Chip stocks are falling hard after the leaders of Anthropic, xAI and OpenAI all called for slowing down frontier AI work, and MediaTek is getting hit along with them.

• Anthropic's Dario Amodei asked the industry to slow down and test models more carefully for safety, and Elon Musk and Sam Altman backed him.
• Investors read that as a sign the big AI players may spend less on chips, and the Philadelphia semiconductor index dropped almost 6%.
• MediaTek fell in early Taipei trading on heavy selling, slipping back toward its 10-day average.
• The selloff clashes with the company's own numbers: August sales hit a record and jumped 44% from a year earlier.
• MediaTek is launching its first flagship phone chip built on TSMC's 2-nanometer process, plus a Pro version aimed at the high end.

Outlook: MediaTek has a strong product year ahead — an Nvidia tie-up shipping in volume and its first AI accelerator chip due to enter production late this year — but the stock will stay hostage to how much the AI giants keep spending.