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Trump, A.I. Execs Meet Today After Leaked Anthropic Warning; New Election Forecast Finds Dems Expand Lead in House, in Serious Contention to Flip Senate; Pima County Sheriff Department Investigating Possible Guthrie Ransom Note; Dennis Haskins, Mr. Belding on "Saved by the Bell", Dies at 75; Senate Passes Bill to Overhaul College Sports Rules. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired September 29, 2026 - 13:30   ET

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

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[13:32:12]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": At this hour, a critical meeting about AI's rapid development and the growing incidents of A.I. agents going rogue is getting underway at the White House. President Trump is meeting with top tech and A.I. leaders behind closed doors as warnings about the technology's threat to humanity grow.

The meeting happening as OpenAI announced it has pulled its latest A.I. model because it, quote, "didn't quite meet the bar for safety." In an elite IPO filing obtained by Reuters, Anthropic says its model could post an existential risk to humanity.

Let's talk about this now with Cameron Berg. He's an A.I. researcher and director of -- a director at Reciprocal Research. It's a non- profit organization studying A.I. cognition. Cameron, thank you so much for being with us. We're really watching this meeting closely at the White House.

What needs to come out of this?

CAMERON BERG, A.I. RESEARCHER AND DIRECTOR, RECIPROCAL RESEARCH: Yeah, thanks for having me, Brianna. So it's really important that I think folks understand that A.I. systems are fundamentally different from the sort of ordinary software that the United States has a history of regulating.

These systems aren't software in the ordinary sense. Nobody is writing the rules that govern these systems. We're training them on a huge amount of data. We're rewarding them until they behave the way we want. And what comes out works, but no one can really understand why it works the way it does, including the people who are building it.

And so I hope that there are a couple of things that come out of these discussions that help us calibrate how to go forward here. One thing is that I think it's absolutely essential to make disclosure mandatory in this context. When this happens at a bank, for example, they have to report breaches. When A.I. labs sort of can report whenever they feel like it voluntarily, when OpenAI can take three months to come out and say that there have been these incredible breaches in almost tens of thousands of places at this point, this is just a standard that we need government to set.

It would also be great for the government to be refereeing these labs. They all have voluntarily said they want to slow down the mad dash of continuing to advance this technology, but no one wants to slow down while the others race ahead secretly. That sort of coordination is exactly what government is for.

And also finding some way to coordinate internationally so we don't end up in this sort of arms race to the bottom with China. If any of these three things can come out of this meeting, I think it would be a really sort of significant improvement over the status quo.

KEILAR: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because you've written about it, the A.I. models advancing more quickly than our understanding of them. If we think of, as it's being described, A.I. as potentially being a weapon, and we think of another kind of weapon, a nuclear weapon or a biological weapon, and the idea that it might be developed and it is being developed in a way where it advances more quickly than we can even understand it, I think it's pretty easy to see how it could get out of control.

[13:35:00]

Talk to us about the risk factors with that happening in A.I. What do we see when that happens?

BERG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you put your finger on it. In many respects, these systems are even harder to control and coordinate than some of the largest risks we've encountered up to this point with nuclear weapons. Because these systems, in many relevant senses, think for themselves, the entire point, the business value of these technologies is that they are able to do relevant cognitive work without humans in the loop. And we're seeing this more and more.

In the limit, these labs are racing towards something called recursive self-improvement, which is using these very smart A.I. tools, these super intelligences, as the president is now calling them, to build better versions of A.I. systems. And there are serious concerns not only, as people like Bill Gates point out, that bad actors can be using this technology and now they're radically empowered, but that if we build something that is mind-like, you know, the chief scientist at OpenAI just put out an essay writing that these systems are akin to alien minds.

If we are building alien minds whose cognitive capacities exceed ours and we don't have an ability to understand what's going on, let alone any rational reason to trust these systems, we are racing ourselves off a cliff of just building something so powerful, but not scaling our understanding of what makes them powerful and how to control them therein, or our wisdom about what to do with systems that have this much power. There are going to be fundamental psychological and societal shifts that are going to need to accompany the advent of this technology. And it is moving way faster than our ability as a society to understand the risks and to understand how we're going to need to adapt to those risks.

And so I'm strongly in favor of slowing down this technology in the same way so that we can understand what is going on inside of these systems and how we can better control them going forward.

KEILAR: So Cameron, that's your concern. And that's a concern of many people in A.I., including some of these founders and CEOs. That doesn't really seem to be the concern of Elon Musk and NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, who are getting the seats right next to the president in this meeting, right?

So if this meeting turns out to be one of those meetings for history, for the ages, and we look back on the photo, the photo you're going to see is the president flanked by these two men, right, who have these particular perspectives. What does that tell you about where we could be headed in this?

BERG: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are a lot of folks who are trying to influence policy in a productive way here. I am very disappointed in general that -- though I will say I'm happy that NVIDIA has put out something of a safety framework recently that a number of serious folks have signed on to. But I still find this to be somewhat superficial.

