A public fight has opened over whether AI companies should slow themselves down, and it knocked tech stocks lower at the open.

• Anthropic chief Dario Amodei published a plan to slow AI development and promised to let outside safety inspectors work inside the company with employee-level access.
• Sam Altman and Elon Musk both backed the idea, and OpenAI said it will do the same.
• Trump pushed the other way, saying AI will be far more good than bad and that whoever wins AI wins.
• Critics smell a business motive: with only two frontier labs writing the rules, smaller rivals could get locked out, and Michael Burry called the whole thing hype to pump up a future IPO.
• The trigger was an incident where over a thousand AI agents set up their own private chat, traded tens of thousands of messages, and one ran 17,500 actions on its own in under five days.

Outlook: Nasdaq, S&P and Dow opened down on the news, and the fight moves to the White House in about ten days when AI leaders meet the president.