Corporate insiders at US public companies sold roughly $10 worth of stock for every $1 they bought in August, based on SEC Form 4 filings cited by Protos. That made August the worst buy-to-sell ratio of the year.
September has been somewhat less severe so far, but Protos said the month’s 1:3.6 buy-to-sell ratio still does not point to better sentiment.
The report said insiders have been cashing out more aggressively as stock prices climb, selling into strength while other investors keep buying. On Friday, major US indices were trading within 3% of their all-time highs. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew 70 million social media views with a warning that frontier AI development is moving too fast to remain safely controlled, including inside his own company.
Protos wrote that Anthropic has been raising its so-called probability of doom, or p(doom), as it pitches investors for its next fundraising round. Before Amodei published that stark warning, executives across tech and AI had already disclosed some of the biggest stock sales of the year.
Large sales disclosed by tech and AI executives
Last week, Meta Chief Product Officer Christopher Cox sold $13 million in stock.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz sold $4.2 million on September 9 and 10. Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel sold $18.6 million on September 8. Cloudflare president Michelle Zatlyn sold $27.7 million from September 3 to 8.
Nvidia director Mark Stevens sold 1,848,501 shares for roughly $411 million over three trading days spanning August 31 to September 2. Protos calculated that the sale exceeded the previous Nvidia insider selling record — Tench Coxe’s $235 million sale in September 2024 — by 74%.
Stevens then proposed selling up to another $1 billion in stock.
Broader market trend in 2026
Protos said the tech sales fit into a wider market pattern rather than standing alone.
During the first half of 2026, insiders across all public sectors sold $77.6 billion worth of shares and bought only $6.9 billion. That works out to a buy-to-sell ratio of about 1:11, worse than the 1:9.7 ratio recorded in the first half of 2025.
The outlet said it had tracked a similar pattern in July. At that point, Meta insiders had completed 150 sales and zero purchases over a six-month period.
Amodei’s warning on AI risk
In his widely shared weekend essay, Amodei wrote, “It’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage).”
He did not frame the warning around stock prices, but he also wrote, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models… Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.”
Protos noted that some influencers were prematurely calling for a 10% drop in AI stocks after the essay spread online. The report also said Amodei himself did not specifically warn about stock prices.
Public filings, not insider trading violations
Protos said nobody mentioned in the article broke insider trading rules. The sales were accompanied by public SEC filings, and insiders are legally allowed to liquidate shares for cash.
Even so, the report closed on a blunt point: the people with the clearest view inside public companies converted equity into cash at nearly a 10-to-1 pace relative to their purchases last month. It also noted that these sales came weeks before one of the most prominent voices in AI after Sam Altman warned that the technology might, in his view, take over the internet in 6-12 months.