Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod, legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones.
We're kind of where we were in October, November of '99.
And his takeaways from a tight circle of the biggest builders in AI, the opportunities.
Absolutely. And the guardrails needed.
Last year, I would say 20% of that room was in favor of government regulation. This year, it was 80%.
Plus, the rest of today's news that got us squawking, big compute, big money, Anthropic's big rise.
If you could keep that going for a couple of years, you'd be a trillion-dollar revenue company. Think about, just think about the sort of math of what that could look like.
It is Thursday, May 7th, 2026. SquawkPod begins right now.
Good morning everybody. Welcome to Squawkbox 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 out today. Among our top stories this morning, energy prices in focus on optimism of a potential US-Iran peace deal on oil. Oil right now is down by about 3.3%. WTI trading at 91.86. Brent is also trading lower even after yesterday's significant declines. A drop of about 7.8% this morning. Brent is sitting right at $98 a barrel.
The CDC says that the United States is closely monitoring US travelers that were on a cruise ship that was hit by a hantavirus outbreak. So far, it has claimed three lives. People in three states are being monitored for potential infections after traveling on a cruise ship at the center of the outbreak. The biggest issue here is with this human-to-human transmission of this hantavirus. There's a 1 to 8 week incubation period. It's a long time. You can be contagious even before you are symptomatic.
Anthropic giving some details about the monstrous growth it's seen recently at the company's developer conference. The company's CEO Dario saying the revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis. That's extraordinary.
That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute, right? We planned for anything from it only grows a little to it grows 10x, and yet we saw 80x. Amodei saying that Anthropic is working as fast as possible to provide more compute to users. And earlier in the day, the company announced a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at a giant SpaceX data center in Tennessee. Writing on X, Musk praised Anthropic and said he'd spent considerable time with senior company officials last week. He also said, quote, 'Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector. So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good.' And that's a bit of a turnaround for Elon as it relates to how I think he was thinking about Claude in the past. Clearly, how he's thought about OpenAI in the past, but here he's doing a deal. In part, by the way, separately, it should be noted that there has been some conversation that, you know, xAI is not using all of the compute and won't be using all of the compute that he's building. So, there's sort of a balance there.
A balance back and forth. You're right, though, that those numbers, I was listening to that yesterday, too, with Dario. The idea of 80 times demand, I mean, that's just hard to get your head around. How could you possibly plan for that? How do you keep up with that? Where are the bottlenecks? How do you fix them? I mean, that's just hard to get your head around.
Well, if you could keep that going for a couple of years, you'd be a trillion-dollar revenue company. Think about, just think about the sort of math of what that could look like. Separately, in the partnership announcement, we should mention the company referred to itself as SpaceXAI. Musk later posted xAI will be dissolved as a separate company. So, it will just be SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX. So, it is a mouthful.
All right. In the meantime, the United States and China are reportedly considering starting an official dialogue on AI safety. The Wall Street Journal says that the issue could be on the agenda for President Trump's scheduled meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping next week. Officials are said to be interested in a series of ongoing conversations touching on the potential erratic behavior by AI systems as well as autonomous military systems and non-state actors using open-source technology to stage attacks. The United States previously engaged with China on AI under former President Biden. The journal notes that the current effort is being led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
It's probably pretty important, too. We look at these things as the potential for nuclear weapons down the road. This is one thing we should definitely be talking with all parties and in particular China.
Okay. GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen saying his eBay account has been suspended. Cohen listed some personal items for sale saying he was quote selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay. Shared a screenshot on X of a notice from eBay saying his account had been suspended, although listings from that account appear to still be available for sale. So you can support his effort if you'd like. So it isn't clear right now if the account was actually suspended. Among the items on sale if you're so interested on Cohen's eBay account, there's some sports cards, a GameStop hat, vintage video games, and a pair of socks as a thank you gift with the purchase. Buyers will get a hand-signed copy of the offer letter that he sent to eBay's board. Maybe I'll bid on it. The current high bid, by the way, on the pair of socks. Oh, no. I won't be sorry. I didn't realize what was going on here. Pair of socks, 14,000 bucks.
Above that. By the way, I wonder if this is a new account for him. I don't know if you noticed the screenshot name is Ryan 50/50, which is 50% cash, 50% stock, which is what he came on here and said the deal was. Of course, that doesn't account for the additional shares they'll have to issue and the debt that comes from that. But I wonder if that's a brand new account, how long that's been around.
I don't know. 50/50. It's a meme. It's everywhere.
I don't know if you've seen when your wife asks how you're going to pay for vacation. 50% stock, 50% cash.
There you go. That's the line of the day.
