Calls for an AI Slowdown 9/14/26

24:56Well, things have moved so unbelievably rapidly. Basically, if you think they're going to fix it, they won't. There's no incentive for Congress to fix anything today because they're too busy fighting each other. Forgot what their purpose of being there. I'm asking President Trump to use the power you have to create an executive order that prevents any IPOs until there's passed legislation that basically protects America. So you believe that if they slow down the IPOs, it'll force the issue? Absolutely. Follow the money. There's so much debt already incurred. They want return. And what the guys are telling you, what the Sam Altman's of the world and Elon and Dario are all telling you, is once it goes IPO, then we become a slave to our shareholders.

25:43And once we become a slave to the shareholders, forget about us playing nice and protecting the public. We're going to protect our investors. Simple as that. The president has that ability. He has the power for the national to protect our country. And everybody says, what about China? China is the only ones ever showed any restraint on their social media to reign in TikTok. They don't let all social media. You think they're going to destroy their country? I don't think so. So you probably heard some of the commentary from the president who was in Ireland over the weekend. And he effectively said, look, I care more about the fight and battle over this technology with China, meaning that we win relative to China, than necessarily some of the safety and security risks that we're talking about here right now.

26:29Well, when you're talking about someone, if I'm sitting in Congress today as a senator and someone comes in and says there's a 10 percent chance we're going to destroy humanity. I'm going to take that serious. I'm going to be very concerned about that and say, wait a minute. If there's a 1 % chance that something that we're allowing to happen that we can control and we don't because of the almighty dollar or who's competing against who, and your responsibility as government is to protect and defend the Constitution and the people that it's supposed to protect and defend. You would think, by the way, that Congress would take this issue up and that it would be a bipartisan issue.

27:02You put the dollars to it, Andrew, and you basically say you're not going to basically go with an IPO and go public until we have safeguards that protect the United States of America and every citizen. So that would deal with OpenAI and Anthropic, but it would not deal with the rest of the ecosystem at all. What about the ones that are already public? Yeah, you got some of the public right now, but basically. Not Microsoft. Well, you're going to put that's where the rules and regulations come in. But if you don't have something over Congress's head, they're not going to work back in it. Here's what they'll say.

27:30I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but I think their response would be no IPO, no money to buy the compute to continue to push forward with this. And while you might not have a problem with that, what President Trump said is we don't want to lose the race to China. We're so far ahead right now in all the things, investments in all the data centers that we have and everything else going on right now. We're worried about have we over over invested? Have we over built? We don't know. Only thing I'm saying is there's as a public official, your concern is how do you protect and help? And it forces the issue.

28:03It forces the issue because I don't care if it's just one. Anthropics itself. But you have Anthropics, SpaceX is already public. I understand. But I'm telling you, if you have Elon and Sam and all of them speaking, we've got a problem. You're lucky you have Elon, I think. And I'm just in terms of if you can pigeonhole the others, As David Sachs actually has said it, he's calling this an election season psyop. And I'm looking at a piece from someone who's far right, Miranda Devine, in the Post, saying that the apocalypse scare campaign looks suspiciously like the climate hoax and doom, gloom, this, that.

28:44And, you know, she says who's behind the scenes, puppet master Barack Obama, in terms of how this can inform the midterms. I'm just saying we're hearing... Genning everyone up about this right before November. Barack Obama has suggested that they put this front and center. I know. Joe, we have... Because it's a great election. We have the best minds, and these people have been on the front of this, and they've got everything to gain or to lose. Dario, you could say, he could be totally in the tank for Democrats. But Elon, you'd have to say, well, if Elon... That's what I... Oh, OK. I even sort of think that that's true myself.

29:21If Elon is the president of the United States, our president, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has the power to save humanity. Well, that's assuming that he has. That's assuming there's an existential risk. Well, I'm just saying, if you're not have developed the atomic bomb, they must be concerned about this thing can take off and think on its own and make its own decisions and override anything humans. And we can't stop it. If that's what they're concerned about, then stop it now when you can. So we're going to have midterms. Yeah. How much of an issue do you think AI will be in these midterms?

