AI Leaders Want to Slow Down Development

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Rachel Warren, and Travis Hoium discuss:

• OpenAI, Anthropic, and more sound the AI alarm.
• A safety problem or a business fundamentals problem.
• Consumer discretionary stocks: Value or value trap?
• AI is accelerating drug discovery.
• Mailbag: How important are dividends?

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A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on Sept. 14, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: AI leaders are looking for the brake pedal. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm your host, Tyler Crowe. Today, I’m joined by longtime Fool contributors, Rachel Warren and Travis Hoium, doing a little bit of a mix-up. There has been a fair share of “we need to slow AI development“ chatter out there. But this past weekend, that conversation appeared to hit a fever pitch. We had several employees leaving Anthropic and OpenAI over safety concerns. Now both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are calling for the slowing down of development of frontier models lest they go out of control, I think was the words that Sam Altman used. Even the CIO of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates was on podcasts over the past week, talking about human extinction, and the probability was higher than 10%, which is silly if you think about it, or startling depending on how you want to look at it. This isn't anything new, but it does appear to come at a very specific time where both OpenAI and Anthropic are on the precipice of IPOs and spending on these businesses is getting tougher to swallow, especially at the frontier level, where the bulk of their spending is going. The cynical view, at least to me, is that all of this slowdown chatter comes at a time when they want to slow down spending more than anything else without disrupting business growth.

I want to pose the question to both of you. On a scale of AI will be the death of us we need to slow down, and we're trying to middle this spending versus growth challenges of business, where do you land on the spectrum here?

Rachel Warren: Honestly, I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but I do tend to take a bit of a more cynical view to what we've been hearing. I want to talk about why. I think there’s a lot of calculations going on behind the scenes, and I don’t think that means that there aren’t real, justifiable concerns about AI safety and the constraints, or lack thereof, of some of these frontier labs. But I also think you have to look at the math behind all of this. You talk about OpenAI and anthropic. You're moving out of the easy bunny venture phase. These are companies that are anticipating to have huge entrances into the public markets, where they're going to face a very different level of scrutiny than they have in the private space.

Infrastructure spending has become a real black hole. You look at OpenAI's internal projections, which were reported not that long ago by the information, they're expecting a $14 billion loss. 2026, they could have cumulative losses of about 44 billion by 2028. Think about how a single next-gen data center runs about $35 billion on its own. This is not something that Wall Street is necessarily going to be forgiving on. Talking about Anthropic for a moment. We have heard for a while now from Dario Amodei. He's been spending almost the last year warning the industry to slow down.

Meanwhile, we also saw a report from the information that Anthropic has locked in $517 billion in compute commitments. That's 14.8 gigawatts of capacity. It's enough to rival just for scale a dozen nuclear reactors. They're funding that obviously with revenue. They have their confidential IPO pipeline. A lot of that is going to Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX. The outside voices that are making this case as well have a lot of ski in the game. We had an interview with Greg Jensen that we saw from Bridgewater in recent days. He's not a neutral bystander. He was one of the earlier investors in both OpenAI and Anthropic. He's the one that was telling Bloomberg on a recent podcast there's a 30-60% chance of a catastrophic AI disaster in the next few years. Bridgewater's own SEC filings show that it's been building up positions in video Broadcom, Amazon. We're seeing this push for regulation in compliance costs, but it's more likely to just price out the open-source community and the small players who can't afford the legal overhead. The biggest labs can absorb it. I think the risks are very likely real. I'm more inclined to believe that there are justifiable concerns there. But I also think the loudest voices calling for caution are the same people holding the largest stakes; you have to question what the motivation is.

Travis Hoium: We're in such an interesting time with this entire debate, and from an investment perspective, we're talking about trillions of dollars in many multi-trillion dollar companies that are involved here. This isn't something that we should take lightly. As I reflect on the weekend, it was so interesting to see, first of all, the leaders of these labs almost all agree with what Dario wrote. That was a little bit stark to me and it felt a little bit coordinated. I don't know whether that's good or bad. But I also came away thinking that all of these things can be true. They can be really worried about safety. Critics can be correct in that they're just trying to pull the ladder up and get regulatory capture so that they can build a mote around their business. Everyone can also be wrong about all of those things.

These companies are crying wolf a little bit because they've been doing this for years. Dario Amodei has been one of the biggest critics, and yet he started a company that is now arguably in the lead in AI development and also thinks that this is going to lead to some terrible. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on here, and the history of technology says that something bad will probably happen. We just don't know what that is. When the Internet was invented, we didn't necessarily think that was going to lead to more isolation and mental health issues among younger people, but this is where we are today. The root cause and the cause and effect is unknown here. I think that's the real challenge is that it's almost like these people are saying, hey, you got to protect me from myself, because if I continue to develop this, I'm going to do something really bad.

