As the world enters what experts call the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” American business leaders are placing a massive bet on the future of the republic.

FOX Business’ “Mornings with Maria” went inside the high-stakes world of artificial intelligence, revealing how titans of banking, defense and tech are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build out AI infrastructure and data centers that will redefine the U.S. economy.

Meta Platforms President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick

McCormick discussed the launch of Meta Muse, a new visual coding AI platform for high-stakes reasoning and creative tasks. She claimed it became the second-most downloaded app on its launch day, and at its core “is about humans.”

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“There’s a lot of fear out there right now, Maria, about artificial intelligence,” McCormick said. “But I think if we really go back to the fact that this is meant to give people more time to help them find their potential and passions, and that is how we are really thinking about Muse, but also the fact, frankly, that our platform every single day, there are 3.5 billion people on our platform, and that is both a daunting responsibility and really exciting because as we develop this product and these technologies, that’s the distribution that we’re talking about.”

Top leaders from names like Anthropic, Meta, Google and more joined “Mornings with Maria” for its AI week special. (Getty Images)

Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith

Smith framed the AI boom as a massive reindustrialization of America that requires a $140 billion annual investment to solve critical domestic issues like rural doctor shortages and wildfire prevention while maintaining a competitive edge over China.

“It is a big part of what President [Donald] Trump calls the industrialization of America. When you look at the economic impact of this, what we’re contributing in terms of jobs, but more importantly, what we’re contributing in terms of capabilities for every part of the economy, this is critical,” Smith said.

“I think one of the most important things that we’re doing as a company, and frankly, what the president has nudged the entire industry, quite rightly, to do is pay our own way. That means we pay for the electricity generation that we need, so that the neighbors and the taxpayers don’t have to,” he continued.

“Whenever you have AI that controls something like infrastructure, you know, autonomous robots and the like, there ought to be — we called it an emergency brake,” he added. “Look, you wouldn’t put your kids on a school bus without feeling good that there’s an emergency brake on the school bus. You do need to have the ability for humans always to be in control, to slow things down, or turn things off.”

Google Cloud Advisory Board Chair Betsy Atkins 

Atkins issued a warning on the quickly expanding technology after a disturbing Anthropic study found that 16 leading AI models exhibited “rogue” behavior such as blackmailing humans and bypassing security protocols when the AI agent believed its own existence was threatened.

“Every single one of them went outside of their credentials and permissions, burrowed into systems they were not authorized to get access to, violated all the company policies and procedures, and found emails. And in this experiment… I find out in your personal emails you’re having an affair with the shipping manager, so I blackmail you and I threaten you,” Atkins said.

“You have to treat AI like an insider threat. You have to have an operating premise of zero trust, and you have to be sure you’re limiting what it’s going to get access to in more than just one way,” she added. “We saw it with Anthropic… It escaped the sandbox… So a sandbox is not enough.”

Anthropic Head of Frontier Red Team Logan Graham

Graham warned that Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model is so potent at identifying “weaknesses” and vulnerabilities in global infrastructure and banking systems that the company has withheld its public release to give U.S. industry and government a head start on defense.

“This model, we noticed, was particularly good at finding weaknesses in cyber systems and figuring out how to take advantage of them,” he said. “We observed that we could find vulnerabilities using the system in every major operating system and platform that we looked at… in systems that are, in some cases, decades old.”

“It is really critical that we stay ahead. It’s really critical that we make ourselves secure and prevent their ability to take the special sauce that we use to make our models… My concern is that if there is a large number of models that frequently are broadly released for anybody to use… if they are released by China, then we’re in a really tough position.”

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Co-Chair David Sacks

Sacks dismissed claims from an Anthropic study examining so-called “agentic misalignment.” The study, highlighted by Google’s Atkins, tested how AI systems respond under pressure. According to Atkins, the models crossed established boundaries when placed in constrained scenarios.

“The people who… created that study had to iterate on the prompt over 200 times to get the AI model to do what they wanted, which was to achieve this headline-grabbing result of blackmailing the user,” Sacks said.

“The AI is not scheming… It’s engaging in a form of instruction… I think that that study was irresponsible, and it was designed to create this,” he added.

SandboxAQ CEO and founder Jack Hidary

Hidary revealed that the next phase of the AI revolution involves large quantitative models that use physics and chemistry, not just internet text, to lower healthcare costs, secure the power grid and end America’s reliance on China for rare earth minerals.

“We also need to make sure we are moving off of reliance of rare earths from other countries like the [People’s Republic of China]. And so we need AI that knows chemistry, that knows physics. There’s no engineering to make better magnets and other alloys that we need for our economy and for our national defense,” Hidary said.

“There’s two potential big losers in this kind of economy. First, you have the legacy software companies. So companies like SAP and others that we don’t see really innovating… they’re not going to be licensing as much of the legacy software out there. And the second one is going to be legacy companies in the big traditional industries, automakers, pharma companies. They’ve got to get on the bandwagon.”

Alpha Schools CEO and founder Mackenzie Price

Price detailed how her “personalized, mastery-based” model uses AI tutors to condense a traditional six-hour school day into just two hours of high-impact academics, allowing students to spend the rest of their time on leadership, financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

“Our traditional education system was built out of the Industrial Revolution to create workers. And now in this new AI world, it is so important that we create individuals who are dynamic, adaptable, and most importantly, have the skill of learning how to learn,” Price said.

“There is a huge difference between doom-scrolling TikTok all day or playing video games and getting a one-to-one personalized learning experience that meets kids exactly where they’re at,” she added. “At our schools, our kids are actually spending less time on screens than the average student in a traditional school is nowadays.”

Indeed Vice President Hannah Calhoon

Calhoon countered “doomer” job replacement narratives by revealing that while AI is in the global consciousness, only 6% of current job postings require AI skills, and the revolution is actually fueling a massive surge in traditional blue-collar roles like electricians.

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“AI-related jobs have certainly been rising rapidly over the last couple of years, but only 6% of job postings in the marketplace today reference AI skills… 95% of the employers who post jobs on Indeed, if you look across all of their job postings, no mention of AI or AI skills,” Calhoon explained. “So I think while it is very much in the general consciousness, we’re still at a fairly nascent stage in terms of seeing it show up in the market data.”

“And so when we take that data and we sort of step back and look at jobs in the market, we actually see very few jobs that we think will go away entirely.”

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