Semiconductor stocks took a leg lower on Monday after Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei made a public plea to “slow down the AI industry.”
The call was echoed by rival OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) CEO Sam Altman and even his nemesis, SpaceX (SPCX) and Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who voiced his agreement.
But Wall Street analysts say the AI train has left the station, with no slowdown in development or spending.
“Nobody’s actually slowing anything down,” D.A. Davidson tech analyst Gil Luria told Yahoo Finance on Monday.
The analysts said of the bleak warnings from Anthropic and OpenAI titans to “pace the frontier” of artificial development: “I just doubt their motivations … they’re demanding regulation to stifle competition.”
Luria said that even if development were to slow down, the big-spending hyperscalers “will be fine.”
“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.”
AI infrastructure spending by heavyweights Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) has ballooned in the past five years, as shown in Yahoo Finance’s AlphSpace chart below.
Hyperscaler AI spending.
Capital expenditures for the four major hyperscalers totaled $293 billion for the first two quarters of 2026. Together, they are on pace to spend nearly $600 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure this year alone, cementing the AI trade as the primary driver of both the economy and stock market.
“The AI genie is out of the bottle,” said Nancy Tengler, CEO and chief investment officer of Laffer Tengler Investments.” She added, “The technology has already spread across sectors.”
President Trump rejected calls for guardrails on AI models, pointing out that the US is winning the AI race against China.
“With China in the race, we don’t expect any major slowdown,” when it comes to AI development, said Giuseppe Sette, co-founder and president of Reflexivity.
As for any retracement in AI stocks, “that’s simply a buying opportunity,” he added.
Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance.
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