On a Monday in mid-September 2026, the architects of the artificial intelligence era did something unusual — they counseled restraint. When figures like Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk publicly urged the industry to slow its pace, markets heard not a safety sermon but a financial warning: that the billions being poured into AI infrastructure may be outrunning the profits they are meant to produce. The Nasdaq fell, chip stocks bore the heaviest losses, and investors were left to reckon with the possibility that the engine driving years of market gains may be running hotter t