AT&T Reports Greater-than-Expected Mobile Subscriber Gains

Summary

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Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast

Episode: AT&T Reports Greater-than-Expected Mobile Subscriber Gains
Date: July 22, 2026
Hosts: Paul Sweeney, Scarlet Fu
Guests/Contributors: Kelsey Griffiths (Telecoms Reporter), Woo Jin Ho (Analyst), Ken Shea (Analyst), Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)

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Overview

This episode dives into AT&T’s surprise mobile subscriber gains amidst a fiercely competitive telecom landscape. The discussion spans AT&T’s strategy, shareholder returns, and the evolving role of satellites. The episode also explores recent moves from Super Micro and Philip Morris, then pivots to an in-depth conversation on AI regulation, comparing possible frameworks to the airline industry model.

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AT&T’s Mobile Subscriber Gains and Strategic Moves

Main Discussion: AT&T Earnings & Strategy

• AT&T topped forecasts by adding ~100,000 more wireless subscribers than predicted ([02:07]).
• CEO John Stanke discussed AT&T’s value proposition: integrated wireless and fixed networks, single billing, comprehensive support ([02:20]).
  • Quote: “We can provide world class networks in both wireless and fixed that tackle 98% of what a customer needs to do on the Internet.” – John Stanke via Gautam Ayo ([02:20])
• Kelsey Griffiths highlights AT&T’s “all-in” subscription plan modeled after Peloton/Netflix, offering home Internet, mobile service, and connected devices for one price ([03:19]).
  • “That seems like it's been pretty successful. They have introduced some price increases … but even with those increases, it seems like customers are responding to some of these newer offers.” – Kelsey Griffiths ([03:19])

Competitive Environment & Satellite Partnerships

• Though AT&T increased prices on legacy plans ($10–$20 per line), the new integrated offers are driving growth ([03:19]).
• The U.S. mobile market remains hyper-competitive, with carriers vying for subscribers both on price and bundled benefits ([02:52]).
• There’s speculation around SpaceX entering the wireless market, creating more uncertainty and potential competition ([04:49]).
  • “The telecom carriers have all so far made it pretty clear that they don’t want to do any deals that would offer SpaceX access … But at least T-Mobile is working with SpaceX to fill in some of the gaps … John Stanke suggested … satellite generally as being very complementary.” – Kelsey Griffiths ([05:05])

Shareholder Returns & Capex Outlook

• AT&T raised its share buyback plan from $8B to $10B for the year, signaling confidence in ongoing growth ([04:20]).
  • “That contributes to that optimism that they're expressing in their long term strategy and growth.” – Kelsey Griffiths ([04:20])
• John Stanke is preparing for a surge in network traffic from “agentic AI,” forecasting 9x enterprise and 7x consumer AI traffic growth by 2035 ([06:12]).
  • AT&T’s capital expenditures strategy remains steady to support anticipated demand from AI over the next decade.

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Super Micro’s Blockbuster Backlog & Industry Reaction

Earnings Jump & Backlog Explosion

• Super Micro shares rose 24% after announcing backlog surged from $39B to $60B in one month, far outpacing analyst expectations for fiscal 2027 ([09:48]).
  • Quote: “That stunning backlog figure … setup for fiscal 2027 guidance is going to be really, really good … I'd be shocked if they don't exceed [expectations].” – Woo Jin Ho ([09:48])

Sector-Wide Implications

• Demand in AI servers benefits both Super Micro and Dell due to dual-sourcing in mega-deals ([10:34]).
  • Dell stock also saw a boost, up 10% in sympathy ([10:55]).
• Memory and chip shortages haven’t dampened server demand—vendors are benefitting as buyers pre-purchase to avoid future inflation ([11:09]).
  • “Customers are desperate for compute because of the rising memory cost … They are buying. It hasn't affected the server business at all.” – Woo Jin Ho ([11:09])

What’s Next for Super Micro

• While quarter-to-quarter execution has been choppy, full-year revenue has “actually been up and to the right” due to robust data center spending ([13:13]).

