Wall Street Delivers Verdict on AI Slowdown’s Winners and Losers

Guess who likes the idea of an AI development slowdown? Software investors! Stocks of enterprise software firms, such as Salesforce, Shopify, ServiceNow and Figma, all gained ground on Monday—ServiceNow jumped 7%, for instance, while Salesforce rose nearly 5%. Software firms, of course, have been seen as threatened by AI. Meanwhile, stocks of neoclouds and chip firms fell by similar proportions—and, these companies might be seriously hurting if the pace of AI development really slows.

Wall Street’s reaction gives some sense of the winners and losers in a real AI downturn, for what it’s worth. But this is likely to be a one-day investor reaction. The chances of a coordinated AI development slowdown, of the kind advocated by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and others on Saturday, seems to be zero. You’ve got both President Donald Trump and the Chinese government dismissing the worries about AI safety as a “hoax” or “fearmongering” (it’s nice they agree on something!). Meanwhile, one major AI firm, Meta Platforms, has stayed conspicuously quiet, aside from this indecipherable X post from Meta's Alexandr Wang.