"Bloomberg Tech" is live from the heart of Silicon Valley, with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. This is "Bloomberg Tech." President Trump puts AI at the center of his agenda with a new AI-powered website called America.gov. Anthropic warns of "existential risks to humanity" in its prospectus ahead of the IPO. AMD makes a big AI bet on the frontier by acquiring World Labs in a deal valued at $8.2 billion. We will also hear from the Ford CEO, the JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer later this hour. Stick around for that conversation.
President Trump is putting AI at the center of his agenda today, launching America.gov, a new AI-powered website designed to make it easier for Americans to navigate federal services. Separately, President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are sitting down with some of the biggest names in tech, including Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Dario Amodei. We have heard from the President this morning. Tyler Kendall joins us from Washington, D.C. Before we get to the big lunch, the President has been speaking about AI. He is disgusted with Xi Jinping, just not that much. What do we need to know?
President Trump is using today to highlight his embrace of the technology. He had this event counting this AI-enabled tool. I was there this morning where a White House official told me this is designed to be a "one-stop shop," where essentially Americans can go online and ask any question about any agency and get a prompt answer about whether that is federal assistance or applying for a national park permit. It goes to underscore how the administration wants to utilize AI and make the American public comfortable with it amid what is this growing concern from the industry. Take a listen to some of what he said. "I will never stifle the growth of technology," adding, "we do not surrender to fears of what technologies to do to us." It will no doubt be a topic of discussion today. President Trump moments ago arriving back to the White House for the big lunch with these tech leaders. You mentioned some of them, including Elon Musk and Jensen Huang. From a D.C. perspective, House Speaker Mike Johnson is going to be in that room, too, as Washington figures out what is going to be next, including a flurry of legislative efforts on Capitol Hill in recent weeks. There is expectation that none of that is going to pass by the midterms, let alone after it, amid what is the administration bolstering its embrace of the technology. I will quickly say that Anthropic's Dario Amodei was started on Capitol Hill speaking with Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
The headlines that come out later in the day is probably for tomorrow's show, but something here and now that our audience is talking about is America.gov. Could you explain the basics? I'm seeing a lot of traffic on social media because of venture-capital founders, leaders in industry, who are saying this is a really big thing.
And it is being touted by the administration as one as well, Ed. A bipartisan initiative that is supposed to last beyond this administration. You heard President Trump say this could be part of the administration's legacy, that they are trying to help the American public in terms of interfacing with the government. At the beginning of the event, they played what I think is a pretty common thread for most Americans. If you call of the government and you get a busy signal or are told you have to wait three hours to get online. A questions about how it would handle the influx of users. We will have to see the trial and error this goes through. But it is something that the administration has been working on for months and they say will impact every agency. President Trump signed an executive order while he was on stage mandating every agency to interface with this AI-enabled tool, whether you have questions for the Department of Energy or Interior Department. It shouldn't matter, it should be in all one defined space. A White House official was touting this as a way just to mind with the American public, especially amid growing skepticism of AI and the data and appalling as we get closer to the midterm elections. It is clear that the White House wants to put it front and center and get the American public comfortable.
The worker joke being the cofounder of Airbnb, active in DOGE in the early days, the first chief officer for the National Design Studio, he is getting a lot of credit for this. As Washington leans further into AI, warnings about where the technology is headed is getting out of it. Joining us is Sebastian Mallaby of the Council and the author of "The Infinity Machine." America.gov, more than symbolic? Something real from this administration?
I hope so. We have large language models. Why not a large bureaucracy model? I think everyone would love that. We will see if it works because the last big tech experiment the government undertook was the Obama health care portal, and that crashed. Hopefully that won't happen again, but it is a great thing to try.
The goal is for the American public to have access to the federal government for something that is useful. The President has to date surrounded himself with people of industry. You get the sense that this would work because he has entrusted it to people that know what they are doing?
Yeah, I hope so. In the past as well when these things didn't work out the first time around, Google people and other people from the tech sector were drafted in to rescue the mess and put it back on track. That is what happened with the health care portal. But look, this is a great bipartisan thing. Everyone wants more efficient government. I moved to Washington, D.C., in 1996 and spent 18 years there. During that period, there was nonstop discussion about how to make the government more efficient. Not much happened. It is good to try, and artificial intelligence is a force multiplier for simplify bureaucracy.
From the President's prospective, AI is in the context of competition with China. America is ahead, he advocates for them to continue pushing the frontier. It is kind of the camp of saying don't slow down. How is he going to manage that group of CEOs at the lunch today who have varying views on pacing the frontier?
