Dire warnings on AI from the CEOs of Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) could weigh especially heavily on the business of CoreWeave if the tech is reigned in.
“The most exposed name in our coverage is CoreWeave. We estimate that 25% of their existing active U.S. power, with an additional ~74% of their contracted power, is situated in Tier 3 and Tier 4 markets. The backlog is primarily comprised of take-or-pay contracts, so we do not anticipate a threat there, but could see a pullback in demand for the contracted, not-yet-sold rural power if training development slows,” said Bernstein analyst Madison Rezaei in a note on Monday.
CoreWeave shares fell nearly 7% in pre-market trading, one of the worst slides in the AI stock patch on the fresh CEO warnings.
Within the course of two days, AI titans at Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), CEO Sam Altman, have managed to scare the hell out of the human race with the powerful technology they created and pushed their teams full of pioneering super-coders to supercharge.
“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Amodei stated in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Altman said right after the post that he agreed with his rival Amodei.
He then followed that up on Monday with a dark X post early on today.
“There are two ways AI progress could go very badly, and that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities,” Altman said in an X post around 12:57 am ET.
He continued, “Second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian. Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path; for example, one country could gain too much power. Another example is one lab ending up with too much power.”
Any slowdown in the pace of AI development could expose CoreWeave’s rather interesting balance sheet and overall approach to doing business. The company has used a large amount of debt to fuel its development on the view that demand will stay very strong for years.