Betting on Cursor & Collaborating in AI 6/18/26

0:00At Venture Global, we think about what can be done, not what's usually done. Through innovation, Venture Global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world right here in the United States, but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. So while others are busy talking, we're busy building. That's Venture Global. That's unstoppable energy. This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading.

0:49Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash marketupdatepodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts. Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. A new era at the Federal Reserve. On the first decision day of President Trump's handpicked chairman, Kevin Warsh, the central bank is keeping rates unchanged. Our Steve Leisman. He's got a lot of confidence in his program and his plan and his ideas. And both the U.S. and Iran have signed an agreement to end the war. But there's still a long road of negotiations ahead.

1:30One item, Iran's wish to toll ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. CNBC's Eamon Javers. Can the Gulf countries prevent something without military force that the United States was unable to prevent with military force? Then AI executives joined world leaders at the G7 for a working lunch this week. One exec who joined OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropics Dario Imode, among others, joined us. Synthesia CEO Victor Ripperbelli. My sense from the room is that, you know, countries want to work together. We want to work with other democracies to set the right guardrail for this technology, but also make sure we don't get in the way of innovation right.

2:10Plus, the fast pace of innovation. Venture capitalist Michael Furtick bet on software coding startup Cursor, the company SpaceX is acquiring for$60 billion. By now, vibe coding is almost old news. By the time the category has a settled name, half of the gains, this is important, half the gains that will ever be realized in that category have already been captured by the very earliest investors and founders and stockholders. It is Thursday, June 18th, 2026. Squawk Pod begins right now. Fan show by in three, two, one, two, Joe. Good morning and welcome to Squawk Box here on CNBC live from the Nasdaq market site.

2:52in Times Square. I'm Joe Kernan, along with someone that, I mean, it was a little bit, I thought, humiliating the way you begged to come back after last week. Just begged. And, you know, what could I do but to say, you know what? That didn't happen at all. We begged her, in fact, because Becky and Andrew are both off today. And you can imagine if it was just me. I can imagine. You can't imagine. Yeah, we didn't want that. Anyway, thank you. Thanks for having me. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve voting to keep rates unchanged and at his first press conference as chairman, Kevin Warsh talked about changes his central bank is making and set the tone for financial markets.

3:37What we've given markets is a new chapter for the central bank. Some fresh thinking. This is a lot of change for financial markets to digest. I wouldn't be particularly intrigued by how they react in the first several minutes or even for several days. What I think is most important is that the financial markets and at least as important households and businesses know that this central bank will deliver on price stability. The first Kevin Warsh led Fed meeting and press conference rattled markets, maybe the opposite of what he wanted. I don't know, one day phenomenon from from all time highs. Basically, Stephen, we don't want to make too much of it.

4:19I saw you there. Someone was asking a question and you were looking down. He looked very pensive on who were you sitting next to. I have the the Fox reporter and the Bloomberg television reporter on my right and left. I am. I am a two. And the Fox reporter is what I call steak sauce because he's a one. Who was that? What's his name? Oh, yeah. I know that guy. Yeah, he's been there a long time. Yeah. Ed something? Ed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the guy I saw asking the question. They didn't show your question. Of course, I was watching Fox, so maybe that's why. Anyway, I shouldn't admit that.

4:58Go on. I'm speechless, Joe. You're watching the other channel. Later, no. Like on Bret Baier, I think. Oh, later on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. No, no, I'm not watching. All day long, I'm watching CNBC. Okay, thank you. Thank you. We appreciate that, Joe. I don't have a Nielsen box. That's important. You're also out of the demo, right? So we don't really care, right? Yeah, so are you. So are you. Did I make? I guess I did. Anyway, they're screaming in the control room for us to move on, and I will do so. New Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh's long-term plans, Joe, to move the Fed off the front page and to lessen the market impact.

5:37It got off to a shaky start yesterday, and maybe just for the first day. We had a pronounced sell-off in stocks. That's come back, but it's bonds where the real action was. Warsh wasted no time in making some immediate changes. Shorter policy statement, just four paragraphs, very short, declining to submit his own personal forecast, and removing forward guidance from the statement. This week's FOMC meeting exemplified the very best of the Fed's traditions. Rigorous debate, open-mindedness, commitment to mission, responsibility, and accountability for performance. In this business, they all add up to one thing, getting monetary policy right.

