September 21, 2026
WHEN: Today, Monday, September 21, 2026
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Monday, September 21. Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/09/21/treasury-secretary-bessent-trump-admin-wont-give-ai-leaders-a-liability-shield.html, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/09/21/treasury-secretary-bessent-on-fed-chairman-warsh-we-are-sure-he-will-do-the-right-thing.html, and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/09/21/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-with-treasury-secretary-scott-bessent.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
JOE KERNEN: Welcome back to “Squawk Box”. Our newsmaker of the morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Mr. Treasury Secretary, thank you for joining us.
SCOTT BESSENT: Joe, Becky, great to be with you.
KERNEN: You're, you get to be in our fishbowl of a Nasdaq studio, which is always, always interesting. You recently held some high-level talks regarding China, and the president will do that soon. What came out concrete from your discussions?
BESSENT: So, it was all day yesterday, Joe. And I think what's important in terms of framing the talks is it all stems from the leaders’ very good rapport and relationship. President Trump, Xi Jinping, at the personal level, have a very good relationship, and we try to bring that down to the working level. They both have great respect for each other. I think in Xi Jinping's eyes, Donald Trump is a different kind of leader than he's seen in the past. And our discussions yesterday, we talked about economics, we talked about AI. We had some deliverables that have not been completely fulfilled for, from our meeting in Busan, Korea, last fall. And then we started an AI dialogue, which I think is going to be very important. And again, this is possible because of the leaders’ relationship. President Trump was in Beijing. I was there with him in May. Xi Jinping will be coming to Washington this week. And then there's a chance the two leaders will see each other two more times. So, I think that adds great stability to the relationship. The Chinese have a phrase, implementing our leaders consensus, and they keep falling back to that. And that's true. We follow the instructions and then we get down in the details. And we spent about 12 hours yesterday doing that.
KERNEN: Can you give us more color on exactly how the AI discussions went? And, you know, we've even seen reports that maybe you were a little bit more cautious than the president at one time about guardrails. What type of cooperation could we expect from China? And what type of guardrails? And do you trust them? Wouldn't they like us to put up guardrails? And they might not put up any.
BESSENT: Well, I think the important thing was to start talking. So, to set up the dialogue, we've now formalized something called the USA-China AI dialogues. We've agreed to meet again probably in two months in Shenzhen. The second thing is we want to open a communications line, an incident line so that we have constant communications, especially in the event of some kind of an incident. And then we want to start discussing protocols for what our, so both sides can agree on what the leading AI dangers are, whether it's uncontrollable agents, whether it's non-state actors, and cyber non-state actors in bioweapons.
KERNEN: You didn't mention to the vice premier concerns about President Xi's health. Did you, is he fine? Is everything fine? You saw him not too long ago, I guess. But I've just read reports, I don't know how, if there's any veracity, but—
BESSENT: I—
KERNEN: All things are go?
BESSENT: Everything's a go.
KERNEN: Okay, at this point?
BESSENT: The president's planning on greeting him the, at Andrews Air Force Base. And I think we're going to have a great visit.
KERNEN: We'll be able to tell firsthand at that point. Can I just ask you about tariffs? You know that there are some of, we suspended higher tariffs on some Chinese imports. That expires November 10th. Did you talk about that at all?
BESSENT: Sure, sure. That was, that was a focal point. And we again, we've had great stability in the relationship since last fall. And I think we're going to maintain that.
KERNEN: In rare earths. I guess all these things were covered. Any concrete things that you can tell us right now that, to take away from the meeting?
BESSENT: Sure. So, in Beijing, this notion of a, what we call a 30 by 30 trade deal for non-critical goods was floated. And U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer has operationalized that. So he and his team met with the Chinese for most of the day yesterday. They've been having extensive discussions before. And are there items that are non-critical to both sides that we would like to take down to most favored nation tariff levels? So, on the U.S. side, it would mean selling more agriculture, selling more energy, and on the medical devices. On the Chinese side, it would be bringing in more everyday items.
KERNEN: Yeah. Let me just ask one more, to bring the AI back here just quickly. There are times where I think you will always, you work for the president, obviously. Do you agree completely with him on the no-holds-barred for AI or, I mean, it's obvious, the president wants to be remembered as one of the great economic presidents, stock market, all these things. AI is very important to all those things. So, he's got a reason to want unencumbered progress with AI. Do you disagree with that at all? Any part of that?
