Calls to slow AI development expose a concentration risk hiding in ordinary portfolios, says the CEO of financial advisory giant deVere Group.
Nigel Green says Monday’s sell-off across AI-linked and semiconductor stocks in Asia, Europe and the United States is being read the wrong way by most investors.
The sell-off followed a weekend essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for the industry to slow the pace of AI capability development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly echoed the call, and other prominent tech figures voiced support within hours.
Nigel Green says the backdrop matters. Days earlier, a prominent AI researcher resigned over safety concerns, and other voices inside the industry warned publicly about the risks of moving too fast.
Markets that had shown little appetite for caution suddenly had a reason to pay attention.
“Markets are treating this as straightforward bad news for anything tied to AI spending,” says Nigel Green. “It’s the wrong lens entirely.”
He argues that a slower pace of model development does not erase the earnings assumptions already baked into a large share of this market’s recent gains, wherever those gains sit inside an index or a fund.
“Amodei and Altman are debating the speed of the frontier. Investors should be asking a different question: how much of their expected growth was ever anything other than one theme, dressed up as diversification.
“Monday’s reaction is a reminder that an enormous amount of recent market growth runs through a single narrative. And that narrative just got a lot more uncertain.”
Nigel Green points out that a slower pace of frontier development does not mean falling demand for computing power itself. Even under a more cautious approach, running the AI systems already built still requires far more capacity than the industry can currently supply, a gap that has little to do with how fast new models are released.
“Slowing the race to build smarter models doesn’t slow demand for running the models already out there,” says Nigel Green. “Conflating the two is exactly how investors end up mispricing news like this.”
He adds that the exposure extends well beyond specialist tech funds. Years of strong returns tied to AI-driven earnings have pushed that exposure into mainstream index trackers, workplace pensions and multi-asset portfolios that were never marketed as a bet on a single technology theme.
“Somebody who has never bought a tech stock in their life can still be sitting on a concentrated AI position through their pension,” says Nigel Green.
Nigel Green says the parallel with previous market cycles, where a handful of dominant growth stories eventually forced a re-rating of an entire market, is impossible to ignore now that AI has become the primary driver of major equity indices.
The difference this time, he says, is how directly ordinary savers are exposed, through the pension funds and workplace schemes that quietly rode the same rally.
“AI isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the demand behind it,” says Nigel Green. “But a portfolio that turned into a concentrated AI bet by accident needs to be reassessed on purpose, not after the next Monday like this one.”
Nigel Green says the argument over how fast AI should advance will keep playing out among the people building it. For everyday investors, he argues, the more urgent task is working out exactly how exposed their own portfolio already is, and deciding on purpose whether that exposure still makes sense.
“Reviewing that exposure doesn’t require predicting where AI development goes from here,” says Nigel Green. “It requires an honest look at how a portfolio got built, and whether the concentration inside it was ever a deliberate decision.”
“Nobody needs to predict the next twist in this debate to do that work,” concludes Nigel Green. “They just need to look.”
