What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just got to think big to accomplish big things. Julia Borsten hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. A breakthrough treatment for genetic deafness approved by the FDA and available for free. Regeneron CEO Len Schleifer celebrates and looks to the future. About 40% of the kids we treated could hear a whisper. They went for nothing. A jet engine and then they can hear a whisper. That's big news. It really is big news. When you studied science, Joe, and I studied it, this was science fiction. But this is now a science reality. And tech investor and advisor to the president, David Sachs, joins us. The feud between his former colleagues, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, plus getting over the government's beef with Anthropik. If Anthropik's concern here is around this mass surveillance, I'm concerned about that too. I'm a civil libertarian. I don't want the government to be using AI to control the population or to censor us or to surveil us. I'm still waiting for a phone call for Anthropic. My phone is open. Plus, the New York mayor versus the hedge funder. It's not a $15 million second home. No, it wasn't. Isn't it a quarter billion? I think it was even more than that. A blowout quarter for Intel and the soldier who placed a winning polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. Did he have inside information? It's Friday, finally, April 24, 2026. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue, please. 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 Karnan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And happy Friday, everybody. We're at the end of the week. Shares of Intel are soaring. You've got earnings of 29 cents a share coming in that beat estimates of just a penny. This was after the company already lowered expectations for the quarter, said they weren't going to make it. And then they beat even what had been expected earlier before they cut those losses. Revenue came in at $13.6 billion. That was much better than the $12.4 billion that analysts expected. Second quarter, guidance was much higher than Wall Street consensus as well. Intel saw the strongest growth in its data center business with revenue up 22 percent to $5.1 billion. That stock is now up more than 80 percent year to date as of yesterday's close, indicated up by 28 percent. A lot of what they talked about was the idea that there was demand for all these chips that they had written off. They thought they were basically worthless chips, but there is so much demand for chips right now that all of those things are now selling. as people try and score all of this up. I just came up with Sherwin-Williams. You know how they poured over the top of the globe? It's like AI is just... Every dog has his day. I mean, AI is... The effects are so far and wide, and real effects for Intel. Then I was on Fast Money, so I already thought about all these things. Oh, that's right. I forgot you did Fast Money. I've gone back to thinking that maybe the CHIPS Act... Remember, we thought they picked it wrong. They can't pick winners. Suddenly, that grant that turned into equity... I mean, it looks almost like it like no, it almost looks good. It almost looks like it was smart, which makes me again think, you know, the journal's hammering the Spirit Airlines idea of bailing them out. Trump last night. Now you're into it. No, no. But Trump last night said they got zero debt stocks and the company's hurt because of temporary higher oil prices. We take a big stake in it. It's a great company. We keep all the employees and we make a bunch of money. Well, that was the thought during COVID, too, when you got shut down. It was a temporary situation. It was the pandemic that forced it. So can you get lulled into thinking that statism works? Well, you are, apparently. No, that's what I'm just asking. I have the knee-jerk response is that none of this is good, but then I see things working like this. Maybe you got, you know, if you got a CEO-type president, I know people, you know, they always impugn his businesses, but he made billions of dollars and he's got buildings all over the world and golf courses and everything else. You know, they focus on casinos. The Chips Act originally was an Biden administration. Right. I know. But the Chips Act also did not come with grants that were turning into equity. It was turning into equity. Well, that's a good, that's a better part of industrial. I don't know what to think, but I'd never, would you have believed it? We saw AMD at $400 billion when for years it had, you know, for decades it had been and also ran. I think AMD is still above Intel, but it must be close after if it's up. What was it up? Twenty dollars. Twenty percent. So here's the question. I prefer to be investing in businesses that have gotten lucky or that are good. And that's the question. Honestly, when you look at the success of an Intel today, I don't think you can sit around honestly and look at yourself in the mirror and say this is a company that is good. You'd say they got a little lucky along the way. It wasn't that they somehow were brilliant managers. That was the other thing I was saying. Where's Pat Gelsinger? And is it, did he set it up for this? Or did the new guy come in and he was so amazing that he did this? And is Gelsinger somewhere going, go! Or has he got a bunch of stock and he's going, go! Or is this just the idea that there is so much demand for chips right now that these outdated chips... Exactly. No, I know. That's what I