Morning Brew Daily - AI Leaders Agree to Slow Things Down & Tesla Makes a Surprising Comeback

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

#932: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman agree on the need to slow AI’s development. Drone attacks in the Middle East caused Saudi Arabia to shut down the East-West oil pipeline. Tesla reclaims supremacy in the EV market as it claws back a dominant market share. Americans love taking supplements, even if they don’t really need it. Finally, what you need to know in the week ahead.  Learn more at https://www.hotels.com/morningbrew If you’re in NYC, come to our run club on 9/16: https://www.morningbrew.com/runclub Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you sucking wind from trying to keep up with AI and its impact? Take a breather and tune in to the Intelligence Shift. Morning Brew's new podcast with PWC. It bridges the gap between big picture AI concepts and what it actually means in practice. Host Dan Priest is joined by expert guests to discuss AI's role in sports, music, HR, and more. Listen to the Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning, Brew Daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell.

Today, AI leaders agree that it's maybe time. to slow things down. Then what's powering Tesla's surprise EV comeback? It's Monday, September 14th. Let's ride. If you find yourself wanting to smooch everyone at an upcoming New Year's Eve party, here's one reason why. Champagne is getting boozier. Because of this summer's heat wave in France, grapes now have extraordinarily high sugar content, which makes them more alcoholic when turned into wine. As a result, for the first time ever, France has lifted the alcohol limit of champagne to 15% from the current 13% to accommodate producers who might struggle to make champagne under the current cap. So it sounds fun, but it's probably going to be bad for business. Jane Anson,

a wine columnist and author warned that higher strength champagne is not a selling point telling the times today people increasingly prefer low alcohol. Also, don't expect any rowdy wedding toast this year. Champagne has to age for at least 15 months, but come 2028, watch out. Someone is going to try to crowd serve after a particularly good father of the bride speech. And now a word from our sponsor, Hotels.com. Neil, I think the hotel I just stayed at was haunted. Oh my God. That's horrifying. The ghosts were actually pretty chill. Well, for those who aren't pro ghost, there's business preferences from Hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast,

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In a blog post on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh called for slowing down progress on the most cutting edge models, warning that a swarm of AI agents could take over the internet in as little as half a year. He wrote, over the last few months, I've become convinced that fully addressing the risk requires even more prudence, not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Other leading figures, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX, responded to Amade's post that they agree on the need to slow down. Alman even went one step

further telling Fortune he was going to put the company's much-typed IPO on ice, at least for this year. he said, I actually think that given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. Though experts have been warning us for years, concerns over AI safety hit a fever pitch last week when an anthropic employee quit saying these AI companies were, quote, gambling with people's lives. Other insiders chimed in with doomsday predictions, putting the odds of AI wiping out humanity at over 10% within a decade.

And while many agree with this prognosis, there is a sizable contingent who accuse AI companies of fear mongering in order to invite regulation that stifles competition and entrenches their position as industry leaders. Toby, just a headspending week, a head spending 48 hours with Dario's call to take a deep breath and slow things down. Yeah, let's dive into some of these skeptics, though. Amongst them is Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO. He is arguing that maybe these AI labs are painting this future of a very dire future where cybersecurity fears are just so big that you're going to need AI to address them. He says, who doesn't want their market

to be hysterical about their product and line up around the corner for it? So he was basically saying that they're playing this up. And then some other more, I don't know, skeptical takes on this came from Nick Mark on social media on X. He said, an alternative hypothesis,

model performance is plateauing. Computer is getting much more expensive. Data centers are massively unpopular. Slowing down AI development is a way to explain slowing progress, reduce spending, and try to regain some goodwill. And his conclusion was this is an effort to save the IPO, not humanity, to put kind of a bow tie on that sort of outlook on this.

