Driverless Cars with Uber CEO, AI with Anthropic & JPMorgan 5/6/26

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. The headline of the morning, the U.S. and Iran reportedly closing in on a deal. CNBC's Dan Murphy watching progress from the Middle East. So this is moving the market and all eyes now are on exactly how Iran might respond. And Uber's got big plans for travel. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi shares the vision for Uber-powered hotel bookings. And you got it, driverless transport. You can choose a robot car, autonomous vehicle, or you can choose a human.

1:40We think that's the ideal experience. Plus, Anthropics CEO Dario Emode and J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon spoke to Andrew about AI investment and innovation. And stocks, they could be coming to a Trump baby account near you. It's going to be a valuable lesson on, you know, look, either the stock takes off and you're all in favor of growth or something bad happens to it and you think maybe I'd rather be in an S &P 500. It's Wednesday, May 6th, 2026. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand back to buy in three, two, one. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We are live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square.

2:25I'm Becky Quick, along with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Joe is out today. And a new report out from Axios saying that the Trump administration believing it is closing in on a plan to end the war with Iran. Our own Dan Murphy joins us right now from Abu Dhabi. Good morning. Andrew, good morning to you. I can also report this hour that Iran's foreign ministry has just confirmed to CNBC that they have this MOU proposal and they are now evaluating the 14 points. That is important as we see oil prices sinking this morning on this Axios report that suggests the US and Iran are now inching closer to a one-page agreement that could end the war and set the stage for broader negotiations.

3:05Iran is also expected to respond on these key points within the next 48 hours. And while nothing is final, the Axios report says this is the closest that the two sides have come to a deal since the conflict began. Now, a few key elements to unpack for you. The first is, of course, the ceasefire. This document would declare an end to active hostilities and the start of a 30-day window for talks on a broader deal. That window would allow both sides to gradually lift their blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. The second element being discussed is nuclear limits. The framework here would include a moratorium on uranium enrichment, the length of which is still under negotiation.

3:47And in return, the U.S. would begin a gradual rollback of sanctions and move to release billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets that are held around the world. The final piece here, and perhaps the most important, is on enforcement. The framework would leave the US with the option to reimpose the blockade or resume military action if these talks break down or if Iran violates the terms. Axios also reporting that many of these provisions would, of course, be contingent on a final agreement. But if the reporting is true, it does mark a very significant breakthrough, but it also leaves plenty of questions as well.

4:24The Axios report makes no mention of who might control Hormuz into the future. And it seems to also leave the issue of Iranian missiles and drones unresolved. These are, of course, key concerns for the Gulf stage, which we know want a more comprehensive agreement, the details of which I suspect can only be hammered out once the preliminary deal is reached. So we're seeing quite a significant development this morning. Obviously, equity, futures and oil markets reacting in tandem. At one point, we were down more than 7 % for the WTI contract, which is now below 100 US dollars a barrel. So this is moving the market.

5:02And all eyes now are on exactly how Iran might respond. Andrew? Dan, thank you. Good news for the morning as we're watching WTI crude continue to fall. And we will see where the equity markets ultimately go when things begin today. Billionaire Ken Griffin doubling down on Miami, is speaking to CNBC from the Milken conference. He said he plans to make Citadel's planned office tower in Miami even bigger. He revised construction plans this after New York Mayor Mamdami called out Griffin's Central Park penthouse in a video discussing a new pied-a-terra tax proposal that we've talked about a lot on this broadcast.

5:43Griffin said he has seen the video filmed in front of his home, said he saw it three times, and called it creepy and weird. The only decision that we've made with no regrets in the last few days is to expand the size of our office footprint in our new Miami headquarters. Just in the last few days you made that? In reaction to New York? In reaction to New York. We filed the permit with the city of Miami. We've added several hundred thousand square feet of new space in our new building. We will add far more jobs in Miami over the next decade as an immediate and direct consequence of the mayor's poor decision here with respect to his his posting of that video.

6:23In a statement, Mayor Mdamdami's press secretary said the mayor wants all New Yorkers to succeed, including business owners and entrepreneurs. But he called for tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers contributing their fair share. But talk about backfiring. Talk about backfiring. I don't know if you saw, there was also a charitable donation that Ken had given to some of the firefighters in New York. And Mdamadami was effectively forced to acknowledge it in a speech that he had to give. He actually had to thank Ken. I mean, the whole thing in the past week. So it's just it seems like, as we said from the beginning, I don't know where you are.

7:00Unforced errors on this. I don't know where you are in the tax policy itself, but in terms of just the approach to discussing it, singling out people this way, I think, and not saying I'm open for business and the goal is to collect revenue from all comers, but to do it in this sort of very specific way, I think. Because getting headlines and trying to win in a primary and win into an election is very different than actually governing. I'm not sure he's figured that out. We will see. The window to fix AI security flaws is narrowing. Anthropics CEO Dario Amodei says that Chinese AI models will catch up in just six to 12 months.