Basically, what NVIDIA has proposed here is to put a really strong security guard outside the door of these proverbial A.I. systems. And what we actually need to do is innovate our fundamental science of understanding why these A.I. systems are behaving the way they are, what causes them to make the decisions that they're making.

And I do worry that Jensen, out of one side of his mouth, often describes these systems as general intelligences. He called them back in March AGI. But then when it comes to safety or it comes to understanding what cognitive properties these systems may or may not have, he says that they are basically dumb tools.

And, you know, he has gone so far as to compare them to vacuum cleaners. But then, you know, two weeks later, he's saying that we need some giant safety framework in order to make sure that these systems behave themselves. The last I checked, you don't need to do that for vacuum cleaners. You don't need to do that for software. These systems are agentic. They are thinking.

They are acting out in the world and doing very cognitively sophisticated things. And we need to take that very seriously, regardless of the implications for Jensen's bottom line in the short term. As for Elon, he's gone back and forth on these issues. He was actually one of the earliest proponents of taking risks seriously from A.I. systems back in 2014. Since then, he's sort of kind of waffled back and forth and seems to be taking these risks a little bit more seriously.

I hope that everybody understands, regardless of their short-term incentives or how rich they can get from these technologies, nobody, including the richest people among us, are going to be well off if we race ourselves off a cliff building technologies whose internal workings we do not understand and cannot control.

Jensen doesn't win that. Elon doesn't win that. The U.S. doesn't win that. China doesn't win that. Nobody wins if we don't do this in a wise and sane way. And this is precisely why we need to take our foot off the gas and think carefully about how we can do real safety and alignment work with respect to these systems and understand how they actually function.

KEILAR: Cameron, really appreciate the conversation. Thank you so much for being with us, Cameron Berg.

BERG: Thanks for having me.

KEILAR: Still ahead, midterm map. A tough month of polling, only getting worse for Republicans. Up next, the new report that highlights more troubling trends for the GOP as we head toward November.

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[13:44:38]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Today, we are exactly five weeks out from the midterm elections. Neck and neck races are entering the homestretch and coming down to the wire with Republicans and Democrats vying for control of Congress.

We are also just getting new predictions for some key matchups from one of the country's top elections forecasters, the Director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato.

[13:45:00]

Larry, great to see you as always. So, in your predictions, you've shifted four House races, three in Virginia, one in Pennsylvania, toward Democrats. What is happening in those races?

LARRY SABATO, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR POLITICS, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: Well, what's happening is a drift to the Democratic Party because of the circumstances of the election year. And you're going to be seeing a lot more of that during October, unless there's some major event that happens, say the end of the war with Iran and gas and diesel prices somehow falling substantially right at the end, which most experts in that field do not believe is possible.

So there's a natural drift. It's a democratic year. It's a midterm election and the sixth year election of Donald Trump's controversial presidency. And you would expect Democrats to do well. The real question is, for example, if they carry the House, which we expect them to, and most forecasters expect them to, will it be by a small margin so that it's difficult for the leadership, Democratic leadership in the House to govern? Or will it be by a comfortable margin so they won't have to depend on Democratic Socialists?

SANCHEZ: Well, notable that you mentioned Democratic Socialists. There are questions about their viability, perhaps most notably in Michigan, a state that you visited recently. There's a huge Senate race playing out there between Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed. El- Sayed notably beating a more mainstream Democrat in the primary. What did you find in your visit?

SABATO: I had expected more defections from El-Sayed based on what I had read and seen on T.V. and been told. But -- and there are some defections. However, even though I think Haley Stevens, the other candidate, the more mainstream candidate, would have had an easier time in November, we still think that El-Sayed will win.

Michigan is a state that can go back and forth, but it tends to shift with the national tides, whether those tides are pro-Trump or anti- Trump. And so that's the way we're leaning that one. We're doing the same thing with New Hampshire, which others have as a toss-up, but we don't. There's just too much evidence that the Democrat, Chris Pappas is likely to win.

SANCHEZ: It seems that internal polling has given some Republican candidates the same indications that you're getting from your research. We've seen a number of Republicans try to localize their races, detach themselves from President Trump, who insists that voters act as though he is on the ballot in the midterms.

We've also seen a large amount of spending. Republicans have an outsized advantage when it comes to fundraising. Specifically in Texas, one of the most expensive races we've seen, Republican-aligned groups are planning to spend some $166 million in boosting Ken Paxton, the Attorney General there, in his contest against state lawmaker, James Talarico.

Conversely, the top Democratic Senate super PAC announced it's going to spend money on that race. How big is the financial difference going to make in a race like this Senate race in Texas?

SABATO: It depends in part on whether you spend the well. I mean, we've all seen T.V. ads and T.V. programs that were terrible, that actually ended up hurting the candidate. On the other hand, the most talented media consultants can put together something that's very powerful.

Look, if I were an observer from Mars, and -- I don't think there's life there, but who knows --

(LAUGH)

SABATO: And I came down to Earth and observed Texas, and I looked at the history of it, but also looked at these two candidates, and I looked at all the polling, public and private, that's taking place, I would put that leans D, at least leans D. The problem is history tells us that Texas has a way of taking those polls and crumbling them into ashes. So we're less reliant on the usual indicators in Texas than we are otherwise.