If you do less training, it boosts your margins. It makes things more attractive from a financial perspective while you can dress it up as sort of this saving humanity, saving the earth type of deal. That is what a loud contingent of skeptics are saying about this slowdown. But if I was Musk, Altman, or Amadee, I would say, I actually was warning about AI safety, AI doomsday, AI dangers, before I even had trillion dollar companies. And this is what they were pointing out over the weekend. Elon Musk pointed to a tweet he sent in 2014, which read, Worth Reading Super Intelligence

by Bostrum. That's Nick Bostrom, a philosopher. We need to be super careful with AI potentially more dangerous than nukes. That was 2014. In 2015, Sam Altman wrote a blog post saying, development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. And Dario Amadeh has been sounding this alarm for years. He has previously said there is a 25% chance, so greater than 10% chance, that things go, quote, really, really badly. So these guys would say, look, this is not just

us being opportunistic with our business. We've been warning about AI danger for a very long time. Now, you could probably criticize them by saying, well, you guys went and gone, build the thing, even that you were saying was extremely dangerous. But also, people within the AI industry think their fears are still overstated. I look at Yan Lacoon. He was one of the godfathers of AI. He worked at Meta for a long time. He said Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019.

I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now. So again, kind of in that camp that they are beating a drum that we are, the end is nigh. And yet it probably, they've been saying the end is nigh for, you know, a decade at this point. Maybe the end is actually here, but maybe it's just crying. wolf once more. All right. So the biggest X factor is probably China. And that's what these guys say had been stopping them from slowing down previously. And Dario Amadeh of Anthropic said that this was the toughest dilemma because if they slow down, the idea is that China will not slow down. And this

technology is so powerful. It confers to their wielded so much benefits in terms of military and geopolitical dominance that we just simply can't do with this. You hear this from President Trump as well. If China doesn't slow down, then the United States can't also slow down. Over the weekend, Sam Alman in that interview with Fortune, said that Trump and she, who's the president of China, would win the Nobel Prize for just a one-page AI agreement if they just came together and agreed on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology. Trump was asked over the weekend whether he supported AI regulation because that's becoming all of a sudden in the past few weeks. It's a huge topic in Washington, D.C. He said, not really. Like, whoever's going to win this,

race wins. We're going at this with China. So that is, that really is the X factor in why the many in the AI leadership camp say, look, we really can't slow down. I know Amade is saying we can slow down a little bit, but they're saying this is a tough decision because of what China presents. So how is the market reacting to these frontier labs saying that they want to slow the role? It is dumping. I'm looking at the NASDAQ 100 futures right now. They are down more than. than one and a half percent because when you are calling for that slow down, that raises a lot of questions around demand for AI inputs like memory chips, the things that have been propping up the market for the past year, year and a half or so. So market does not like when you say slow down

because they want full speed ahead when it comes to this AI buildout. Moving on, there's a saying when one door closes another one opens, but when it comes to oil flowing out of the Middle East, all the doors are slamming shut. Saudi Arabia shut. down its critical east-west oil pipeline as precaution just before the weekend, after drone attacks likely launched by Iran, damaged it. The pipeline is of critical importance to the region because it's the pressure release valve for the Strait of Hormuz. When the strait is blocked, the pipeline can take up to 7 million barrels a day around Hormuz out to the Red Sea and onto the global markets. Saudi Ramco chairman Yasir al-Ramayan calls it the lifeline for us as a Saudi economy.

That lifeline has since been kinked, making the global supply crunch even worse and sending oil past $100 per barrel for the first time in months. Even before the pipeline was hit, though, Iran-backed rebels were tightening their hold on the region. The Yemen-based Houthis captured a key island in the Bob Elman-Dab Strait, which means even if oil was able to traverse the pipeline, it's not guaranteed it could make it out past the Red Sea. Neil, option A is oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz, but ships are still barely trickling through there. Option B, send it through the East West pipeline. But now that's out of commission. Option C, send it you and me in there with a camelback and a can-do attitude.

I'm booking my flight because things are getting pretty dire over here. Costco, the shining beacon of abundance, buy anything you want in as much quantity as you want, is now placing limits on how much Kirkland motor oil you can buy. And it's also jacking up the price. So stores are now saying, are now limiting motor oil to two. per customer per week. They've jacked up the price, too, a 10-quart box used to cost as low as $30. Now they have raised that to almost double.

