Global sell-off in tech shares; ST and Prysmian down in Milan

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) - Sales of global technology shares have plummeted following statements by the American artificial intelligence giants, OpenAI and Anthropic, which have signalled a slowdown in the development of the technology in the wake of security concerns. Following declines in Asia, where South Korea’s technology-heavy Kospi index closed down 3.26 per cent, the sector is also under heavy pressure in Europe.

The wave of sales comes after Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the developer of Claude), called over the weekend on leading companies in the AI sector to coordinate their efforts to manage the sector’s development and promote safety. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, immediately endorsed this call. ‘We must slow down the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will continue to seem rapid, and we must use the time we gain wisely,” wrote Amodei in an essay published on Saturday on his personal website, entitled “We Must Pace the Frontier”. Alarm bells had already been ringing last week following the resignation of a researcher at Anthropic, who claimed that the Silicon Valley firm, alongside OpenAI – with whom it is vying for supremacy in the race for artificial intelligence – was “playing with our lives”.

Against this backdrop, Kioxia’s shares plummeted by -6.37 per cent in Tokyo (Nikkei -0.59 per cent); in Hong Kong, shares in the Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups Z.AI and MiniMax fell by 8.51 per cent and 6.59 per cent respectively; Samsung Electronics in Seoul lost 4.05 per cent.

The latest storm surrounding artificial intelligence technology, amongst other things, risks complicating Anthropic’s planned initial public offering, which is due to take place this year. The market had expected the US giant to publish its prospectus last week ahead of the mega IPO, which could value the company at over 2,000 billion dollars. Instead, the company has decided to share documents with a select group of investors and will make them public after gathering their feedback.

According to financial sources, however, the San Francisco-based giant is said to have attempted to reassure the market following all the alarm bells over the weekend, informing a small group of investors that it will close its second consecutive quarter with a positive adjusted operating profit. The company’s gross margin, in particular, is reportedly above 80 cents per share, excluding revenue shared with distribution partners, such as Amazon, and the costs of training artificial intelligence models.