said. AI is like Sherwin-Williams. Well, and this is, by the way, you could take Intel, which people think is an also-ran, or you could take Apple, and you could say, you know, they didn't get into AI, they should have done all these things, and yet they're the beneficiaries right now of this sort of wild moment where everybody's buying a desktop Mac for the first time in a bajillion years. And is that because they were good or because they were lucky? And I will also say, if you're using taxpayer dollars, what you're doing is not trying to get the smartest investment in things. what you are doing is trying to ensure that American industry sticks around and that we don't lose jobs because of temporary situations like the jet, like the Spirit Airlines situation. I mean, do you think that the GM bailout was a good thing? I do during the 2008 financial crisis. That's total. Yeah, that's that. I guess AMD 500. So it's half 497. But today, I think Intel goes above 400. It's just amazing. Yeah, gain of another 28 percent. Meantime, let's talk about what's going on. Can we order in this morning with our profits? Can we get some stuff with our... You want to go to Starbucks and get some... Who gets that? Who gets these profits? It goes back to Treasury, wouldn't it? Hopefully it'll just reduce the debt. A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was arrested, accused of using classified information to make bets that won him $400,000 on polymarket ahead of the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro. The DOJ says the soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, was involved in the planning and execution of Operation Absolute Resolve. The soldier was charged separately by the CFTC in a civil complaint with three counts of violating the Commodity Exchange Act. President Trump was asked about the arrest yesterday. Was he betting that they would get him or they wouldn't get him? It sounds like he was betting on his removal from office, that Maduro would be removed. It sounds like he was involved in the operation. That's like Pete Rose betting on his own team. It sounds like Pete Rose. Pete Rose, it kept him out of the Hall of Fame because he bet on his own team. Now, if he bet against his team, that would be no good, but he bet on his own team. I'll look into it. I thought it did occur to me that he was betting on a successful outcome, and he didn't know beforehand that it was going to be so successful. I know. But he didn't know it was going to work. But this goes back to the idea, what is your fiduciary duty? I don't see how these in any of these instances. But I think in this case, this was the right case to bring because it was classified information. Right. So I don't know how argue that if it was information that he knew because he was walking down the street and he saw his neighbor doing something that's totally different. But because he was a soldier with classified. If it was a nation, if it had been a bus and a terrible, you know, God forbid it hadn't been so good and it didn't work, would he have lost the money? Yeah. Weird. But you can't use classified data. But again, by the way, insider trading. The whole thing is crazy. Losing your money is not a excuse. It doesn't get you out of insider trading. There have been lots of people who have lost money involved in insider trading, and they have still gone to jail. But the insider trading part is what gets me. Classified is the reason this is such a strong case, because it's classified information. But I was going back to the idea of if you called Ben Affleck's son to ask if he was going to the Super Bowl and he said, no, he's not. And you bet information on that. Why is that classified information? You know, that doesn't rise to the level of insider information that that should be acted. Like, did you do anything wrong by doing that? Well, let me ask you, I can't speak to that one. The question is, in any instance that you are a government official of any sort when you work for the government, by default. By the way, if you're a police officer and you know that there's going to be a sting operation about something, or even if you know that there's going to be a parade and they're worried about something terrible happening and you bet on it. But this is why all of these things are gambling to me These are not derivatives contracts that should be taken care of by a market I mean all of those issues are so stupid to say that this is a derivatives contract It not a derivatives contract. This is just gambling, flat out gambling. And I don't think a government insider should be using any of that information. But the idea of making a market on it. There's the government side, but then, you know, Steck over here, our great stage manager who operates, he can see the scripts beforehand. And if he decides he wants to bet on what's going to be in the script, I would argue to you that he has, you know, in the same way that the government, that someone working with the government is a fiduciary. If we're talking about publicly traded stocks that we have information that may be in the market, I think that's one thing. And it's just if the next word out of my mouth is going to be... Yes. Yes, if he knows that the next thing says coming up, the Dow under pressure, and that he's bet on that because he has access to that as an employee. Again, this is where I think the whole market in some ways is a complicated situation. Wild Road West, it's impossible. I think we all agree. But so if you have inside information. Sorry, Stack. You got inside information