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Super El Nino Fueling Storms, Driving Extreme Heat; Venezuela's Acting President Vows to Hold Elections; OpenAI Agent Hacks into Australia's National Healthcare System. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired September 24, 2026 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:30:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Even in the face of criticism, but that walkout does show that a large portion of the world is not on Israel's side in this war.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Yes, certainly demonstrated there. And these are live pictures that we are watching. Jim, thank you so much for monitoring this for us. We appreciate it.

The Super El Nino is already making its presence felt around the world. It's helping fuel Tropical Storm Nolo, which forecasters say could strengthen into a Category 3 hurricane by this weekend as it moves toward Hawaii.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: But it's the heat that has scientists really concerned. A new report warns that this supersized El Nino combined with human-caused climate change could push global temperatures higher and contribute to more than 450,000 heat-related deaths worldwide by February.

CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir joins us now. So, Bill, what more did this report find?

BILL WEIR, CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is a group out of the University of Chicago, Boris. Not peer-reviewed yet, but they basically looked at the relationship between temperature and heat deaths in thousands, 24,000 regions around the world. And given that El Nino is expected to push the temperature a full 2 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, that's how they came up with this number of 451,000 mortalities.

They even get country-specific. The global south is expected to bear the brunt of this. So Nigeria, 31,000 deaths there.

Sudan, India, Brazil also high risk. They have the number of deaths in the United States 3,500 between now and February. But other scientists that we talked to not involved in this study said really don't get hung up on the numbers.

Those are not real predictions of specific mortality. It's more a model to show the incredible risk that comes with these El Nino events that are stacked on top of record-setting global warming temperatures that we've seen. And these deaths do not include those that would come from floods or fires or other results of our overheating planet right now.

And what it really indicates is this is sort of a postcard from the future. At the current rate, what we're going to experience in this super El Nino is going to be average annual temperatures in the next 10 or 20 years or so at a time when we expect that the number of extreme heat days will increase by 44 percent. And, of course, a lot of lives could be saved in the near term right now preparing for this El Nino, cooling centers, making sure the public is aware of heat warnings on especially dangerous days.

And so, again, another scientific report just trying to get us prepared for just unprecedented temperatures. And if you see the charts for where it is, guys, in the Pacific now, it is literally almost off the charts. And we're just getting warmed up going into the winter.

SANCHEZ: Wow. Bill Weir, thank you so much for bringing us that report.

Nine months after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the country's interim president tells the U.N. General Assembly that elections will happen but at, quote, the correct time. How the U.S. plans to play a part in that when we come back.

[14:35:00]

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SANCHEZ: Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, is promising to hold elections and transition the country to a full democracy. Speaking at the U.N. General Assembly, Rodriguez didn't specify when an election would be held, instead saying the Venezuelan people will decide at, quote, the correct time.

Rodriguez assumed the position of acting president in January, of course, after longtime leader Nicolas Maduro was captured in a U.S. operation and then transported to the U.S. to face criminal charges.

We're joined now by senior political reporter for Axios, Marc Caputo. Marc, thanks so much for being with us. So in her meeting with President Trump that lasted about 15 minutes, did Trump push Delcy Rodriguez to hold the elections by a certain date?

MARC CAPUTO, SENIOR POLITICS REPORTER, AXIOS: Not by a certain date, but from what we're told in that meeting that Trump had with Rodriguez, he said, you know, at the end of the day, you're going to have to have elections, and he brought it up. Issues of this country's finances, its sovereign debt that needs to be restructured, problems with its electoral council and with its Supreme Court are also sort of on the docket. Here, the Venezuelan government and the Trump administration are apparently on the same page, which is that these big issues need to be fixed first before there can be elections.

SANCHEZ: To that point, the U.S. is looking at a three-step plan. They want to reform the electoral process, they want to reform the country's Supreme Court, and then at some point announce an election date. But then there is that complicating factor, the question of $300 billion in debt restructuring that officials told you has to be sorted before any ballots are cast.

That is separate from mining and oil deals the administration has recently struck with the government in Caracas. So I wonder if you think these elections really are the priority for President Trump, or is it having dominion over what he sees as the United States' fear of influence and dominion over Venezuela's resources, as he said at the U.N., to the victor go the spoils?

CAPUTO: Well, judging by his own speeches and what you just mentioned there, it certainly indicates his priority more is what is in the U.S. interest rather than in Venezuela's concerning elections. However, from what we're told in this meeting, he did emphasize that this was a needed step anyway for them to have elections. There is a connection, by the way, between Venezuela's sovereign debt and these other oil and mining deals that President Trump and others want to have, which is in order to have a successful country to be able to strike these arrangements and make money off of their natural resources and develop them.

