11AM Hour: Moderna and Merck Shares Surge, Former CEA Chair Jason Furman & Chinese Robotics Company Soars in Shanghai Debut 8/19/26

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Carl Quintanilla (0:58)

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. Sara Eisen is off today. Yields pulling back. That's the big story from those multi-year highs. We're going to discuss the impact of this new government buyback operation with former CEA Chair Jason Furman.

Leslie Picker (1:14)

Then shares of Moderna and Merck are surging today. Big moves there on the heels of positive vaccine trial data. We'll speak to an analyst who says, while the results are great, the huge move higher is very difficult to rationalize. He'll explain why. He's skeptical.

Carl Quintanilla (1:29)

Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree surging in its public debut in Shanghai with that IPO signals for the Chinese tech market at large. As we got some accession highs going on here, Dow's up 320, back to 77.41. Most sectors are green, with the exception of some IT and industrials. Healthcare up 3% as we're going to get to that Moderna news later on. Let's begin with a new report, looking into OpenAI's financials. For that, we'll turn once again to Kate Rooney. Morning, Kate.

Kate Rooney (1:58)

Hey, Carl, good morning. So OpenAI reportedly seen deeper losses in the second quarter, at least while sales grew sequentially. That double-digit growth was outshined by rival Anthropic, which is also poised to go public. The Wall Street Journal now with some new numbers overnight. The ones that really stand out, guys, are these operating margins, which sank further into the red at least in the second quarter. Its operating loss, which does include stock-based compensation, grew to $12.3 billion in the quarter, well outpacing some of that revenue growth. Losses were up from about $9 billion when you look at the first quarter. This is again according to the Journal for total net revenue. It did bring in just under $7 billion in the three months that ended in June, according to that reporting, and it was up about 18%.

We have reported on some more recent numbers, though. If you look at July, that does seem to signal uptick since the end of June, which was the end of this quarter when some of this reporting is out there. We have reported that it was about 20% growth when you look at the more recent month. Greg Brockman confirmed that on our air earlier in the week. 32% growth when you look at enterprise. For most companies, guys, double-digit revenue growth would be something that a lot of investors would be cheering on, but they are now being directly compared to Anthropic. The AI lab started, of course, by OpenAI co-founders. I reported earlier this week Anthropic was profitable, at least on an EBITDA basis. It did bring in $11.5 billion in the quarter, according to sources that I've talked to. We have also reported on some of the ARR numbers for both of these companies. I have heard from sources OpenAI is now around $40 billion.

Anthropic ramped up to $65 billion in the recent quarter. Back over to you.

Leslie Picker (3:40)

Kate, is there anything we could derive from these figures and just the changing of leadership between OpenAI and Anthropic, just about the stickiness of their business model? Obviously, OpenAI is surpassing Anthropic in Q2. How easy is it for that to reverse or another competitor to just quickly ramp up and take that leadership position? What does that mean for investors in a potential IPO? Just the moat around these businesses?

Kate Rooney (4:04)

Leslie, the one thing that's standing out to me is the profitability picture here. I think when we talk about the leadership changes, it's interesting. The enterprise growth was really strong, at least for OpenAI, and that's where the leadership shakeup happened. I've been trying to kind of read the tea leaves on that. I haven't had any reporting or had any sort of progress. I don't know what actually happened there and why. If they are seeing 30 percent revenue growth on enterprise, you saw that shakeup and we mentioned the shakeup, I should say, Chief Revenue Officer got shifted around and that's been a big change at OpenAI.