Dario Amodei Suddenly Wants to Slow Down - What Did He See?

LG (0:00)

AI is going to kill us all if we don't slow down its development. This is what the leaders of the space have come out to tell us this past weekend. Yet somehow, this warning hasn't hit as strongly as some in the past. We're kind of brushing it off as another marketing campaign. But should we? What's up, everybody? It's LGDUSET here, and welcome to Milk Road Stocks, the daily market show that rebranded itself to stocks, but then just ended up making every show about AI anyways. Today is September 15th, 2026, recording on the 14th. We need to slow down the AI frontier. These were the words of Anthropics CEO Dario Amodei over the weekend as he called for the frontier models to slow down for fear of creating AI that would be too strong and that doing so without proper regulation would mean destruction for humanity. Yesterday, everyone anticipated a major market pullback based on this essay from the weekend, which happened but so far has not been as extreme as many people feared. But the real story behind Dario's essay is not whether his warning is real, it's whether he's writing it with a different intent. Are the Chinese models just too strong now? Is Anthropic buying time while they seek profitability? Or is it just another marketing campaign to get in the news before an IPO? We'll dive into these questions and more today as our top portfolio manager, Melvin, takes us through the story, how we got here and how to position for the next leg. Melvin has been an absolute machine on the portfolio side this year. He absolutely nailed the bottleneck stocks like Micron and Nebius, and he's making more calls every week. You can see those in Milk Road PRO along with his entire portfolio, which costs just a dollar at the link below. A reminder that our podcast today is free, and that it wouldn't be possible with our partners at Nexo. The digital asset platform lets you trade, earn and borrow all in one place. Keep an ear out for more information about them later in the show.

All right, Melvin, we're on. It's about just after noon Eastern on Monday the 14th. We're expecting a bloodbath this morning, but it has briefly occurred, and all this coming on the heels of Dario from Anthropic, telling everybody they got to slow down the capex, they got to slow down the AI, and I think this is obviously going to be the big story, at least for today or the next couple of days. And I think we're all really keen to know what you think.

Everyone has an opinion on something like this.

And I think yours is one that I definitely value probably more than anybody else's. So tell me, what's your take on all this? What's going on?

Melvin (2:11)

Yeah, perfect. Thanks for having me back on, LG. My God, I was out of this weekend, out of the grid this weekend, and I came back on Sunday, and seems like everyone on X was going crazy. Our favorite boogeyman, Dario, is back with another essay calling for industry to slow down the pace of these frontier models.

People like Sam Altman supported parts of the idea. Now we have Elon saying that Dario was right. Now, what does that mean for the AI trade? Like, is the CapEx of 1.4 trillion for the next year done? Is the build out essentially done? That's basically the question on everyone's mind these last couple of days. And this is gonna be a continuing theme throughout the next couple of weeks actually, because there's a couple of summits going on with Dario essentially gonna be talking.

And this is gonna be a big thing that's gonna come up. So now this is all unusual a little bit because you might be thinking, these are all guys competing against each other, right? OpenAI and Anthropic are basically fighting for the same customers. Google wants to prove that it can take the lead. Elon wants XAI and GROK to become a serious competitor. They're all competing for the same researchers, Chibs, The Power, Enterprise Contacts.

But when they all say something like the similar and start to agree with Dario, we have to pay attention. Because the first question everyone's asking is, what did they see? For a long time, we all know that many of these people closest to the frontier AI models have become essentially red-pilled on how powerful these models are getting. They talk about it as something as that could change economics, science, cybersecurity, national security, you name it. There's a lot of use cases for this.

Elon even talks about UBS and never having to work again. So this is all a big, big deal.