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The Situation Room

Dangers of A.I.?; Trump-Netanyahu Tensions; Capitol Hill Staffers Fear Reporting Sexual Harassment. Aired 10:30a-11a ET

Aired June 02, 2026 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

ALLISON GORDON, CNN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: So, women have told us that they need that change in culture, but also a change in the reporting process to feel more comfortable coming forward.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Yes.

And, meantime, I know you've been speaking to the House Ethics Committee. One source told CNN that the House Ethics Committee's historical nickname has been the Member Protection Service. How is the committee responding to this reporting?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, look, the committee typically gives no comment.

They don't want to be seen as going out there and having these conversations publicly. But I will note that, in the wake of those resignations from Swalwell and Gonzales they did put out a really robust statement, making clear that they have done investigations on sexual harassment in the past.

They really chronicled where those investigations had gone in an unprecedented way, Pam. They realize they are coming under fire by not just these reports, but also members, who argue this process is taking so long.

And if you're a young woman and you're considering coming forward and members are saying publicly that they don't trust the Ethics Committee to move quickly enough, that might make you second-guess whether or not you want to go to them, right?

BROWN: Right. And then, as we've seen, once the members leave, the committee loses jurisdiction, right?

FOX: Exactly. That's another huge issue.

BROWN: So, there is concern of the -- not being accountability.

All right, great reporting to both of you. Allison Gordon, Lauren Fox, thank you both -- Wolf.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Some terrific reporting indeed.

And just ahead: sophisticated drug tunnels. Shocking new video showing a very complex system stretching from Mexico to the United States inside here. Traffickers allegedly carried more than a ton of cocaine.

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BROWN: Happening now: Gas prices are falling. The national average is $4.29 right now. That's a 20-cent drop over the last week, the largest weekly decrease since the 2008 recession.

An explosion at a fireworks factory. Investigators are looking into the cause of the blast. All workers at the plant are accounted for, fortunately. Two men in nearby fields had minor injuries.

And look at this, drug tunnels revealed. A federal investigation discovered this sophisticated system between Mexico and California. The tunnels are almost 2,000 feet long and have reinforced walls, rails and ventilation systems, even electricity. Four people were charged with trafficking more than $45 million worth of cocaine through these tunnels.

BLITZER: And we have more breaking news.

Tensions reportedly flared up between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Axios is reporting that President Trump vented his frustration over Israel's plan to bomb Hezbollah targets in Beirut, saying to Netanyahu in a call: "You're effing crazy" -- direct quote.

With us now is Barak Ravid. He's a CNN political and global affairs analyst. He's also a global affairs correspondent for Axios and broke the reporting on Trump and Netanyahu and that phone call.

Trump and Netanyahu, Barak, are known for having a very tight relationship that still obviously can get some -- pretty tense at times. Is this conversation any different?

BARAK RAVID, CNN POLITICAL AND GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Yes, Wolf, I think Trump and Netanyahu have been very close, very coordinated, especially on Iran, but that doesn't mean that from time to time they don't have some significant differences that erupt in phone calls.

And the U.S. official told me that the phone call they had yesterday around noon was one of the worst they have had since Trump came back to the White House. And during that call, Trump pretty bluntly told Netanyahu that he needs to stand down when it comes to his plan to order the IDF to bomb Beirut, to knock down buildings in Beirut, Hezbollah targets in the Lebanese capital.

And Trump for some time thought that knocking down buildings in Beirut was a disproportionate response to what's been going on, to the fighting and the fact that Hezbollah is attacking Israeli soldiers in Southern Lebanon and Israeli towns in Northern Israel.

Trump supported Israeli retaliation, but not by knocking down buildings in Beirut. And I think that is what led to this call. And during the call, Trump was very clear and very strongly worded when he told Netanyahu to stand down and not to move forward with the strike.

BLITZER: Does the tension, Barak, in this phone call partly come from the pressure that President Trump is under right now to try to bring this war to an end?

RAVID: Yes, definitely. I think that's part of it, because, since the first cease-fire with Iran almost two months ago, it was clear that the Iranians want Lebanon to be part of the deal.

Actually, in the announcement, in the Pakistani announcement of the cease-fire at the time, Lebanon was mentioned. And the Iranians want Lebanon to be part of any new memorandum of understanding with the U.S.

And it's actually -- at least at the moment, it is part of the draft text. So I think that the Iranians, what they did, on the one hand, they pushed Hezbollah to escalate the attacks on Israel, including on towns along the border, in order to put more pressure on Netanyahu.

On the other hand, when Netanyahu ordered retaliation, they went to the U.S. and said, well, if the Israelis are attacking Beirut, there's no deal. We're not talking to you. And through this maneuver, they try to or they're still trying to get a deal on their terms with the United States.