about something that's going to happen, but it could go either way. But, you know, it's going to happen. If you if you lose, you still can be prosecuted. Absolutely. Absolutely. Not a measure of just if you just because you try to rob the store doesn't mean and you fail doesn't mean you don't go to jail. That would be even worse. Citadel blasting New York's mayor Zoran Mondani for singling out CEO Ken Griffin in a push for a new pied-a-terre tax in New York targeting wealthy non-resident homeowners. When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today, we're taxing the rich. At issue is this social media video. It was filmed right outside of Griffin's New York residence in which the mayor unveiled that proposed tax on homes valued above $5 million when the owner's primary residence is outside of New York City. In a memo obtained by CNBC, Citadel said that targeting Griffin showed, quote, ignorance and disdain towards contributors to the city's economy. Citadel highlighted that its employees, including non-residents, have paid nearly $2.3 billion in New York City and state taxes over the past five years. And the memo pointed to the firm's planned redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, a project expected to generate about 6,000 construction jobs and more than 15,000 permanent roles with spending to exceed $6 billion. And I think if you really read the memo carefully, there's a little bit of a threat in there that maybe they wouldn't necessarily do this. They didn't say it was like done, done, done. And this goes back to why I'm not sure where I land on the tax itself, because I don't think we know enough about even how the tax is structured, but the broader concept of not New York is open for business and we're thrilled that you're here and happy that you're contributing to the revenue base under this new plan and old plan, but we're not open for business and we don't want you here. And I think that sort of spirit is the distinction that I hope other people, you know, appreciate and maybe have some conversations with the mayor about. Aren't we burying the lead here? I mean, it's not a $15 million second home. No, it wasn't. Isn't it a quarter billion? I think it was even more than that. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's important to note how amazing this place must be. And again, I'm not saying I want to kill the guy. I'm saying I want to be the guy. I think it's awesome that you can have a player. And I've seen pictures of it, too. It looks unbelievable. But the point is, if you have someone who has a pied-à-terre here who maybe isn't a full-time resident, but by the way, you're not using any of the city services if you're not a full-time resident. You don't have kids in schools. You're not kind of siphoning off, which is what Bill Ackman has pointed out. But if it means that he is not going to do this project that I think is supposed to create 6,000 part-time jobs and 14,000 or 15,000 full-time jobs, that is a serious impact to the city's welfare from this point. But they picked the most expensive property probably. Oh, yeah, he did that on purpose. But there's an element of almost doxing to it, meaning you're standing in front of the building, and I guess it's knowing where the building is and all of that. But still, it's just, it's in bad, I would argue to you, approaching it that way is in bad taste. This is the first time Amdani's done something that you think might be. I'm trying to be a, as I always tell you, down the middle. I can go all different ways on these people. And I'm just telling you, I think that approach is not the right approach. Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, David Sachs, an original member of the so-called PayPal mafia, co-host of the All In podcast, an investor in SpaceX, Palantir, Uber, Lyft, Meta, Airbnb, and so many more. He was brought into the Trump administration to advise on all things AI and crypto, and he's weighing in now on the government's complicated relationship with Anthropik. We don't care what their personal views are. What we care about are the quality of their products, and we don't want the bias creeping into the products. As long as they keep the bias out, I don't think we have a problem with them. That would be woke AI. Advisor to the president, David Sachs, is right after this. What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just got to think big to accomplish big things. Julia Boorstin hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC with Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Here's Joe. Right to our next guest, David Sachs, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He's also co-founder and partner of Kraft Ventures and a co-host of the All In podcast. It's great to finally we've had you on, but it's good to have you on again today, David. Thank you to be with you. I don't know if you saw the president the other day talking about Anthropic. He seemed very conciliatory and actually made some positive comments. High IQ people. We want high IQ people. We need what they have to offer. There might be a deal. Were you watching that? I did. Yes, I saw you. Look, I thought his comments were balanced and accurate. I mean, we know that Anthropic makes good products. They are smart people. There's no question about it. They're high IQ. The president said that they're left wing, but that's OK. We can work through it. Look, we don't care what their personal views are. What we care about are the quality of their products. And we don't want the bias creeping into