Cramer questions Anthropic CEO’s slowdown manifesto, puts forth an action plan
There could be pressure on Nvidia , given the self-imposed slowdown of the artificial intelligence data center buildout that Sam Altman from OpenAI, Elon Musk from xAI, and Dario Amodei from Anthropic have raised. Dario’s posting over the weekend — headlined as “We Must Pace the Frontier” — is self-evident and extremely self-serving. David Sacks, former tech investor and White House AI and crypto czar, has an excellent counterpoint that could explain the apparent duplicity of Dario’s manifesto. Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, wrote on X and concluded: “Go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.” While I have grown tired of Dario’s endless proclamations, the Anthropic co-founder does raise points that will impact many stocks if the slowdown proceeds, which it sounds like it will. To wit: Skeptics will be concerned about Nvidia, which is financially intertwined with many companies that benefit from a speed-up that is now in doubt. We will stay in touch on this, but I need you to know I will take any decline very seriously. At last week’s September Monthly Meeting for CNBC Investing Club members, I warned that we had to cut back on the data center; we were just too dependent. I mentioned at the top of Thursday’s livestream, which can be watched on-demand anytime , that we had to sacrifice one of our best, Corning , because of the potential for a political halt in data center progression. Well, here we are. As it dawns on people that any slowdown in the building of the data centers is not in the stocks — especially after last week’s earnings call from Oracle , the cancellation of Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s sell program notwithstanding. We would have come in positive, but the post-OpenAI/Hugging Face incident has been resurrected, and that’s now a dream. Potential reasons for Dario’s posting other than saving humanity? The language reads like he wants regulation that would enshrine OpenAI, Musk’s entities, and, of course, Anthropic, to slow down spending — making its S-1 initial public offering (IPO) document look better when it comes to lighter capital expenditures? But there is an ulterior motive: Dario is inviting regulators in and calling for a new regimen that is so strict that he is building a moat that no startup can breach. His casual mention of antitrust was painful. Why flag an intentional breach of antitrust doctrine unless you show what a good guy you are? Or, to be really cynical, why bring up any of this? Dario can just slow down spending without making a big deal of it? Aren’t they just pulling up the rope ladder for everyone else? Can he convince anyone to regulate it? Does anyone think they really are going to limit their own growth? So, let’s do this. When the overreaction is baked in, and not before that, we will follow the game plan, which talked about buying our faves after our heavy selling. We will not let you down. However, we can only do our best in a world where I wish we owned more Cardinal Health and BNY , two of our positions, which provide much-needed diversification in a market that goes up and down based on the latest AI headlines. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA, CAH, BNY. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