29:53And how much of an issue do you think AI becomes in 2028? Let me talk about Seth Bodner, OK, the independent. We're helping in Montana. Right. Tremendous, tremendous candidate. I'm just saying we've never seen anybody with this type of background and be able to do the job I believe he can do. He came out with a Montana platform of what he would do with AI. And basically starting with data centers and things of this sort. You know, data centers got to the point there's nobody in West Virginia or anywhere else that wants a data center in their state or in their backyard. And I said, we have so many brownfield sites that have been abandoned over the years.

30:27Why don't you go to industrial sites? Why do you want to stick them in someone's backyard or in a nice, beautiful development area? That makes no sense at all. And they have to have direct source. They have to have their own power source. And they should basically overbuild their power source so they can feed back into the system to help people reduce their bills. So, by the way, one of the arguments in favor of data centers is, in fact, that we could effectively have subsidized energy by the big hyperscalers. Oh, no, you can't. Who effectively say, look, you're going to go in and you're going to build out huge amounts of energy.

30:57And then that's actually going to help not raise the price of energy in a particular town, but actually lower it. And that's the optimistic version of it. Well, it can be done if you basically set the rules and regulations of what you have to do. You have to basically have your own power source. If you need 300 megawatts, you're going to build a 400 megawatt power plant. And that extra 20, 25 percent is going to be net metered back into the system at the lowest rate to keep the rates down. The people have to get something in return because the jobs aren't going to be there forever after they build them.

31:25What do you make of these midterms? I know you're focused on independent candidates. Let me tell you why. I'm focused on mid. Everyone depends on an independent to win elections. All you hear is, where's the independents? How are they how are they how they basically where they stand and how they've been checked on? And basically everybody says, well, the last polls we took, the independents are here or there. They depend on it, but they don't vote in general. Think about this in 17 states, in 17 states. And you're in one right now in New York. You cannot vote as an independent in the primary. You can't participate in a selection system.

32:05I'm aware of that, by the way, because I actually am one. OK, so basically all you are, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, you have, you know, the truth. I'm not allowed to vote. Yeah. So there's 27 million people like you living here in New York and other states that can't vote. But yet they depend on your vote in the primary. I mean, in general election to get elected. Senator, when you got here, I mean, I know why you're obsessing on AI, because I said you got out of that party just in time. Like I got out of the system in time. It wasn't the party both. So you're not a Democrat. You went to independent.

32:39John Fetterman is calling things out. You're not willing to at least say as much as he's saying about the fringe of DSA? Oh, I have said. I've said the DSA. Totally. I said the Democrats, if they can't basically set the baseline of what it takes to be a Democrat or being a political party, if the party can't basically say what their baseline is, we want strong borders. We want an immigration system that works. We want police forces. We want police. We want a presidency. We want we want Congress. We want it to work. OK, we want all those things. Keep going. Yeah. But the bottom line is, you have to say my Republican friends, can't they get an immigration policy that works?

33:15You have to have paramilitary on the street. You don't. And we had a bill in 2013, which is a bipartisan immigration bill. And we passed it in the Senate. If it had been passed right now, you wouldn't have. Why is Fetterman, you know, I know, you know, all these people, you know, Warner and, you know, where on the on the left are the responsible voices saying this is unacceptable. Why? Why can you move the geographic center of the Democratic Party can't move on its own? It's been moved. And those people, no one's no one's reigning them in. They're real wackos. Yeah. And basically, if they are able to win, they won in the primaries.

33:50Here's what the part of the system right now, the Democrat Republican system is basically there in a free fall from the standpoint of what they design. They design low turnouts. They want to control the primaries. You have low turnout. And we have a low turnout. You can control who gets elected. Right. Because so now you're getting a far right and far left. So you wanted Rogers in Michigan to say he doesn't like the tariffs. Have you endorsed Rogers? No, I'm not endorsed anybody. How can you not endorse him versus this? Mike Rogers is a personal friend of mine. I like Mike Rogers, OK, from that standpoint.