One of the things that's most resonant to me is that there are laws in place for a lot of these things. If you build a product that goes out and hurts people or steals things, it is your fault. I almost wonder, too, if after this hugging face incident, my understanding is that there were laws broken. There were felonies committed and is OpenAI. We just seem to be glossing over that. If the next big thing is suddenly financial institutions are broken into and these AIs steal money, are people going to go to jail, and that's what they're worried about? It all is a very interesting and complicated push and pull of many things that are probably have threads of truth but are not completely true.

Ultimately, we're investors here. Something bad is probably going to happen. The question is going to be, then what are we going to do? Because, especially in the U.S., we don't typically act first. We act after the thing happens, and that's probably I can go back to the great financial crisis anything in the last 20 or 30 years, at least. That's just the way that I think it's probably going to play out. I think that's what regulators are looking at. That's what the president says, as well. A lot of uncertainty, but take these risks very seriously, but also ask questions about who is bringing them up.

Tyler Crowe: I got to say, hearing all of this, I feel like reading the S-1 for anthropic and OpenAI of seeing in the risk sections like, our AI agents might commit felonies, and we don't know if it might happen. I don't normally read the entire risk section line for line, but I might have to if this is what we're going to find. But you guys touched on a point I want to drill down a little bit deeper into here. You're talking about this little bit more, the idea of regulating AI development, stuff like that. It really feels like the Silicon Valley playbook that we've seen before, where it's this land and expand role of like you saw with Google, where it dominated search, or Meta, where it started to dominate social media. Then what ends up happening is regulations come down. Think about GDPR in Europe. Or something along those lines where the regulatory burdens are put up, and it's the idea of trying to make it more fair. But what ends up happening is these giants are the only ones that can handle the regulatory compliance to make it happen. I am curious to get your specific point, do you think this may actually just be like a regulatory thing? It's like we have pushed ourself far enough ahead of other people that we want to drop the drawbridge now and then use the regulatory advantage to our benefit, or is this more like the money side of it?

Travis Hoium: I think it's a nice happenstance that it also is to their competitive advantage if the ladder is pulled up. I don't necessarily think. Anthropic in particular, but I think all the AI developers, in general, this sounds crazy. Again, we're an investing podcast, but there is much more of a religious view to this in a lot of ways because they don't really know how this thing works. They can't explain to you why AI is doing the things that it's doing. There is this ineffable view that they have of this technology that they're developing. That's why I think they're very serious about being concerned. Oh, by the way, if it happens to help our business, that's a nice byproduct.

Rachel Warren: Look, the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak. I think there's multiple ways to look at this. I think I was pretty clear about. I have a cynical take in the sense that I think a lot of this unity that we're seeing among the leaders of these frontier labs goes back to the reality that the bottlenecks are their concerns about growth as they enter the public markets and trying to set expectations. But I do also think that we see that these leaders are talking about a technology that they have helped to create and develop that is rapidly outpacing their ability to control and even fully understand it. That creates a very difficult paradigm to unlock, because how do you regulate something that is evolving and learning so quickly?

At least in the short term, the answer is, you have to pull the brakes a bit. You have to scale back development, to understand how to regulate it. If they are watching somebody's recent incidents, obviously, the hugging face one is one of the most prominent. There could be a real concern about what liability could look like for these businesses moving on to the next three, five years and beyond. I think it's both to their benefit and of course, more broadly for the benefit of mankind for there to be regulation, but that is a much more difficult type of technology to actually set real legal guardrails around than what we've seen come out of Silicon Valley in the past. I think that is part of why this is so challenging.

Travis Hoium: Tyler, I just want to bring up one quick thing. I wonder if something happened at one of these labs that we don't yet know.

Rachel Warren: Can I get a report?

Travis Hoium: We didn't know about the Hugging Face incident until long after it happened.

Rachel Warren: Could be.

Travis Hoium: Is there a reason that all these people who seem to be fighting each other to lead the AI world? Why are they suddenly all on the same page? Just bringing that up.

Tyler Crowe: Waiting two months from now for the big news drop. He's like, there was an oops at OpenAI or something like that. Something that we're all going to be following, and not exactly the most cheaper way to start your Monday is, hey, AI might kill us, but maybe it's just for regulatory compliance purposes. But I promise we're going to do a little bit more of a palette cleanser here in the next segment.

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