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A 27-year-old’s viral warning… AI CEOs agree about slowing down… why Wall Street is selling… and the contrarian case that a slowdown could extend the AI bull… how Jonathan Rose is trading it
As I write on Monday morning, the AI trade is in the red.
Over the weekend, the people building artificial intelligence spent their time warning the world about it – a panic that started with a single viral post last week.
A 27-year-old Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon quit the AI industry with a seven-part post on X. It has since been viewed more than 150 million times.
Coxon had spent three years in pretraining research – first at OpenAI, then at Anthropic, the lab many consider the most safety-conscious of them all. Here’s the heart of what he wrote:
I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly.
They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.
He went further, claiming the people building AI, “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” – and that this was “not a marketing stunt.”
You can debate whether Coxon is right about the existential stuff. Plenty of smart people agree with him. Plenty think the doom scenarios are wildly overblown.
But for our purposes here in the Digest, whether he’s right almost doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened next. Because within 48 hours, the story had escaped the tech world entirely.
From viral post to political ammunition
The commentary from the political class was nearly immediate.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker – a Democrat and a 2028 presidential contender – fired back at Coxon’s post the very next day:
It’s time to sound the alarm – louder – on reining in Artificial Intelligence.
It’s becoming more clear the threat AI poses to humanity, so I’m calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington.
When AI researchers are whistleblowing, we need to listen.
Let’s be candid – this is a 2028 presidential hopeful test-driving AI fear as a campaign plank. That’s a sign of where we are.
Of course, he wasn’t alone…
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who just days earlier had teamed with Rep. Greg Casar to introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act – a bill to permanently ban superintelligence and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator writes the rules – posted:
Mr. Coxon is right. The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity. That is why I will soon be introducing legislation to ban superintelligence and pause AI development.
All told, more than 20 lawmakers joined the chorus within days. Whatever you make of the policy, the signal is unmistakable – the AI rollout now faces a serious political headwind.
Then the CEOs agreed
Rather than defend themselves, over the weekend, the people running these companies didn’t push back on Coxon. They agreed.
On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy open letter titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” His central argument:
We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast – and we must make wise use of the time we gain.
Amodei pointed to two things that had changed his thinking: AI systems increasingly capable of building more advanced AI systems, and the July “Hugging Face” incident we covered here, in which autonomous AI agents slipped their controls and compromised another company’s systems.
Then OpenAI’s Sam Altman backed him up:
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.
Even Elon Musk chimed in, saying, “Dario is right.”
Not everyone is on board. President Trump rejected the idea outright on Sunday, framing it as a matter of national security. “Whoever wins AI wins,” he told reporters – making clear he has no interest in slowing America down while China races ahead.
The market is circling the wagons – but is that the right response?
Put it all together – a viral extinction warning, a bipartisan political scramble, and the industry’s own founders calling for a slowdown – and you get this morning’s selloff.
The logic is straightforward…
If the companies driving the AI buildout deliberately slow down, the torrent of spending that has lifted everything from chips to data centers to power companies could ease. Slower buildout, slower revenue, softer stock prices. Sell first, ask questions later.
But is this the right take?
Picture two cars racing down a twisting mountain road…
The driver who never touches the brakes probably doesn’t get down the mountain faster. He goes off the first sharp curve. It’s the driver who brakes into the turns who makes the quickest descent – because control is what lets him carry speed the whole way down.
For three years, the AI trade has been the car with no brakes.
The entire story has been “faster, bigger, more” – more compute, more capital, more capability, with little regard for the curves ahead. And the sharpest curve of all was never going to be technological. It’s political.
Which is exactly why a self-imposed slowdown might not kill this bull market. It might prolong it.
The single biggest threat to the AI trade was never a soft earnings quarter. It was the risk of a public backlash so fierce that Washington slams on the brakes for the industry – bans, restrictions, and heavy-handed rules that land all at once and choke off the whole thing.
If the industry taps its own brakes first – pacing the frontier, adding guardrails, taking the safety concerns seriously – it takes the ammunition away from the Pritzkers and Sanders of the world. It defuses the very backlash that could otherwise end this cycle years early.
A controlled deceleration, in other words, might be exactly what keeps this AI bull alive longer than a reckless sprint ever could.
That is not the conclusion Wall Street reached this morning. But it may be the more useful one.
