Microsoft’s Brad Smith & Utah Gov. Cox: AI, Teaching, & Peace 9/9/26

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Bring in show music, please.

Katie Kramer (1:00)

Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod, is artificial intelligence out of control?

Andrew Ross Sorkin (1:08)

Okay, so what? What do you do?

Katie Kramer (1:10)

Anthropic has a public defection over fears that AI can kill humans, and soon.

Joe Kernen (1:16)

Which decade?

Katie Kramer (1:17)

This decade.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (1:18)

This decade.

Joe Kernen (1:19)

It's 2026

Katie Kramer (1:23)

Is it safe in the classroom? Teachers and tech are teaming up. Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, on why he's building an AI standard for school.

Brad Smith (1:31)

Look, I don't think anybody wants a tech company to tell teachers how to teach. I know it's be serious. But they do want us, I believe, and we can and should and are, stepping up with the kinds of guardrails that ensure, for example, that student data isn't used to train an AI model.

Katie Kramer (1:48)

And teachers union leader, Randi Weingarten, says those guardrails are key.

Randi Weingarten (1:53)

If you can, by the touch of your prompt, get an answer, you are not learning how to think.

Katie Kramer (2:02)

Then can't we all just get along? Utah Governor Spencer Cox with a warning for our communities.

Spencer Cox (2:08)

We've lost our healthy tribes. People are lonely, they're desperate for something. And so we're finding it in very unhealthy places. Politics has become religion for so many people.

Katie Kramer (2:19)

Plus Joe Kernen with a Telluride Film Festival report.

Joe Kernen (2:23)

Three hours, you never really look away. There's times where you'd like to look away.

Katie Kramer (2:27)

The movie the business world can't wait to see.

Joe Kernen (2:30)

There's a lot of cringe.

Katie Kramer (2:32)

It's Wednesday, September 9th, 2026 Squawk Pod begins right now.

Brad Smith (2:38)

Stand Becky by in three, two, one, cue.

Becky Quick (2:43)

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We are live from the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Everybody's here. We're ready to go.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (2:55)

An anthropic researcher saying that he quit the AI company because it, along with OpenAI, where he used to work, are making a headlong rush towards super intelligence and has hit, in his words, quote, gambling with our lives. On X, that researcher, his name is Jacob Cox, and writing the following, the people building AI earnestly believe that could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible. But I hear the same people express fear privately.

Cox said that anthropic employees understand the potential dire implications of self-improving AI, but they don't trust that open AI will shepherd the technology responsibly, so they feel they have to do it themselves. Now another anthropic researcher chimed in saying, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans.

He said anthropic doesn't have a plan to solve alignment for super intelligence and isn't clearly on track to do it. This is connected in many ways to the conversation we were having just yesterday on the set about the head of safety and other things at open AI calling for, I don't know what he was calling for, but really explaining how they still don't understand how these systems even work, and ultimately therefore, what could ultimately happen. Therefore, the question is the one that you asked yesterday, which is, okay, so what do you do? You can drop out like this guy is doing, but we don't even believe that there's regulation that could necessarily change the dynamic because these folks are saying they don't even understand how it actually works.