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Philip Morris: Strong Earnings & New Products

Quarterly Results & Global Franchise

• Philip Morris reported solid numbers, beating top-line and EPS expectations ([14:32]).
  • Quote: “Philip Morris numbers today were really good … EPS up 15% expectations were for 7.” – Ken Shea ([14:32])
• Stock initially dipped due to lowered currency-adjusted guidance (very international exposure), but investors regained confidence ([14:32]).

Brand & Product Overview

• Clarification: Philip Morris International (PMI) sells Marlboro and other products outside the U.S.; Altria handles inside the U.S. ([15:19]).
  • Recent deals enable PMI to sell non-cigarette products in the U.S.

Zyn – The Nicotine Pouch Craze

• Zyn, an oral nicotine pouch, is gaining popularity as a discrete, non-tobacco alternative ([16:12]).
  • Quote: “It’s a non tobacco product … a very discreet way of getting your nicotine and it's doing really well. A lot of smokers are switching over.” – Ken Shea ([16:12])
• FDA recently authorized Zyn as a less harmful alternative to cigarettes ([16:56]).

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AI Regulation: FAA as a Model for Governing Emerging Risks

Rationale for Regulatory Approach

• Guest Gautam Ayo proposes regulating AI similarly to the airline industry, citing both economic and security implications ([18:23]).
  • “Aviation just stands out … that level of innovation from the success of the FAA … If we’ve done so well with such an important industry, I think we can learn from that.” – Gautam Ayo ([18:23])

Is It Too Late to Regulate AI?

• While some risks are already here, the most severe harms are still preventable if action is taken now ([19:47]).
  • “The really big risks aren’t there yet … We want to have these regulatory barriers in place before we lose the safety that we’ve inherited.” – Gautam Ayo ([19:47])

Perspectives on China & Europe

• China’s regulatory posture: advanced but currently “surprisingly light touch,” focused on practical and industrial applications ([22:09]).
• Europe is less innovative in AI but renowned for heavy-handed regulation; has not yet established a leading or harmonizing template ([23:05]).

U.S. Politics and Policy

• The Trump administration has floated banning Chinese open weights models; debate continues on national security vs open innovation ([24:10]).
  • “That seems to me … walking down a very slippery slope … those open weights models are a big threat to the economics of our frontier labs, but they're pretty great for everyone else.” – Gautam Ayo ([24:10])

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Notable Quotes

• Kelsey Griffiths on AT&T’s Subscription Strategy:
  “They were modeling it after Peloton or Netflix … you pay one price and you have access to everything … that seems like it's been pretty successful.” ([03:19])
• Woo Jin Ho on Super Micro’s Backlog:
  “That stunning backlog figure … I'd be shocked if they don't exceed [expectations].” ([09:48])
• Ken Shea on Zyn:
  “It’s a non tobacco product … a very discreet way of getting your nicotine and it's doing really well.” ([16:12])
• Gautam Ayo on FAA as AI Regulator Model:
  “Aviation just stands out … If we’ve done so well with such an important industry, I think we can learn from that.” ([18:23])

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Segment Timestamps

• [02:07] — AT&T’s subscriber gains and strategy
• [03:19] — The “all-in” subscription approach
• [04:20] — Shareholder returns and buyback plans
• [05:05] — SpaceX speculation and satellite partnerships
• [06:12] — CapEx planning for agentic AI growth
• [09:48] — Super Micro’s earnings and industry impact
• [14:32] — Philip Morris earnings and global business model
• [16:12] — Zyn oral nicotine product explained
• [18:23] — AI regulation framework: FAA analogy
• [19:47] — Timeliness and necessity of AI regulation
• [22:09] — China’s AI regulatory approach
• [24:10] — US policy trends and regulatory debates

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Transcript

[Paul Sweeney]

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[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

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[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

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[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Staying with earnings at and t adding more wireless subscribers and forecast by roughly 100000 customers. The CEO John Stanke joined Bloomberg Surveillance to discuss the rise in subscribers to take a listen.

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

We can provide world class networks in both wireless and fixed that tackle 98% of what a customer needs to do on the Internet.