The fascinating thing is it seems that Dario Amodei from Anthropic is going to attend. He represents the most cautious, the most forthright in terms of emphasizing AI risk. You mentioned at the top that the leaks about Anthropic prospectus ahead of the IPO talked about existential risk. There was a letter signed by top people from Anthropic and other labs reemphasizing the potential risk. Amodei's speech at the U.N. was also about existential risk. In the past, the Trump administration would say Dario Amodei, left-wing nut job, we don't want to talk to him, freezing him out. All of a sudden he is invited to dinner Sunday night at the White House by Trump. The reports are that it went well, that he is back in the game today. He will be attending this lunch. The kind of obvious interpretation of what the Trump administration is to, basically, hey, let's do a nice government website using AI, we will show how useful it is to citizens, we won't bother with the slowdown nonsense. Now they have got Mr. Slowdown coming to the lunch. I hope we end up with a more nuanced picture of the balance between accelerating with AI and making it helpful, which is good, but also going slow enough to make it safe, which is also extremely important. I hope that sticks, but you never know, there are a lot of twists and turns with this administration.
Sebastian Mallaby, Council on Foreign Relations. We talked about your book at the top. Grateful for your time on "Bloomberg Tech" this morning. I want to talk about what is happening in financial markets. We will focus on the technology sector. At a high level, the Nasdaq 100 is basically flat. There is a broad valley in chip stocks. That includes AMD. Later in the hour we will get to that deal, AMD, $8.2 billion. AMD is higher, but so is the rest of the field. That is kind of interesting. You still see Treasury yields at high levels. That is impacting the equity market. There is a big focus on economic data as well. Bitcoin, nothing to write home about. No specific catalyst. $83,500 per token system in the background, there is a lot of wait and see right now. One of the big news stories which we will get to later in the hour is Oura delaying its IPO because the IPO environment. Anthropic is the canary in the coal mine. Sometimes you see those stories impact the equity market in aggregate. We go to Detroit, Michigan. David Westin is joined by the former CEO Jim Farley, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for an exclusive interview. David?
Thank you so much. I am in Detroit, Michigan, Michigan Central, joined by the Governor of the great state of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, as well as Jim Farley and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, for a big announcement. Michigan Lift, a launchpad for industrial innovation and transformation. Those are pretty good words. What does it all mean?
We are trying to fix a problem, onshoring things that were off toward in the name of pennies on the dollar to make here in the U.S., where we needed to be independent come to defend ourselves. Ford will commit billion dollars of purchasing for new companies building advanced manufacturing, new capabilities, magnets and rare earth that we used to buy overseas and we are going to buy here to help JPMorgan as well as the state of Michigan.
Do they have to be Michigan companies?
Jamie, markets we rely upon an awful lot. Why don't markets already take care of this? Why do we need this initiative?
First of all, I applaud the initiative, and I think that it is important that states and governments work together to fix things like Detroit, which they did, the number one thing. We lost some of the muscle to do that. Markets will take care of a lot of it, but if you are an innovative company, you invented something here and you need in order, got to actually work, they have to build a real plant, not just an experimental plant. It takes a whole group of us to do this kind of thing. Hopefully this will be replicated. This needs to be done everywhere and a lot of industries to make sure the United States can defend itself.
Why Michigan? Why is it so important for Michigan?
We know how to build things. That is who we are in our DNA. The arsenal of democracy. This is about homeland security. It's about advanced manufacturing. That is who we are in Michigan. When I saw JPMorgan was doing this resiliency initiative, I reached out and said let's talk about what is possible in Michigan. I know what we are capable of. I think government plays an important role with industry as we think about what the future looks like and how do we do advanced manufacturing and protect ourselves. This is a combination of all of those great strengths. We need to have a concerted collaborative effort.
This is ultimately about supply chain, the resiliency of supply chain, which has been disrupted by geopolitics, trade and things like that. How does this fit with your neighbor Canada? There is a lot of back-and-forth in the auto industry with Canada. How does this fit with that?
I want to first and foremost say the Canadians have been tremendous allies and partners of ours in Michigan for a long time. Autos go back and forth over that border. This is the busiest crossing in North America, right here in Detroit. We are proud of that long heritage. But I think it is really important that we continue to onshore as much as we can to the United States from all around the world.
But if a Canadian company came along who was innovative in the industrial space and had something, for example, Jim, you could use, can they apply to this program?
Yes, but we want this to be a Michigan initiative. There are so many things in Canada we depend on. Aluminum, trucks made out of aluminum. They go into all of our trucks and all of our plants. We are looking for innovative companies even in the aluminum supply chain with this initiative.
Jamie, you have a piece in "The Wall Street Journal" today for a need for economic policy that maintains preeminence in the U.S. economy. Part of it is what we're talking about right here, the supply chain. How does this fit in your plans for a preeminent U.S. economy?
If you want to be safe, have the best military in the world. It is predicated on having the best economy in the world. That is what makes the dollar the reserve currency, not some fantasy about something. We have Atlantic, Pacific, all the foodborne energy we need. This is domestic now, but also foreign. We have extensive relationships, foreign policy, industrial policy, regulatory policy. Companies overseas, folks have $20 trillion to $30 trillion in the United States and American companies have equal amount invested overseas. I want to keep the Western world together for trade. That is the way you protect yourself. 60% of global GDP is Europe, U.K., Japan, Australia, Mexico, Canada, South Korea. Those are friends and allies. With 40 military alliances, 20 free-trade agreements. Obviously if we are treated unfairly, we should fix it. My view is we should get the trade deals done. It is better for the U.S., better for those countries. I don't know all the complexities I can't get into exactly why we are running into roadblocks.
