Anthropic Just Asked the AI Industry to Slow Down. Nothing in It Asks Anyone to Buy Fewer Nvidia Chips.
Anthropic Just Asked the AI Industry to Slow Down. Nothing in It Asks Anyone to Buy Fewer Nvidia Chips.
Daniel Sparks, The Motley FoolMon, September 14, 2026 at 3:58 PM UTC
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Image source: Getty Images.Key Points -
The essay asks frontier AI labs to slow capability advances, with embedded evaluators verifying safety practices.
Nvidia's $108.0 billion fiscal third-quarter revenue guide assumes no data center compute revenue from China.
CEO Jensen Huang says demand is accelerating, with multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel.
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday asking the companies that build the most capable artificial intelligence (AI) models to slow down -- to pace how fast those models improve. Stock futures fell Sunday evening as investors weighed AI safety concerns, with Nasdaq futures falling the most.
Nvidia(NASDAQ:NVDA) shares had already dropped about 5% last week, to about $218 as of this writing, before the essay came out. The chipmaker's own forecast calls for $108.0 billion of revenue this quarter.
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Does a paced frontier change what Nvidia can sell, or only how fast models improve? I read the essay over the weekend. Nothing in it asks anyone to buy fewer chips.
What does the essay ask for?
The essay, called "We Must Pace the Frontier," lays out a three-step plan. Frontier AI companies (the handful of labs training the most capable models) would grant third-party evaluators something like employee-level access to verify safety practices and report incidents. Labs in democratic countries would then coordinate on shared safety standards and limits on the pace of unchecked progress. The third step asks governments to bring authoritarian countries into the arrangement. Anthropic says it is committing to the first step unilaterally.
But the plan is about oversight, not buying. Nowhere does the essay tell anyone to cancel a chip order or reduce a capital budget.
"[P]acing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models," Amodei wrote.
And the idea has momentum. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk both supported it publicly within a day.
Demand is the part the essay leaves untouched
In the second quarter of fiscal 2027, a period that ended July 26, Nvidia's revenue more than doubled year over year, totaling $96.2 billion. Data center sales made up $89.0 billion of it, up 117% from a year earlier. Net income grew 126% year over year to $59.7 billion. Management's late-August guide calls for $108.0 billion of fiscal third-quarter revenue, plus or minus 2% -- about 12% above the quarter just reported, and roughly 89% above the $57.0 billion posted in the year-ago period. The growth rate is decelerating, but the dollars keep stepping up.
"Now, compute is revenue. And demand is accelerating," CEO Jensen Huang said in the earnings release, crediting "multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel" as one of the forces behind the build-out.
Notably, frontier labs are precisely the companies the essay is addressed to. If those labs ever paced their spending as Amodei wants them to pace their capabilities, Nvidia would feel it first.
But that isn't what he proposed. Pacing, by the essay's own definition, means taking more time to make models safe -- not halting training.
Anthropic itself is likely the best evidence the two can separate. The company committed to the essay's first step while paying SpaceX about $1.25 billion per month for computing capacity under contracts running through May 2029. The essay's author is one of the industry's biggest buyers of computing power, and nothing he published asks him to stop.
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The China zero
The essay does make one demand about chips. "Do not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, and crack down on chip smuggling operations and remote access to data centers outside China," Amodei wrote.
Put another way, the essay's one instruction on chips is aimed at Washington and the companies doing the selling, not at the labs doing the buying.
That is also the one place Nvidia's forecast already assumes nothing. Management says it is not assuming any data center compute revenue from China in its outlook. The $108.0 billion guide doesn't include a dollar the essay wants blocked.
Of course, the risk isn't zero. The essay floats capping the computing power that goes into training the largest models, and voluntary standards that hardened into mandatory rules could become a headwind for the build-out.
If that ever happened, the demand behind Nvidia's guidance could slow. But a floated idea isn't one of the plan's three steps, and none of those steps asks for smaller orders.
In the end, nothing published over the weekend changes what Nvidia can sell this quarter. The essay asks the frontier labs to be monitored more closely, not to spend less.
Shares trade at about 28 times earnings here -- arguably a modest price for a company guiding for revenue growth of almost 90%. I wouldn't sell Nvidia stock over this essay. If a frontier lab actually cut back its purchases of computing power, I would rethink that.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Source: “AOL Money”
