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Roller Coaster Lawsuit; DOJ Defends Trump Press Ban; Impacts of AI. Aired 10:30a-11a ET

Aired September 23, 2026 - 10:30   ET

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

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PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Happening now: Camp Mystic, the Texas camp where 27 girls and counselors died during flooding last summer, now face a criminal investigation. According to court documents, Texas investigators want to look at evidence that could lead to charges, including manslaughter or negligent homicide. No formal charges have been filed, and Camp Mystic didn't respond to requests for comment.

Also, Russia pounded Ukraine with another huge wave of strikes overnight. The attacks hit railway targets, warehouses, and fuel stations. At least two people died with dozens more hurt.

And happening now: President Trump is gearing up for a high-stakes visit from Chinese leader Xi Jinping. They have a long list of topics to discuss, but AI is likely toward the top. We have heard a string of dire warnings about AI from tech leaders who are now calling for more regulation.

CNN's Tom Foreman explains the benefits -- Tom.

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, when we look at this question of what's happening here, there are certain these strengths to be had from AI Automation is one of them.

This is a system that can much more in many ways look at a broader sense of information than humans do for things like a factory supply chain, how things are coming in, how they're going out, all of that works. This can automate tasks like that, research tasks. Instead of having a room of people researching, it can do it very fast and very quickly in many cases.

Calculation, analysis, and prediction. Let's say you want to build a new apartment building and you want to know about traffic flow and where people are going to live and where they're going to work and what other things are going on in the area, and income and weather, and so many things that could affect it.

AI is very good at taking that massive amount of information and crunching it down, telling you whether you should spend the money or not. Troubleshooting and diagnostics. You can look at systems, for example, and suss out the problems of financial irregularities, for example, and diagnostics.

Interestingly enough, in medicine, there have been tests where AI has outperformed doctors. In mammograms, for example, there was one example where it performed much better in avoiding false positives and false negatives for women having mammograms.

But there are dangers in all of this too. Radical industry shifts can come from the use of AI, bad actors taking control, that's one, and job losses. This is a big one that a lot of people talk about. There is a study out there by the Boston Consulting Group, which basically said that 10 to 15 percent of jobs in this country could be eliminated by 2031, and somewhere around half could be reshaped by 2031.

That's really, really fast. And if you look at some of the big companies that are dealing this way, we call this job cuts, but in many ways this is job reapportionment. Many of these companies say, look, we haven't given human jobs to AI, but we are shifting a lot of resources to AI to build up our ability to take advantage of this, and that has made some jobs go away.

Maybe they get replaced by other jobs, but it is a big change. And if you're one of the people affected, it just feels like an overwhelming change.

And, of course, the dangers here, uncontrollable independence. If you let AI start running everything in your company, or a government starts letting it run a lot, the question is, do you really have containment of it anymore? It's smart. It expands its power. It learns a lot. Does it move beyond that?

Malevolent actions. Let's say you have it in charge of a military system and you harden it against people hacking in to stop it. What if you harden it to the point where it can defend anybody trying to stop it, and then it takes its own action, it starts saying, we need to defend against this, we need to defend against this, and humans are not overriding it?

And, of course, that cuts to the idea of hallucinations, a persistent problem. Remember, this may be very smart, it may act like humans. These are not humans. It does not possess the ability of a human to make a certain call.

So, for example, if an AI system said the best military solution in this town is to wipe the town out, a human might say, no, that is unthinkable. We're not going to do that. There are better ways to do it. And yet that may be, to an AI system, the most efficient way to do it, Pam.

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So there are real questions about these things here and about job loss and how it fits in. And, honestly, Pam, it is moving so fast, and so few people understand the full implications. That's why they have to look at this carefully.

BROWN: And so many people have a stake in AI for many different reasons, whether it's a financial stake or for their job. Billions of dollars are invested in AI.It's really propping up the economy.

And so that all raises the question of regulation. The same people who are charged with regulating AI have a direct stake in it, right? Bottom line, what can be done in this space?

FOREMAN: Well, that is -- you just hit the nail right on the head there.