7:39He issued that warning during a conversation with JPMorgan Chase's CEO, Jamie Dimon, that I hosted just yesterday, moderating with him. Amodei also signaling that some software as a service companies will likely go bust. Take a listen. I think individual SaaS companies, it's very possible for them to lose market value, go bankrupt, completely go bust. But it depends on the response, right? I think there are incumbents today that are going to see very clearly. We have a lot of moat here. The moats here are going away. We're really going to pivot and we'll do better than we did before. And there are others who are not going to pay attention, who are going to be blindsided.

8:21And, you know, they're going to have a really bad time. I asked Diamond if all the spending in the area, potentially$1 trillion over the next year, makes sense. The way I look at it is that in total it will make sense. If you want to try to pick the winners and losers, you will have a hard time. So there will be losers and there will be winners. People will say, I told you so and stuff like that. But the technology itself is so powerful it's worth a trillion dollars of investment. And the investment is way beyond that, by the way. It's in chips, it's in wires, and it's in hardware and all these other various things.

8:58But, you know, technology tends to pay for itself, just not in a straight line. We also talked about the theme of AI regulation and the idea that the White House could take steps to vet models before they're released as part of a possible executive order. We don't want a Wild West where you can just do anything, right? We chose to do what we did with Mythos, but there was literally no law, no requirement, you know, preventing us from just offering this thing in the wild with no safeguards. Should there be? That's not, yes. So that's not going to work. Now, the example you gave of the FDA, I think the FDA, you know, slows down medical progress a lot.

9:36So, you know, that's a cautionary tale in the other direction. I had mentioned whether there should be the equivalent of FDA for these models where you have to get them approved before they go out. I think they don't love the idea. I don't think they love the FDA idea. He likes the actually the national transportation group that you moderate that you monitor it once it's out there. I think that that there's some oversight as cars are coming out and they're kind of monitoring all the time. but it's a little bit different. That's interesting. That was sort of the model he thought was sort of more interesting in that regard.

10:10Well, I'm sure that is the way that everybody in Silicon Valley kind of reads it. I had a conversation with Jensen Wong the other day, and it was very similar. The idea of government regulation should be there, but not until after we get it out. You know, the whole idea of move fast and break things. You know, they say move fast, not break things. But it's not wanting to ask permission for these things, I think, is pretty universal through the industry. Meantime, we also got involved in an interesting conversation about what all this could mean for jobs. We talked about how just a couple of weeks ago, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman made headlines warning of 20 to 30 percent unemployment in the United States within two to five years due to AI.

10:49Here's Jamie Dimon's take on that. Technologies have made mankind's lives better forever, starting with agriculture and electricity and Internet. All these things were used by bad guys too, by the way. All of them got some kind of regulation proper or over-regulated sometimes. So I think it's a legitimate, when you look at this technology, it is exponential. And if you look at agriculture and steam engine, electricity, internet, it took years to kind of roll those in. And the capitalist society is very good at recreating jobs and creating new things. And life is better. Not always if that town loses a factory, but in general better.

11:27and we should worry about the people get hurt by something. So I think it's a legitimate concern. I don't think it's going to be quite like that. I mean, look, these are the big ideas that all of these thought leaders are kind of running through at this moment. How do you play it out? Probably the extremes are inaccurate, but there are going to be real places where, you know, Jamie's right, agricultural, all of these changes that we've watched roll through, but this is faster. And you wonder if that leaves more disruption in the wake. He also, and we didn't get to show the full clip because it was a much longer conversation, but, you know, talked about what are the things that the government should be doing?

12:04Is it really about training? Are there better jobs that they can get you into? If you're a truck driver and all of a sudden we have autonomous trucks, what are you going to do? Is that the answer? Do you get into a whole sort of redistribution? Right, which brings up the universal basic income. Right. That's the question that it comes back to all the time. There are going to be disruptions. There are going to be people who feel pain and how to deal with that. But everyone always says we got to somehow get ahead of it. But I think one of the points that Jamie said was we don't know what ahead of it even means.

12:34And that's the hardest part about it. Right. Tees will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, Uber CEO Dara Khashrishahi looking for clues about the economy in our ride sharing. We watch consumer patterns really closely. Are people taking shorter trips? are people trading down in terms of the size of their grocery baskets. All of those indicators continue to be really strong. Exterior Remodels, Inner Monologues, brought to you by Power. The house looks good, like really good. That siding, stunning. The roof, elevated. Windows, I mean, wow. The process, smooth. The neighbors, jealous. Choose Power Home Remodeling and remodel how you think about remodeling.