[Ken Shea (Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst)]

Occasionally they walk off one of our networks and as you look at our

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

partnerships that we're working with the satellite industry, by this time next year we'll be able to solve that problem. And so we're the natural place for people to come and meet their needs on the Internet and do it easily on one bill with one set of services and one support infrastructure. We think we're in a great position as a result of that.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Kelsey Griffiths is the Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter. She has been tracking the earnings today and she joins us right now from Washington. Kelsey, the mobile phone industry is extremely competitive. You we are bombarded by ads constantly from AT&T, Verizon and T Mobile trying to undercut each other and offer better terms, better deals. How is AT and T able to add more monthly wireless subscribers than expected in this kind of environment?

This is a strategy AT and T has put into place since about last quarter. So back in March they debuted this new plan that is kind of like an all in approach. They were modeling it after Peloton or Netflix or one of these sort of like tech lifestyle subscriptions where you pay one price and you have access to everything that you hope to get out of it. So AT and T's version of that is one price. You get home Internet, you get mobile service, and you get a few connected devices like iPads or Apple watches thrown in. So that seems like it's been pretty successful. They have introduced some price increases on I believe with some of the more legacy plans that was about 10 to $20 per line. But even with those increases, it seems like customers are responding to some of these newer offers.

[Paul Sweeney]

Kelsey, talk to us about their return of capital plans going forward because I know that's a big part of the investment story, right?

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

AT&T has said for a while that they are heavily invested in returning back to their shareholders and today they announced that they're pulling that forward a little bit. I think they said they're going to buy back 10 billion instead of just 8 billion in shares this year. So that's a modest uptick. That kind of contributes to that optimism that they're expressing in their long term strategy and growth.

I want to just go back to the competitive market landscape for AT and T and the other mobile operators for a moment here because there's been talk that Space X might enter this space. So what's already hyper competitive will get even more so. What is the latest on that front?

That's right. We've seen the all three of the big telecom carriers stocks take a pretty substantial hit over the last several weeks as speculation about what SpaceX might be up to has sort of taken off. The telecom carriers have all so far made it pretty clear that they don't want to do any deals that would offer SpaceX access to the market as a peer. But at least T Mobile is working with SpaceX to fill in some of the gaps in T Mobile's terrestrial network. That was kind of what John Steinkey suggested today. He didn't say specifically that he wants to do a deal with SpaceX, but he did say that he sees satellite generally as being very complementary to the based network that AT&T has and it can actually potentially help them, you know, make, make their revenue better because they can fill some gaps in their network with satellite and potentially retire some parts of the network that are very expensive to maintain.

[Paul Sweeney]

Capex, Kelsey. It's a capital intensive business, this telecom business. Did the company mention kind of what they're thinking in terms of CapEx going forward?

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Well, I can tell you that John Sanke is very bullish on or at least very aware of how agentic AI is changing the network traffic patterns. And so I think he said he expects to see 9 times enterprise growth in Agentic AI by 2035 and 7 times the volume of energetic AI on the consumer side. So those massive increases in essentially AI driven traffic are things that he's planning for. And they do have a strategy right now and they're not adjusting that strategy necessarily to account for in yeah in their, their capex.

[Paul Sweeney]

Got it.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.

[Paul Sweeney]

I don't love the word retirement because I think has negative baggage. I like the word financial independence. If you were to be financial independent like how would you spend your and

[Bank of America Representative]

that's exactly what a lot of my

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

clients talk about and the term they'll

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

use is a work optional lifestyle. I agree like the next gen millennials and below are not thinking about retirement. We're thinking about let's find something that we enjoy that we can have financial independence.

[Paul Sweeney]

I think that's a better way to think about the end of life stage versus quote unquote retirement.

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[Paul Sweeney]

Stay on the earnings front. Super Micro jumps after early results show rising backlog the Stock is up 24% today. Just extraordinary. So let's talk to the analyst who covers Super Micro. That'd be Woo Jin Ho, he's in our Princeton office, which talk to us about Supermicro. What did they say with the results and why is the stock up so much today?