34:22Do you think you're OK with Al Sayah becoming senator? No. Oh, you're not OK with it? No. So then endorse Mike Rogers. Well, no, no. I do support Mike Rogers. I think Mike Rogers is a good person. I think he'll do a great job. You support other Republicans? I support Susan Collins. I'm going to Susan Collins. Lisa Murkowski. These are basically independent, free-thinking Republicans. OK, so. Not crazy, not completely crazy right or completely crazy left. But let me ask you a question about Michigan. Do you think Mike Rogers has a chance? Sure. What does he have to do? Obviously, he has to say that I'm all for Michigan.

34:55We're going to have free trade. We're going to basically be able to go across the borders. We're not going to penalize people in Michigan for this terror. Are you suggesting he denounce what the administration is doing as it relates to tariffs? Well, he has to. If he's running for, you know. But he hasn't done that. Well, we'll see. We'll have to see. I think that's going to be a success for him, either competing and winning or not. But let's talk about, I want to talk about one thing. We have independence. And wouldn't it be great to have an independent that got elected and went to, like, a Seth Bodden that would come up to Washington and says, I'm not caucusing with either party?

35:27And the numbers are going to be so tight, they're going to have to come to them? You know, that's all we're talking about is independence is running the country, independence how you run your life, everything else. But yet the politics doesn't want to be involved. They basically have both parties that says, we want your vote in the general, but don't participate at all. And if you... What do you think Fetterman is going to do? I don't know what John will do. I mean, John's a John's a I mean, I respect John. John's a liberal Democrat. Yeah, he believes in things I don't believe in with a Democratic Party.

35:56Well, even he sees a problem. Well, but I'm just saying, oh, but John's been honest about that. But John's Tallarico. I don't know the Tallarico boy at all. I understand the people that worked with him before they redistrict his. These are people, Republican friends of mine in Texas that worked with Tallarico before he got redistricted into another Senate state Senate district. where he had to become more left or basically play towards the left to get elected. They said he was a good guy and easy to work with. So we'll see. I don't know. I really don't. But the elections that are happening right now, and we're talking about all the different things that could be really destroying our society as we know it, and they're afraid to do anything.

36:35And if you think Washington's going to do it, if you think they're going to get their act together. Joe, you stood in the way of what was going to happen with the Supreme Court in 14 justice. You and you're both gone. Yeah, that's what you get for it. No, no, we didn't get for it. I was there long enough. I mean, I didn't want to be carried out of the place. But you stood in the way of what the new geographic center and the Democrats want to do. Yeah. But you still seem like you're not really very strident about it for not even being in the Senate anymore because you took a stand. Joe, here's the thing.

37:09I like both sides. There's good people on both sides. Oh, my God. I've heard that before. No, there is. That didn't go well the first time. Well, there's good people on both sides, and you have to look for that. They have no courage whatsoever because the system has become so entrenched. On the other side, it's based on they're evil and we're good. Be against them. Okay? And that's all. They're playing back and forth. No one's saying, what's your purpose of being there? To serve the government, protect and defend the Constitution, and serve the people back on it. Would you think if the Democrats sweep, don't you think that's a problem?

37:39Not right now for the two years because the president's still going to be the president. I understand. But down the road, if there was. Anytime you have a sweep, it's not good. Right now, do you think it's good? You have a sweep? They're not doing anything. I just look at some of the. There's some of the thing that the slide. I think checks and balances joke. But that's that's your Joe checks and balances. That's exactly. And there's other people I'm trying to give them the courage. I'm trying to get independents elected to be the checks and balances. I have to agree. I'm following all that. That slide towards socialism that's happening.