the products. As long as they keep the bias out, I don't think we have a problem with them. I will say that I noticed today on social media, there's a report going around that Claude admitted that it was trained to privilege the views of the SPLC over the Trump Justice Department. If that's the case, that's an example of the bias creeping into the model. We don't want to see that. That would be woke AI. But assuming they keep their bias out, I don't think we have a problem with their personal political views. I bet you could find a thousand things like that, David. Well, this is the thing. I mean, we've said we don't want woke AI. We want AI to be accurate, unbiased and truthful. As long as AI companies can stick to that, we can work with any of them. What are they going to scrape for info then? It's GIGO. Everything's already like that. Well, sure. I mean, they're going to scrape the whole Internet for data. But it sounds like what Claude was saying by the admission of its own model, that it had been taught to basically privilege the views of the SPLC. So in other words, the the the architects of the model have basically said this is a trustworthy organization and the Trump DOJ is not or at least SPLC is more trustworthy. I don't think models should be doing that. I don't think they should be putting their thumb on the scale of credibility that way. But is that enough is that enough reason to put him on on us as a supply chain? Because you said that anthropics, government affairs and media strategy to position itself consistently as a foe of the Trump administration. That's all it does. And then to whine that you're being targeted after. And you even pointed out Amadei's comparison of Trump to a feudal warlord and his support for Kamala Harris. That all sounds political. And that's been Andrew's, I guess, the rap that he's pointed out over and over again, that you can't take politics and use that as a reason to put them on a supply chain. There's a couple of things going on here, Joe. I mean, the SPLC thing that I'm talking about that just popped up today. That just happened today. It's got nothing to do with what happened at the Pentagon. Listen, with respect to what happened in the Pentagon, that's a procurement matter. That was not a policy matter. I wasn't involved in that. But I think that what the dispute came down to is that the Pentagon wants its vendors to agree to allow products to be used for all lawful purposes. And Anthropic didn't want to agree to that standard. My understanding is that all vendors are held to that standard. And look, if Anthropic doesn't want to sell its product to be used in a war, I think that they can agree to do that. But if they sell to the Department of War, they should understand that their product will be used in a war. I mean, it's in the name. So I don't think that the Pentagon's position in that contract negotiation was that unreasonable. And I think, like the president said, Anthropica was trying to tell the Pentagon what to do. And I just think that wasn't realistic. David, what do you think, though, of OpenAI, which similarly has, I think, a lot of the same things built in effectively to the model itself? In fact they said that publicly What things are we talking about Both the use of the use of how the how the model is used for autonomous warfare Right I mean there were sort of two main issues that have been on the table. And in both cases, Anthropic and OpenAI effectively seem to be in the exact same camp. And yet one potentially for political reasons doesn't seem to be in the mix or is being called a security threat while the other is not? Well, my understanding is that where OpenAI ended up is that they agreed to the terms of use that their product could be used for all lawful purposes. Let me be clear. Nobody wants AI to be used by the government for mass surveillance. The Pentagon said they would not do that. The question is around some of these edge cases and corner cases. And my understanding is that Anthropic would not agree to the Pentagon standard of all lawful uses. By the way, let me just say that if Anthropic's concern here is around this mass surveillance. I'm concerned about that, too. I'm a civil libertarian. I don't want the government to be using AI to control the population or to censor us or to surveil us. And if Anthropic had those concerns, I would have been very interested in having that conversation. They should have come to me and we could have talked about that. I mean, apparently they're saying that there's loopholes in the law, but they've never explained what those loopholes are. I'm very interested in hearing what those things are. Maybe we can agree on them. I would like to protect the privacy of Americans. And I'd like to build that into our national AI framework. And I've said this before, I'm still waiting for a phone call for Anthropic. My phone is open. But what you don't do is try and strong arm the government through a vendor negotiation into agreeing to the changes you want to see in the law. That's just not realistic. But look, my phone is open if they want to talk about surveillance. David, on Monday, the trial, the federal trial in Oakland begins where where Elon Musk is taking Sam Altman to trial with OpenAI. Do you think Musk has a case? And what do you think the future of AI holds if he wins? Well, this is a dispute that's been going on for a while. I don't think I should take sides. The dispute originates from the fact that Elon and Sam were co-founders in OpenAI. It started originally as a nonprofit. Elon contributed, as