BESSENT: So, Joe, you know, I, I am, I lead the administration on the economic policy. And I think the president put his finger on it last week, because what we saw from these labs, and I saw your earlier guest, and we kept talking about the 10 percent, the 20 percent. So, imagine these labs came out or one lab in specific, a sitting employee came out and said, there's a 10 percent chance of an extinction level event. But then the labs also said, take the liability off of our hands. And we will not do that. I am in agreement with the MIT professor who leads the AI lab up there, Daniel Huttenlocher, that it is humans who are responsible, not the AI. The Hugging Face incident, the, that is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents. So, what the president was saying is that we cannot, the, say, oh, you, we absolve you of responsibility and the government's going to take responsibility. These labs need to take responsibility for themselves. They can slow down any time they want to.
BECKY QUICK: On that point, is there something that the government might do to maybe put that in finer point, what those liabilities are? We just heard over the weekend that Google has now had agents that have broken out as well. It's happened with OpenAI. It's happened with Anthropic. I mean, if these were humans that were doing it, you would expect to see ramifications and legal actions that followed.
BESSENT: Well, Becky, that's exactly what I think we need to do. When President Trump talked about appointing an AI czar, I think it is to put context, shape and contours around these questions, and they're very important. That was also one of the discussions that I had with the vice premier on AI, in terms of incident reporting, have they had incidents? Of course, they've had incidents, but because of the nature and the lack of transparency in their system, they're not going to tell us. But the Chinese models are very powerful. Even though they're open models, they are very powerful. The U.S. remains in the lead, and that was a very good acknowledgment that I got from my Chinese counterpart. They agreed that we are in the lead.
QUICK: Just in terms of what you laid out. If in two months you've opened this AI dialogue, you meet again in two months, you were saying, that's where you'll kind of lay out the agreement on what you think is most dangerous about it. Is it the agents? Is it states that might be leading some of this or non-state actors? In your opinion, what is the biggest danger you see? You know a lot more than we do on this.
BESSENT: I think it's all of the above. And I think we do have to, the real danger, Becky, in my mind, is a lack of resiliency. On one side, that we're seeing, and these frontier labs are national champions. They've done an incredible job. You know, when you think about Anthropic, the, it was a bunch of folks sitting in a park during COVID. And this is an only in America story. They're sitting in a park, social distancing in San Francisco, I think, in 2021. And I've seen valuations from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Like, you know, imagine that in five years. But we've also got to look at the, as you said, what are the biggest dangers? And, but we've seen this push for sort of frontier with the, with the labs. Now we need to see the frontier on defense and resilience. And part of my job is working on that. And I lead on the financial system. I think that our systemically important banks have done a very good job because they probably have the best cybersecurity in the world outside of the government, because they are constantly attacked, whether it's hundreds or thousands or millions of attacks every day. And how can we use what they've learned and take that down? They've done an excellent job of taking that down. The cap structure in the banks, sharing with the smaller banks. We have AI workshop/forum called Gold Eagle, and we are working on that. So, I think the kind of, the all-hands-on-deck is the other side of the equation now on defense.
KERNEN: You—
QUICK: Just one more question, I'll get out of the way.
KERNEN: Yeah, okay. Sure.
QUICK: The valuation of Anthropic at $1 trillion or $2 trillion. Does that make sense to you as somebody who understands the market so well, if you are thinking about this liability, that could be more strongly enforced?
BESSENT: Well, again, that, Joe and the professor had a very fulsome discussion, that if you believe, as the professor does, or even indeed, as that one employee at OpenAI did, if you were running a fund and someone said, oh, there's 10 percent chance it's going to be a zero, and not only a zero, you're going to have a big liability. You probably wouldn't invest. On the other side, it's probably the, a much smaller probability. And with all valuations, you've got to think about the tail event. And that's where the discussion is going to be. But like I said, they do have to have responsibility for the tail event. Because if you think about it in terms of the valuation, what did they try to do last week? It was, well, there's a chance that, 10 percent chance we could destroy the world, but we want the government to give us a liability shield. And, you know, that's good business for them, bad business for the American people.
KERNEN: You are not, well, you know this, you're not secretary of state. You're not secretary of war or defense, but you are in charge of trying to squeeze Iran through economic measures. Where does that stand right now? Last time you were on, we talked about it. They have a, maybe a great capacity for pain because they don't care about the Iranian people, obviously. Are they going to last right through the midterms like the president thinks?
