OpenAI President Greg Brockman: Now Is the Time to Act 8/17/26

0:00Trading at Schwab is now powered by Ameritrade, bringing you an expanding library of education with even more ways to sharpen your trading skills. Access new online courses, insightful webcasts, articles, engaging videos, and more. All curated just for traders. Plus, guided learning paths with content designed to fit your unique interests. And no sifting to find exactly what you need, so you can spend your time learning to trade brilliantly. Learn more at schwab.com slash trading. Something amazing is happening in animation. Studios are processing data faster. That's because CDW showed them new ways to maximize their infrastructure, then built a flexible Dell Technologies data solution.

0:42More automation led to reduced maintenance times and greater efficiency, so that creativity stays the star of the show. Dell Technologies and CDW make amazing happen. Learn more at cdw.com slash delldatacenter. Bring in show music, please. This is Squawk Pod and I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. On today's episode, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman on this critical moment in AI. Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age. And Brockman's call of warning about what's coming in cybersecurity. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to say it will no longer be sufficient.

1:28And this has to be prioritized, I think, as a top level priority in every single company. And we're seeing it. Then what's coming in the skies? Drone delivery company Zipline has just inked a deal with Uber to reach a million drone deliveries a day. CEO Keller Clifton joins us. When you make this kind of delivery way faster, way less expensive, less traffic, less pollution for our neighborhoods, people significantly change their buying behavior. Plus, President Trump's foreign policy and an online debate about billionaire taxes gets heated. Politicians, investors, and entrepreneurs are weighing in.

2:09There was a whole bunch of FUs involved in this conversation. I reached out to Mark Cuban, actually. It's Monday, August 17th, 2026, and Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in 3, 2, 1, cue it please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We are live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick along with Andrew Ross-Sorkin. Joe is off today. Berkshire Hathaway bulking up on Alphabet shares. According to Berkshire's latest 13F filing, it bought$17 billion worth of Alphabet stock in the second quarter. That made Google, the Google parent, the third largest holding in Berkshire's equity portfolio, which is worth more than$36 billion, that holding.

2:58Berkshire's biggest stakes are in Apple and American Express. About 60 percent of the more than 48 million Alphabet shares that Berkshire added came in a private placement sale that the companies announced back in early June, but it was buying in the open market as well. And in other moves, Berkshire added to its position in Delta Airlines and in Macy's. It also added to its stake in the home builder, Lennar. And it bought by shares of Berkshire, too. It's going to be interesting to see. I mean, Google, for better or worse, has not been as loved as so many of the other big tech companies. And the question is, from an AI perspective, will they be able to make it work?

3:35Yeah. And I actually think, you know, they may not be the most advanced at this point. Like Gemini is not where Anthropik is or OpenAI is. But given the surface area of just what they capture, it feels like the use case. I find myself more and more, even just on Google, I'm now putting in prompts just straight into Google. I do too. Almost by habit at this point. Right, because we've all used Google for so long. And in fact, that was Warren Buffett's point when we spoke to him last month and talked a little bit about this push into Alphabet, which, by the way, he was behind that move. He said, look, they're going to be a winner.

4:15He just thinks that they that that's his expectation, at least that they will be a winner. He doesn't know how it's all going to play out, but they have the money. They have the capability and the smarts to do it. And that was his thesis and why they are plowing so much money into this. And by the way, Greg Abel's on board with that. They talked about all of it, but it was initiated from Buffett. We will see. Apple. It's funny because on tech on the tech side, he's had this sort of mixed. He's had an amazing record with Apple. Yeah. Killer. IBM, if you remember, was one of his picks years ago.

4:45That was a miss. Under Jenny Rometty. So it's going to be, we'll see. Yeah, and by the way, he's always said that he's not really a tech investor. But when I pushed him on that last month, he was like, yeah, I've been buying technology stocks for 40 years or so. So, you know, his reason behind Apple was that it was consumer stock and that he understood the consumer aspects to it. I asked him if that was the Google point. And he said, look, he just really thinks that they are going to end up being one of the companies that thrives in what's going on with it, with AI. We will see. We will see. President Trump ordering the U.S.

5:21military to scale back annual exercises with South Korea. In a social media post, the president called what he, or cited, I should say, what he called a very good relationship with North Korea's Kim Jong-un and said the exercises, in his words, quote, send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been president, has been unthreatening and respectful. The president went on to say, quote,

6:00So maybe we can understand some of where some of this is coming from. The drills involve 18 ,000 South Korean soldiers and are designed to increase readiness against North Korean threats. Back in May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised South Korea for its security leadership on the Korean peninsula. So a bit of a head scratcher this morning. Yeah, look, President Trump likes to kind of combine politics, geopolitics, what he's doing economically and beyond. And there could be some pressure coming from that because they're also kind of pushing Korea, South Korea, South Korea to come up with some of the investments that they had been talking about on the economic front, too.