It now costs $58. That's just how stressed this market is. All these refiners are getting limited amounts of crude, and when they turn this crude into various products like diesel or motor oil, and the margins on diesel and other refined products like jet fuel are so much higher than the motor oil you buy at Costco. So there's just a shortage of motor oil. And we're seeing that at Costco. I do want to just put some perspective, though, on what that means. Even though it's two per customer per week, that is a five-court two-pack. So that is 10 courts weekly. And so gas buddy Patrick DeHan on exit, unless you're

hurts, most households don't need to worry. Who's going through 10? It's more symbolic than anything. Exactly. It's more symbolic than anything else because everything is bigger at Costco. And then I jokes that let's send Neil and I in there because there's no other options. There is actually a third option for getting oil out of the region. Saudi oil can actually go north through the Red Sea and use a pipeline near the Suez Canal to reach the Mediterranean, but that adds a lot of time, adds a lot of money. And then also, as I said, the Red Sea is no longer this safe place anymore because of what has been happening with the Houthis there and how they've kind of established themselves in the region. So a lot of people may be taking an optimistic look, are saying that

this is happening because the economic strangulation that we are trying to do on Iran's economy is coming to pass or losing some of that leverage so they want to get it back by attacking these alternative routes. Again, is that a good thing for the global oil market that they are becoming more aggressive? Probably not. But maybe you can look at it and say it's because they feel the walls closing around them that they are making these more aggressive plays. on oil prices. They were up 8% last week this morning. They're up to $108 a barrel. That is kind of getting close to the peak a few months ago during the war, which was $120 a barrel. Diesel is now at $8 a gallon in California, a record. Many stations are showing $9.99 a gallon because they

just can't add that extra digit on their digital signage. So if this isn't going to seep into inflation, nothing well. All right, welcome to winners of the week. where Toby and I picked two things that had an even better weekend than Celine Dion. I won the pre-show game of Sequence, great board game if you haven't played, so I get to go first, and my winner is Tesla, which is making a Minnesota Vikings level comeback in the American EV market. According to the Wall Street Journal, Tesla now accounts for more than half of electric vehicle sales in the U.S. 52%, up from just 43% one year ago. It's a far cry from the 80% share the company once commanded, but it's a pretty sizable bump following a year's

long slump. It's not that Tesla is doing great in this depressed EV environment. It's just doing less worse than others. So far this year, Tesla's U.S. sales are down 16%. But that seems downright stellar when you consider the overall EV market has plummeted 30%. C.O. Elon Musk makes many predictions that don't come true, but he pretty much nailed this last year when asked how the elimination of the federal EV tax credit would impact the company. He said it would be painful at first, but over the long run, beneficial, since it would hurt his rivals more than Tesla. Toby, sometimes it pays to be the biggest fish

in an ever-shrinking pond, as Varev, when Al-Graz and Sinner are out of the draw. You just gave me such a flashback to playing sequence growing up. I haven't played it in probably a decade, but it is a fantastic game. The Tesla story is also just a Model Y story because Tesla technically has multiple models on the market. They have the Model 3, they have the cyber truck,

but one out of every three EV sold in America is a Model Y sales are down just 2% this year. And again, they are falling, but against the broader backdrop of what else is happening in the market, falling just 2% is a massive W. I'm just looking at what is happening to the competition because they are dropping like flies. The Honda Prolog, which is their version of an EV,

that's discontinued, heading towards discontinuation. The Volkswagen ID4, that's going the same way. The Ford F-150 Lightning never took off. That's going to be discontinued. And even though GM resurrected the Chevy Bolt, they're actually reducing the resurrection. They're making production smaller and that are probably going to phase it out again in 2027. So it really just is the fact that Tesla is standing at all and not falling to the wayside

means that it's going to grow its market share. I think it's also an FSD story. And FSD is full self-driving, which it's not full self-driving. There's a parentheses there that they had to include called supervised. But people are obsessed with this. Basically, if you buy a Tesla and you get full self-driving supervised, which is a monthly payment, you can literally put in an address into the GPS in the car, and then it just drives you there. And you're supposed to have your eyes on the road and your hands near the steering wheel. You're supposed to be alert.