I understand it, the first $40 million or so to it. But at some point down the line, Sam and the company changed from being a nonprofit to a for-profit. Elon did not end up with any equity in the company. I can see why he would think that would be unfair. In the past, I have said that it's too bad they didn't settle this issue. Maybe they should restructure the cap table. I don't know. I don't want to take sides in it. But I think the dispute all originates from that issue, that the company at some point went from being a not-for-profit to a for-profit. So this is something they're going to work out through the courts now, I guess. So you think if Elon had a stake, it'd be different because he makes a case that, you know, charity is charity. And, you know, if you're going to start out, I think he doesn't like how some of the other founders, they're going to be worth billions of dollars from starting a charity. I think that's that's kind of look, I mean, if you gave the first 40 or 50 million dollars to a nonprofit, to a charity, then I think you'd want that charitable purpose to be upheld. I mean, that is, I think, his point of view. I guess the point I'm making is that if they were going to do a redo, if they're going to change it, I mean, maybe what they should have done. Look, this is just my personal point of view. I'm not involved in this. Maybe they should have gone to him at some point along the line and tried to restructure the cap table. I don't know. This is a dispute between those two. I don't really want to take sides in it. OK. Hey, David, I got a different one for you, which is XAI and the potential acquisition of Cursor. and where you think XAI lies in this sort of larger battle, if you will, between, you know, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google? Well, I think that the deal makes sense in a lot of ways because Cursor and XAI are very complementary. Cursor is a coding tool that is the red hot area of AI right now is coding. XAI would like to accelerate its efforts in coding. So it's worked out this partnership with Cursor that includes this option to buy. Cursor, for its part, gets access to XAI's compute. Elon has this huge data center, Colossus, and there's a compute shortage going on right now. Elon was ahead of the curve on building compute. So now Cursor will get access to XAI's compute. They get access to a foundation model and team. And what XAI gets is acceleration in this area of coding. So it seems like a smart deal to me in the sense that these two companies are very complimentary right now. Everybody's getting laid off. I say technology always means more jobs. I'm I'm I it wakes me up at night. Is everything going to be OK? Joe, I'm pretty sure you're going to be keeping your job. It's not going to it's not going to be a problem. Look, I know that people are very afraid about the job loss concern. What I can tell you is we don't really see it in the data so far. If you look at Challenger Gray report from last year, very small percentage of layoffs were attributable to AI. You look at the Yale Budget Lab study, no discernible disruption in the job market for the first three years of AI. In fact, what we're seeing are a lot of junk games right now. They're going to just go to, I'm sorry, we got to have you back. I probably shouldn't have asked that question. Please come back. We can finish these thoughts. Next up on Squawk Pod, a life-changing innovation in medicine. Regeneron has found a single gene therapy to cure profound deafness. and for Americans, it won't cost a thing. Regeneron CEO Len Schleifer shares his big news. What will this gene therapy cost for patients that don't live in the United States? We haven't set a price yet, but they should pay their fair share outside the United States. But in the United States, we're giving it away for free. What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just gotta think big to accomplish big things. Julia Boorstin hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Squawk Pod. Straight up on Becky. Three, two, one. Up on Becky. Cue. You're watching Squawk Box right here on CNBC. I'm Becky Quick along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. The FDA has cleared Regeneron's hearing loss drug, Otarmony, which is a gene therapy that's designed to treat and potentially reverse a rare form of inherited hearing loss in children. Joining us right now is Regeneron CEO, Lynn Schleifer. And Lynn, this is really pretty amazing. Why don't you describe how this gene therapy works, what it does? Yeah. So unfortunately, some children are born profoundly deaf. And the cause of that deafness is their gene for a very specific protein in what are called the hair cells of the ear. The part of the ear apparatus that transmits sound is missing. And they just, if you could put a jet engine next to them and they wouldn't hear it. It's really terrible. It's profound deafness. And what our scientists were able to do is to replace that gene. This is the first time ever that a gene that has replaced something and restored one of our senses. And you realize how important hearing is, obviously sight, touch, but hearing, it's really, really important. It sounds like the reason you decided to do this, it's a single gene. So it was an attractive candidate to try a new technology on where the addition of a single gene could change it. Because I don't think you'd set out for a patient population of 50 to try to find something for it. So it was either serendipitous or you decided this is an attractive target because it's a single