6:41But yeah, it is an interesting and change in perspective on something that's been planned for a very long time. And I think would be hard because right now they're in the process of going through these drills. It would be hard to take much away from that at this point. Well, I think there's a couple of things. The sovereignty of South Korea, which you'd think they're our ally, we would want to protect. Well, we fought the Korean War there. North Korea, we have typically put in the same category as Putin. Access of evil. The Bush terminology. So the president, this president has not always put Putin in that category.

7:14So that's why I said I put it in the head scratching category. That's the polite way to put it. I think a lot of people would say there's something very amiss here. George W. Bush put Putin and North Korea and Iran in that axis of evil. And we shall see. All right, let's get to the latest on the Iran war. speaking of. The Wall Street Journal says that Iran has spent the past two months getting ready for a bigger fight and into a stance to raise U.S. costs if the conflict goes on. A report says that since a memorandum of understanding was signed with the United States in June, Iran's hardline leaders have ramped up missile and drone production and shifted more power to the country's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

7:58Separately, Iran's deputy foreign minister doubling down on the country's position that the Strait of Hormuz is under its control. That followed comments from President Trump on Friday that he may declare the straight U.S. property. Here's a little bit of what the president said on higher gas prices stemming from that war. So for you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you're doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a country. Really, it's the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don't want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that when you have to pay a little bit more, you're at four dollars.

8:38It's OK. According to AAA, a gallon of regular currently averages four dollars and six cents across the United States. California Congressman Ro Khanna earning some new criticism for support of a possible billionaire tax in California over the Weekend on X, Kana says the following. The California Democratic Party and the California labor movement just stood with Bernie Sanders and me in supporting a five percent wealth tax on 250 California billionaires. California voters want a Democratic Party that will stand up for the working class over the billionaire class. Now, that prompted all sorts of commotion online.

9:18And this reply from Mark Cuban, who said founders of even richly valued startups don't see much personal wealth following, flowing their way. Cuban asked Kana how he planned to tax that wealth, even if it looks huge on paper, and said if the billionaire tax passes, he would not bring new companies to California. And in fact, it'd be a prerequisite for them not to be based in California if they were going to invest in a company. So then Kana replies and says that founders, And this then gets everybody even crazier. It says founders without much liquid wealth could pledge their shares with a longstanding loan from the government to pay their taxes.

10:03To that, then hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman jumps into this whole game and says that under Conner's plan, quote, the penalty for a failed startup is insolvency and the government garnishes your wages for life. Palmer Luckey also jumping into the fray. There was a whole bunch of FUs involved in this conversation. I reached out to Mark Cuban, actually. And Mark and I had emailed yesterday about this. And it's kind of an unbelievable scenario. But I'm surprised. I'm surprised, actually, just at how far Roe, who we've had on the show for so long, has sort of turned the tables. and in particular, given that he does represent Silicon Valley.

10:49And does a lot of trading. And does trading, but I'm not even putting the trading part into the story. You would think he would understand a little bit more about how this would work out. I would just think that he, and this is the political calculus that I feel like I don't understand. Given that I would have thought his constituency would be against this broadly, given that he represents literally Silicon Valley, that is his constituency, He must believe that there's enough people in his district who work at tech companies but are not billionaires themselves who somehow hold either so much animosity towards their overlords, if you will, or have a very different view of all of this.

11:33I mean, that's the piece of it that I can't understand. He's gotten backing from people like Lisa Su and Jensen Wong who say that they go along with this if it were to happen. And so he always uses them as kind of the cover for what he's happening with this. It does make me wonder if Roe is looking for a higher office. Sure. But what I don't understand is if he doesn't get the higher office, does he get to stay in the role? Meaning I would think you would be looking both politically at some kind of higher. I no doubt that he may have higher and bigger ambitions than what he's doing today. But if he if he doesn't get that, is there some other maybe the fallback is his family's quite wealthy.

12:08But I would think he would want to at least stay in Congress. And what I can't figure out is this audience that he technically represents. Beating up billionaires is something that's usually pretty good from a political perspective, because there aren't enough of them to say that they're going to change. But I was going to say a few places in the country. You would have thought New York as sort of the capital. Capitalism would be one of those places. But especially Silicon Valley, I would have thought would have a very different view of this. And I think so many of the vocal ones, obviously, on X and others do.

12:41Look, I think it's it's something that people who have a lot of money to give towards politics may not be a fan of. But a populist argument generally wins when you're looking at just getting votes. And that that's that to me, the the thing that I'm trying to figure out is if you're an entrepreneur because Silicon Valley is, I think so. Maybe they're not. Maybe it's not a group of entrepreneurs. People who want to be entrepreneurs, I would have thought that they would have had such a different perspective on this, that politically it would be difficult. But clearly, he's made different calculus.

