Fast Money · Sep 29, 2026
With Gene Munster, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Deepwater Asset Management
Gene Munster expects AI capital spending to hit 60% growth next year, well above Wall Street's 40% consensus.
The White House had just signed an AI accord built on industry self-regulation. Munster, who spent two decades covering the biggest tech companies as a Wall Street analyst, called the announcement theater and said the safety problem behind it is still unsolved.
"And so the reason why I mention that is that I just want to underscore is that the safety topic is still not been solved and it won't be solved because the government is essentially saying go for it." — Gene Munster
Munster spent 21 years at Piper Jaffray as a senior equity research analyst covering Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook before co-founding Deepwater Asset Management. He told CNBC's Fast Money why he isn't buying the self-regulation pitch, and why he still expects capital spending on AI to accelerate.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 2 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
The White House's new AI accord is "theater," not a safety fix, Munster said
He said AI stocks fell 5% to 7% the Monday after Dario Amodei's letter warned about AI risk a few weeks earlier
AI capital spending is headed for 60% growth next year, above the Street's current 40% forecast
Personal AI agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's newly launched Dot are used daily by less than 1% of Americans, and Munster says that will change fast
He rates AI investing in the "third inning," with the hardware buildout running another three to five years
1. Accord Called 'Theater'
The host asked whether today's AI accord amounted to a green light for the industry to move fast and self-police. Munster said the announcement mixed a symbolic gesture with a harder truth.
He called the safety framework theater, not substance
"There was a theater piece today. I'll start there. The theater piece was they've got it. They've got safety under control. They're going to self-regulate. That helps people at the dinner table. I don't know if anybody's going to buy it, but that was kind of the fluff side of this." — Gene Munster
The real story, he said, is that Trump is fully behind treating AI as central to the country's future, and the self-regulation talk does not hide that the industry is being told to move fast. Munster said AI stocks fell 5% to 7% the Monday after Dario Amodei's letter warning about AI risk rattled the market a few weeks earlier, and that Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Sam Altman all have an incentive to downplay safety concerns that could hurt their businesses.
The safety problem behind the accord is still unsolved, he said
"And so the reason why I mention that is that I just want to underscore is that the safety topic is still not been solved and it won't be solved because the government is essentially saying go for it." — Gene Munster
Munster pointed to a safety protocol he called Sentry, which he said Nvidia announced the day before, plus separate open-source efforts, as more likely sources of real progress on keeping AI agents in check than the accord itself. None of it changes his own outlook.
"I'm a big believer that there's a lot of positive that's going to come out of AI and can think investors should still look at us in the third inning of AI. we are nowhere close to the end of this train." — Gene Munster
