Doomsday

Will AI destroy humanity?

When Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei agree with each other… you know things are serious. 

Amodei wrote a 3,800 word essay last weekend, urging the AI industry to slow the pace of model development. A somewhat counterintuitive move as Anthropic meets with investors ahead of a potential US$2T IPO. As of this week, they had even seemingly zeroed in on the Nasdaq for their upcoming listing.

Altman called the current climate an ‘ill-advised’ moment to go public, pushing OpenAI’s IPO plans to 2027. It still went ahead with a US$300M acquisition of AI camera startup Glass Imaging on Monday.

Trump’s visible outrage with an AI slowdown was evident from his Truth Social posts. He called fears a ‘hoax’ and a ‘sick conspiracy,’ reiterating that sentiment on speaker phone to Nvidia’s ($NVDA) Jensen Huang at the All-In Summit.

Either way, the frontier model builders’ rare consensus was enough for a tech stock rout. Marvell ($MRVL), Sandisk ($SNDK), AMD ($AMD) and CoreWeave ($CRWV) all declined, while software stocks Autodesk ($ADSK) and ServiceNow ($NOW) gained steam.

But the biggest winners were cyber stocks: CrowdStrike ($CRWD), Palo Alto Networks ($PANW), Rubrik ($RBRK) and Zscaler ($ZS) all rallied north of 13% as protection from rogue AI became the need of the hour.

So how is big tech responding? Well, Broadcom ($AVGO) CEO Hock Tan said the company isn’t changing its revenue targets based on the slowdown talk. But Microsoft ($MSFT) has already announced limits for future AI models through a new code of conduct. 

Meanwhile, Alphabet ($GOOGL) is finally letting its engineers use Claude Code internally instead of Gemini. And Meta’s ($META) Mark Zuckerberg thinks any kind of coordinated industry pause is unwarranted.

There was another harbinger of doom this week: the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield hitting 5% – a level not seen since 2007. Higher yields hit tech stocks hardest, but fears were amplified ahead of a potential rate-hike. Even consumer discretionary names like Chipotle ($CMG) fell nearly 6%.

For the crypto industry, the CLARITY act’s Senate stall on Tuesday was enough to send Bitcoin below US$75,000. Crypto stocks Coinbase ($COIN) and Circle ($CRCL) posted double-digit single day declines.

With cyber stocks up, tech and crypto down and yields sky-high, one thing is clear. Even if we are heading towards the apocalypse, someone is still finding a way to hedge.

This is not financial advice nor a recommendation to invest in any of the securities listed. The information presented is for general information purposes only and intended to be of a factual nature only. Past performance and forecasts are not a reliable indicator of future performance. The value of your investments can go down as well as up and you may receive back less than your original investment. The author of this article and other employees of Stakeshop Pty Ltd may hold positions or have financial interests in the company (or companies) discussed above. As always, do your own research and consider seeking financial, legal and taxation advice before investing.

Samy Sriram

Markets Analyst

Samy is a markets analyst at Stake, with seven years of experience in the world of investing, working across roles in private banking, venture capital and financial media. She has a Master’s degree in Finance and Data Analytics from The University of Sydney Business School.