MW Here's the potential stock-market reaction from new restrictions on AI models

By Barbara Kollmeyer

UBS CIO says chip stocks could take a hit, software could gain

Restrictions on Anthropic could have some short-term market reaction, says UBS Global Wealth Management.

The market fallout from export restrictions imposed by the U.S. government last week on the latest models from Anthropic could mean more selling for troubled chip stocks, but some gains for software.

That's according to UBS Global Wealth Management's chief investment officer for the Americas, Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi, who spoke of "profound implications" for the AI ecosystem in markets due to late Friday restrictions on a "cutting-edge AI model," without specifically naming Anthropic.

"It raises the broader question of what government restrictions on AI mean for the markets. AI in particular, AI-related semiconductors have been the central engine of the stock market this year. Semiconductor stock gains account for over half of the S&P's [500] year-to-date gains," the CIO said in a podcast that published on Monday.

Anthropic late Friday cut access to all users of its latest Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the U.S. government determined that foreign nationals using those models posed a security threat. The company sent senior technical staff to Washington over the weekend to work out a deal to get the restrictions lifted, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources.

Read: U.S. restrictions on new Anthropic models could trigger a global AI arms race

The UBS CIO said such restrictions would firstly discourage training of more capable AI models as makers feared they would not be released. "Second, foreign nationals working at frontier labs may want to work in countries where they can have access to the latest and most powerful models. And third, it gives an economic advantage to companies in countries that make their models available without restrictions."

China AI models, which lie outside U.S. jurisdiction, are among the top strongly performing across the globe, she said. "Increased token costs have led U.S. companies to increasingly use Chinese models, such as Qwen and Kimi, which are 10 to 100 times cheaper than the U.S. frontier model."

Read: ChatGPT price-war report comes as data shows AI usage already tailing off

Chinese-developed language models account for around 61% of token consumption among top-ten models, according to data from OpenRouter, an API routing platform used by thousands of startups, she said. "U.S. restrictions could make Chinese open-source model companies an even more attractive and low-cost alternative."

As for U.S. market fallout, compute demand would also decline, putting semiconductor stocks under pressure as the incentive to train cutting-edge models would diminish, she said. Disappointing guidance from Broadcom $(AVGO)$ earlier this month took the wind out of the soaring semiconductor sector, though the VanEck Semiconductor ETF SMH remains around 65% higher this year.

"The overall compute demand declines on the margins, putting pressure on token prices. Currently, training makes up about 50 % of compute. The balance would tip further to inference using less potent models," said the CIO.

Sticky U.S. restrictions might also spark a rotation into software stocks, which have come under heavy selling pressure this year due to fears of AI disruption, she said. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF IGV is down around 11% this year.

"The latest frontier models have shown super exponential growth in coding capabilities. If model progress slows because of government restrictions, the replacement risk from new AI created-software diminishes and the terminal value of traditional software increases."

All of those potential stock reactions are likely to be short lived though, and if the overall market and semiconductors sell off due to the export restrictions, both pullbacks would be a "buying opportunity." That's because in all likelihood, the restrictions will be lifted once the vulnerabilities are corrected, she said.

"There is much at stake in the global competition for leadership in AI. For a country to hold back progress unilaterally means a loss of relative power. To succeed with regulation, it would have to be agreed to globally."

-Barbara Kollmeyer

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June 15, 2026 06:44 ET (10:44 GMT)

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