Goldman Just Built an Escape Hatch From the AI Trade

Goldman Sachs has quietly launched a product called the S&P ex-AI index (ticker: SPXXAI). The premise is simple: take the S&P 500, remove every company tied to AI, and see what you've got.

What you've got isn't pretty.

According to Slashdot's reporting on the Axios story, AI-related companies now make up roughly 45% of the entire S&P 500. Strip them out and the remaining index has returned just 32% over the last three years. The full S&P 500? Up 76% in the same period.

Nearly half the market's value is now riding on AI. The other half is basically treading water.

Who This Product Is For

Louis Miller, head of Goldman's equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to clients that excluding AI enablers from a passive benchmark would "eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype." The index is available exclusively to Goldman customers and was built in collaboration with S&P Dow Jones Indices.

This isn't a product for skeptics who think AI is useless. It's a product for institutional investors who are overexposed and want to hedge. Big difference.

If Goldman's own clients are asking for an off-ramp, that tells you something about the temperature in the room right now.

Goldman's Bigger Warning: The Chipmaker Era May Be Over

At the same time, Goldman published a May 11 research note — covered by Prism News — making a more pointed argument: the first wave of the AI trade is done.

Chipmakers and hardware infrastructure names powered the initial rally. Goldman is now telling clients that the next winners will be hyperscalers and enterprise AI deployment firms — companies that can actually convert massive capital spending into real earnings.

The core problem Goldman identified: most of the AI ecosystem still isn't making money from AI. Consumer adoption has been, in Goldman's own words, "spectacular" — but the majority of users are on free tiers. If the paid layer doesn't deepen fast, the industry risks becoming a story of enormous spend and razor-thin monetization.

Goldman is essentially saying the market cannot keep rewarding builders forever if the gains stay locked in a narrow group at the top.

Meanwhile, Some Non-AI Stocks Are Worth Owning

In a separate May 15 note covered by CNBC, Goldman's chief U.S. equity strategist highlighted stocks with low price sensitivity to both the AI trade and broader economic momentum — but with legitimate earnings growth behind them.

Two names stood out.

Eli Lilly (ticker: LLY) has slipped roughly 1% this year, and Goldman estimates only about 9% of its recent returns are driven by AI or the U.S. economic outlook. Morgan Stanley analyst Terence Flynn has a $1,344 price target on Lilly — implying 26.2% upside from recent prices — pointing to GLP-1 drug sales that have beaten consensus estimates for four straight quarters.

Fortinet (ticker: FTNT) is the outlier — up 68.7% this year — but Goldman says only 19% of those returns tie back to AI exposure. BTIG analyst Gray Powell upgraded Fortinet to buy after what he called a "blow out Q1 print," with revenue 7% ahead of estimates and operating income 22% above Street forecasts.

These are earnings stories, not AI stories.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

Most financial media is treating the AI-free index as a novelty. It isn't.

The fact that Goldman built this product tells you institutional money is nervous about concentration risk. When 45% of the S&P 500 is tied to a single theme, and that theme is still largely pre-monetization, you have a structural problem that no amount of bullish analyst notes can paper over indefinitely.

Slashdot's commentary raised a valid point: we're still waiting for the AI era to produce companies that are sustainably profitable at scale. Plenty of smaller AI applications in robotics, logistics, and translation are working fine and making money quietly. But the headline names — the ones valued in the hundreds of billions — are a different story.

Mainstream financial coverage keeps framing this as "rotating within AI" rather than asking whether the AI premium baked into nearly half the market is justified by current cash flows. It isn't, by any traditional valuation standard. That doesn't mean it collapses tomorrow. But it means the risk is real and underreported.

For Regular People

If your 401(k) is in a standard S&P 500 index fund, you are already 45% exposed to the AI trade whether you chose to be or not. You didn't opt in. The market made that call for you.

Goldman building an escape hatch for its wealthiest clients while average investors sit in passive funds with no such option reveals the distribution of certainty on Wall Street. The AI trade may continue running. It may not. But Wall Street's most connected firm now selling both "buy AI" and "hedge your AI" products simultaneously speaks volumes about how much confidence actually exists here.