gene and we can test this technology on that and see it work. Well, so, Joe, you're 75% right. Okay, tell me. Tell me how it happened. How did you stumble onto this disease to try to cure? Well, I think our scientists literally are the people who rule the ruse. I mean, why are we giving this product away for free, by the way? Because our scientists, as George Ankopoulos said, it's the right thing to do. We're learning so much from these young people. Let's give this one away for free. We work on things where we think we can make a difference. Our scientists thought that they could make a difference with this gene because it was a single defect. Exactly. It was absolutely right. How come I'm only 75 percent right? Because I think that sounds exactly right. It was one where you could use the technology and cure it. Right. But the part that you're not right about is we don't look at the size of the market when we look at what we work on. Well, there's a million other small markets that you could do if they've got multiple genes. That wouldn't make sense. It wasn't the size of the market. It was what you said. Right. Exactly. So what comes next? If this one you're going to give away for free, what does this technology now allow you to do? You've proven it works. Now what can you do with it? Right. By the way, this is an AAV and adeno associated virus that uses this. It's adeno. Adeno. So the most important thing is that everybody came together on this one. Our scientists, the patients, the doctors, the FDA, the commissioner's voucher. People have been making comments about the FDA, that they're lowering the standards. I guarantee you they're not. We had so much up and back on this. They're keeping the standards high. But this program says if there's an important program, let's move along fast. I say kudos to the agency on that. But what's next is there's many other forms of hearing loss that we want to look at. I don't hear as well as I used to. none of us do as we age Maybe we can figure out how to improve that There so many things we can learn and this is just the beginning the first time you can actually take a child One of them was in the White House with us yesterday, young Travis. He couldn't hear anything, and now he can hear his mom, and in her voice, he can hear her love. Think about that. It's really heart-rendering and moving. It is. So you're giving this away. There are 50 children a year about that are born in the United States with this. How big is the patient population? Well, it's hard to know. There are more people alive now if they haven't with it than are born every year. But if they've already had a cochlear implant, we might not be able to help them. Oh, because the surgery for the cochlear implant? Yes, it destroys some of the innuerea. But we're looking into that. But the most important thing is that, look, we sell drugs like Tupixin, like ILEA and ILEA HD. that we've given 100 million injections in the eye. We treat a million and a half people with Dupixen. We have plenty of large markets. But our scientists said, let's give this one away for free because they're helping us. And that's the kind of company I think Regeneron is. This vilification of our industry has really got to stop. And I think that we've got to recognize that if we don't value what our industry does, Because China is really going to pass this right by. I'm amazed by the science. I'm completely impressed by what you guys are doing. But you're also doing this at a time where you're cutting a deal with the Trump administration. I think you're the last of 17 companies to cut this deal with the Trump administration to say that you will lower some of your drug prices. It was tougher for you because you don't have as many drugs as big of a wheelhouse where you can say, OK, I can lower the prices on these and still make money on these others. Explain what happened with this deal. Yeah. So a lot of people have had the sense that we've been pushed into or bullied into this. That's not the case at all. We actually on this show, I think we can find the transcript. But I know I've gone back. We have been arguing for over a decade that the other wealthy nations are ripping us off. It's just wrong. Other people, it's great that they give away their drugs for they get their drugs from us. Nothing. But they're not paying for innovation and they're not paying for the current drugs or the future drugs. And we've been arguing that. And that's why we are actually proponents almost of this exact design of this MFN, where we hope that prices can come down a little bit in the U.S. and would come up where other wealthy nations pay their fair share. We have to we have to support this industry, but we have to do it in a way that makes our drugs affordable. Is that happening yet? Are other nations agreeing to pay more for some of these drugs? Yeah, I think the Trump administration is wielding a pretty heavy hand there with trade policy. And I think we're starting to see that the other wealthy nations are going to have to come up. This treatment, this gene therapy, usually gene therapies go for millions of dollars because it's a one time treatment. It fixes and corrects something that could be very expensive, not to mention the pain that it puts on the patients going through it. what will this gene therapy cost for patients that don't live in the United States? We haven't set a price yet, but they should pay their fair share outside the United States. But in the United States, we're giving it away for free. What comes next with this technology? Is there a next step that you all are already working on? You need more single low side targets. Can you do it with, let's say there's five genes. That's a heavy lift, but usually it wouldn't be five genes that are disrupted at once. These monogenic disorders, single gene disorders, as you said, are easier to deal with. But sometimes we can find a single gene that is critical for the pathway. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is what, when you studied science, Joe, and I studied it, this was science fiction. But this is now a science reality. I mean, I participated in Becky's cure day where there were just so many people there who were desperate for help for their children because and I have a child who has a genetic disease. There's nothing for that child right now. And just hope matters. Hope matters. And so this is the right thing to do. It's the right time to do it. Our scientists, George and the gang, said let's not only do it, but let's show who we are and give this product away for free. And that's really just the right thing here. Can this be used for more than the curing deafness? I mean, what other monogenetic diseases are on your target list right now? There's a whole host of them. As you know, we have the largest collection of genes that have been sequenced in the world that are married to anonymized medical records. Frankly, everybody realizes that that database that's been created at Regeneron is probably one of the most important databases out there. Frankly, a number of the large AI companies want to train on that database because it can really change the practice of medicine. So we want to expand that. We've got lots of single genes, single genes that have made a difference. we can show in development, whether it's in liver fibrosis and liver fat, whether it's in obesity, all sorts of places where a single gene really can change your risk. So I think the future is so bright right now, and we're so excited about pursuing that future. And throw in AI. Pardon me? Throw in AI. Well, that's exactly right. But the AI companies realize that AI is only as good as the data they train on. And there's no better data set than we have. Are you working with any of the AI large language models? I don't have any comment to say on that now, but certainly we know we're looking at it and they're looking at it. And are you the view that this is just going to advance things like at a crazy rapid rate, like in two years from now, all of a sudden? I mean, does this bring it forward by tenfold or what are we talking about here when people talk about the step change? OK, I think it's likely to become exponential. I do think it will make big differences. But once again, not in the way that people are talking about it. We don't use AI to design our drugs. We got lots of humanized mice that can do that for us and what have you. And we but we do use AI like everybody else to to have an agent with you to maybe file a protocol with the FDA faster. Right. But what we're talking about here is potentially using AI to train on a data set that can change the practice of medicine. When people talk about sort of like AI being able to sort of go through the permutations of all sorts of protein folds and do it overnight while everybody's sleeping so that when the scientists come in in the morning, they have a whole new subset. Or the idea that at some point you even get into the wet labs because you have robots that will be doing all of this work for you. That's not. I think, Andrew, it's a little bit futuristic, and I don't know how close that is. I mean, the people who want to do these protein folds, we have the largest collection of antibody structures in the world. They actually want to train, train, train, train on our stuff. Remember, it's all about the training. If you have good data sets to train on, AI can be exceedingly powerful. Because it tells you what? Pardon me? Because it tells you what? Because it can go through and find patterns that we can't see. But you have to train it on. It has to look at infinite number almost of patterns. Then it trains. Then it figures out why you do what you do and maybe why somebody else doesn't get sick or why somebody else has this kind of problem and somebody else doesn't. I think the future of medicine is likely to change. certainly the future of drugs impacting. You know, truth be told, we talk about cancer advances. We talk about, you know, small, albeit important advances. This advance in hearing goes from nothing to where about 40% of the kids we treated could hear a whisper. They went from nothing, a jet engine, and then they can hear a whisper. That's big news. Small numbers of people, thank goodness, frankly, but that's the kind of big sea changes that you want to see from medicines. That's fantastic. Lynn, thank you for the work you guys are doing. Thank you for joining us this morning. And we hope you come back as you have more to report with these AI training models that you work with, too. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And that is SquawkPod for today and for the week. Thanks for listening. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern. To get the smartest takes and analysis from our TV show right into your ears, follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts. We'll meet you right back here on Monday. Have a great weekend. We are clear. Thanks, guys. What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just got to think big to accomplish big things. Julia Borsten hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.