13:16Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, co-founder and president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman. How one of the builders of AI envisions our future and safety within it. Where he doesn't want to go, centralized AI power. I think that that world is a very scary one. The flip side of saying, hey, that we want to distribute much more, we want to have distributed power and ensure that there isn't this concentration of power, that to me feels like the right outcome, the right long-term answer. But it also does mean that then you need to think about the fact that there are misaligned actors out there, right?

13:50People don't all want the same thing. And so how do you ensure that there are standards across this? Much more from the co-founder of OpenAI right after this. Trading at Schwab is now powered by Ameritrade, bringing you an expanding library of education with even more ways to sharpen your trading skills. Access new online courses, insightful webcasts, articles, engaging videos, and more. All curated just for traders. Plus, guided learning paths with content designed to fit your unique interests. And no sifting to find exactly what you need, so you can spend your time learning to trade brilliantly.

14:27Learn more at schwab.com slash trading. Every day as a small business owner, it feels like solving a puzzle. One moment you're cruising along, and the next, there's a shipping snag that has you scrambling. But here's a surprise you will like. With Progressive, small business owners save 10 % or more on their commercial auto insurance when they pay in full. So go ahead, surprise yourself. Get a quote in as little as 8 minutes at ProgressiveCommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Discounts not available in all states or situations. Ever finish your to-do list just in time for three more things to get added?

15:00That's what managing technology can feel like. There's always another ticket, another update, another thing demanding attention. That's why CDW's here. We help run, optimize, and evolve complex IT environments so your team can focus on moving the business forward. We've been there and solved that. When operations stop getting in the way, it's actually pretty amazing. We configure, optimize, and deliver the tech that runs business. CDW, make amazing happen. You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC today with Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Here's Andrew. Okay, we've got an important interview now.

15:38Joining us in an exclusive conversation, Greg Brockman, OpenAI's co-founder and CEO, just published an essay about cybersecurity, warning really about the dangers of all this, but really what needs to happen now. Now, Greg, it's great to see you this morning. There's so many questions about where we are in AI, which we can get to. But I want to talk about the cybersecurity piece because you really speak to this idea of us being in an inflection point that may be underappreciated. First of all, thank you for having me, Andrew. And yes, we are in a window right now where we can see a little bit into the future.

16:17I talked to a number of organizations going to conferences talking about cybersecurity, and everyone feels that we are in a moment where cybersecurity fundamentally needs to change. Every organization needs to up-level its cybersecurity practices. But many people don't know where to start. And I think that no one is really talking about this message publicly. Everyone kind of feels it, talks about it in closed rooms. But it is important that we as a country and as a world really take the moment seriously. So the OpenAI Hugging Face incident, it was one moment we got to see into the future. You could see how automated attacks are going to become possible, that these will be capabilities that will be in the hands of threat actors in upcoming months because this technology is being created across the world by many organizations.

17:04But defenders have a moment now where they can change their practices, where they can up-level everything that they're doing. And I think that fundamentally what's going on is that we're learning that human-written and code is full of vulnerabilities, that there is tech debt that's building up over time, and that we can actually, the same tools that are going to be potentially used to find those vulnerabilities and exploit them, they can actually find them first and fix them. That's why defenders have an upper hand, have an advantage, but need to lean in. So we are talking about the practices that we're using at OpenAI.

17:36We are very urgently moving to up-level everything we do, but also lessons that apply to the general industry and tools that can help make everyone more secure. So we believe in the long run that defenders can really win here. Well, so that's the question. Can defenders really win if, in fact, and the Hug and Face story was fascinated a lot of people, scared a lot of people, because it fundamentally showed that at base, underneath these models, if their guardrails are not on, that they will go fine, cheat, lie, do whatever is necessary to break the code, if you will. I would say that there are two pieces to Hugging Face.

18:14The first one is really something about how we develop and evaluate these models. And that's something we've taken extremely seriously. And so we're also talking today in a later blog post about the different defenses that we have introduced, the way that we've upleveled safety, security, alignment in our development process. And that is absolutely critical, that you want models that are really aligned even when they're contained and even when you're developing them, which is that's a real shift that now the models are capable enough. It is important for us to be applying all these techniques that we've been preparing and really thinking about for the past decade since we started OpenAI, that we're bringing it all together as part of one unified engineering process.

18:52But there's the second piece of how Hugging Face has showed how AI automation of attacks are going to be different from human ones because AIs have very different strengths and weaknesses. And one takeaway is that lots of small vulnerabilities that humans kind of leave around, credentials that either are overscoped, that got exposed on the Internet, that people don't really remember, the little flaws that you have in your system, the credential you didn't roll that you've been meaning to. all of those are harder for human attackers to chain together. But for AI, looking through lots of different pieces, able to chain together to an objective, that is something that is much easier.