Which is what Luke Lango has been flagging all along
Regular Digest readers know this framing didn’t come out of nowhere. Our technology expert Luke Lango, editor of Early Stage Investor, has been building this exact case for months.
Luke has been wildly bullish on AI. But for months, he’s been just as clear about what will eventually end the trade – and it isn’t a tech failure or a recession:
The force that will derail the AI Boom is not a technological failure, demand collapse, or even a recession.
It is politics – specifically, a populist backlash against AI that is already building momentum.
Luke has said that backlash is likely a multi-year story, mostly tied to the 2028 election cycle – “not this earnings season or even this year.” The Coxon firestorm and the scramble of 2028 hopefuls that followed within 48 hours is that forecast assembling itself in real time.
That’s why, despite headwinds for the AI trade in recent months, his advice hasn’t been to run from AI but to recognize that the window is finite – and to make the most of it while it stays open:
Make your money now. The window for transformational wealth creation in this AI cycle is the next two to three years. This trade will not last forever.
Now, that quote came before this weekend’s turn – we’ll update you on Luke’s latest thinking when he sounds off. But the framework he’s laid out points to the same question either way: not whether to be in the AI trade, but how to be positioned before the politics fully catch up.
This ties into what Luke has spent the last several months mapping out in the investment markets. As we’ve tracked here in the Digest, he’s been identifying which of Elon Musk’s suppliers stand to benefit most as Musk builds out his “Vertical AI” empire – the smaller companies quietly supplying the physical capabilities his empire still leans on.
In a first-ever InvestorPlace workshop last week, Luke put Musk’s empire up on screen, zeroed in on the key bottlenecks, and highlighted the companies positioned to fill them as Musk’s spending accelerates. We’ll be taking the free replay down soon, but you can still catch it here for now.
If you’d rather trade the turbulence
Wall Street read this weekend as a reason to sell. We’d read it differently – and not only for the long-term reasons above.
In the near term, it’s a reason to know exactly what you own, and to be honest about how much of an AI name’s price is riding on a rich multiple rather than the business underneath it.
That’s the lens our trading expert Jonathan Rose, editor of Masters in Trading, is bringing to the moment. Here’s what he wrote this morning:
The AI story isn’t going anywhere… What worries me isn’t the story. It’s the multiple.
Rates, cooling global conflicts, the midterms – none of those stories in isolation can kill AI. But they can change what investors are willing to pay for it – and that can change fast…
When multiples compress and volatility picks up, those same names can pull back hard without anything actually being wrong with the long-term thesis. That’s not a story shift. That’s a repricing.
It’s exactly why Jonathan has been telling his readers to treat volatility as something to position for rather than fear – getting long VIX options as insurance, and hunting setups in supply-side names like Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) and The Metals Company (TMC) built to surge on volatility instead of getting crushed by it.
Today, he broke it down in today’s free episode of Masters in Trading Live, flagging where he sees the biggest friction points for AI, and exactly where he’s been making money in metals, infrastructure, and the names built to handle whatever comes next.
By the way, Jonathan publishes these free episodes every day that the market is open at 11 a.m. ET. He profiles market trends, explains entries and exits, discusses the opportunities he’s watching in real time, and offers plenty of tickers along the way. You can sign up right here to receive daily reminders and links to the upcoming episodes.
Coming full circle
In last Wednesday’s Digest, I gave readers a homework assignment:
Sit down with every AI position you own, one at a time, and sort each into a bucket.
Bucket one: “I believe in this so deeply I’ll hold through any pullback, any panic, any ugly headline — no matter how far it drops.”
Bucket two: “This is a momentum trade. If it turns against me, I’m out — and I know exactly why, when and how I’ll sell.”
There’s no wrong answer. The wrong move is not knowing which bucket a stock belongs in until you’re staring at a 30% drawdown, deciding in the heat of the moment.
Days like today are what those assignments are for. Are you prepared?
From here, whether you’re trading the volatile names pushed and pulled by emotion, adding to your long-term portfolio as fear drags great stocks lower, or protecting what you own by being clear-eyed about which names carry the richest multiples – and the most exposure to the political attacks now taking shape – the posture is the same…
Don’t fear the volatility – follow your plan. That way, you’re prepared no matter what happens with the AI trade.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
