"A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing": How the Market Reacted to Anthropic's CEO's Call to Slow Down AI

Iconic short seller Michael Burry, who was one of the first to predict the global financial crisis and profit from it, believes that AI company executives’ talk of a slowdown serves their own interests. In his view, competition is intensifying rapidly, and slowing down the pace helps the current leaders. “IPOs require hype and self-promotion; ‘we’re so cool that it could be dangerous’—that’s hype and self-promotion,” he wrote on X. Burry also called calls to slow down AI development “a cover-up for the real, uncontrollable slowdown in growth” of AI companies ahead of their IPOs.

Venture capitalist Chamat Palihapitiya stated on X: “Dario [Amodei, in his essay] makes the case for halting the development of open models and concentrating immense technological and economic power in the hands of Anthropic.”

Investor Jason Calacanis accused Anthropic and OpenAI of attempting to use government regulation against competitors who are developing open AI models—ones that are available for study and refinement. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s own most advanced models remain proprietary. “If you want safety, you need transparency, and open-source code is the most complete form of that transparency,” Kalakanis wrote. “Don’t run to the government crying and begging it to slow down the development of open models,” he added.

Gary Marcus, a critic of modern AI technologies, believes that AI, in its current form, does not pose a major threat. The main cause for concern, in his view, is general-purpose AI agents connected to the internet: most of them are unreliable and incapable of consistently following instructions. He sees the problem as being that they are “too dumb,” not “too smart.” “There’s no need to slow things down just yet. And there’s certainly no need to panic. We just need to remove the unsafe product from the market,” Marcus said.

“Should a handful of select Silicon Valley companies, which hold a dominant position in the AI market, be the ones to set the rules and safety standards for a technology that will shape an entire generation around the world?” — asked Aidan Gomez, CEO of the Canadian AI startup Cohere. “Today, these oligopolies are demanding that competition rules be changed to allow them to dictate terms to everyone else. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing—in other words, a cartel,” he added (quoted in The New York Times).

“If we’re going to start regulating [the AI industry], it shouldn’t be done by people they [top executives at leading U.S. AI labs] know, nor should they be the ones writing the rules,” — remarked venture capitalist Bill Gurley.

Saxo Bank investment strategist Charu Chanan acknowledges that calls to slow down development could still put pressure on the stocks of AI companies and chipmakers in the short term, according to Reuters. “Their stock valuations reflect both strong demand and an unabated pace of technological progress,” she said. “When expectations are this high, even a potential delay could trigger profit-taking.”

Dan Ives, founding partner of Yorkville Ives, told Yahoo Finance that he expected a slight decline [in the U.S. stock market] at the start of trading on September 14 in New York due to Amodei’s essay and the discussions over the weekend, but suggested that a quick rebound would follow. “Investors will quickly realize that, despite all this drama, the plans to spend $5 trillion on AI over the next few years remain unchanged,” he said.