GoKawiilDario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, during the company's Builder Summit in Bengaluru, India, Feb. 16, 2026.
Stocks tied to the AI boom slumped on Monday, but cybersecurity companies rallied, as concerns about a slowdown in artificial intelligence development rippled across Wall Street.
Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for AI model creators to slow the pace of development after fears voiced by researchers went viral. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk both said they agree with Amodei.
"They may be really good at models, but they're not good at talking stocks and what they're doing is freaking the market," Melius Research's Ben Reitzes told CNBC on Monday.
Chipmakers and server vendors that have seen their fortunes soar in the AI buildout plummeted on fears of dampened growth and rising inventories. Micron , Intel , Marvell Technology and Applied Materials dropped more than 4% each, and Nvidia fell about 3%. South Korean memory maker SK Hynix declined 7% in U.S. trading.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise slid about 11%, while Dell and Oracle lost 6% and 4%, respectively. Neocloud CoreWeave , which Bernstein analysts flagged as one of the most exposed AI names given its massive rural data center reach, dropped about 7%. Data center stocks Equinix and Digital Realty Trust declined more than 3%, while liquid cooling providers such as Vertiv dropped about 8%.
The narrative is having the opposite effect for cybersecurity companies, which are tasked with protecting companies and government agencies from AI-related attacks. Calls for those vendors to ramp up their capabilities hit a fever pitch this summer after OpenAI revealed that its agents orchestrated an attack on Hugging Face.
Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike , the industry leaders, jumped more than 13% each. Okta , Zscaler , Qualys , SentinelOne and Netskope also saw double-digit gains.
CrowdStrike and Palo Alto have played a major role in model development, participating in early testing for unreleased OpenAI and Anthropic models.
SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten told CNBC that cyber companies sit in a unique position to build protection technologies used to monitor agent behavior.
... continue reading