If you want to make this safer, among questions out there, is, one, industry accountability. This is something that some of the industry people and one of the top advisers to Donald Trump has said, oh, no, this is really the key. Let industry regulate itself.

And, of course, critics are saying, we have a long history in this country of industry regulating itself, and then we find big problems later and say you weren't really regulating yourself, except to the degree that it helped your bottom line. So there are big questions about that from some sectors.

Software safeguards, can you build something into AI that says it can't do these bad things? Again, I go back to Isaac Asimov's rules for robots, the idea of can you tell the machine itself you can't do this? And if you try to do it, you must stop, case in point, chatbots, where people have said, well, I'm going to ask it how to commit suicide. And they built safeguards to say, no, you can't do it.

Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn't. Rules and regulations, government, that's what some people really think has to happen, and what they're talking about right now at the U.N., global cooperation. Can people get together? There is so much gray area here, Pam, and yet really serious black-and-white issues that have to be addressed.

BROWN: Yes, and no doubt that will be a topic between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week on, how do you deal with this AI race between the two superpowers?

Tom Foreman, thank you so much.

And coming up at 11:00, we are talking with a psychiatrist and anxiety specialist about handling all this angst many Americans are experiencing as they hear these warnings about AI. You may have felt it there from Tom's segment. So we're going to talk about that later on in the next hour.

But I also want to talk about AI-linked stocks that took a tumble last week before roaring back on Monday. The roller-coaster ride led to big questions about what could happen to the economy if CEOs of some of the largest AI companies make good on their recent promises to slow down the technology's development and allow for more guardrails to be put into place.

CNN business senior reporter David Goldman is here to "Make It Make Sense."

All right, David, today's question what would happen to the economy if spending on AI slowed down? DAVID GOLDMAN, CNN BUSINESS SENIOR REPORTER: Yes, it's such a good

question, because what Tom was just saying is that there are efforts to slow the pace down.

And this is not an insignificant part of America's economy. It makes up today 1.8 percent of all U.S. economic output. That is not a small amount. The expectation is that's going to grow to around 3 percent by 2028.

So just like Tom was saying, we're not far off from this really expanding, almost doubling. And if you want to put that into perspective, what does 3 percent mean? Well, the entire U.S. defense output is just 1.8 percent of the economy. Transportation is around the same, around 3.3 percent.

It's more than education. It's more than what hospitals create, and it's around what restaurants and hotels create. This is a massive, massive economic output that we're talking about. And that has a lot to do with how much companies are spending on AI infrastructure, data centers, chips, all of that.

It is this year going to be $1 trillion. Let's see, thousand, million, billion, trillion. Yes, one trillion this year, according to J.P. Morgan. That is a massive amount, more than we spend on the military, incredible, incredible amounts of money.

And that is why, to your point earlier, Pam, that we have huge amounts of investment in AI; $52 billion since March went into tech funds. Every other ETF on the planet got four billion. So another way to think about this is, for every $13 that was spent on AI, just $1 went into everything else.

This is a massive source of growth for our stock market. And we have seen the top companies, the biggest companies in the world are all AI companies right now, Nvidia, Blackwell chips, Siri for Apple, Gemini for Google, Copilot for Microsoft, and so on and so forth.

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All of these companies are dealing in some way, shape, or form with AI. All of them combined make up nearly 40 percent of the total value of America's stock market, just those eight companies that I mentioned.

So, why does this matter? Because the economy is standing on just two legs right now. It is AI that we just mentioned and fueled from the stock market gains, record stock market gains that we have seen, we have spending, predominantly from wealthy Americans who are invested in the stock market.

If we take this out, if we say that we're going to slow down the amount of spending on AI, it could hurt consumer spending, and that is how you get into a recession. We have an estimate from Goldman Sachs that we could go into a 1.5 percent GDP decline, that is the economy slowing down, if this scenario happens and spending on AI starts to collapse. Pam, that is not something that we want to see.

BROWN: No, what you just laid out is truly eye-opening. I learned a lot.

David Goldman, as always, thank you so much.

And if you would like David to help you "Make It Make Sense," e-mail your question or send us a selfie video of your question to MakeItMakeSense@CNN.com.

