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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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Several big tech firms whose leaders signed President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence accord in September lost billions in market value on Thursday as a brutal sell-off swept through Wall Street following Democrats’ big win in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Nasdaq Composite, which is full of AI-related and other tech stocks, fell 5.5 percent, while the S&P 500 fell 4.4 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 1,883 points.
It came amid fears the Democratic Party’s sweeping victories on Tuesday, retaking control of both the House and Senate, could bring more scrutiny of AI companies and stall the construction of more data centers, which have faced opposition from voters on both sides of the political spectrum due to their impact on energy bills and the environment.
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Trump has blamed the stock market fall on the election result.
“The Stock Market crashed today because the Dumocrats had a big Tuesday — So sad to see, you only have yourselves to blame,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Thursday night.
It came just over a month after Trump assembled a group of leaders of AI companies at the White House, where they signed what was cast as a voluntary accord aimed at addressing Americans’ fears about the technology.
The agreement was signed by Trump, as well Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk, founder of xAI, which has become part of Musk’s SpaceX.
Newsweek has contacted the companies for comment via emails sent outside regular business hours.
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Not all of the companies are publicly traded. Here’s how they fared on Thursday:
Anthropic
Anthropic, the maker of AI assistant Claude, is not publicly traded, so it did not suffer a stock market loss on Thursday.
The company filed paperwork in October for an initial public offering (IPO) on Wall Street. However, analysts are now questioning whether the company will move forward with its highly anticipated IPO in the wake of the market sell-off. Reuters previously reported that it was expected to kick off the week of November 9.
The company was recently valued at $965 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable startups.
Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and one of the most influential stocks on Wall Street, fell 2.2 percent on November 5.
Based on Alphabet’s post-close valuation of approximately $3.47 trillion, the fall erased an estimated $78 billion in market value.
It added to a volatile period for the company, after Alphabet suffered its worst-day ever on the stock market last month. Alphabet stock fell almost 13 percent on October 29, the worst day for the company since it went public in 2004, losing about $500 billion in market value after reporting weaker than expected growth for the summer.
Meta
Shares of Meta Platforms dropped 3.96 percent on Thursday
The company finished the day with a market capitalization of about $1.55 trillion, suggesting the company lost about $60 billion in market value.
Nvidia
Nvidia, a chip company that quickly became the face of the AI boom, sustained the biggest losses of any company that signed Trump’s accord.
It saw shares fall by 9.3 percent on Thursday, wiping out more than $440 billion from the company’s value.
OpenAI
OpenAI remains privately held.
The maker of ChatGPT had been looking to go public this year, but CEO Sam Altman said in an interview in September that the timeline would be extended amid concerns about AI safety.
“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune.
xAI
SpaceX shares fell 9.05 percent on Thursday, wiping an estimated $167 billion from the company’s market value.
SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, was valued at $800 billion last year, but its value grew to $1.25 trillion after it merged in February with Musk’s AI company, xAI.
The company went public in June with an offering that raised $86 billion, breaking the record for the largest IPO and making Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
But Musk’s estimated net worth fell by $80 billion on Thursday, bringing it below $800 billion, according to Forbes.
What’s in Trump’s AI Accord?
Trump released a one-page document called the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” on Truth Social in September.
He had described the document, which he said he and the tech executives had signed, was “morally binding.”
The document called for the companies to implement four “layers of controls and audits.”
It asked them to:
- Implement internal controls to monitor capabilities and alignment of AI models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats to ensure that models "do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.”
- Have an internal team to ensure "all of the controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended.”
- Partner with an external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether a company's AI control and monitoring systems were operating as intended.
- Designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from teams operating AI controls and from internal and external auditors.
The document said that these steps would give the companies, its customers and the public “confidence that the technology is operating as intended.”
It added: “Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations. Regardless of whether this is required of companies, we believe that implementing these controls and audits is critical to ensuring a safe future for everyone, and each of our companies are committed to doing this."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Tobias Meyjes and Cristina Diciu.
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