NEW YORK — Global markets punished AI-linked stocks Monday morning, Sept. 14, 2026, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s weekend call to slow the pace of frontier model advances rippled from Tokyo to U.S. futures, NBC News and CNBC reported.

In early Monday trading, Nasdaq 100 futures were down about 1.5% and S&P 500 futures about 0.8%, NBC’s Steve Kopack reported (updated ~8:18 a.m. EDT). Nvidia fell roughly 3% early. Chipmakers Arm Holdings and Marvell slid about 6%, as did cloud computing provider CoreWeave. Corning, a key data-center components supplier, fell about 7.5%. Amazon was off nearly 2%.

Overnight selling had already hit Asia. SoftBank Group, a major OpenAI investor, fell about 10.7% in Tokyo, NBC reported; CNBC and The Guardian put SoftBank’s drop near 10% to as much as 13% at points. SK Hynix plunged more than 7% and Samsung Electronics sold off about 5% in South Korea, per NBC.

The selloff followed Amodei’s Saturday essay urging companies to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” — a call Insanity Developing covered when it landed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he agreed that firms need to “pace the frontier”; Elon Musk wrote on X, “Dario is right,” NBC and CNBC reported. Altman later clarified that pacing “does not mean ‘stopping,’” and told Fortune OpenAI would not go public this year given safety concerns: “Given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.”

China’s Foreign Ministry dismissed U.S. slowdown talk as “fear-mongering” that would “disrupt the process of global AI governance and serve no one’s interests,” NBC reported. President Donald Trump struck a skeptical note on weekend guardrail talk: “I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” he said Sunday, per NBC.

Amodei, speaking Sunday on CBS’s “Sunday Morning,” said there are “real dangers” and that he had not fully appreciated how fast progress would feel: “It doesn’t mean we need to panic today. It doesn’t mean we need to shut it all down. But I would say it’s a warning sign.” Markets were also watching Wednesday’s Federal Reserve meeting, with hike odds near 85% after hotter core inflation Friday — a secondary backdrop to the AI scare, not the lead driver Monday morning, NBC noted.

Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid framed the investor question as whether this is “the first sign that the extraordinary AI investment cycle might eventually moderate,” while arguing rivalry among companies and countries still makes voluntary retreat unlikely. HSBC’s Max Kettner called fears for the tech build-out “overblown,” NBC reported.

Sources