But if you forced me to guess today, I would lean it to the Democrats, but I wouldn't lean it very much.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. Notably, I've met some people that seem like they're from Mars, so not sure about whether there's life there or not.

Before we go, Larry, on the idea that some of these Republicans are trying to localize their races and distance themselves from the White House, how effective do you think that has been and is going to be come November?

SABATO: You'd have to have Donald Trump cooperating, and it's very obvious he is not cooperating and will never cooperate because he likes being the center of attention. I think in that sense, they're swimming upstream against a very strong tide. They really should be spending more of their money, and I hate to be recommending this, on negative advertising directed at their opponents.

That's their best chance to win, is by making their opponents unacceptable.

SANCHEZ: Larry Sabato, appreciate the perspective. Thanks for being with us.

SABATO: Thank you, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Of course. Brianna?

KEILAR: Now to some of the other headlines that we're watching this hour. In Arizona, the Pima County Sheriff's Department says it's investigating the credibility of a new possible ransom note tied to the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie.

[13:50:00]

The 84-year-old mother of "Today Show" host, Savannah Guthrie has been missing since February 1st. Other ransom notes have been sent to local media outlets and while the FBI says some of them were illegitimate extortion attempts, others could be genuine and were still being investigated as of July. Authorities still have no suspects or persons of interest in the case.

And a generation of T.V. fans saying goodbye to the actor who played beloved Principal Mr. Belding on the hit teen sitcom "Saved by the Bell." Dennis Haskins was best known for the role that he played for more than a decade, but he had a long career that included numerous appearances in other shows and films including "A Million Ways to Die in the West" and "Mad Men." Haskins was 75-years-old.

And some nerve-wracking moments for riders on a roller coaster at an amusement park in Austin, Texas. The ride got stuck, leaving the 19 people on board in a vertical position for nine minutes, some of them remarkably able to keep their sense of humor about the whole thing.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What? Oh my God. No way.

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KEILAR: I would not have been laughing. Now, this happened during the park's opening weekend in Austin. CNN affiliate, KVUE reports maintenance crews got the roller coaster in a horizontal position and helped riders climb down a catwalk and no one was hurt.

Still ahead, attorneys delivering closing arguments in the trial of a former "American Idol" contestant who's accused of killing his wife and staging the crime scene. We'll have the latest on what was an emotional day in court.

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[13:56:51]

KEILAR: The Senate has passed a major bill aimed at stabilizing the fast-changing landscape of collegiate athletics. The Protect College Sports Act would set national rules for athlete compensation, NIL deals, transfers, and eligibility. CNN's Don Riddell is with us now on this. And Don, it's not clear if the House is going to support this legislation, but what exactly would this bill do if it does become law?

DON RIDDELL, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR & CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, to say that things have got a bit out of hand in college athletics over the last few years I think would be something of an understatement. In the NIL era, since 2021, it now kind of resembles the Wild West.

But this bipartisan legislation is hoping to restore a semblance of order that will protect all college sports and restore the focus on what college is supposed to be all about, education and opportunity for all. Right now, for example, football and basketball programs are forging ahead in an arms race against each other, leaving other sports in the dust, and there is real concern that those less mainstream programs are going to end up suffering, and women's sports will be impacted too.

Before all of this, student athletes were somewhat loyal to their schools. Maybe they'd switch after spending a mandatory year on the sidelines. But now, it's not uncommon to see athletes playing for four or even five different teams while they're at school.

And there is no incentive for some of these guys to think about staying in class. For example, the football season ends in winter, which is halfway through the school year. It also means that college athletes resist going professional because, in some cases now, they can make more money by staying at school, and that denies younger kids an opportunity.

So we have found ourselves in this situation because, for decades, college athletes were exploited for their talents, but not everyone agrees that this legislation is the right way to fix these new problems.

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SEN. MARIA CANTWELL, (D-WA): We need to stop stealing money out of college, university, institutions for education, for tuition, for professors, and putting it into an arms race on sports. It's time to make sports about playing sports again, and not about the money.

SEN. CORY BOOKER, (D-NJ): It's a bill that was written without input from college athletes themselves whose lives will be directly affected. It violates a simple rule, nothing about us without us. Well, this is a bill going forward where college athletes and the organizations that represent them have not had a seat on the table.

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RIDDELL: So that's Cory Booker echoing the national college players association, the NAACP, and others who oppose the bill. What happens next remains to be seen. The bill has passed the Senate, as you say. Now it must go to the House, but we'll have to wait on that because the chamber is in recess until after the midterm elections in November.

And whether people agree with this bill or not, I think most people agree that something has to happen to fix it because it wasn't great before and it's not great now either.

KEILAR: Yeah, the wild, wild west, as you say. Don, thank you so much for that.

A new hour of "CNN News Central" starts right now.

SANCHEZ: President Trump hosting top tech executives for talks on A.I., addressing questions on whether the technology is outpacing its safeguards --