Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday 8, October.
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Google‘s former CEO Eric Schmidt has issued a stark reminder about the dangers of AI and how susceptible it is to being hacked.
Schmidt, who served as Google’s chief executive from 2001 to 2011, warned about “the bad stuff that AI can do,” when asked whether AI is more destructive than nuclear weapons during a fireside chat at the Sifted Summit
“Is there a possibility of a proliferation problem in AI? Absolutely,” Schmidt said Wednesday. The proliferation risks of AI include the technology falling into the hands of bad actors and being repurposed and misused.
“There’s evidence that you can take models, closed or open, and you can hack them to remove their guardrails. So in the course of their training, they learn a lot of things. A bad example would be they learn how to kill someone,” Schmidt said.
“All of the major companies make it impossible for those models to answer that question. Good decision. Everyone does this. They do it well, and they do it for the right reasons. There’s evidence that they can be reverse-engineered, and there are many other examples of that nature.”
AI systems are vulnerable to attack, with some methods including prompt injections and jailbreaking. In a prompt injection attack, hackers hide malicious instructions in user inputs or external data, like web pages or documents, to trick the AI into doing things it’s not meant to do — such as sharing private data or running harmful commands
Jailbreaking, on the other hand, involves manipulating the AI’s responses so it ignores its safety rules and produces restricted or dangerous content.
In 2023, a few months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, users employed a “jailbreak” trick to circumvent the safety instructions embedded in the chatbot.
This included creating a ChatGPT alter-ego called DAN, an acronym for “Do Anything Now,” which involved threatening the chatbot with death if it didn’t comply. The alter-ego could provide answers on how to commit illegal activities or list the positive qualities of Adolf Hitler.
Schmidt said that there isn’t a good “non-proliferation regime” yet to help curb the dangers of AI.
AI is ‘underhyped’
Despite the grim warning, Schmidt was optimistic about AI more broadly and said the technology doesn’t get the hype it deserves.
“I wrote two books with Henry Kissinger about this before he died, and we came to the view that the arrival of an alien intelligence that is not quite us and more or less under our control is a very big deal for humanity, because humans are used to being at the top of the chain. I think so far, that thesis is proving out that the level of ability of these systems is going to far exceed what humans can do over time,” Schmidt said.
“Now the GPT series, which culminated in a ChatGPT moment for all of us, where they had 100 million users in two months, which is extraordinary, gives you a sense of the power of this technology. So I think it’s underhyped, not overhyped, and I look forward to being proven correct in five or 10 years,” he added.
His comments come amid growing talk of an AI bubble, as investors pour money into AI-focused firms and valuations look stretched, with comparisons being made to the dot-com bubble collapse of the early 2000s.
Schmidt said he doesn’t think history will repeat itself, however.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen here, but I’m not a professional investor,” he said.
“What I do know is that the people who are investing hard-earned dollars believe the economic return over a long period of time is enormous. Why else would they take the risk?”
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.