6:17We're as near to it as we can do. That is our North Star. But if the intent was to tamp down market reaction, it didn't work. The two years sold off in two waves. First, a sharp bolt higher in yields when the statement and forecast were released, and then a drift higher in yields during Warsh's first press conference. The statement added a new line saying, quote, The committee will deliver price stability, a commitment markets now believe could be delivered with rate hikes. The Warsh refused to explain what conditions would be met to hike or not to hike. And as reported yesterday, the committee had grown much more hawkish.

6:50That came out in the forecast the market reacted to. Nine Fed officials projecting at least one rate hike this year. None had in the March SEP. Just one official forecast to cut this year, down from a dozen in March. So the market reacted, and now it prices in that first hike in September, with a 72 % probability that first hike had been priced in for December. A second hike, which wasn't priced in at all for this year, now 53 % probability in December. So think of it as the market really pricing in one and a half hikes this year. Long return Worsh announcing plans to rethink of how the Fed does its business, creating external task forces to review Fed communications, balance sheet policy, data sources, productivity and jobs, and the inflation framework.

7:30The committee will be comprised of external experts with help from the Fed staff. But interestingly, no members of the Federal Market Committee are on these task forces. Now, none of these Fed comments yesterday guarantee rate hikes. If inflation recedes, the Fed could stand pat. But the committee showed it is running out of patience with inflation. And Warsh pledged to deal with it, Joe. He was creating one task force for each year that inflation's been over target. I guess that's the way to think about it, Kelly. These will be interesting. Some people remark to me that you take ideas and put them in task forces to die.

8:03I don't think that's the case here. What I am interested in, though, Kelly, is the idea that there are no members of the FOMC on those committees. Now, that suggests there could be some opposition. On the other hand, Warsh might be taking a page out of his pretty successful review of the Bank of England communications back in 2014. They did adopt some of his policies, and he was an outside expert. The Fed doesn't typically do that. The Fed sort of does internal things. Well, Kevin might have looked at that and said, well, wait a second. The Fed had a communications committee back, I think it was a year or two ago, and it went nowhere.

8:38So maybe the right idea is to go outside and sort of have these suggestions for the committee to adopt. So it'll be interesting to see how that happens. But the real story I keep getting is this absence of forward guidance. And the market reacted anyway. And this question, and maybe we'll talk about it. I'd love to hear Rick's idea that Warsh has that, hey, if you remove the Fed from telling you where we're going, we get a pure signal from the market. But the market is just going to do, I think, what it does all the time, which is because the Fed is so powerful, it's going to guess what the Fed is doing anyway.

9:12So you might as well help it along, I would think. Some of the scuttlebutt I see just in different places is, does he have a calming voice? People say the end of it, but I think that it's not a calming voice necessarily. I think it's a combination of a lot of confidence, but not really coming off as not having humility, I think. Because nobody knows everything, but I think he feels in a really good position to react to whatever he needs to react. He's got a core set of what he thinks he needs to do, and I don't think he has a lot of doubt on what he needs to do. I think that's right. I mean, he's got a lot of confidence in his program and his plan and his ideas.

9:54and I guess the question, Joe, was whether or not he has buy-in from the committee. The chair can be very powerful, but there are limits to the powers of the chair. It's worth pointing out, he did not submit a dot, but didn't really convince anybody else not to submit a dot. Now, he did go on to say he wanted other people to do that, so that's a little unclear to me why he would think it's a bad idea to submit a dot, but think it's a good idea for others to submit a dot. Look, the dot is a is a potential source of power for people on the committee if you can express yourself. And then, you know, if he's going to step back, Joe, from providing forward guidance, that makes every speech coming up by every Fed president and governor that much more important.

10:36So we'll see if he wants to really see that power. You just you love that. So every time you do one of your reports or get an interview or talk to someone, you just made it that much more important to tune in to you and Steve Leisman and CNBC, I think. That was smart. Joe, it's all about me, as you know. I mean, you taught me that. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm a good person to come to for that. I was an only child. I was an only child. My mother. And I was adopted, you can imagine. So, I mean. I don't really want to go that deep with you, Joe, this early. But if you want to, we could. I had some separation anxiety because there is that when you started in an orphanage, but I'm working on it still.

11:18Kelly helps me. You know, there's people now who are going, he's kidding, right? Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not kidding. Anyway, President Trump and Iran's president signing an agreement to end the Middle East war that started back in late February. Eamon Javers joins us now with the latest. Hi again, Eamon. Yeah. Good morning to you, Kelly. President Trump said in France on Wednesday that he decided to end the war in Iran to prevent economic catastrophe, which could have happened if the fighting continued. If we didn't do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years.