BESSENT: Well, Joe, I can't tell you whether it's one week, one month or six months, but I will tell you that we are pressuring them like never before. And the Treasury's sanctions authorities were really emboldened after 9/11. And that's when we were given many of the authorities that we have now. We got five new authorities about a month ago that we've implemented against the Iranian regime, including on aviation, maritime, crypto, gold. On September 23rd, all the Iranian airlines, all the Iranian airlines will be shut down around the world. And how do we do that? That if they land, you cannot provide them with fuel. You cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets, or you will be knocked out of the dollar system. And what we're seeing here, Joe, is we've seen enablers throughout the world. We know who they are, they know who they are, and we are putting a stop to it. So we have had now three banks that we have sanctioned, the second largest bank in Egypt, the Dubai Branch funneled more than $1.8 billion into the regime. They’re, they will be closed down. The 30th largest Turkish bank, same thing. They will be closed down. Second largest Russian bank, their external branches doing the same thing. Those branches are—
KERNEN: Nothing in China. And, did you talk about that?
BESSENT: We did. And with many countries, having quiet behind the scenes discussions are better than having a public display. And that the Chinese and the Chinese financial authorities, including Governor Pan at the PBOC, have been very engaged in the process.
KERNEN: Do you think Chairman Warsh, switching gears, did the right thing and maybe long rates, which we'll talk about that in a second, and maybe even bring up your, our friend, Mr. Druckenmiller. But do you think long rates around the world are going up for good reasons, bad reasons, debt, the growth in this country? I don't know what you expect GDP to be, but there are good reasons why interest rates go up.
BESSENT: Yeah. Well, look, it's tough to disaggregate all the reasons. You can assign weightings. But one thing I would point out, Joe, is that we have one of the highest correlations ever between 10 and 30-year bonds and crude oil price and crack spread.
KERNEN: Yeah.
BESSENT: Look at the rates today. Look at the oil price. You know if—
KERNEN: Yeah, I didn't mention that, yeah.
BESSENT: The R-squared since the, since the conflict started has been quite high.
KERNEN: Yeah.
BESSENT: Which tells me that this, the, is a observable phenomenon. And once we get on the other side of this conflict, which we will, I think the oil markets are going to be more supplied than they previously were and rates should come down.
KERNEN: Have you talked to Stan since his editorial?
BESSENT: Oh, sure. Sure. We talk all the time.
KERNEN: And can you just give us some more color on what you continue to, you know, to use funds to buy the long end to—
BESSENT: Well, Joe, we always do that.
KERNEN: Right.
BESSENT: I just raised the size because we are in a very illiquid period. The market was moving quickly. You know, as I've said, I can't set the equilibrium price. But markets are never in equilibrium. They're either moving away from equilibrium or toward equilibrium. I thought that they were moving away.
KERNEN: But did he finally say, okay, you're right, Mr. Treasury Secretary? Or did you finally say, you're right, Stan? Or how did, how did that end?
BESSENT: I think I met him since 1988, I don't think either one of us has ever said that to each other.
KERNEN: To the other. I know you got a breakfast or you got to go, so I want to make sure I ask you about this because I’m not, I'm not sure what to think of it. And, you know, our sister network is MS NOW. One of the things that sets the United States apart, I think, is that our leaders have to answer difficult questions, sometimes even hostile questions. And we see the alternative. And it's a badge of honor. I watch you answer hostile questions, and I think that's when you're in your element. Is how is, how is this going to play out with this ban of, and what do you think of it?
BESSENT: So, Joe, I've been traveling. I don't know much about it. I wasn't in the Oval—
KERNEN: But in general, do you think—
BESSENT: I wasn’t in the Oval when it happened. But I think we have to get, when we talk about equilibrium, clearly, for the legacy media, the equilibrium is so far out of kilter because what the, what group is one of the few that is less popular than the U.S. Congress?
KERNEN: Right.
BESSENT: Legacy media. And why is that? Because of the perceived bias. So the American people deserve good reporting. I couldn't agree more.
KERNEN: Right.
BESSENT: But you know, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see where this goes—
KERNEN: Stop, stop the presses, all the different presidents. And I will grant you that I think maybe Republican presidents historically have had maybe a tougher time with mainstream media, but you've got Fox News that has been all over Democratic presidents. I just don't, I just don't think this is something we, that will last in this country. We don't do this in this country.
