Normally, trying to time these things is a fool\u2019s errand. You can be completely right about a bubble, completely right about the eventual outcome, and still get your face ripped off for another year while everybody collectively agrees that paying any price for anything with the letters \u201cAI\u201d attached to it constitutes rigorous securities analysis. But the setup now looks so insane, I\u00a0decided to stick my neck out anyway<\/a>.<\/p>\n Then, last week, I wrote about the\u00a0recent Anthropic whistleblower situation and argued<\/a>\u00a0that the biggest risk to the AI trade might no longer be competition, valuations or even disappointing revenues. It might be regulation itself. Researchers inside the companies building these systems are publicly warning that the technology was advancing faster than they believed it could safely be controlled.<\/p>\n I\u00a0wrote days prior<\/a>\u00a0that we may only get one chance to stop AI. And suddenly, last week, the idea that governments might intentionally impede AI development, something that would have sounded completely insane to investors a year ago, started\u00a0looking considerably less insane.<\/a><\/p>\n I also\u00a0wrote last week that I found it fairly sick<\/a>\u00a0that 24 year old \u201chedge fund manager\u201d Leopold Aschenbrenner was being handed another opportunity to speculate on the same AI theme using options after his fund managed to incinerate more than $30 billion during July\u2019s AI stock rout. As a reminder, his fund Situational Awareness had grown to roughly $45 billion\u00a0before collapsing toward $10 billion<\/a>, forcing the fund to unload most of its public equity portfolio.<\/p>\n Which brings us to this weekend, because something much more fundamental may actually be changing. And as a result, the market could wind up flying from ludicrous speed to a deadass stop, shooting investors, most of whom are not buckled up, to the front of the ship helmet first.<\/p>\n On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly called for the AI industry to slow the pace at which frontier model capabilities improve. Sam Altman then publicly agreed that the industry needs to \u201cpace the frontier\u201d and said the issue has become a major topic of discussion inside OpenAI. Even more interestingly, Altman suggested that leading AI companies may be getting close to announcing some kind of coordinated arrangement around slowing development and addressing safety risks.<\/p>\n Now, think about how bizarre that sentence would have sounded six months ago. The company sitting at the nerve center of the biggest speculative narrative on planet Earth is effectively saying that\u00a0now may not be a particularly good time to sell itself to public investors<\/em>\u00a0because everybody is\u00a0suddenly having a serious conversation<\/a>\u00a0about whether the technology underneath the trillion dollar investment boom needs to be slowed down.<\/p>\n And remember: the massive AI capex buildout is one of the primary engines of this entire market boom, meaning any serious slowdown in AI spending wouldn\u2019t just hit AI companies, it would hit…<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/assets.zerohedge.com\/s3fs-public\/inline-images\/Screenshot%202026-09-13%20at%2009.42.30.jpg\")
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