[14:40:00]

Companies have to know what the tax rate is going to be, and they have to know the financial burdens and realities. And if Venezuela has a sovereign debt that is larger than its GDP, which it currently is, it makes it complicated to figure out the taxing situation. So that's one of the reasons that the administration is also working with Rodriguez's government in order to sort that out so that they can have a stable country.

One of the things that Marco Rubio Marco Rubio had said at the U.N. General Assembly during a press conference is that they don't want to have a chaotic situation with basically a broke government where the democracy would fail. Now, this might be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, but nevertheless, we're going to find out. I mean, my sources say, and everyone has said on the record so far, that no real date, no year for election has been set.

But when people start to look at the calendar and at the big challenges ahead, restructuring the debt, namely, restructuring elements of the government, they think it's more likely elections would be in 2028, not in 2027.

SANCHEZ: Yes, that description of not letting the perfect get in the way of the good, not exactly music to the ears of folks in South Florida, especially Venezuelan Americans who view Delcy Rodriguez.

CAPUTO: An enemy.

SANCHEZ: Yes, they view Delcy Rodriguez, perhaps rightfully, as an extension of Nicolas Maduro and the decades of oppression that many Venezuelans faced. She's now posing in pictures with President Trump. So how are they absorbing that?

CAPUTO: Oh, not well. And understand that's an issue that pertains mainly to the Venezuelan community in South Florida. If you stack on top of it, what's happened to Venezuelans who had temporary protective status in the United States, it compounds to sort of the misery and the anger is a lot, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans were here legally under TPS status.

And the administration canceled that. So suddenly legal residents were essentially now illegal immigrants. Legal workers were suddenly now illegal workers.

People lost jobs, people had to flee the country. And those who are still behind, some of them are hiding and not coming out. And businesses not only don't have workers who used to be legal, they now don't have customers who used to be legal.

And this is in Trump's backyard. Doral, nicknamed Doralzuela because of its large Venezuelan population. Where Trump has a golf course, you're seeing people as one hamburger shop owner, a hamburger restaurant, say that sales have fallen 70 percent.

So you start to compound these different issues. The democracy matters and the issue of Delcy Rodriguez in a very friendly thumbs up stance with President Trump, the rejection of TPS and the subsequent immigration problems. And then just the economic woes and troubles stacked on top of it, including with not limited to Trump's tariffs and the gas -- the cost of gasoline at the station as a result of the Iran war.

It's really sort of a toxic combination that you're seeing in South Florida in various Latino Hispanic communities, but especially there.

SANCHEZ: Marc Caputo, always appreciate the reporting. Thanks for joining us.

CAPUTO: Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Still ahead, the first known AI hack of a government network, how it's causing extreme concern over a process that Australia's prime minister calls unacceptable.

[14:45:00]

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KEILAR: AI anxieties are growing, not just here in the U.S., but around the world. A special task force in Australia is now investigating the first known case of an AI agent going rogue and hacking into a government system. Late yesterday, Australia's Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, revealed an OpenAI agent hacked into the country's healthcare database.

The incident happened back in June, but OpenAI says it didn't learn of it until August and did not inform Australia's government until earlier this month. Albanese calling it unacceptable when meeting with reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ANTHONY ALBANESE, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: Today, I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to express Australia's extreme concern about this incident. And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: We're joined now by the CEO of "The Atlantic" and host of "The Most Interesting Thing in AI" podcast, Nicholas Thompson. Nicholas, thank you so much for being with us to talk about this. Can we talk about the timeline here first off?

Because we know that this isn't the only case where you've had a hack. This was the Google hack also was one where it took them a couple months to find out it had happened, and then it took a couple months for them to go public with it. How problematic is it that this one with Australia happened in June, OpenAI didn't know about it till August, they didn't tell Australia immediately?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON, CEO, THE ATLANTIC: It's quite problematic. OpenAI, it seems only learned about it after they did a security review after the big Hugging Face incident. So maybe the most interesting thing is it wasn't even on their radar when it happened.

It's a reminder about how little we know about how these AI models work and what exactly they're doing.

KEILAR: Yes, they didn't catch it in real time here. So this is the first hack into a government system by an AI agent. I should say that we know of, right?

What are the national security implications here?

THOMPSON: So what's so interesting about this hack is that the previous incident, the Hugging Face incident, it's agents who are sort of being trained to do cybersecurity. This appears to have been an agent that was just part of like a training exercise to see whether they could get information. It was like kind of an innocuous experiment.