[10:40:07]

And I think that Trump, one of the reasons that he told Netanyahu to stand down when it comes to bombing Beirut is that he understood that this would lead to a major escalation and would unravel all the negotiations and all the progress he had in his effort to reach a deal with Iran.

BLITZER: All right, Barak Ravid reporting for us.

Excellent reporting, Barak. Thank you very, very much -- Pamela.

RAVID: Thank you.

BROWN: All right. Wolf, coming up here in THE SITUATION ROOM: Will artificial intelligence replace us? That's the next topic in our SITUATION ROOM series "Decoding A.I." We will discuss up next.

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BROWN: And now to our series here in THE SITUATION ROOM "Decoding A.I."

All week, we're examining the impact of artificial intelligence on just about everything, looking at the good and the bad. But perhaps the overarching question many experts in the field have is, is A.I. an existential threat to humanity?

On one end, the so-called A.I. doomers say, yes, that, without safeguards, the race between A.I. superpowers could lead to the end of humanity. And then there's A.I. optimists on the other hand that say not to worry and that the technology's pros outweigh the cons. And then there are those who are in the middle who say, look, if we act right now, something can be done and we can all be protected and have a mutual existence.

So, joining us now to discuss as Tristan Harris. He is the co-founder of Humane Tech and a former Google design ethicist.

Tristan, great to have you on the show.

So, where do you stand in this debate? Does A.I. pose a fundamental risk to life as we know?

TRISTAN HARRIS, CO-FOUNDER, CENTER FOR HUMANE TECHNOLOGY: Well, yes, I think the thing, people hear all these competing narratives about A.I.

And we did this film with the directors of "Everything Everywhere All at Once" "The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist," which was trying to, as you said in the opening, synthesize these different perspectives on A.I.

But what I want your audience to know is, how can we be so confident, I believe, that we're heading to an anti-human future? And the way that -- we predicted in the film "The Social Dilemma" what would happen with social media. We had the possible of social media, it was going to do all these amazing things.

But then we had the probable based on the incentives, the race for engagement and maximizing addiction, maximizing duration of use, frequency of use, the doomscrolling brain rot economy, extreme content polarization.

And we got the probable, not the possible. So, with A.I., we have a similar thing. We have the possible, it could cure all diseases, it could automate all work, do all these jobs for us and free us up. But then we have the probable. What are the companies' actual incentives?

And Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, said, if you show me the incentives, I will show you the outcome. OK, so what are the A.I. companies' incentives? Are they to free us up from all the labor, or are they to -- are they to give us tools that help us do our work more efficiently?

Or is it to replace our jobs? Think about the amount of money that they have taken on. The only way they can pay back that debt is if they actually replace all labor in the economy. And so that's why, and I can go into it...

BROWN: Yes.

HARRIS: But I think people need to understand that the default incentives are to replace economically valuable work, not to augment it or support it. BROWN: That's an important point, because some of these A.I.

companies, these big ones, still haven't made a profit, right? They're investing so much money, still haven't made a profit.

And given this scenario, I mean, is there any realistic way to regulate A.I., given this global race that is happening right now between superpowers and between these companies for artificial general intelligence, which, for our audience, just so you understand what that means, that means A.I. can match or surpass human capabilities and virtually every cognitive ability?

HARRIS: Yes, that's right.

Well, so I think the thing to get about the race with China is that we're not in a race for who has the technology. We're also in a race for who's better at governing the impact of the technology, because let's say we beat China at automating all the work, but then we create 50 percent unemployment and we don't know how to manage that transition.

Well, we just beat China to just blowing up our entire social fabric and not actually leading to a healthy society, whereas, if they manage that transition, they would beat us. So think about social media. Again, the U.S. beat China to social media, to that technology.

But then it's like we created this psychological bazooka, but we didn't govern it very well. So we kind of flipped it around and blew off our own collective national brain with that technology.

Meanwhile, China has actually done more to regulate that technology. So, again, we're not just in a race for the power. We're in a race for the wisdom for who's better at governing the technology. And whoever governs it better will win.

Now, there's an important concept called the intelligence curse, that if a country discovers -- like, Venezuela or Congo discovers a natural resource like oil or diamonds or conflict minerals, and the economy comes from the resource, not from the labor of the people, you get these kind of failed states, where the resource used to become a blessing turns into a curse.

And there's a similar thing with A.I. where,. what happens when 50 percent of the GDP in the United States comes from A.I. and data centers and not from people and labor? Does the government have an incentive to invest in the health care, education of people, or does it have an incentive to invest in data centers?

