Investing.com -- Wells Fargo said Monday that a coordinated slowdown in artificial intelligence development appears unlikely despite recent calls from industry leaders to pause progress for safety reasons.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued over the weekend that frontier AI development may be advancing faster than safety measures can keep pace. Anthropic called for third-party oversight, industry safety standards, and international coordination to slow the rate of AI growth. The push follows growing concerns over recursive self-improvement and recent AI security incidents.

Wells Fargo said that while Anthropic and OpenAI are calling for a more deliberate pace of frontier AI development, it remains unclear whether they can meaningfully slow progress in a highly competitive market with winner-take-all economics. Meta continues to push aggressively and Chinese AI labs have not agreed to a slowdown. Absent broad international coordination, a unilateral slowdown risks ceding leadership, which Wells Fargo believes is a non-starter for frontier AI labs.

The bank's base case is that any slowdown in AI deployment is more likely to result from supply-side bottlenecks, such as permit delays, power availability, and local opposition, than a coordinated effort to curb demand. Wells Fargo noted that President Trump has expressed opposition to slowing US AI development. If growth is constrained by supply rather than demand, the result is a longer AI cycle, not a smaller one, the bank said.

Wells Fargo views midstream companies including NYSE:DTM, NYSE:KMI, NYSE:TRP, and NYSE:WMB as relatively insulated from an elongation of the AI cycle. Pipeline stocks already trade on 2030 multiples, the bank said. If AI demand is delayed rather than destroyed, an elongated buildout could ultimately support multiples even if near-term EBITDA compound annual growth rate falls. The bank sees a similar dynamic for NYSE:GEV, where investors price in years of growth. NYSE:BE and NYSE:GNRC may face greater risk given their heavier investor focus on near-term deployment activity, Wells Fargo said.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that AI development should accelerate, not slow, reinforcing Wells Fargo's positive view on NYSE:WMB, which has emerged as a key provider of off-grid, behind-the-meter power solutions for Meta. Meta's recently launched Muse AI model has also gained traction, climbing to number two on Apple's App Store.