AI Safety Concerns Pushe Tech Stocks and the Market Lower: Your Next Move 9/14/26

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Scott Wapner (1:00)

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Michael Santoli (1:16)

Thank you, Carl. Welcome to the Halftime Report. I'm Mike Santoli. In for Scott Wapner today. Front and center, this hour, AI stocks sell off. The 10-year yield cracks 5% and a Fed decision looms large this week. We will trade all of it with the Investment Committee. Joining me for the hour, Joe Terranova, Liz Thomas, Stephen Weiss and Jim Labanthal. Let's get a quick check of the market. The index is still lower, but well off their lows from earlier. S&P 500 got down below 7600 It's up about half a percent from where it kind of retested last week's lows. Mazdaq has been the underperformer, but Mag 7 helping that come back. Tenure yield you see has come off the boil. It did crack 5% in a few little fractions of a basis, pointing out back to 495 We're gonna have more on that move in yields in just a moment. But first, let's get to Kate Rooney with more on what's driving the slide in AI stocks. Kate.

Kate Rooney (2:08)

Hey Mike, well it goes back to what we saw over the weekend. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei really shocked the tech world with an essay out on Saturday. The CEO proposed a three-step plan aimed at tempering how fast some of the most powerful AI and AI models out there are going to be improving. He talks about third-party evaluators as part of this, safety standards and then international coordination as well. Amadei has argued for safety in the past, but he does talk about this with some new urgency, given some of the recent panic around the risk of this technology. It did snowball last week after anthropic researchers tweeted about the existential risk of AI labs and said that they are, quote, gambling with our lives. Two new concerns from Amadei that he flags, he talks about AI developing a lot faster than expected. Then an example of open AI agents hacking into the startup, hugging face if you remember that he called those agents a fanatically devoted collective. Major AI leaders agreed with Amadei, you don't see that every day. Elon Musk saying that Dario is right, he said that on X, Sam Altman, the CEO of Anthropix, his biggest rival, OpenAI, tweeting his support as well. At the same time, Altman told Fortune over the weekend, an IPO right now would be ill-advised. He did say 2027 for their own listing, although we have reported that the AI giant, OpenAI, was already likely to list next year anyway, so grain of salt there. I did speak to some people over the weekend who argued that the safety push could actually help Anthropix IPO. Positioning the company now as a responsible player, reducing some regulatory and liability risk, and then multiple investors told me that the growth rate is still off the charts. They do expect the IPO to go forward. I also confirmed with a couple of sources that Anthropix has seen back to back quarters of at least adjusted profitability and then a new wrinkle in all of this. President Trump weighing in this morning, slamming Omidy saying that the only guardrails AI needs is a strong and smart president. He goes on to say there's a sick conspiracy going on against AI in data centers, that the only one that's happy about this, Mike, is China.

Michael Santoli (4:09)

So Kate, among the many questions that pop up here is, what it would mean in a practical sense for there to be a slowdown in the pace of development at the frontier, in the terms that the market cares about.