11:55You would never have the Hormuz straight open. You would never have success. Your market would have, instead of going up at levels that nobody's ever seen before, would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before. The president said the deal reopens the Strait of Hormuz and prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But at the same time he was speaking on television, two senior U.S. officials were briefing reporters in a conference call and reading aloud the text of the agreement for the first time. Now, the official was asked why the president said it's not important to retrieve Iran's nuclear material, given that the stated reason for the war was to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

12:38The official told reporters that U.S. strikes months before the war did so much damage that Iran didn't actually have the capacity to quickly build a bomb. Now the official said the material, because of the success of Midnight Hammer, that's the name of the operation last summer, is very, very much buried. So from President Trump's perspective, it's not like they can immediately grab it and go make a bomb with it. Now the official also said the U.S. will discuss the possibility of retrieving nuclear material in talks with the Iranians in Geneva this coming weekend. but shortly after the official said that, Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson said, transferring enriched nuclear materials out of the country is unacceptable to us.

13:25And similarly, a second U.S. official suggested that negotiations were unlikely to result in Iran charging tolls for the Strait of Hormuz, but a short time later, the spokesperson of the Iranian foreign ministry said, Iran will charge fees for services in the Strait of Hormuz. So clearly the Iranians have some ideas of their own of what's going to happen post-war. Back over to you. And that issue, charging for services in the strait, Eamon, I can't imagine the U.S. would find it acceptable past 60 days. But maybe it will end up being the new status quo. It might very well. I mean, we had the president say, look, it's not going to happen.

14:05We had the senior U.S. officials who were briefing on the details saying, well, it's not going to happen for 60 days. And then after that 60 days, we're going to negotiate. And one of the officials yesterday briefing us was saying, well, look, the Iranians are going to negotiate. Oman is going to negotiate. And also some of the Gulf countries are going to be involved in that negotiation. And he was making the argument that the Gulf countries don't want to pay tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. And so, therefore, it's unlikely that it would happen because they're involved in these negotiations. But then you immediately, you know, within a few hours saw this Iranian statement saying we're going to charge these fees.

14:42So it's clear what the Iranians want to do. They have the leverage coming out of the war. And, you know, can the Gulf countries prevent something without military force that the United States was unable to prevent with military force? That's the big question. Eamon, thank you very much for now. Really appreciate it. Eamon Javers. And Intel shares are jumping this morning in an overnight post on Truth Social. President Trump said Apple will work with Intel, the chip maker, to design and build its semiconductors in the United States. This is part of a longer social media post in which the president called for the tech industry to manufacture chips locally.

15:20Referring to the government's stake in Intel, the president said we decided to help Intel in exchange for 10 percent of their shares. Is that too much or too little? Well, let's see about Apple. Those devices could cost possibly a lot more in the near future. CEO Tim Cook telling The Wall Street Journal the company is planning to raise prices to offset memory costs, which have jumped thanks to huge AI-related demand. It's unclear when prices could rise or on which products exactly, although the journal says Mac computers and iPads could see the hikes sooner. The report cited an estimate from tech research firms saying if Apple hopes to maintain its current profit margin, the iPhone Pro model would have to cost$270 more than it costs right now.

16:03Cook told the Journal, we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable. They say the foldable one, you know, that could be one way to fold in those price hikes in the future. Cheese will be next. Coming up next on Squawk Pod, in the room with artificial intelligence executives and world leaders at the G7, Synthesia CEO Victor Ripperbelli. His takeaways from the working lunch that maybe mapped out the world's future. The code of conduct, creating a coalition around those is probably what we're going to end up. I think that's going to be a really good thing to coordinate.

16:40We'll be right back.

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18:19Welcome back to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Today with Joe Kernan and Kelly Evans. AI CEOs joined world leaders at a G7 lunch yesterday. Attendees included Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, Demis Hassabis, Mark Benioff, and our next guest, Victor Ruperbelli, CEO of AI Video Platform. Synthesia joins us this morning. And, Victor, it's good to see you. I'm glad we have you because, first of all, I was looking at exactly what your company does. And all the worries about AI, I guess, could be coalesced at some point into video generation. So all the problems that we foresee, you've probably already had to deal with as the company was being founded and developed.

19:11Could you explain what your company does, when it was founded, and market cap, everything else, or what it's worth right now? It's in the UK, right? Based in the UK? Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. So I founded Sudizia nine years ago, which was today the world's largest AI video platform for businesses. It will help our customers make video without having to use cameras, actor studios. Everything can be done like straight from just your laptop. We're used by 90 % of the 4100. We have thousands of customers all over the world and are just about to launch our second generation of products, which is a video you can talk to.

