Calls from within the artificial intelligence industry to deliberately slow the technology's development rattled markets on Monday, sinking AI-related stocks — while Bitcoin rose.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called on AI labs to rein in the pace of their capability gains for safety reasons, and OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk both said publicly that they agree. Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Marvell led a chipmaker selloff as a result, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down almost 6%. Crypto, meanwhile, has so far been unaffected: Bitcoin climbed as gold, silver and most AI-linked stocks fell.

The split reflects what each market is trading on: chip valuations rest on the expectation that AI capability keeps advancing fast enough to justify the data-center buildout, while Bitcoin's recent swings have turned on Federal Reserve expectations and Washington's crypto agenda rather than Silicon Valley headlines.

Over the weekend, Amodei published a lengthy essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier", arguing that the AI industry needs to deliberately slow how fast it improves model capabilities. He pointed to two recent developments behind his shift: recursive self-improvement accelerating progress industry-wide — a dynamic in which AI systems help produce their more capable successors — and an OpenAI-Hugging Face agent-swarm incident that he treats as a warning sign.

Within a day Altman said on X that he agreed, and Musk publicly concurred.

When markets opened Monday, Wall Street apparently read those calls as bad news for the chips powering the AI boom. Nvidia fell as much as 3%, Intel dropped more than 5%, and AMD sank about 6%. Chipmaker Marvell Technology lost as much as 7.5%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, a widely used gauge of chip stocks, sank almost 6%. For suppliers whose data-center sales have become the backbone of the AI buildout, a slowdown at the model layer cuts to the demand outlook.

But not everything crashed.

Bitcoin Sits Out the Selloff

Bitcoin moved in the opposite direction. The largest cryptocurrency climbed as high as $78,280, up nearly 2% since midnight UTC and about 4.8% below this month's record of $82,284. Ethereum added 2.1% to trade near $2,514, XRP gained 3.3%, and total crypto market capitalization grew about 1.5%.

The strength extends a pattern that has played out for weeks. Bitcoin was knocked down to $76,877 during Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh's hawkish Jackson Hole speech in late August, then bounced back above $80,000 on September 3 after Fed Governor Christopher Waller signaled he could support holding rates steady — a comment that triggered a short squeeze exceeding $415 million, as traders who had bet on lower prices were forced to buy back in.

Monday's move fits that same rhythm: rate-hike anxiety knocks Bitcoin down, and any hint of relief sends it climbing again.

Progress on U.S. crypto legislation gave sentiment an extra push. The odds of Congress passing the Clarity Act in 2026 jumped to 31% on Polymarket over the weekend after President Trump agreed to updated ethics provisions that had stalled the bill since July.

The Senate holds a cloture vote on Tuesday. Cloture is the procedural step that ends debate and clears a bill for a final vote, requiring 60 of the chamber's 100 senators. With Republicans controlling 53 seats and at least two expected to vote no, Clarity Act backers likely need close to nine Democrats to reach the 60 votes required — setting up a dramatic vote that could move markets in either direction depending on the outcome. Success would move the bill toward a floor vote; failure would leave it stalled once again.