BESSENT: You know, I, again, we'll see. This president has been the most transparent president in history.
KERNEN: He answered more. I think he likes to answer questions. That's why I don't, and I understand, believe me, that he feels that he has been unfairly treated by the media, but I think he finally got to a point where sometimes he just, he just says, okay, enough, but I think there's got to be an off ramp that the administration is looking for.
BESSENT: Yeah, we'll see. Maybe it's a change in coverage at the White House because some of these reporters, they just don't do their job well. We'll have something. And then they'll ask some crazy question.
KERNEN: And I know you have said that you're here for policy. You don't like, you don't want any palace drama. And you've called swamp creatures I think. And I understand all that. But that's the way, you can't control the press, right? The press is going to press, media is going to media.
BESSENT: Joe, you know, the one thing I'm sure of the press cares more about the press than anything else, that after the White House Correspondents dinner, that they didn't come in there to kill the press, they came in to kill the president. But all we heard about was the personal experiences of the press people in the room, because somehow the, they were more important. Same thing with the aircraft in Ankara that the presidential pool saying, oh, we were so vulnerable. They were there to kill the president of the United States of America. And the Secret Service made a decision. So, you know, again, one thing I am sure is that this will be covered by the, by the press. And, you know, I think we could get back to something that is a little more, I can't even remember which network it is, fair and balanced.
QUICK: And, Mr. Secretary, let's talk a little bit more about the markets very quickly. I know you have to leave very soon, but looking at what you've said, that you're the house, that you're going to make sure you've got a lot of money behind you and you can really maneuver things. What do you see in terms of what action might be needed?
BESSENT: Yeah. And, Becky, what I said is that I didn't mean it by I have a lot of money behind me, is that the, I am able to have legal inside information that I see, my job for 35 years as a macro analyst and investor was to sit outside the room, maybe have my ear up against the door, sometimes pull myself over, try to look over the transom and figure out what policymakers could do or should do and will do.
QUICK: OK.
BESSENT: Now I am in the room.
QUICK: Yeah.
BESSENT: And we try to figure out what we should do, what we can do, and what we will do, and how will the markets react. And I've constantly said that if investors can just take a deep breath and listen to what's being said in a rational way after Liberation Day, I think I was on this network, many other networks. And I said, why doesn't everyone just take a deep breath? The tariffs you were seeing are the highest tariffs. You're going to see if there's no retaliation. And the only country that retaliated was China. The market sold off. I can't remember about 14, 13, 14 percent. And then we had the fastest recovery ever. So anyone who sold then just wasn't listening. And it was the same, it was kind of the same thing. You know, I will point out that since the, I announced the increased buyback size that we've had a surge in oil prices, global rates are up around the world. How much is the 30-year treasury up?
KERNEN: Yeah. We're going to let—
BESSENT: One basis point.
KERNEN: We're going to let you get to breakfast. I offered to bring in those new Chick-fil-A waffle stuff, but, I know you, I know you got to go.
BESSENT: Oh, I'll take you up on that.
KERNEN: I, that advertising works because I'm like, whoa, they have those. Now, Kevin Warsh did go up a quarter point. Inflation's been running time. Maybe you think it's going to come down. Does the president understand what, what Kevin Warsh had to do? Do you think that the long end needed that credibility move to not even be more, more vigilantes getting in? Do you agree with the move?
BESSENT: Yeah, I'm not going to talk about whether I agree with it or not. But the, I have great confidence in Chair Warsh. More importantly, the president has great confidence in him, and we are sure that he will do the right thing to balance the inflation mandate versus the growth mandate. And we'll see that, we will see whether this is the, a supply shock on the energy side, but thus far, core inflation has been a very quiescent. And we, so we haven't seen an uptick in that. Everything is in the headline inflation.
KERNEN: All right. Well, you let us know next time you're in town because it's much better when you're on set. And I will have those waffles and chicken waiting.
BESSENT: Yeah. Well, I, I allocate myself to two Chick-fil-A's a month. So—
KERNEN: And that's hard, right? You have trouble sticking.
BESSENT: It's very, it's very hard. When you're from down south, you grow up on them.
KERNEN: I hear you. Mr. Treasury Secretary, once again, thank you for joining us.
QUICK: Thank you.
KERNEN: And we love all those Secret Service guys. Just leave a couple of them if you could. Anyway, thank you. We'll be right back.
BESSENT: Good to see you.
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