[Woo Jin Ho (Bloomberg Analyst)]

Yeah, hey Paul, so essentially it was that stunning backlog figure that they posted, right? So if we think about a month ago when they did an equity raise, they announced that they had $39 billion in backlog at the month of at the start of June. That increased to about 60 billion as part of the pre announcement. So what happens now is that the setup for fiscal 2027 guidance is going to be really really good consensus prior to the to the backlog guidance was at $53 billion for 27. I'd be shocked if they don't exceed that.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

So if Supermicro sees this kind of backlog, what what does it mean for its peers, for its competitors? Are they getting a similar lift?

[Woo Jin Ho (Bloomberg Analyst)]

Well, I mean, you know, that's a great question. Scarlet Dell. Dell is the market leader in AI servers. I suspect that Dell is going to see similar demand patterns as well. Right? Because typically these type of mega deals, server deals are dual source. So Super Micro is benefiting, Dell is benefiting as well.

[Paul Sweeney]

And Dell Stock is up 10% today in sympathy. So that probably tells the story there. Which how does the memory shortage, the wave, the chip shortage and all that kind of stuff. How does that impact the super micros of the world? Because it doesn't seem to be an issue.

[Woo Jin Ho (Bloomberg Analyst)]

No. So you know we did some analysis on that from the server front. It's, it's clear that the. Given the demand for AI servers and the demand for compute, the Neo clouds are more than willing to absorb those costs. Now what's happening on the traditional servants servers. Right, the stuff that powers our own enterprise data centers. Customers are desperate for compute because the rising memory cost. They want to avoid the, the inflation of the server. Server inflation. So they're actually, I don't know if they're pre purchasing or pre buying, but they are buying. It hasn't affected the server business at all. If anything the vendors have benefited.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Okay, as we mentioned, Supermicro shares up about 24% today, so getting a big lift but still, you know, well below the highs that we saw in early June. So Jin, this was a preliminary result. The company will actually formally report its quarterly results in mid August. Have we seen all the upside here or is there something that the company might withhold until the actual results that could give this stock another kick?

[Woo Jin Ho (Bloomberg Analyst)]

Yeah, so the thing that we're waiting for right now is the gross margin guidance for 27. Scarlet, look, they gave phenomenal gross. They expect phenomenal gross margin 15 to 17% for the fiscal fourth quarter and they guided to previously 8.2 to 8.4%. Look, I think it was one megadeal that helped them raise that guidance. I do expect gross margins to come down in 27, but I suspect that there is an uptick in gross margin overall from the 8% that they delivered in 26 to around 9 to 10%. If that's going to be the case, given that the leverage of the model, you could start seeing a substantial uptick in earnings in 27, even with the dilution from the equity raise.

[Paul Sweeney]

30 seconds left. Which, what is the revenue visibility for a super Microsoft Seems, seems pretty, pretty solid.

[Woo Jin Ho (Bloomberg Analyst)]

I mean from a quarter to quarter basis, Paul, they, they've missed their guidance for the past three to five quarters so their execution has been choppy. But from a full year basis it's actually been up and to the right given how these data centers have been sprouting up and they've been really wanting to get that the Nvidia chips in their buildings as quickly as possible.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.

[Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast Announcer]

You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10am Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg business app Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.

[Paul Sweeney]

More earnings here today. Philip Marsh think cigarettes. P M is the ticker. Some numbers out today. Stocks up about 1.65%. Stocks at a 52 week high, up 19% year to date. Plus you get a 3% dividend yield. So Philip Morris shareholders been quite happy. Let's bring Ken Shea. He's been following this company since the beginning of Time for Bloomberg Intelligence. He's seen all the iterations of Philip Morris and Altria and all that kind of stuff. So Ken, talk to us about what we saw from Philip Morris today.

[Ken Shea (Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst)]

Yeah, hi Paul. Philip Morris numbers today were really good. The headline numbers top line 10% beat 5% expectations. EPS up 15% expectations were for 7. You know, initially despite those strong numbers, initially the stock in the pre market was down and I was scratching my head and I guess it was because they lowered their guidance on a after currency basis. Other words, this company is very international, hence the name. And they said look, you know, currencies are not going to be quite as favorable as we saw last quarter. But our adjusted currency numbers, we're still looking for high single digit EPS growth. I think investors digested that, they got bullish again, right?