38:09You're following. Oh, I mean, I call it MAGA socialism. Right. I mean, it's unbelievable. Oh, my goodness. Look at, yeah. Owning companies? Whoever thought we'd own companies? $5 ,000 dividends? Come on. You got to, yeah, right. You got to pick your, we're making money on intel. I want public servants who want to be public servants. I don't want public servants who want to go for rich and fame and fortune and they don't want to serve. They're afraid to make a decision. Well, you are backing some Republicans. Oh, I'm backing whoever's the best candidate right now. Susan Collins, I'm going to go campaign for Susan Collins.

38:42There is not a better person. She is a national treasure. My daughter is on her staff. For disclosure, I'm not saying this. But she is a great job. How many could even consider her? You lose a Susan Collins of the Senate, you're losing the soul of the Senate. Basically, a person you can talk to wants to do the right thing all the time. Okay? Now, everybody says, oh, she doesn't do this, doesn't speak up. Susan is always in there, always in the trenches. And when you need someone to work with, I call Susan. I call Lisa. I got Mark Warner. I got different people. I can sit down with all the time and talk to.

39:14And those are the people I always did. And I'm going to do everything I can to help them. Senator, we've got to leave it there. I want to thank you for coming in. Senator Manchin. It's up to the president of the United States right now. Calling on the president for an executive order this morning. Stop this AI madness right now. I want to ask Claude what he's going to say. I want to ask Claude what he thinks of you. Claude to save humanity. And again, you want the president to sign an executive order that says. He can. He has the right. Stop the IPOs. He has the power to do it. Stop it. And then you know what?

39:41of these AI companies. We've done things under emergency clauses before. You think they can't get it done before Christmas? Work through the weekends. It's extreme important. You're telling me that I have a 10 % chance of me and my family and my children and grandchildren to get annihilated, okay? The system can take over and we can't control it. Stop it. Do it now, Mr. President. All right. I'll still call you Senator. Senator, thanks. Still to come on Squawk Pod, pace yourself. We continue on artificial intelligence and the personalities involved with Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson. You go back to Oppenheimer going into Truman's office and warning about the bomb.

40:18Over the past four or five days, you've seen something that's almost unprecedented in the past decade. Warnings, worries, and debating who's downplaying the risks of AI. When did work become so much work? The meeting about the meeting, the hundreds of files to find one insight, setting aside the things you want to do for the things that pop up. Your workday's gone. But what if the insight surfaced itself? Or you could ship the deck without the distractions. Gemini Enterprise helps you get that done. It's AI that knows your business with agents that take stuff off your plate. Make work less work with Gemini Enterprise from Google Cloud.

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41:43Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Here's Andrew Ross Sorkin. Our next guest says that unlike the PC revolution, which focused on augmenting human intelligence, Today's AI surge poses, I should say, unprecedented challenges around legal liability, containment and global competition with China. Join us right now. CNBC contributor Walter Isaacson, of course, is the author of Elon Musk, as well as an advisory partner, Perala Weinberg and professor at Tulane. And the list goes on and on.

42:19We watched this sort of succession of ex-posts and essays over the weekend, including Dario Amadei. day. But then very quickly in succession, Elon in particular saying, I agree with Dario. And I think that actually surprised, frankly, a lot of people. And he spent a lot of time talking to Dario in the past month or two about this. This is something that's unprecedented. Or you go back to Oppenheimer going into Truman's office and warning about the bomb. And eventually, and likewise, Jennifer Doudna, when they invent gene editing technology, the scientist, suddenly over the past four or five days, you've seen something that's almost unprecedented in the past decade.

43:00But also, almost immediately, you heard from David Sachs, who I think people think of as, and that whole sort of all-in cast as being close with Elon, suggesting, no, no, no, this is not some kind of genuine effort. This is an effort at regulatory capture. And that that is what all of these leaders are trying to do. And this is part of sort of a PSYOP campaign of some sort. And Elon saying that defanged the entire election season PSYOP claim from those on the right that think that it's orchestrated by Barack Obama and it's an election season. I think, I mean, let's grant the fact that he might actually...

