Market Open: Stocks Mixed, Oil and Treasury Yields Dip, White House Tech Lunch • 9/29/26

0:00See NBC Business News Update. I'm Jessica Ettinger. Wall Street's mixed out of the gate this morning. Treasury yields and oil prices ease. Tech shares were higher in early trading ahead of a tech Titan lunch at the White House with President Trump today. The Dow down 29 points. It's being led lower by shares of Walmart, which are down more than 2%. The S &P 500 index is up two points. The Nasdaq's up 33 points. Chipmaker shares are mixed this morning. Major tech CEOs meeting with President Trump at the White House for a luncheon as lawmakers push for artificial intelligence regulation and guardrails.

0:38This as OpenAI canceled today's release of its latest AI model for safety reasons. Here's CNBC's Karen Cho in London. The company said it decided to hold back its GPT 6.1 Astra model after it, quote, did not quite meet the bar for staying within instructions. It's the latest in a series of disclosures made by the chat GPT maker in recent weeks about rogue agents. Just last week, OpenAI said it had notified dozens of partners about security breaches. Virginia Senator Mark Warner telling CNBC today that AI safety is imperative. Let's deal with AI safety now. If we leave and an incident happens and we have no safety protocols, shame on all of us.

1:23Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper telling CNBC today it's time for AI guardrails. Think about NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We've done this for lots of other industries. You know, you can't go out and just start building an airplane without having to meet certain standards. You can't put a new vaccine in the market without going through amazing amounts of tests. We can devise and create a system and work with industry. As difficult as the democracy is, we need to work together now and get to this point where we can have innovation and grow this industry, but at the same time protect our national security.

1:56CNBC's Becky Quick asked Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren about her proposal for a national moratorium on building new data centers, as Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has temporarily done. Governor Abbott in Texas basically doing the same thing, a moratorium in his state until he can do some assessment of what's happening. And Ken Paxton, I think, is running against that for United States Senate. Yeah. And what support do you have in the Senate at this point to do what you're talking about, a national moratorium? The Democrats? I think we're all pretty much there, that we want to see regulations.

2:29But right now, Republicans, uh-uh, talk to the hand. They are with the big tech guys that they're all having lunch with and dinner with and big events with. And those boys want to be able to come in and build whatever they want to build. And they don't want to pay for the consequences. House Speaker Mike Johnson telling CNBC today that laws already exist to handle AI issues. He's hoping big tech companies will police themselves. There is a lot of federal law. Of course, products liability law applies here directly. And we're going to make sure that that keeps everybody in check. But I will say that each of them have said in their own ways, in their own words, that, you know, they welcome oversight.

3:10And I think what's going to come out of the meeting today, I hope, is that we have an agreement of the mind, so to speak, around the table. Mortgage rates in focus. The average rate on a 30-year fixed home loan hits 7.5 % for the first time in more than two and a half years. Oil prices are ticking lower today. U.S. crude back near$90 a barrel. It was just$68 a barrel in February before the U.S. sent missiles into Iran. The eighth month of the war has begun. Gas prices ticked lower overnight to$4.45 a gallon on average for regular, according to AAA. On this National Coffee Day, there are deals and discounts.

3:48National chains today. Many require you to use the chain's app, including McDonald's, Krispy Kreme, Dunkin' and Paris Baguette. I'm Jessica Ettinger, CNBC. Traders don't need a prettier app. They need a better angle. Schwab's think-or-swim trading platforms were built for real traders like you. They have an insane amount of chart studies. I'm talking over 300 studies for virtually any strategy. They also have integrated risk management technology and nearly unlimited customization so you can shape the platform to fit the way you trade. And when you do that, you can analyze trades from angles you won't find anywhere else.

4:23Go see what that looks like at schwab.com slash trading.