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Philip Morris is basically the international business, right? I mean Altria is a domestic business and Philip Morris I believe sells Margaret Marlboro cigarettes outside the U.S. that's right Scarlett.

[Ken Shea (Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst)]

In the late 90s, I should say 2008 I believe was this company split. Philip Morris International basically took the Marlboro name and the franchise outside the U.S. altria, a holding company, owns PM USA which owns the Marlboro name in the U.S. since that time though, the two companies have agreed to allow PMI to sell non cigarette tobacco products in the U.S. and that's why you're seeing them sell Zim, you know, the oral nicotine products. And soon they're going to launch their heat not burned vapor product in the US A big potential growth market.

[Paul Sweeney]

What is Zyn? It's all over social media. Can you explain this to me?

[Ken Shea (Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst)]

Zyn is an oral nicotine product, Paul. It comes in those little round cans, maybe plastic containers but in it you have 20 pouches that you can get your nicotine buzz. It's a non tobacco product. You tobacco free and you get your nicotine buzz without the ire of your neighbor at work or on the subway or whatever, getting annoyed that you're smoking or vaping next to them. So it's a very discreet way of getting your nicotine and it's doing really well. A lot of smokers are switching over.

[Paul Sweeney]

Interesting.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

All right, is it like nicotine gum? Is it meant to kind of get you off of smoking or is it just a flat out replacement? I mean, is the idea like a smoking cessation device?

[Ken Shea (Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst)]

It's mostly that, yes. Yes, Scarlet. And that's what the intent is. And that's why the FDA has granted it recently the authorization to promote it as a less harmful source of nicotine as opposed to cigarettes. You know, it's the inhalation of carbons that causes the harm. The FDA acknowledges that if you get your nicotine, you know, through your mouth or whatever, it's, it's bypassing that harm. Not to say nicotine is completely safe, but it's a much less harmful, you know, form of nicotine ingestion.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.

[Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast Announcer]

You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10am Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg business app Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

I very much on our minds right now and you know, we look ahead to some of the bigger picture issues that we need to resolve. And regulation is and has been coming up quite a bit. Our next guest suggests that perhaps we think about regulating AI the way that we regulate the airline industry. Gautamakonda is lecturer at Yale School of Management and a Bloomberg Opinion contributor and this is exactly what he's written about. Gautam, just walk us through your thesis here about regulating AI using an FAA kind of approach.

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

Right. So let's think about this from, you know, what the industry itself says is that this is a technology that will have not just gigantic economic implications, but gigantic security implications. Right. That they're already finding evidence this is technology that can help you do cybersecurity attacks. That can help maybe even in the with development of sort of chemical or biological weapons. That sounds like something that the government needs to step in. Right? There needs to be some regulation of that when you talk about those kinds of risks. So then if you look at the industries and the areas where that risk has been successfully managed, the aviation just stands out. It's just head and shoulders above everyone else. I would say that if you could, you know, you could tell people 100 years ago that you could go from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world in 24 hours in safety. So Complete that it is safer to be on the airplane than driving to and from the airport. And the worst thing that would happen to you is you would complain about the quality of the pretzels. They would say, that sounds, you know, that's a miracle. That is an astonishing achievement. And you cannot separate out that level of success and that level of innovation from the success of the faa, the American regulatory agency, which has just led the world in regulatory safety. So if we've done so well with such an important industry, I think we can learn from that.

[Paul Sweeney]

Is an argument to be made, Gautham, that we, as society, it might be too late to regulate AI. Maybe it's.

[Ken Shea (Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst)]

There are.

[Paul Sweeney]

It's already kind of out there.