Surging jet fuel prices reportedly causing some anxiety in the White House. The Wall Street Journal reporting that President Trump's advisors are worried that the higher costs will result in losses for Republicans in November's midterm elections. That article noting that former New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu recently told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that airfares could surge if the Iran war doesn't end soon. Sununu is now president of the industry trade group Airlines for America. Just yesterday, transportation secretary said airlines' jet fuel costs in March jumped more than 50% compared to February. And we've had a couple guests on, but I'm thinking of one in particular who suggested that some airlines may just stop flying certain routes over the summer.
Well, if things get out of control, was it who was it? Lufthansa, some one of the German air carriers cancelled thousands of flights. They were short-term flights, short-haul ones. The CEOs that we've talked to here, I'm thinking specifically of Jeff Kirby from United, when we asked him about it during earnings last week, said, 'Look, right now it looks like they're okay.' He does not think that the long-haul flights will be canceled. It would probably be short-haul ones that do. But if you get to the end of May and there hasn't been anything that's opened up, I think or beginning of June, you're looking at about 23 to 27 days of fuel that they have for jet fuel in Europe. We've managed to avoid some of those issues now. If you get this 30-day pause, perhaps some ships that move through before that. But it's certainly something every single one of the airlines are watching very closely.
Don't go anywhere. Paul Tudor Jones is next on SquawkPod. The hedge fund manager and founder of Tudor Investment is fresh off of an intimate conference with the leaders and builders of artificial intelligence. What he learned and what concerns him about AI.
Do you think there's a 10% chance that half of humanity could be wiped out in the next 20 years? And out of the 50 people there, five raised their hands. I was one of them. The other four were the people who actually built the models. So that was disconcerting. This year that was 60-40. The answer was yes.
That's next.
Welcome back to Squawk Pod from CNBC today with Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Here's Andrew.
Joining us now exclusively on the markets, the Fed, artificial intelligence, and so much more, legendary investor and billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones is here, of course, founder and chief investment officer of Tudor Investment Corporation. And he is also founder and board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, which is going to be holding its annual benefit in just a few days right here in New York. And we always love having you here. And so much to talk about in terms of the markets. We're at these record highs. It's a remarkable situation. I think in large part driven by AI, correct? On the other end, we have the situation in the Middle East, which has been a question mark, but for whatever reason, at least the way the markets are thinking about it, maybe not as big a question mark as we might think. You just got back from a big AI conference that I think has your head spinning. I thought maybe you could help us understand. And I remember last year you were with us. I think right around this time when you had been to maybe the same conference.
And I think you had people frankly a little freaked out last year.
Yeah. I would say this one was really interesting. Some of the key takeaways. The first, the good part. The good part is in two years with mRNA vaccines empowered by AI, tailor-made mRNA vaccines probably 50% of cancer cases can be cured for under $100,000. So that's the great side of this technology, right? 2030, probably robotics will be ubiquitous and we could be on the verge of the age of abundance. That's wonderful. I would say there were also two big attitudinal shifts last year. So this conference, it's small, it's about 50 people. It's the leading AI entrepreneurs, modelers, the people who are actually building the models, overseeing their deployment, people who are using AI in the fields of medicine, biotech, the whole nine yards. So, you got the best of the best in that room. The big attitudinal shift I would say is last year, I would say 20% of that room was in favor of government regulation. This year it was 80%. Including the head of one of the largest model companies who said, 'I can't believe we're not regulated. I can't believe that no government is regulating us. We need to be regulated.' So there's been a big attitudinal shift. They obviously see something.
Yeah. So that's the other side of that point. And it's a really interesting conference because it's very interactive, a lot of polling as we go through to see where everyone is. So, last year they asked the question, what is the, is there, do you think there's a 10% chance that half of humanity could be wiped out in the next 20 years? And out of the 50 people there, five raised their hands. I was one of them. The other four were the people who actually built the models. So that was disconcerting. This year, that was 60-40. The answer was yes. 60-40.
So fewer people are concerned, but the ones who are include the ones who are more people, this is more people.
Oh yeah. No, this is scarier.
Yeah, it's gone from 10% to 60%.
So that's not necessarily good.
That's to put it politely.
We did a simulation. We also did a simulation where we kind of walked forward the next few years in AI and you had, so we kind of broke up into groups of three or four and you had all the major tech companies represented, you had the US military, US government, Chinese government, Chinese military, the rest of the world, the general public. So and then we just kind of started walking forward. What was the advent of AI going to bring? And I would say after we did five rounds, after the second round, it got comedic. So, I want to couch all this, right?
Is it as then it got to be well, what could be the, you know, what could be the more interesting or funny thing that we could do.
However, what was really interesting was to see the interplay of all the tech companies, which I don't really know that world as well, but it was so funny to see the competition. But just to fast forward to the end, it ended with Earth-based AI, which was Anthropic and OpenAI, against space-based AI, which is Elon.
Which was Elon and Heidor met about that point in time. Those two were kind of in a war.
