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei said. <\/p>\n Tech leaders support a slowdown<\/p>\n Amodei’s essay sparked rare consensus among leaders from Anthropic’s rivals. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Saturday said he agrees with Amodei that AI companies need to “pace the frontier.”<\/p>\n SpaceX<\/a> CEO Elon Musk, who has been sounding the alarm on the risks posed by AI for several years, posted on X<\/a>: “Dario is right.” <\/p>\n There are concerns that any kind of slowdown in the pace of AI development could impact multiple areas, from the purchasing of chips to the purchasing of computing power \u2014 where hundreds of billions of dollars of capital expenditure is headed.<\/p>\n “The kind of equity market rally has been based on AI growth and productivity gains \u2026 so if we do see that start to derail, then it could have an impact on equity performance going forward,” Zoe Gillespie, a senior director at RBC\u00a0Brewin\u00a0Dolphin, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.<\/p>\n “Certainly, a lot of what we are looking into with equity returns is baked into the future earnings growth of these companies, and if that comes under threat then we may see this destabilize.”<\/p>\n While Amodei called for a slowing of the pace of frontier AI capabilities, he stopped short of pushing for a complete halt. In fact, he said that “progress will still seem fast.”<\/p>\n![\"hide](\"https:\/\/static-redesign.cnbcfm.com\/dist\/a54b41835a8b60db28c2.svg\")
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