10AM Hour: Wells Fargo, Chime & Charter CEOs 9/9/26

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Sara Eisen (1:00)

Good Wednesday morning, and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber, live from the Wells Fargo Health Care Conference today in Boston. More than 300 companies participating, 2,000 people attending here. In just a few minutes, I will speak with the host, Wells Fargo CEO, Charlie Scharf, about his business, the economy, and much more. Next hour, CEO of Biogen joins us for a rare interview on the company's drug pipeline and rising health care costs.

David Faber (1:27)

Here at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia Conference in San Francisco, the CEO of Chime will join me. We'll talk about their deal by Stride Bank.

The CEO of Charter on that company's closing the acquisition of Cox, and we'll also have an exclusive with Visa CEO. Talk of course about the consumer and how that company is using agentic AI.

Carl Quintanilla (1:50)

Meantime markets are struggling a little bit here as we work our way further into September. Dow is having its worst three-day run in several months. Only sectors positive today are energy for obvious reasons and a little bit of tech. VIX above 16 is the highest we've seen in a little bit, and we're watching that 10-year at 4.8 ahead of some treasury buyback announcements later on this morning. We'll start with these rising AI fears and a new warning from now former anthropic researcher who quit over concerns the company and competitors will not be able, he says, to control the models that they're building. Following that warning, another anthropic safety researcher said there's a greater than 10% chance that AI, in his view, could kill all humans within the next decade. David, a lot of buzz getting generated. I think the one post on X already has 50 million views by itself.

What's the tone out of Communicopia on some of this stuff?

David Faber (2:44)

Yeah, I mean, listen, this is a debate and a theme that's been going on for many years. It's not as though it's new and, in fact, those same percentage numbers, I think, were shared by the likes of Elon Musk many years ago. In fact, one of the reasons why he and Sam Altman, at the time when they were friendly, launched OpenAI to make the technology safe as it advances, and it has advanced at a rapid pace. Of course, as you might expect, given an investment conference in San Francisco, Carl, that certainly has been one of the focuses here. Sara Friar, for example, yesterday was a guest here. She's the CFO of OpenAI, mobbed, treated like she's a rock star in many ways.

You might expect, of course, her session was full to the brim in terms of people who want to understand the underlying growth rates, want to understand what's going to be happening when and if that company does go public being OpenAI, and of course, Anthropic as well, expected to hit the public markets even sooner than perhaps OpenAI. We don't know when we'll see that S1, but it can't be too far away. And the underlying growth rate there as this technology continues to diffuse in the enterprise has been astounding. And that's been the subject of a lot of what I've been discussing with the CEOs here. How quickly are you using AI within your organization? How much friction is there in terms of diffusing the technology within the enterprise? And then some broader conversations as well around what it all means for a society. In fact, I did have one of those conversations yesterday with Brian Chesky. He's the CEO and founder of Airbnb.

He did have a more positive take, although of course admits like so many others that we simply don't know what the future holds and the near future in terms of the advancement of this technology.