AI Slowdown Debate Splits Tech CEOs: Nvidia, Broadcom Dismiss Any Threat While Elon Musk Calls For Peer Review System

• AI infrastructure executives see durable demand despite the debate over development speed.
• Analysts argue competitive pressures make a meaningful industrywide slowdown unlikely.
• Cybersecurity firms see growing opportunities as increasingly capable AI models enter the wild.

The proposed slowdown in AI development has split the technology world, with investors largely dismissing the prospect of a meaningful pullback while executives and tech leaders debate whether faster development raises unacceptable risks. 

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to moderate the pace of frontier AI has drawn support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, but skepticism from Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. 

President Donald Trump has gone further, calling fears of AI destroying the world a “hoax,” while analyst Gene Munster argued the industry is unlikely to materially slow given the U.S.-China race and competitive pressures.

The debate intensified after Amodei argued over the weekend that AI labs should “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI,” citing the possibility of increasingly powerful systems becoming difficult to control.

Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said the market reaction had been excessive, noting that several major AI stocks fell 4% to 8% after Amodei’s comments. 

He compared the proposed slowdown to moving from “200 mph” to 195 mph, arguing that competitive dynamics make a substantial pullback unlikely.

“There’s no way these companies are going to measurably back off,” Munster said, pointing to the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and the U.S.-China technology race. He maintained his bullish stance on AI stocks and said Anthropic could still have a “blockbuster” IPO.

Tech CEOs Take Positions

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan similarly played down the threat to AI infrastructure demand. Asked in an interview with CNBC whether the debate had changed his long-term AI semiconductor outlook, Tan said, “No, not in the least.”

He said demand for compute infrastructure would remain “very strong” and “very durable,” particularly as AI moves from model training into inference and commercial products. Broadcom shares nevertheless fell 4.8% Monday.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also pushed back against the idea of slowing AI development. At the All-In Summit 2026 in Los Angeles on Monday, Huang backed Trump after the president characterized the slowdown argument as playing into the hands of political opponents and China.

“You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir,” Huang told Trump over the phone, drawing applause from the audience.

Block, Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey took a more nuanced position, supporting independent evaluations and scrutiny but opposing limits negotiated by incumbent AI labs. “Preserving a company’s commercial advantage is not a safety objective,” he said in a long post on X.

Cybersecurity Firms See AI Opportunity

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz offered a different argument: even if frontier AI development slows, the security problem already exists. “The genie’s out of the bottle,” Kurtz said in an interview with CNBC, pointing to frontier and open-weight models that are already capable of dangerous behavior. 

CrowdStrike shares jumped nearly 14% Monday.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, meanwhile, suggested the pacing campaign could be both a safety effort and a commercial strategy, adding that he believes AI companies have little incentive to slow individually.

“The pacing is a ninja move,” Arora said in an X post, while warning that industry-wide coordination could ultimately produce fragmented regulation, higher compliance costs and an advantage for open-source AI.

Trump Calls For AI Doomsday Fears A ‘Hoax’

Trump, however, has rejected the underlying premise of an AI catastrophe altogether. In a series of Truth Social posts, he called the idea that AI could “take over, consume, and destroy the World” a “Hoax,” comparing it with his criticisms of climate change warnings and other political controversies.

Trump also dismissed concerns that AI development and data centers could pose broader societal risks, accusing critics of using the issue to advance a “Bad and Evil Cause.” He argued that fears of AI and robots replacing humans are exaggerated.

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