But this is crazy. I mean, I saw someone tweet, I just bought a new Model Y and can confidently say, cars and Teslas are no longer the same product. A car is like a pony or horse. I still like driving a stick shift. It's fun. Tesla with FSD is a transportation robot. So if you get hooked on this particular software where you can just punch an address

and it takes you there without you having to do anything, then this is going to be the car for you. And as more people get hooked on autonomy, it's like your own personal waymo kind of. So that's, I think, another reason why it's this particular software and this autonomy that's driving Tesla to the front. Have you never been in a self-driving car yet?

Have you experienced it yet? No. It is crazy. That is exactly what happens in there. a little bit freaky. The one thing that we haven't mentioned, too, is gas prices. I mean, for a while, Tesla was losing market share because gas prices were pretty low and people were just saying, I'd rather have a combustion engine vehicle. Now, gas prices are clearly on the rise, so that always feeds into the electric vehicle market, getting a little bit of a tailwind.

All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend right after this. Capturing value in fixed income is tough. How? Tough is it. Toby, that wasn't a setup. Bond markets are massive and murky. Well, then I guess it's a good thing Vanguard bonds are institutional quality. Their lineup includes over 80 bond funds.

Vanguard focuses on reliability and consistency. It's not always flashy, but it sets the standard for what dependable investing should look like. See the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor.

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for app exclusive offers. That's quince.com slash brew. My winner of the weekend is America's pastime, which you might think is baseball, but I'd argue is actually taking dietary supplements. A new Pew survey found that 8 in 10 U.S. adults take at least one dietary supplement with the highest overall use coming from adults, 65 and older.

The most popular things Americans are taking are vitamins and minerals with 67% of respondents indulging protein powders or drinks come next, followed by omega-3s like fish oil, then herbal supplements like Ashwaganda. A potent combination of social media influencers pushing supplements, as well as an overall increase in people focused on longevity, health, and wellness has turned this industry into a $228 billion behemoth. However, the market itself is likely stronger than the evidence backing it up. Yes, there are legitimate use cases for supplements like treating nutrient deficiencies. But experts warn that most consumption doesn't fall into that bucket.

Protein in particular is way overuse. Harvard's Dr. Peter Cohen estimates that 80 to 90% of supplement consumption offers no proven benefit to the person taking it with most Americans already getting enough through their diets. Still, Neil, go into any person's medicine cabinet or kitchen right now. You're going to find some supplements. Yeah, and mine was a kid, shout out Flintstone vitamins. Those were the absolute best. The reason that there's such sketchiness around this industry is the FDA doesn't need to approve them. They don't approve dietary supplements. There is a workaround, so we just don't know necessarily the health benefits or the health drawbacks, which is why you have so many people taking them.

There's a chasm between all the people taking them, eight and ten Americans. I don't think eight and ten Americans do anything except maybe tech vitamins together. And the expert consensus would say, look, actually, we don't have any evidence to say these will help you, yes, in some minority cases that they could be particularly helpful, but for the mass amount of people that are using them, we just can't say they actually help you. I think GLP1 drugs is part of this equation as well.

As you consume, you know, less food, people have been fixated on getting more protein into their diets as well. And again, I don't need to say how big of a trend of protein has been. Everything, my coffee is topped with protein code foam, my cereal somehow has protein in it as well. But again, the scientists say that it's probably too much protein, not enough benefit.

This has been happening for a while now. This is not just a recent phenomenon. Supplement use has been growing over the past few decades or so. If you go back to 1999, a survey of 63,000 U.S. adults found that 51% were taking supplements. Now, if you believe the Pew survey, which is a smaller sample size, that number is up to 80%. So that is a 30% is point increase in just the last. 25 years or so, which just goes to show how big this groundswell of support has been. And I thought the most interesting point, the most significant point is that among older adults,

people take the most supplements. And there's new research that might be a little concerning about how vitamins interact with the aging brain. So the Washington Post wrote this report and said, look, you know, when somebody gets older and we give them medicine, we change the dosage. We change things about it to work with their brainwomeness. with their changing body, but we don't with vitamins. It's just the same thing that a 35-year-old might take. But there has been a wave of research. Washington Post points out in January,

researchers found a link between vitamin D supplements and faster cognitive decline among older adults. Then in April, another study found that adults 55 and older taking omega-3 supplements displayed greater cognitive deterioration over time than those who didn't take them. And then finally, in June, there was other research that found that people taking glucosamine for joint pain, they had a much higher likelihood of progressing from mild cognitive impairment to dementia over five years.