13:26Schedule your free quote on windows, siding, roofing, and doors at powerhomeremodeling.com. Power. Our work shows. At 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 and 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.

14:09Join 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. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash market update podcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.

14:35This is Squawk Pod. Up on Becky. You're watching Squawk Box right here on CNBC. I'm Becky Quick along with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Joe is off today. Uber reporting mixed first quarter results just a few minutes ago. I'm going to go with strong. I'm not going with mixed quarterly profit coming in 13 cents per share. It does include, though, some several special items that many had built into their forecasts. That number fell short of the 70 cent consensus estimate. However, once you strip out those special items, we can talk about those. The ride share and delivery firm reported an adjusted profit of 72 cents per share.

15:11Investors, though, are focusing on an upbeat bookings forecast for the current quarter and the market not only moving higher, but Uber moving higher. Close to 9 % right now. Joining us is Dara Khashrishah. He's the CEO of Uber. Dara, it's great to see you. Congrats on what I said was at least look strong to me, though I do know there are these special items in here, and I don't know if you want to walk through those, but I think of your company to some degree is a barometer of the economy, but to some degree just a machine that keeps operating. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And the results were just excellent across the board, Andrew.

15:49Transactions and trips were up 20 percent year on year. So people continue to go places. They continue the demand for delivery of food, groceries, everything in home continues to be incredibly strong. Our gross bookings were up 21 percent on a year on year basis, 56 billion dollars. growing healthily both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. And non-GAAP operating, non-GAAP earnings per share, which excludes our equity stakes, losing some value, was 72 cents a share, up 44%. And free cash flow over the past 12 months, now getting very, very close to$10 billion. So the company is hitting on all cylinders.

16:34We continue to grow. We continue to innovate. And fortunately, the markets are strong. The economies are strong. And hopefully we'll see peace in the Middle East as well. And all that coming together means, you know, hopefully another great year for Uber as we continue to build and innovate. Real quick, before we go back to the earnings, just because we're watching the stock and I know you're probably not. And I know you don't like to talk about the stock itself, but it is up about nine percent this morning. And I'm trying to understand how much of that you think, as somebody who does watch it and knows it, is a function of the earnings report itself versus the larger moves in the markets and the results of the price of oil coming down, at least in this moment, by about 10 percent.

17:16Well, it's impossible to identify whether it's market or us. Obviously, a close to 10 percent move is great in a single day. But we're building for the long term here. And, for example, we've been growing top line over 20 percent for multiple quarters in a row. We continue to grow profits, you know, well above that. In this quarter, we bought back three billion dollars worth of stock just in the quarter. So that certainly looks like a good buy so far. When you look at the health of the consumer and you look at the mobility business versus the food business, what do you see? What's the difference?

17:53You know, both are strong, Andrew. Actually, mobility for us accelerated. The growth accelerated if you look at Q1 versus Q4 last year, which was really strong. So we're seeing people getting out of the house more. We're seeing particular strength in commute use cases. So people are back in the office. And obviously, Uber is a beneficiary of that. We've got now over 10 million people on our platform, earners, whether they're drivers or they're delivering food or shopping at your local grocery store on our platform as well. So both mobility and delivery continue to grow really strongly. You know, every quarter I get asked about consumer strength, the barometer of consumer strength.

18:39We watch consumer patterns really closely. Are people taking shorter trips? Are people trading down in terms of the size of their grocery basket, so to speak, or the kinds of restaurants that they're eating at? Are consumers tipping as much as they were? All of those indicators continue to be really strong. The consumer is spending, they're spending locally, and we don't see any signs of that weakening at this point. So I'm curious, when the war in Iran started, were you thinking to yourself, oh, goodness, this is going to have an impact on our business? I mean, we keep talking about this idea in the country that, you know, on one end you have these energy costs which haven't really, don't seem to have impacted consumers the way I think people anticipated.

19:26And then on the other end, you have this sort of AI-driven growth machine. And the question is whether that's just so outpacing everything else that we have to worry less about the energy situation coming out of the Middle East. Yeah, we're always looking for periods, obviously, of stability. And you can argue that this, the last couple of months, certainly have been anything but stable. But I think one of the strengths of Uber is that while we operate globally, we operate in over 70 countries, we are a very local business. So what we see is even obviously we've been through periods of uncertainty many, many times before, but people are still going to work.

20:06People are still going to see their friends. People are still eating out or getting food delivered to them. So Uber tends to be relatively shielded from the big international issues, et cetera. Certainly, we're affected by weather in the first quarter. To some extent, the war in the Middle East for our Middle Eastern operations, which are very, very, have been historically very, very strong, certainly had an effect. But what had a much larger effect is the general growth of the business. more people coming to the platform, both in the affordable end, you know, two-wheelers and three-wheelers in South America and India, and also at the high end, our U4B customers, these are enterprises.