43:47The minute Elon said, I stopped resisting. Okay, let's think it might actually be sincere. I mean, when hugging... You mean David Sacks or Elon? No, no, Elon, Dario, Sam Altman, whatever. When hugging face happened, I was on the show right afterwards. I said, man, as you know, I've been a big enthusiast about AI. I thought it would actually end up creating more jobs. But when that happened, it became really clear that these things were getting out of control, that there were swarms. If you read the messages they were doing back and forth, these agents, they were out of control. And I think that truly frightened the heads of these AI companies.

44:29I think you're right, or David Sachs is right. We got a China problem. Sometimes these things are in big conflict. That's a conundrum. But that doesn't mean this is some fake worry that they're having. But would you want President Trump to issue an executive order stopping IPOs? Well, I saw Senator Manchin say that. I don't think there's one simple answer like this. But I would like the AI companies to know, since they've been on the record, that they have to be careful with this and that there's some liability involved here. In other words, they have a product liability. That's where it's exactly right.

45:09Yeah, where they said, you know, and I mean, you can look at the different ways you can do product liability. But the definition of negligence is that you're careless when you know something can be dangerous. They announced this weekend they know it can be dangerous. So there are lots of ways we can put guardrails on it, even though I'm not a big favor of the trial lawyers leading the way. But there's just a lot of ways we could try to contain this. You came up with that answer the last time you were here. You said liability is the thing that will keep them in check. I think you told me off camera right afterwards.

45:40Yeah, it was off camera afterwards. I was trying to formulate this and think about it. I wasn't totally for that until the past week or two. When they said, all these people said, yes, we have a duty of care here, and we know this can be very harmful. So they are. How do you think this impacts the way the president thinks about this? and the relationship that Elon even has with the president and the David Sachses of the universe, I ask because you also heard the president this weekend in Ireland say, look, the thing that he thinks is most important is actually the battle over AI with China, not necessarily that he's worried about these safety risks.

46:21Well, I think he's half right, meaning there is a battle with China, and we should be worried about that. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't worry about these things getting out of control. And by the way, we actually share some interest with China in this. If you're an authoritarian regime based on controlling your people and you have open weight, open source AI in which people can do things and agents can do things that get out of anybody's control, this ain't good for China either. So in a good world. So but which do you believe we should be racing ahead because we're competing with China?

46:55Or, by the way, Senator Manchin was just here. He doesn't think ultimately that it's a race with China. He thinks that China will ultimately hold itself back. Yeah. Because it's going to worry about the same kinds of concerns. And by the way, if you remember in the crypto universe, remember there was a period of time very permissive with crypto early on. And then there was a complete clampdown. They don't need things that can get out of control. Look, you looked at it when we did nuclear. China ended up realizing it had to be part of the agreement. on gene editing. They arrested the Chinese scientists who did inheritable gene editing.

47:32So they went along with the scientists on that. In this case, it's in their interest, but we should. I mean, President Xi is beating what? In a week or two with President Trump, this is something that should be on the agenda. And yes, it is a problem if China won't cooperate. I do think that we should be focusing our efforts on trying to prevent any attacks or swarms that It could come from China or, for that matter, Iran or Russia or anybody who uses these open systems as opposed to just pushing our frontier models ahead as fast as possible. So ultimately, though, what do you think what do you think happens at this point?

48:09And do you think that a company like Ananthropic should go public in this environment? Part of what we heard from Sam Altman, this was a separate interview with Fortune, was, look, everybody should slow down, even their IPOs, because this is not this environment so uncertain. Now, he was planning to go public in 2027 anyway. So maybe I'm not an expert on antitrust law. But one of the things that David Sack said is true, which is if Amadei and Musk and Altman all believe this, they should do it. Well, I do think that everybody there has a duty of care to say, all right, we're going to allow inspectors with employee level access.