And coming up: why the Trump administration now says the move to ban some press from the White House was a matter of national security.

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BROWN: Happening now, the Justice Department is defending President Trump's decision to ban three media organizations, including CNN, from the White House.

In a filing overnight, the Trump administration argued the news outlets' coverage of the Iran war and President Trump's ballroom construction could be a national security risk.

Well, today, a federal judge will hear arguments from CNN, MS NOW and Politico challenging the ban, and even some Republicans are pushing back against the president.

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QUESTION: Was it appropriate for the White House to kick MS NOW, Politico, CNN out of...

SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): No.

QUESTION: On the midterms, does this look like...

CORNYN: I think it's something to do with the First Amendment.

SEN. THOM TILLIS (R-NC): It's absolutely inappropriate. I mean, that's why I have been critical. I can't be critical, as I have been with Pete Hegseth, and when you see the same behavior, not have the same observation. So I think it's a mistake.

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BROWN: All right, joining us now is CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter and constitutional trial attorney Seth Berenzweig.

Brian, let's start with you. Catch us up. What else did the Justice Department's filing say?

BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA ANALYST: Well, the filing says the words national security 32 times. And in separate letters that have been sent to CNN, MS NOW and Politico late last night,there are claims from the White House that there are numerous articles that have either violated national security or created problems behind the scenes that the White House says are breaches of conduct that warrant these bans.

Incredibly, some of these articles have nothing to do with national security at all. One of the citations to Politico involved some great reporting Politico did last month in the -- actually earlier this month, it's still September, in the Playbook newsletter about how that midterm convention might not go well and how there were concerns among Republicans about it.

That article had nothing to do with national security, but the White House is citing it as an example of why Politico has been banned. The other articles cited involve reporting on the Iran war, on the ballroom, and on other topics of obvious public interest.

So these letters, they seem to be a post hoc rationalization or justification for the ban, and the letters say that the news outlets have a couple of days to contest this before the ban becomes permanent. Meanwhile, Pam, I'm told the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is about to file a friend of the court brief with dozens of other news outlets all coming together, standing in solidarity with CNN MS NOW and Politico.

So you have the American news media on one side and Trump's Justice Department on the other.

BROWN: So, Seth, does the Justice Department's reasoning hold any water legally?

SETH BERENZWEIG, CONSTITUTIONAL ATTORNEY: Well, the Justice Department has put forward some arguments that will have an interesting role in the drama that unfolds in the courtroom here in Washington, D.C., when the hearing takes place midafternoon.

I would respectfully push back a little bit on some of Brian's thoughts with regard to the national security elements. I do agree with him that those were some pieces that were forwarded by the administration in its brief. Some of them were a little bit more specific, however.

They talked about publishing with respect to the preparation and building of the bunker. The administration and the Justice Department talked about disclosure with respect to munitions and other aspects of interceptors.

So it is going to be, frankly, an uphill battle by both sides. One of the unique elements of where we sit today is that this is an emergency injunction hearing. Specifically, the media is asking for a TRO, a temporary restraining order.

And what that does as kind of a unique legal animal is, it takes the end of the train and kind of puts it up to the front. In other words, the legal standard is whether the plaintiff can demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits. That's a hard standard. The media also has the plaintiff's argument that includes due process.

I don't think that that's as strong as an argument as the First Amendment. I think that that is a viable argument. That's really where I think Judge Kelly's going to come down today.

And regardless of who wins or loses, one of the elements and aspects of injunction litigation is this. These cases are very fast-tracked. This is going to be resolved. The entire case, frankly, is going to be resolved within a matter of days, if not more than just another week or two.

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It's very front-loaded. There will probably be a ruling. We will probably get it by close of business today, so it'll be interesting to see what happens in this fast-moving case.

BROWN: So, Brian, do we have any idea of how these media organizations plan to respond today?

STELTER: Their -- the counsel, the outside lawyers continue to submit exhibits to the court. So, for example, yesterday when the president said to Kaitlan Collins, "You shouldn't be here," that headline became an exhibit that was sent to the judge.