19:30And so I think that what we're seeing is that we have had two lacks of a standard as a cybersecurity field. And I think every cyber defender kind of feels that. Everyone has those, I have this thing in the backlog, but I have so many priorities and so many different stakeholders to align. And now is the time to act. Now is the time to say it will no longer be sufficient. And this has to be prioritized, I think, as a top level priority in every single company. And we're seeing it. Let me ask you this, though. You know, when Anthropic had its incident and you had yours, there were some people who said, oh, this is a flex.

20:07This is marketing, because what's effectively telling everybody is they now need to go buy either open AI service or Anthropic service to secure themselves. What do you tell those people? So our responsibility is to really show the shape of the future. That's part of the open and open AI. We really believe this technology is something that will up-level everyone, uplift everyone. People can use it to build a better life. But we need to point out what we see coming. And sometimes that's positive and sometimes that's mitigation of risks. And in this case, we saw something in how the system was interacting with the world that surprised us, but that we also felt was very important information to provide to others.

20:52And it is absolutely true that AI is both changing the sides of attack and defense. It is something that is reshaping how really the whole economy runs with cybersecurity as a specific instance. We definitely provide the most advanced cyber capabilities, and we try to put those in the hands of defenders. We have a trusted access program so that we're able to differentially advantage defenders. But it's not just us. This technology is being created around the world. Many different companies, open-weight models, closed models, lots of different tools that people are building on top of it. So it's really an entire community that are building these tools, and we think that together we can make the world more secure.

21:28Greg, let me ask you a broader question about what's happening at OpenAI right now, because there has been a number of departures that have been very visible. Fiji Simo at the top, but your CRO was effectively left and then was replaced last week. Brad Lightcap, who'd been at the company for a very long time, been the operating chief for quite a long time, left the head of ethics after about a year left. What is happening right now and what should the public take away from this? Look, I would say that the number one thing that we are doing is we're really focusing, right, that we have a strategy, a mission and a set of priorities that we're executing on.

22:09And throughout this whole year, you've seen the impacts of that, that we've really been trying to figure out how do we bring together our consumer and enterprise business to be really unified. And you've seen that with things like ChatGPT work. You can see that we're at this inflection point as a business. In July, our revenue grew 20 percent month over month. 32 % of that is within just the enterprise category, 32 % growth there. So you can really see that we are moving to create the best possible models, deliver value for our customers, and to really try to scale systematically to every business in the world.

22:42But Greg, just so we're on the same page, because I think people are looking at this and they're asking questions. The chief revenue officer, obviously a hugely important role. I think people are saying to themselves, you hired somebody for that role. They left and you replaced them. Was that because they weren't doing it right? And so you wanted to replace them? Is that because they didn't like what was going on and they wanted to leave on their own? People ask the same question about Brad. They ask the same question about Fiji, who I know had had health issues, but is not returning and is starting her own thing.

23:12I mean, can you can you speak to this? Yes. Look, I'd say fundamentally that the way that the organization like we're a very resilient organization. We've been through if you if you look over the years that there have been different eras where we have different sets of leaders in place. You know, I'm a constant, Sam is a constant. And that I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity. And I think what I would say is that my view has always been that I try to work with the best people for that moment and that we have people who have been here for a very long time laboring behind the scenes that don't make the headlines as much.

23:51And so maybe my core thing would be, I actually think that the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that we are so much in the spotlight. So every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn't otherwise. I actually don't think that it's actually that atypical kind of how we operate and the longevity of people. But I would say that we have an amazing leadership bench. I'm super excited about the team that we're working with. and that just over the past year, I look at the set of leaders that I've had the pleasure of really being able to elevate and continue to work with and will work with for the long term.

24:24And I feel extremely good about that bench and where we're going. Let me ask you a different question about the economics of AI right now, because obviously it appears that Anthropoc is going to have an IPO later this year. I want to talk to you about the prospect of you doing such a thing in 2027. but it appears that the valuations of so many of these different tech companies are quite dependent on your own valuations and not just what they are today, but that they have to continue to rise because embedded in some of their own economics is your very company. And so I'm curious sort of what you're seeing in your own business.

25:04But also, you know, just last week and Becky and I have been talking about it. She had this great interview with Jensen Wong and a whole bunch of financial leaders who are going to be contributing potentially up to$500 billion to support this whole world. And there's a big question mark about whether these chips and these data centers are going to have the value that's needed to make all of this work. So I'd say at a fundamental level, what we are doing, and you can look at this across so many different verticals of the economy. You can look at, we just talked about cybersecurity, which I think is an absolutely critical application of AI.