The stock market aced two big tests this week. That's a great sign for its resilience-and suggests that the next meaningful move could take stocks higher.

The first test came Monday, when investors grappled with the idea that frontier artificial-intelligence companies Anthropic and OpenAI might intentionally slow their own progress to save the human race from a murderous superintelligence.

That sounds less like a stock market headline than the plot of a 1953 monster movie. But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodio really did write a bracing Sept. 12 note entitled "We Must Pace the Frontier" in which he argued that AI companies should slow development for safety reasons. Strikingly, he also called for broad regulation of the AI industry. Not wanting to be left out, Microsoft announced Monday that it was adding more guardrails around its AI development.

These developments came a few days after Anthropic (and ex-OpenAI) researcher Jacob Coxon resigned with a public declaration that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is acting responsibly. "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he wrote.

If AI developers tap the brakes, they certainly won't need to buy as many chips as quickly. So on Monday, the iShares Semiconductor exchange-traded fund plunged 5.6% for its worst session in two months, embarrassing any columnists who might have recently published bullish takes on chips. But the "pacing" narrative quickly cooled off, and the ETF rose for four days straight to end the week flat.

The market seems to be coalescing around the narrative BofA Securities semiconductor analyst Vivek Arya put forward on Monday morning. "The economic stakes are simply too large for any sustained meaningful deceleration," he wrote, adding that since Washington is unlikely to regulate the industry, he expects "any eventual outcome to resemble industry-led self-regulation, akin to Finra (finance) [or] MPA (movies)." (Perhaps the next iteration of Claude will get a little warning label: "This model is rated p(doom)-17, for graphic threats to human existence.")

The second test came on Wednesday, when the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate for the first time in three years.

Stocks barely reacted to the decision, but as Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh began to explain his thinking, the S&P 500 index tanked. "I would be hard-pressed to describe broad financial conditions as restrictive," Warsh said. "This view was widely shared by the Committee. So we removed a dose of accommodation."

Since Warsh opts to say so little, every word he utters is subjected to Talmudic analysis. In this case, the idea that a hike merely removes a dose of accommodation was taken to mean that policy remains accommodative even after this hike. Since policy probably shouldn't be accommodative when the economy is running at full employment and above-target inflation, the clear implication is that Warsh won't hesitate to raise rates even higher so as to remove yet more of these metaphorical doses.

Things got weird when CNBC's Steve Liesman asked Warsh where the federal-funds rate is relative to the so-called neutral rate-the policy rate that is neither accommodative nor restrictive. Warsh answered that while he finds the idea of a neutral rate interesting "as an academic matter," the concept doesn't have "an operational effect on decisions that we make today."

It's a puzzling stance. "How do you say we 'removed a dose of accommodation' without having a neutral rate in mind?" wrote economist Claudia Sahm. "It is the dividing line between accommodation and restriction."

Cynics-and Wall Street is glutted with them-might say this is all by design. Some argue that Warsh wants to keep the economy balanced by effectively delivering a spate of rate hikes, but without earning President Donald Trump's ire, which explains why he eschews forward guidance but finds artful means of implying that more hikes are ahead.

Either way, the market soon thought better of the afternoon swoon, and the S&P 500 surged 1.14% on Thursday for its best session in more than a month. And why not? Even if the Fed hikes two more times this year, the impact on S&P 500 companies is likely to be limited. They are much less reliant on debt, since they've reduced their ratio of net debt to Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from 1.7 a decade ago to 1.3 today. And their earnings growth, at around 26%, remains staggering. What matters more than the path of short-term rates is whether the Fed can maintain its credibility and enhance its ability to respond to any future recessions; on Wednesday, Warsh's Fed took the right step in both directions.

It probably hasn't escaped your attention that the S&P 500 has traded in a narrow 3.2% range since Aug. 4. This has been a healthy period of consolidation and has allowed the S&P 500's forward price/earnings ratio to come down from 20.3 at the start of that period (and 22.2 at the start of the year) to 19.2 today, per FactSet data. "Because equity prices have failed to keep pace with surging earnings, near-term valuations show no hint of a bubble," writes Goldman Sachs Chief U.S. Equity Strategist Ben Snider.

This means the stock market could be gathering its strength for a surge to fresh highs. Just so long as earnings keep up their strength-and the Robot Monster remains at bay.