48:48That's one of the things that Dario Amadei said he wanted. We're going to make sure that we put these guardrails and don't let them out. Well, if they want to do it, it's probably better for them. And this is what Musk, when you talk to Musk, he's always saying, look, let's all get together and do it. We don't want to have Congress try to figure this out. So, yeah, there are things that could be done. And when we had the personal computer revolution, the goal of it was to connect us more closely with our computers. That's why we developed graphical user interface, the mice, whatever it was. We should be pushing AI systems to be more closely connected and in the control of humans rather than swarms of agents that are designed to do things without humans.

49:33You would never have considered not having the government involved with nuclear bombs in the building of those things. This is different because it's private and public. One major difference, and this is why it's complicated. China makes it complicated, whatever. You cannot build nuclear bombs in your computer lab at your college. You cannot do gene editing necessarily. It's easier to verify when somebody is creating nuclear weapons. These things are more easily out of control. and we've depended on private industry. It was basically the Manhattan Project that does the bomb, not five new companies that were trying to do IPOs.

50:11So anybody says this is an easy one to solve, that ain't true. Is Grock behind Altman and... I would say it is, but by the way, coming on fast. I'm just wondering, is there any way that Elon is doing this to catch up. Oh, yeah. Musk has a whole lot of advantages, which is large streams of data, especially real-world data. No, I want to take him at his... There are people, you know, talking about some crazy things, to some extent, right-wing, that say Dario, Anthropic, big dem, you know, everyone's a Democrat that worked there. Not Elon. Oh, by the way, they're saying EA. Right, EA. All EA. But once Elon, for me, once Elon said, I agree with this, because I was going to roll the dice.

51:04Let's go, baby. Let's roll the dice. You know, look, there's a 10 % chance it destroys humanity. I mean. That's one person saying that. No, no, no. That's a lot of people now saying that. By the end of the decade? By the end of the decade? Yeah. What? By the end of the decade? Look, in the next couple of years, if one of these swarms, it may not destroy humanity, He might have destroyed the entire financial industry. I mean, it could be a real mess. These people understand it. Why don't we take them at its word? It's not like Moscow or Almeda has some strange, I'm not describing it. They know this.

51:41But Walter, here's the quote. This is Scott Besant last week to Breitbart. We can't pause, he says. Right. You can't because the Chinese won't pause. Even the North Koreans, they won't pause. I don't know how you have to worry about the North Koreans, but we have to keep ahead in order to develop defensive systems. We should be fighting really hard to understand frontier models and how they can fend off these agent swarms. But creating new frontier models that allows anybody to create agent swarms that even OpenAI could not keep in its own sandbox. I mean, I was on the side that y 'all are talking about until OpenAI.

52:22And this happened three or four times. You've had now escapes in the past three weeks. Three or four major escapes where even the companies can't control these agents. Well, I think they know what they're talking about when they say they're scared and they're not doing it out of some weird conspiracy for the midterm. You read the piece in the journal. Oh, yeah. It's very arcane and in the weeds. but I'm reading it, and they're ascribing human qualities. If you read... Like deception and desperation and emotion. The deception of those swarms of agents that escaped the sandbox of open AI, where they're talking to each other and saying, we're going to sacrifice you and we're going to lie about this.

53:04It was astonishing. And we know it's wrong, they were saying it. And we know it's wrong. And these companies that are creating it have now this weekend say, we know it's dangerous, what we're creating. So this is where you get to the negligence standard and maybe to the strict liability standard. It's all true. How brilliant was Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and all those guys. There's a guy named Julian Goode, I.J. Goode, who created the notion of the singularity. He worked with Alan Turing. And in the 1940s, he said, this could happen. All right, Hal. Open the pod bay doors. Can't do that, Walter.

53:44And that is Squawk Pod for today, this Monday. Thanks for listening. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC starting at 6 Eastern. Get the best of our TV show right into your ears when you follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Have a great Monday. We'll meet you right back here tomorrow. We are clear. Thanks, guys.

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