11AM Hour: ECB Forum Highlights, Anthropic Investor on Reversal of AI Model Ban & Alex Karp's Message to Wall Street 7/1/26

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Carl Quintanilla (0:52)

Good Wednesday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Leslie Picker here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Today, Sara Eisen's in Central Portugal, fresh off that major panel discussion with global central bankers, including the Fed chair, who gave his latest thinking on inflation, rates and artificial intelligence. Sara's gonna join us in a few moments with the highlights, and we'll break down the chairman's messaging with former Fed Governor, Randy Crosford.

Leslie Picker (1:15)

Plus, the Trump Administration dropping restrictions on Anthropic's AI models, ending a two-week standoff. We'll discuss the implications with Anthropic investor Matt Witheiler from Wellington Management.

Carl Quintanilla (1:26)

Metashares are surging this morning. The company making a cloud push to sell excess AI compute power capacity. Shares up almost 11%, one of the best days of the year for that name. Let's begin though with some breaking news in the auto sector. For that, we'll get to Phil LaBeau with some new numbers out of GM. Hey, Phil.

Phil LaBeau (1:45)

Hey, Carl. For the second quarter, General Motors sales here in the United States down 4.2%.

That's roughly in line with what most analysts were expecting from the automaker for the second quarter. Average transaction price just over $52,000 for all the talk about more affordable vehicles. And yes, GM has some lower priced entry points for vehicles. The average transaction price remains over $50,000, one of the industry leaders there. And then finally, when you're taking a look at the inventory, it's at 55 days supply, so they have a fairly lean inventory, not unfamiliar to a number of other automakers as well. This is an industry, guys, when we get the full sales for the month of June, a little bit later on today, over the next couple of days, you're probably going to see a sales rate in the mid $16 million range, which is relatively strong relative to what we've seen over the last several months.

Leslie Picker (2:37)

Yeah, especially given the prices of autos too, Phil, thank you.

Now, let's get to Sara Eisen at the ECB Forum in Portugal. She just spoke with Global Central Bank leaders on a blockbuster panel, including Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh. Sara, fascinating discussion, wide-ranging discussion. What were your key takeaways from the stage?

Sara Eisen (3:02)

Thank you, Leslie. Well, I tried quite a few times to get Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh to give some sort of forward guidance, some sort of clue about what the Fed is going to do next with policy. He is pretty insistent that he's not doing forward guidance, but this is the closest I got. So the market was right to interpret your first news conference as hawkish.

Nice try.

Kevin Warsh (3:27)

Yeah.

I've just gotten advice from my senior statesmen on this group not to do that. But I'll say this, expectations of inflation over the first four weeks of this period, they've come down, inflation risks have come down. Again, in our business, we don't want to over-determine things. But if there were people in household or the business sector and the financial markets, who thought that this central bank was going to be comfortable with an inflation objective above 2 percent, well, I guess they'd be disappointed. We're going to deliver price stability in the US. That's what this committee has signed up to do. And our objective is to do that. The tactics, the strategy and the rest, that's still to come.

Sara Eisen (4:15)

No matter what the president wants.

Kevin Warsh (4:18)

We've been an independent central bank for a very long time. We're going to be an independent central bank at this moment. And you're going to see no changes on that.

Sara Eisen (4:30)

We also talked a lot about AI and just how central banks should be thinking about some of these monumental changes and what it means for their economies. Listen.