Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a roughly 4,000-word open letter Saturday titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing the industry must slow capability gains so safety work can catch up. OpenAI's Sam Altman posted "I agree with Dario" and Elon Musk backed it too — turning a safety essay into a sector-wide repricing event. Nasdaq 100 futures fell more than 1%, with Nvidia and Broadcom off about 3% premarket and AMD down as much as 5.6% to around $487.
The second-derivative AI names got hit far harder than the megacaps. Marvell and SK Hynix each fell about 7%, while CoreWeave, SanDisk, Intel and AMD dropped roughly 6%, and Micron and Super Micro slid about 5%. Western Digital and Seagate were each off more than 4% — a classic high-beta unwind where the most leveraged AI exposure sells first.
Brent crude jumped about 2.5% to roughly $107.30 a barrel after Saudi Arabia halted flows through its East-West pipeline following drone strikes near key pumping stations. WTI pushed above $102. With energy adding to inflation pressure, markets are now pricing roughly an 86% probability of a Fed rate hike at Wednesday's meeting — a rough setup for long-duration growth names.
The Information reported Anthropic is the buyer behind Rum Group's previously announced $13.7 billion, six-year compute agreement. Anthropic also received options on up to 51 million RUM shares at a penny apiece, tied to actual compute consumption at the Maysville data center and an additional 400 to 500 megawatts at a second site. The stock popped about 20% overnight before dilution math trimmed the gain.
Oracle said Saturday that Larry Ellison cancelled a 10b5-1 plan to sell up to 50 million shares worth roughly $7.5 billion, adopted June 22 and set to run through October 24. No shares were sold, and the company says he has no other plans to sell. Context matters: Oracle is down roughly 22% year to date, and a person close to Ellison said he views the shares as undervalued.
Anthropic confidentially filed with the SEC on June 1 and has been targeted as the first frontier lab to list, carrying a private valuation near $965 billion after its Series H. That makes the timing of Amodei's slowdown essay the question of the day for underwriters. OpenAI, meanwhile, has signaled it isn't going public in 2026, with CFO Sarah Friar saying the company isn't ready. Neither is publicly traded — flagging as news only.
JPMorgan moved Iren two notches from Underweight straight to Overweight, lifting the price target to $65 from $46. The thesis is that Iren has established itself as a tier-one neocloud with Nvidia partnership momentum behind it. Notable that the call landed on a day when neocloud names were broadly red.
Mara Holdings was double-downgraded to Underweight from Overweight, with the target cut to $11 from $13. Analysts argued peers offer more direct growth and value accretion from data center opportunities — effectively saying Mara is the wrong vehicle for the AI-infrastructure pivot.
Evercore ISI downgraded Hewlett Packard Enterprise to In Line from Outperform, calling the shares fairly valued after a 158.5% year-to-date gain. It's a valuation call rather than a fundamental one, but it lands at an awkward moment for AI-server exposure.
DA Davidson's Gil Luria raised his Palantir target to $250 from $200 with a Buy, and Rosenblatt reiterated Buy with a $225 target after attending AIPCon 11. Palantir also announced a partnership with Oracle to jointly sell cloud and AI services to enterprises and governments. Shares closed around $167, still well above the $195 average target's implied starting point — note the Street's average sits below the newest bull cases.
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