Bloomberg Surveillance TV: September 15th, 2026

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Jonathan Ferro (0:11)

This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Jonathan Ferro along with Lisa Abramowicz and Annmarie Hordern. Join us each day for insight from the best in markets, economics and geopolitics. From our global headquarters in New York City, we are live on Bloomberg Television weekday mornings from 6 to 9 a.m. Eastern.

Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen. And as always on the Bloomberg Terminal and the Bloomberg Business App. The president, of course, calling AI safety concerns a sick conspiracy, blaming Beijing during a call with the Nvidia boss, Jensen Wong.

Annmarie Hordern (0:44)

They're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen.

Ted Mortonson (0:49)

And that could be political people.

SPEAKER_1 (0:50)

It could also be China.

Ted Mortonson (0:52)

And we're not going to let that happen.

SPEAKER_1 (0:54)

It's a hoax.

Jonathan Ferro (0:56)

Ted Mortonson of Baird writing, The cloud titans, the Republican and Democratic parties are trying to control the future narrative to control global economic outcomes. This is a battle for regulated control. Ted joins us now for more. Ted, I feel like I'm facing down a PsiOp conducted by the leaders of technology. And I don't really know what to think anymore. What are you telling your PMs about what's happening here?

Ted Mortonson (1:19)

I think, number one, everybody's got to take a deep breath.

This is just in this hysteria phase. It reminds me a lot of, to some degree, what happened in COVID, where everybody is going to die and et cetera, et cetera. I think everybody's, like I said, it's got to take a deep breath and actually deal in the facts. There are arguments, as Lisa said, on both sides here, but I think going forward, we've really got to look at the facts and react to the facts and have a strategy. I'm not a huge believer in the federal government regulating an industry. I think the cloud titans and even the VCs that are funded these companies really have to go forward and protect the industry and self-regulate and get away from this hysteria and going into the midterms.

Jonathan Ferro (2:15)

Ted, do we not have liability rules already on the books that make the risks so large for these corporations that they should be self-regulating themselves anyway?

Ted Mortonson (2:25)

That's exactly right. And I think Anthropic opened themselves up for a review of their IPO, quite frankly, on that point exactly.

The industry has to stay within the guardrails. And if they can't, bringing in the politicians, I think, is probably one of the worst mistakes, because quite frankly, they're not equipped to understand this technology. So I think going forward, the CEOs better get together and refine their message and refine their strategy.

Lisa Abramowicz (3:00)

Who do you think the frontier models are actually worried about? It's not necessarily open source that doesn't have the same kind of compute power. So the anthropics of the world, the open AIs, the XAIs, are they worried about China? Are they worried about each other? Are they worried about themselves?

Ted Mortonson (3:18)

I think they actually are worried about open source.

Open source, if you look at what NVIDIA has done with Nemotron in conjunction with Palantir, that combination is impacting the frontier models' pricing and availability. If you look at some of these open source models, whether you're using Gwenn from Alibaba or Nemotron from NVIDIA or any of the open source models, those token costs go right through the floor. And to some degree, that influences, to a great degree, what the frontier models' pricing model looks long term. So I would say it's a strategy to put open source in a box from a regulatory standpoint, and my personal opinion, that's very dangerous.

Lisa Abramowicz (4:14)

So Ted, how much is this an existential fight for a business model rather than an existential fight for humanity?

Ted Mortonson (4:22)

It's both. I mean, listen, this is a very complex discussion, and the technology is moving so quickly that I think both sides of the coin have to be addressed.

Annmarie Hordern (4:37)

How much do you think also these tech executives are responding to the American backlash you see in polls and in states that want a moratorium on data centers?

Ted Mortonson (4:46)

Yeah, I've been on your show before, and I think their message is not very good. And I think the tech titans, whether it be Microsoft, Amazon, Google, even NVIDIA, they have to convince the US population, the entire population, what AI could do for humanity versus self-enrichment that is viewed by, I think, most of the population.