What price an apocalypse? Leaders of the biggest AI companies want to slow development to avoid "frontier models" capable of wreaking enormous damage. Fortunately, this is a goal their investors should be able to get behind too. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei suggested over the weekend that AI advancements should be "paced", with governments co-ordinating on standards where possible.

Even without regulatory coercion, AI hotshots such as Anthropic, Open AI and Space X should be able to find a financial case for reining in the pace of progress. One advantage of slowing down would be that it would reduce the enormous amounts of cash being lavished on training new models. For example, Open AI plans to spend $750bn on computing capacity by 2030. Every year that gets pushed back reduces the present value of that outlay by almost $100bn, Lex calculates.

True, one risk of "pacing" is that also-rans will have a chance to catch up and snatch market share. Open-weight models are just a few months behind the leading edge. China is a formidable competitor, though Amodei suggests keeping cutting-edge AI chips out of its hands could buy three to five years. But there is plenty of hay to be made from existing models, and slowing down would create extra incentive to make it. Space X, in its IPO, suggested a $22.7tn market for "enterprise applications". Anthropic may hint at a market worth $30tn. Deutsche Bank reckons that if 60 per cent of knowledge workers are using AI-related apps by 2031, they would equate to a $400bn revenue pool.

Any investor in Anthropic — including Black Rock, Singapore's GIC, Coatue and Sequoia Capital — should have another pressing reason to support a co-ordinated pacing effort. After all, the extinction of humanity, which would presumably include all of their clients, is a risk for which there is no known hedge.