19:46So rather than just passively watching it, you can actually interact with the avatar, the person in the video. So the kind of safety thing has always been very important for us. We founded a company nine years ago. I'm very proud of all the work we've done to safeguard the platform. We do content moderation. We make sure that you can create avatars of people that aren't yourself. And I think, you know, when you look at kind of a track record, we've been really good at doing that and also kind of pushing the rest of the market to sort of get there. In terms of the scale of the company, we're valued at$4 billion earlier this year.

20:14Around 700 people worldwide and growing really, really fast. Great. What was the key themes yesterday that were discussed? If you could summarize them, Victor, I am being told that there are two main themes and it sounds like each one of them could have a lot of subsets, I would think. Yeah, so I think an overarching theme is obviously how do we collaborate on creating the best future for AI. My sense from the room is that, you know, countries want to work together. We want to work with other democracies to set the right guardrails for this technology, but also make sure we don't get in the way of innovation, right?

20:49There's no doubt that there is for sure a race going on right now around who is leading in AI. It's going to have huge economical impact, huge societal impact. And we want to make sure that democracies win, right? When we look at the different state leaders, different countries and sort of what they want, I think it's banned from calls for like regulation, calls for most of code of conduct type of working together, calls for like very specific things some countries want to put forward. And my clear sense is that the code of conduct, creating a coalition around those is probably what we're going to end up.

21:20I think that's going to be a really good thing to coordinate across the markets of the world to build the AI future that we all want. We're going to be OK in terms of the workforce, Victor. Or was that discussed? Yeah, obviously that's a topic, right? I think there's the sort of, there's impact on jobs and then there's the impact on democracy. And you mentioned yourself, some of the issues around kind of AI-generated content. I think with the jobs, everyone agrees there's going to be a lot of displacement for sure. We're going to see what the effects of that is going to be in the coming years.

21:52I don't think we've really seen it yet. There's been some kind of pretend AI layoffs happening already, but I don't think we've seen the real impact of it yet. That said, I think it's also important to remember that in every single technological cycle, there has been a change in the kind of jobs that we have. There's been an impact on it. This one will be a lot faster than the previous ones. But it's fundamentally also much, much easier to imagine the jobs that can be displaced than the jobs that's going to be created. If you went back 50 years in time and you told someone on the street that in 2026, most people's jobs are going to be sitting at a desk looking at a screen, absolutely no one would believe you.

22:23So there's sort of a bias, I think, in our imagination of what's going to get displaced and what will be created sort of net new. I tend to be in the positive camp. I think we'll invent lots of new jobs. I don't know anyone who's adopted AI tools and now goes home at 3 p.m. because the AI is doing all the work for them. I think on the contrary, more work is being created. Businesses develop more products than they would before. They give better customer service. And so I'm pretty hopeful that we'll see a whole bunch of new jobs that will emerge from the AI shift. When you emerged in blog, I think that kind of relates to what you said, that all we talk about are what happens at the models, but what's going to help society and as we move into the future is the applications that are built on the models.

23:07And it's going to take people to figure out what kind of applications are needed. I would, at least for a little while, I guess eventually AI can figure out which applications by itself, but this is what you're talking about. At least in the near term, there could be more people that need to be. Why don't you explain the thoughts on your key takeaway, I think, was this after leaving the lunch. Sure. Right now, a lot of conversation, as you said, is very much about the foundational model, the LLMs, the platforms that most AI products and services are built on top of. And that is a very important conversation.

23:42But ultimately, for most consumers and most businesses, they're going to interact with AI through application layer. That is companies like mine. It's also about the companies solving specific workflows. and I think it's really important that we invest as much as in those as we do the foundational models especially in Europe where I think you know kind of if I had to predict the future I think the US is going to be leading in like the frontier labs that's anthropics the open AI is the Googles of the world we're pushing really really hard on the foundation model here in Europe I think we should focus on the application there I think that's what we're good at I don't think we're going to be competitive on the kind of base models in the future so I think we should focus there.

24:18And in terms of the headcount, like, look, I think the core DNA of a good company today are good people, right? And I don't think that's going to change in 5, 10, 15, or 25 years. It's easy to imagine all these sort of sci-fi scenarios where there's just going to be like one agent that's just going to build products that's going to sell to other agents. Obviously, I can't predict the future either. But I think that the tech community in Silicon Valley generally kind of tends to undervalue the value of human connection in business. And I think what we always see in society is whatever is the most scarce, right, becomes the most valuable.