Caution, these studies are observational. They don't prove causation. But it's kind of a worrying trend to see these studies come out this year to throw some cold water and maybe even point to a more concerning trend about how vitamins interact with the aging brain. Yeah, people just want it to become more of a nuanced conversation rather than just saying, is vitamin D good for you? It should be, is vitamin D good for you at what dosage and at what age? It's Monday, so here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. Federal Reserve meets on Wednesday and seems poised to raise interest rates for the first time in three years. The most recent inflation report on Friday showed prices climbing at 3.4% far above the central bank's target, putting pressure on Chair Kevin Warsh to take action. While Warsh is famously tight-lipped about his plans, traders believe there's a 90% chance the Fed will announce a rate hike.

Yeah, we didn't get to talk about that inflation report, but energy will. was obviously the biggest driver of headline inflation. Gasoline was up 3.9% in August. Energy prices are now up 16% year over year. But technically you can look past that if you are the Fed because you are thinking that this is a one-time shock. The war in Iran is not necessarily indicative of what's going on with the broader economy. But you look underneath that and you see that we are seeing some inflation beyond just energy. Shelter rose 0.3% transportation services up 0.5%. Those are the stuff that make you, as the Fed share, a little worried because if you are seeing inflation in the economy beyond just energy, that means core inflation is rising,

and you probably need to do something about it. If you have an iPhone in an hour where you don't need to use it, a big new software update is available today, iOS 27. The biggest new feature of the operating system is Siri AI, an actually helpful conversational Siri that's powered by Google's Gemini. It's compatible with every iPhone model 11 or later. I feel like we've been talking about this for so long, and I am excited. We've talked a lot about these personal assistants that just recently came out from meta, from the startup instinct. Now this is Apple's chance to finally show that Siri isn't completely useless anymore. And finally, in the world of television, the Emmy awards are tonight hosted by SVU star Mariska Hargate. HBO's The Pit leads the way with 25 nominations,

followed by Hacks with 24 and Apple's Widows Bay with 19. Then on Wednesday, South Park returns for its new season, though I should say South America ahead of the premiere. The show said it changed its name to South America to make fun of President Trump trying to rename everything on the map. Every time we get to the Emmys, I realize that I haven't watched the show completely all the way through since Game of Thrones.

So I guess put it out there, people send me some good recommendations because I just genuinely don't know what to watch and haven't watched anything for so long that I'm feeling outside of the loop of entertainment culture. Have you chose a college football team? Because the last time you asked for audience participation, you know, they send in college football teams. Now you're asking for TV shows.

I'm just hoping that you're able to handle all of the inbound that you're getting. Well, here's what I'll say. The two top teams that were recommended were one, Texas, which felt too obvious to pick Texas, although it would have been good to hop on the bandwagon before what happened this weekend. And the other one was Iowa State. Actually, I got so many Iowa State submissions. So I would love to say that the Cyclones is where I'm taking my talents.

But I'm sticking with Utah. I just feel good about the Uts this year. I feel good about what's going on with that program. So Utah is my team. Back to TV. I think you should watch Widows Bay. That's what I've heard. That's what like everyone in our office just talked about Widows Bay all the time

or they did a few months ago. It got the third most Emmy nominations feels a little bit up your alley. Utah Uts and Widows Bay sounds like a pretty good week. weekend to me. All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful start to the week. To share your thoughts on the episode or anything else, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at morningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lou is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia

Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hair and makeup took off blaming a bad first fantasy week. Devin Emery is our president and our shows are production of Morning Brew. Great, show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.