And the answer is, it's going to have an incentive to invest in data centers. And this is how you get an anti-human future by default. But this is why, if we see this clearly, that clarity creates agency, if we don't want the future we're headed towards, the anti-human future, we have still time towards the pro-human one.

[10:50:09]

But it takes actually putting in guardrails and saying, how do you incentivize labor augmenting technology?

BROWN: Just really quickly, I mean, I know you're talking about jobs, but what else does the anti-human future look like, in your view, if nothing is done? And is there any way to pull the plug once or if we get there?

HARRIS: Well, the companies are racing to make our entire society dependent on A.I. as fast as possible, just like with social media. It's not -- really hard to unplug social media, because elections depend on it, politicians depend on it, influencers depend on it, advertisers depend on it.

And so it's really hard to put in guardrails after you have addicted your society to the technology, which is the incentive of these A.I. companies. So we have to actually change those incentives before we get to the danger zone.

And, sadly, we already have examples right now of things that used to be considered just science fiction, like the A.I. model that goes rogue or wants to blackmail people, or recently the Alibaba A.I. company, they were training their A.I. model, and in the middle of training, it actually set up a secret communication channel to the outside world and started mining for cryptocurrency on its own.

And no one programmed it to do that. These are things that people in the A.I. risk community have been warning about that I used to not even be sure were real, but this is not a hypothetical anymore. This is now real.

Now, does China win if the U.S. screws up and we lose control of an A.I. that starts mining for cryptocurrency or hacking into every computer system on the planet? No, China doesn't win if we screw it up, and we don't win if China screws it up.

So the countries have a mutual incentive to coordinate towards controllable A.I., that humans should be in control of A.I., because if I'm a Chinese military general, am I stoked to hear that A.I.s are hacking into every computer system, that we don't know how to control them?

BROWN: Right.

HARRIS: They will even hack out of the sandbox container that's meant to contain them.

No, I'm terrified as a Chinese military general. And President Trump wants to be commander in chief. He doesn't want A.I. to be commander in chief. So there is a shared incentive to make sure that humans have control over A.I.

But, to do that, we have to change again the incentives to this pro- human future, this human-controlled future of technology, and technology that's in service of human workers, not trying to replace and displace and kind of leave us without a livelihood.

BROWN: All right, Tristan Harris, thank you so much -- Wolf.

BLITZER: And let's get some more perspective right now.

I want to bring in Lance Ulanoff. He's an expert in the field and the editor in chief of TechRadar.

Lance, thanks very much for joining us.

First of all, I'm curious for your view on what our last guest just said and where you stand in this debate. Is A.I. an existential threat to humanity?

LANCE ULANOFF, EDITOR AT LARGE, TECHRADAR: No, I don't think it is. But I really understand the concern.

We are living in unprecedented times. The development of A.I. is unlike any kind of technology I have seen before. I think it's the speed that is causing this concern. The line between danger and disruption is so close, and sometimes one can look like the other.

We are living in a very disruptive time. Jobs have absolutely been affected. I think the thing that's kind of missing from the argument there is that humans are involved in this equation. Humans are building these tools.

The incentive is not purely based on companies trying to drive A.I. down our throats, not at all. In fact, it's people, consumers, adopting A.I. at scale at an unprecedented level, because previous technology epochs where people -- even the Internet took a decade for people to really adopt it, broadband, really adopt it fully, cell phones.

Each of these things took years. Four years down the line from the first introduction of ChatGPT, people are replacing Google with ChatGPT and saying they chatted. So this is all happening really quickly, but it's happening because consumers, humans, businesses are finding value in the tools.

I agree 100 percent with Tristan about the balance that's needed here. And, in fact, one of the things I think that's a real problem and why people are so freaked out is that there is no regulation. In particular, in the U.S., we can't agree on anything. And we have yet to agree on some sort of broadband U.S.-based full-scale regulation that can sort of decide what should and shouldn't happen.

Instead, states are starting to do it. States are suing. Like, Florida is suing OpenAI, which is not helpful and not really going to change the trajectory of this technology. The other thing he talked about, China, and the global competition, good luck getting the world to work together on solving this and having some sort of global regulation.

Instead, it's going to be a race. And China will not slow down. And the U.S. has to be a part of this. So there's no way to walk back or away from what's happening. But I agree we have to go through it thoughtfully. We have to think about, what do we actually want from these tools? What's valuable? What's not? [10:55:07]

BLITZER: All right, Lance Ulanoff, appreciate your joining us. Thank you very, very much.

And in our next hour, we will be discussing how A.I. could change the future of higher education.

BROWN: And, right now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is testifying on Capitol Hill for the first time since the start of the Iran war. We will bring you some of his testimony ahead.

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