When it comes to the automotive industry, there are a lot of things that can and should be done. You have been working on with the essential economy. Where are you in that process and how does this fit into your program?
We are in the second inning. 1.7 million open jobs. It is a crisis and we have to do something about it. Ford by itself, we can solve our problems. But that is not what we are trying to do. We have always been a company that has more ambition than the four walls of our company. We are putting focus on the facts. We have published our first report on the facts around skilled trade deficits in the U.S. Most college advisors or high-school advisors recommended a four-year degree. Only 2% recommended trade school. That's a problem. High-quality trade school graduates people almost 100%. For a company like Ford, but also our country, we have to address the skilled trade deficit. We can sit on the sideline or fix the problems at Ford. That is not what we are going to do in Detroit this week. We have to fix it for our country.
That takes us obviously to education and training, which is a component of Michigan Lift program. What is Michigan doing specifically on the skilled trades in the training program?
A great deal. Part of our DNA is tradespeople. We have put a lot of effort into making sure that anyone who wants to upskill can afford to do that. We have free community college in Michigan, apprenticeships that are available and easy to get into. You can graduate from an apprenticeship and get a good paying job and not have any debt carried on. This is a good way to make a very good living in this country that won't be -- it will be impacted by AI, but won't be replaced. That gives people some confidence as well. Michigan is number four in the country by "Site Selector" magazine for our workforce efforts and that is something that will continue.
Jamie, your anchor capital provider to this, and that is helpful to startups, and as I understand it, small companies. It is not just for startups that this program is designed. They are facing issues including high interest costs, which hits small and medium-size businesses disproportionately. How does this fit with the pressures on these committees right now as you see bond yields rise, interest rates rise?
I think you have to separate this. That may make it harder for some people. To me, the ultimate goal is to get inflation down. Sometimes you have pain in the short run to accomplish what we need in the long run. This transcends what the market yesterday and with a yield curve does today. We need to do this for the future safety of America. We need to get our mojo back. When you travel the country like I do -- I'm sure you guys do, too -- it is happening. I don't know if the people here know that the Ford, GM plants in all their vendors stop building cars in 1942 and did not build a car for the next abuse, but 100,000 fighter jets and bombers, 100,000 tanks. If you go anywhere around the country, there is a huge amount of stuff taking place. We have to put more elbow grease into it.
This is part of an initiative you announced a while ago, security and resiliency. This is part of that. Where does that stand? Insofar as this goes beyond the state of Michigan, you would like other people to copy you. Are you willing to be an anchor capital provider in other places as well?
Totally. The initiative is real. We went through what we need in drones and semiconductors. A lot of policy around what we need to do to make it work. It is coming up to the one-year anniversary. The numbers will be better, in my view, than $1.5 trillion. We have invested $5 billion directly into companies that you security and resiliency. It is working. If it works, you do more of it. It should be replicated. Part of it is working together. If we acknowledge the problem and you start working on it, roll up your sleeves, it will be fixed. It is denial of the problem that puts us in trouble. It was his idea. She called me, so I gotta give credit to get us going. Like you said, this estate is one of the great manufacturers of the world, not just the United States.
Can it regain that, Governor? If you go back to the 1920's and 1930's, it was the engine behind a lot of the U.S. economy. We are not going to go back to that, we have to go forward, but can Michigan regain that prominence?
Absolutely. Investments like this should show what we are capable of and uplift. I mentioned our workforce, but we have the highest concentration of engineers per capita in the country as well in Michigan. We've got the talent to tackle the world's problems. We just need the organization and the ability to make all of the connections for innovators who are resolving or coming up with solutions to problems we are all confronting.
Jim, in your auto business, as I noticed, there are few competitors around the world. Particularly in China. You have talked about the ability of the Chinese manufacturers to move at light speed, and that we need to speed things up. How do you fit together light speed on the one hand with a program to bring in a new companies, whether startups or small companies? That sounds like it takes time. Can you move at light speed without innovation?
Sure. I don't think we have a choice. It is humbling to see the competitiveness around the globe, especially in China. I have to say, I'm very optimistic. We developed a small group in the U.S., in California. They out-innovated companies like the really good EV companies in China. We are coming out with a $30,000 vehicle built in Louisville, Kentucky, engineered in California and Michigan. I think it will be fully competitive with BYD if they were in Mexico. We have to have innovation, but we also have to have these kinds of programs and on for things we have offshored. If we don't do all of that, we are going to be in trouble. But there is an opportunity that I don't think everyone sees yet that we see at Ford, which is Ford being a winning global company in this competitive landscape. But we have to do it all.
