The warning about the risks of accelerated artificial intelligence development, issued over the weekend, has changed how the market views the sector. For months, the bet was straightforward: buy the companies selling computing power. Investors are now beginning to distinguish between those building the infrastructure and those selling ready-to-use applications. The result could be a rotation related to the pace of development, not its direction.

The slowdown in chips opens the door to software and cybersecurity

The Nasdaq’s 2026 performance has been built almost entirely on computing power. Since the beginning of the year, it has been the best-performing Wall Street index, rising 15.56%, while the S&P 500 has stopped at 11.40% and the Dow Jones at 9.13%.

The iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX), which includes the leading US chipmakers, has gained 58.46% since the start of the year. Over the same period, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), which tracks the North American software sector, has stopped at 3.92%. The gap between the two returns shows how the market has performed over these nine months. Moreover, the contribution from the Mag 7 has been notably absent, with Meta at 0.43% and Microsoft at 4.34% since the start of the year. Nvidia, meanwhile, stands at 11.30%, excluding Monday’s negative close of -3.36%. The figures cited in this article are updated through Monday’s close, as today’s market session was still underway at the time of writing.

What Anthropic’s warning really changes

The warning about the risks of AI developing too quickly does not call computing demand into question, but rather the timing of that demand. A slowdown affects the speed at which frontier models advance, not their existence. In practice, Anthropic and OpenAI are currently calling for a regulatory framework and, in its absence, are not stopping.

Therefore, spending related to model training is the area most exposed to a slowdown in the pace of development. Spending related to inference—that is, the daily use of already-trained models—remains where it is. Software companies work with already-trained models and do not need the next breakthrough to arrive immediately. This distinction shaped Monday’s session, with semiconductor stocks retreating and the cybersecurity sector rising sharply.

Cybersecurity did not emerge on Monday

The cybersecurity rally is not a one-session phenomenon. The First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR) has gained 41.55% since the start of the year, more than ten times the performance of general software. The picture becomes even clearer among individual sector stocks, as shown in the accompanying chart.

Fortinet is up 114.31%, Palo Alto Networks 103.01% and CrowdStrike 100.85% since January. Cloudflare, which sells networking and protection services for websites, is up 67.57%. The sector remains uneven, however, with Rubrik limited to 31.01% and Gen Digital to 15.52%. Zscaler, which specializes in secure access to enterprise applications, is instead down 14.76% despite its recovery in recent sessions.

Software still has to respond

If the rotation had already been completed, software should be showing a visible recovery in the figures. The IGV ETF does not show this yet, as the sector is up just 3.92% since the beginning of 2026, compared with 58.46% for semiconductors, as represented by the SOXX ETF.

Was Monday’s session an isolated reaction to news, or the beginning of a trend?