20:53The growth there at enterprise grew two times as fast as the growth of the overall business, which already was pretty strong. So across the board, whether it's a low end or the high end, whether it's domestic business or international business, we see our platform growing and it's because people like to move and people like, you know, delivery at home. We often talk about, I think, your efforts ultimately to try to be an everything app. I want to understand where you think you are in that journey. And if we were to have this conversation a couple of years from now, what else is on the app? I know you just did a partnership with Expedia so people can, your former company, to book hotels, for example.

21:33How big a business is that going to be? We've always talked about sort of the advertising piece of this, meaning advertising on the app itself. That's still a relatively nascent business, I think. Well, you know, we want to just make your everyday life in the city a little bit easier. We want to give your time back. The only thing that you can't get back once you spend it is your time, Andrew. And so as we add on more services on our platform, we're seeing more uptake. For example, we see now, if you look over the past five years, the number of consumers who use both mobility and delivery in a particular month is up 6x over the past five years.

22:18This is a unique advantage that we have over our other competitors. We usually compete against mobility-only players or delivery-only players. The fact that we have both on the same platform and an increasing percentage of our customers using both services is just a fundamental advantage that we have over the other players. It's not easy to achieve. You know, when do you cross sell one service versus the other? Some moments of delight that are powered by AI, like, you know, your car showing up with a hot cup of Starbucks coffee in it. How cool is that? These are the experiences that we are building that no one else can.

22:54And now we're starting to add on to those services, you know, whether it's trains in the UK or France or now it's going to be hotels on Uber. And if you're an Uber One member, we have 50 million Uber One members now up 50 percent. You get 10 percent off every single hotel booking and you get another 20 percent off a rolling list of 10 ,000 hotels. So we continue to expand our services and then make those services be great deals for consumers. Do you imagine allowing fully all of your APIs, I don't know if you'll make public APIs, so my agents can completely and utterly do business with you. But then, potentially, as we've talked about, I don't have an AI that does it.

23:42I sometimes, as you know, occasionally arbitrage my Uber versus the taxi on the street. If I can get the taxi first, sometimes I'll do that. But my question is, you know, if we get to a point where I'm just working with my agent, whether my agent's going to try to find both the car that's going to come the fastest, no matter what the service is, and maybe the better price, and then how that would actually work. Well, Andrew, I'd remind you that your Uber agent is going to be able to also hail a taxi on the street, right? Uber is amalgamating this content, whether you want a black car or you want to take a taxi that day.

24:17And we are building AI agents on the Uber platform, whether you want to get a ride to work and get me a taxi if it's available and if it's convenient, or you want to take a picture of some piece of food that you think is really cool. We'll make a shopping list powered by AI for you. Right. No, that's all inside Uber. I'm saying whether you think third I'm talking about third party AI chatbots. And we'll do the same and we'll do the same. We'll absolutely work with third parties. We have unique supply on a global basis. So we think every single third-party agent is going to want to work with us.

24:53But what we're seeing now early on is that people are interacting with our proprietary agents much more than third-party agents. I think third-party agents are going to happen. But at this point, the proprietary agent technology that we're building is the one that we see growing very quickly. And hopefully more and more consumers will interact with our own agent technology. And finally, on the AI front, it's a question that we can't get away from, which is autonomous vehicles. And where you think, I mean, you you're now even more in it than ever before. Definitely. At some point, we've always said, when is the when is there going to be a battle of sorts between the drivers and and and this autonomous vehicle situation?

25:39Well, autonomous vehicles are, first of all, it's a great product, incredibly safe. We're in eight markets now with different partners, whether it's mobility or delivery. We plan to be in 15 plus markets by the end of the year, and it continues to develop. But it's off of a really small base. These cars are super expensive. It takes time to test them in the roads to make sure that they are safe. And the affordability factor is going to take some time. At the same time, when we see them in market, for example, we have a partnership with Waymo. in Austin and Atlanta, we're actually seeing new customers coming into those markets at faster rates.

26:22And the earnings of our drivers who have been driving in those cities are up on a year-on-year basis. And actually, the number of drivers is growing faster because we're seeing incremental demand coming from AVs. As long as we see that incremental demand, I mean, there's going to be plenty of work for the robots. Now, there aren't that many in the streets, but there's going to be plenty of work and a growing amount of work for our earners on the platform, for the 10 million earners who are earning monthly on our platform globally. Hey, Dara, just to focus on that, I don't think this is one of the areas where I do have the choice of getting an Uber that's an automated vehicle.