Asian stocks and US equity futures retreated after leading AI companies called for slower development, with Nasdaq 100 futures losing more than 1% and South Korea’s Kospi dropping 3.1% to 6,692.61. SoftBank fell 13%, while MSCI’s Asia Pacific Index declined 0.5%.

SK Hynix fell more than 5% and Samsung lost 4%, leading South Korean losses. Japan’s Nikkei declined 1.6%, while AI developer MiniMax fell 5.6% to HK$254.80 in Hong Kong. In US overnight trading, Nvidia lost 1.5%, Micron and Arm each fell 3%, Intel dropped 3.5% and Sandisk declined 4%.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a Sept. 12 essay, arguing for more time to safeguard models rather than a halt to training. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed his call, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella welcomed deliberate pacing. Anthropic and OpenAI committed to giving independent evaluators access comparable to employees to assess safety. Mark Zuckerberg took the opposite position, calling for faster AI development.