[14:50:00]

What I was -- the image I have in my mind is I go and tell an intern, hey, go get a bottle of milk. And the intern goes to the store and the store is closed. And the next thing I know there's police sirens because the intern has like taken a jackhammer and gone through the back window to get the bottle of milk, right?

And so it's a crazy thing that happened. The national security implication is that, oh wait, there are rogue agents everywhere for all kinds of purposes that could be accessing systems. So we need to do top to bottom security reviews.

Now what's hard about a top to bottom security review is that you kind of need AI to do that. And if you use an AI to do a top to bottom security review, you have the possibility of unleashing other bots into the world. So everybody's in a complicated situation right now.

KEILAR: Definitely. So this morning, the president posted, Super intelligence" -- SI, he said -- "will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is." I think the SI, he's just talking about AI there, right?

Maybe you can touch on that. But he said he wants to leave it exactly where it is. That is China's position also. Our guardrail is the DOJ. Is that an adequate guardrail, the DOJ?

THOMPSON: Well, maybe, right? The things that AI does, if AI commits crimes or commits felonies, we do have a legal system that can prosecute it. But this case actually maybe pushes back against that because let's say that Australia wanted to bring criminal charges against accessing a database.

Now, if a human had gone and a human had controlled it and a human had accessed the government database, yes, and I think it's a two year penalty in Australia, but it was part of a test at OpenAI. So what do you do? Do you go after the company?

Do you go for the person inside the company who authorized the test or who signed off on the data? We actually don't have a legal framework that would show where exactly the liability lies. So if Trump's argument is the legal system, we have is fine, just apply it to AI, that's partially correct.

But I do think there's a pretty strong case that that's inadequate. And we need to think through different ways of incentivizing the companies to do the right behavior, making sure the models are set up to do the right things, making sure that companies have done the work to understand what their agents are doing. There's a whole series of steps that could be taken to make this kind of thing much less likely.

KEILAR: And Trump portrayed AI as a way to promote peace for decades to come while he was standing next to Xi today. Does China view AI the way Trump's saying that they do?

THOMPSON: Well, China views AI quite differently from the United States. Certainly Xi, and there's certainly a lot less open discussion of it in China, either because everybody loves AI or because open discussion is a lot harder in China. And China's view is that -- or the view in China is more like powerful AI is like clean water.

Everybody should have it, it'll be great. Whereas in America, we're a little more fixated on what could go wrong, what could be bad. The advantage of the Chinese perspective is maybe it's simpler, more optimistic.

And I think that's what Trump would like in America, the advantage of the American perspective is it's grounded in reality of what's happening right now. There are a lot of complicated things happening in AI and I'm glad we're having these discussions in America. And I'm glad there's pressure on the legislative system to try to figure out how to handle the opportunities and the threats and balance them.

KEILAR: Not all AI leaders, of course, agree on the need for regulation and how available access to it should be to AI. Which industry leaders have the ear of the White House the most? Who's influencing them the most?

THOMPSON: Well, I think that Trump, it seems to be quite close. Obviously, he was quite close to Elon Musk. It does seem like his perspective aligns quite well with Mark Zuckerberg's of Metas and also Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, interestingly, who has had a somewhat different view, certainly of chip sanctions on China, appears to be having a lot of influence on Trump right now.

And then of course, he does have advisors around him like David Sacks, who are extremely influential on him. I think there's also a fairly antagonistic relationship between Trump and the leaders of Anthropic or certainly that seems to be the hardest relationship of the big AI companies. So I would say Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg are probably the two major AI leaders who most have Trump's ear right now.

KEILAR: Yes, people to watch there. Nick, great to speak with you. Thank you so much.

THOMPSON: Oh, thanks for having me on. It's always a pleasure.

KEILAR: Yes, it was great. Thank you.

The Trump administration says it can bypass a major hurdle in trying to get its 250-foot arch built outside of Arlington National Cemetery, but it's almost certain to trigger lawsuits. We'll have those details ahead.

[14:55:00]

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SANCHEZ: Now to some of the other headlines we're watching this hour. The President Trump-led Board of Peace says the reconstruction of Gaza will take $71.4 billion over the next decade. The board laid out details on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, this week.

Members of the board pitched a plan for the first six months of the recovery that involves 66 programs, including humanitarian shelters, diesel generators, and rebuilding hospitals. It's unclear exactly where the funding for those programs will come from. The board also said that its plan would be led by Palestinians.

Hawaii is bracing for more dangerous weather right now. Tropical storm Nolo is quickly strengthening and is expected to become a hurricane as it gets closer to the State's eastern islands, bringing life- threatening flooding and mudslides. The Big Island will see the worst of Nolo's impacts late Friday through Saturday ...

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