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

So it is out there, but it's not. But the question is, you know, it might be too late to eliminate all of the potential harms, but if we're looking at the curve, and the curve keeps getting steeper and moving faster, it's not too late to obviate the worst ones. Right. So the really big risks aren't there yet. You hear people talking about AI's use in biological weapons. That's a place where I published articles and we're still quite a few years away from that. Right. So working with biological systems still involves a lot of handwork, involves people. It involves a lot of sort of tacit skills that's there. It's. But it is going away. So we want to have these regulatory barriers in place before we lose the safety that, the safety that we were sort of, we sort of inherited.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

So China, Chinese company MoonShot released Kimi K3, and we talked about this AI model and how disruptive, potentially disruptive it could be. Do we think that China is going to move faster than the US on regulating AI?

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

So this is a fascinating question, and there's clearly a lot of debate in China. And the Chinese regulatory state is quite advanced. And, you know, they, they have, they have a deference to sort of technical expertise that we don't, that might allow them to do that. But when we think about these, these open weights models that are coming out of China, however impressive they are, they are also very clearly sort of behind what the United States has. And in quite a few cases, they seem to be heavily based on American models. So much so that if you take Kimmy and you ask it, what is your name? Its answer will be, my name is Claude by Anthropic, which is kind of a flag as to where they might have gotten that data from. Right. And so what I would say is in this duality, what we've learned is aviation is an incredibly cooperative space. Right. It's both competitive and cooperative. Everyone wants to have the world's leading airplane makers, it wants to have the world's leading airlines, but they also understand that we've all got to work together in order to make those safe. And what the FAA was able to do was to create international norms of cooperation by being the best regulatory agency in the world. So everyone in the world sort of looked at the FAA and took their lead from the FAA that that again, is the same model we can do here where we can get the Chinese and us to agree on a regulatory harmonization that might make it safe for everybody, because we know they can, because we've done it before.

[Paul Sweeney]

What has China said on this matter, if anything, as it relates to just broadly regulating or controlling AI?

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

Yeah, there have been some really interesting discussions, but it hasn't come out yet. Right. So it's pretty clear that they have some concerns about the AI systems and they're willingness to sort of talk about issues like Tiananmen Square. They cracked down on that and made it much more difficult for these systems to do, for their systems to do that. There are a bunch of other areas where they've talked about it, but so far it's been a, almost a surprisingly light touch. I think, at least in part because the Chinese attitude towards these systems is very different from ours. Right. The Chinese AI community is not consumed with the possibility of superintelligence or ending the world. They're sort of like, we're building these things and then we'll be able to apply them in factories and make our factories more efficient. That is a lot less likely to generate fear and might actually be more likely to generate short term economic returns too.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Okay. Europe is not exactly the leading edge of AI innovation, but Europe is very good on regulation. They spend a lot of time on that. Has Europe said or done anything that kind of creates a bit of a template?

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

So I would say not yet. And I want to sort of push that on. On. When you say they're very good at regulation, what they're often are is they have a heavier hand.

[Kelsey Griffiths (Bloomberg Telecoms Reporter)]

Okay, yeah, maybe that's a better way to put it.

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

Yeah. But, but you know, like, I think the American regulatory state that we established, you know, up until pretty recently with agencies like the FDA was incredibly successful. We managed to get both high levels of safety and high level of innovation at the same time. Those weren't. Those aren't right. Those weren't in conflict. They were together. The reason that the airline industry was able to, the aviation industry was able to progress so quickly was because people trusted that the American government would keep it safe. And so this is sort of a point that people in the industry who sort of keep at weakening the, you know, supporting the weakening of the federal government or things like that, they are fundamentally misunderstood, misunderstanding the situation. And they should, they should be really careful. They might get what they want for what they what they're asking for. Because if they get a US Government that is too weak to regulate AI, what they will get is also an American public that rejects AI entirely in an industry that will die on the vine here.

[Paul Sweeney]

30 seconds left. What does the Trump administration said on this matter, if anything?

[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

They started to talk about banning Chinese open weights models, and that's probably going to be my next column because I'm not sure what I think about that. But that seems to me that that is walking down a very slippery slope because those open weights models are a big threat to the economics of our frontier labs, but they're pretty great for everyone else. So you're making a pretty striking trade there.

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[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

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[Gautam Ayo (Yale Lecturer and Bloomberg Contributor)]

How is this $47?

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All right, we're gonna here.

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Oh, that's actually really simple.

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