There may be even more exhibits and submissions later today responding to the late-night letters. We know when it comes to this claim about national security, it reminds me of what Trump is saying about the ballroom, about the arch, about other things that he wants to push through.

And I would go back to the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in "The New York Times" Pentagon Papers case, where the court upheld press freedom. And Hugo Black wrote in 1971: "The word security is a broad, vague generality whose contour should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment."

It feels to me like we're right back to where we were in 1971, with the government claiming that it can keep all these secrets and that the press should not be revealing those secrets. And, in that case, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the press to go ahead and publish.

BROWN: Yes.

And, Seth, as I recall legal precedent, in terms of national security the press can't put out their troop movements, for example, something that really would implicate national security. And -- but we also have an obligation to report on what's happening, right, in the public interest, what's happening in the Iran war.

And when it comes to munitions, you had DOD -- the I.G. report put out that we reported on talking about immunities and what's happening on that front. So what do you think about that in terms of the legal precedent and this now argument from the Trump administration that somehow these articles or reports have implicated national security, when you look at past cases?

BERENZWEIG: Well, when you look at the Justice Department's brief, they went through a little bit of a historic rendition of some examples when the president of the United States during moments of military engagement did have some restrictive approach with the media.

Frankly, if I was the media and that argument came up today, my argument would be one of process, rather than substance. Although reasonable people could argue about whether some of these aspects are more national security-oriented, one of the arguments that I would raise for the media -- and, again, I'm not looking to be political, I'm just looking at it through the legal lens -- is, if this was something that risked national security, why didn't the administration file its own request for a temporary restraining order?

Why didn't the Justice Department go in and file a -- or a motion for emergency relief and try to restrain the publications of things that actually violated national security? So, one of the very interesting aspects of these hearings is how dynamic they are.

There are submissions that will be leading up to the hearing. There may even be some post-hearing submissions with briefs, but I do think that Judge Kelly is going to issue a ruling today. Keep in mind that the TRO is not the whole ball game.

What judges typically do in cases like this, not always, but typically, is then, in 10 days thereafter, there could be what's known as a P.I. hearing, a preliminary injunction hearing, where both sides can submit further arguments. They can come in and they can put witnesses on, affidavits, declarations.

So this is going to be very fast-moving. The case itself, I think, will probably resolve sooner, rather than later, because since injunction cases are very front-loaded, these things don't take very long to ultimately wind its way through the judicial process.

BROWN: All right, Brian and Seth, we will leave it there. Thank you both.

And we will be right back.

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BROWN: Happening now: More than 100 people are coming forward to say they suffered brain injuries after riding an extreme roller coaster at Six Flags. That's according to the attorneys representing them.

A previous CNN investigation linked the world's famous X2 ride to severe injuries and deaths dating back a decade. These new claims came from people who rode the coaster in just the past two years.

CNN's Kyung Lah has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) MICHAEL WILK, INJURED ROLLER COASTER RIDER: It's not about the lawsuit.

KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's hard for Michael Wilk to comprehend how so many people like him say they were injured at Six Flags Magic Mountain on a roller coaster called X2. He underwent emergency brain surgery after his doctor ordered an MRI.

WILK: I truly hope that, by coming forward, changes will be made. That's my goal. That's why I'm here today.

LAH: Wilk's lawyers announced more than 100 people plan to sue Six Flags. Three have already been filed, but many more say they were seriously injured on this ride.

GARY DORDICK, ATTORNEY FOR RIDERS' FAMILIES: We were contacted by more than 300 people injured on the X2 ride. We couldn't take all of the cases. Some were past the time limits in California, which is two years.

LAH: A CNN investigation first reported two women collapsed right after riding the X2 roller coaster at Magic Mountain this summer. They ended up in the same hospital the same week, and both women underwent emergency surgery for similar brain hemorrhages.

Pam Guillen was at Magic Mountain with her daughter Camille, celebrating her 16th birthday on July 5.

PAMELA GUILLEN, INJURED ROLLER COASTER RIDER: It was seconds. You go in as yourself, and then when you come back, you're a medical emergency.

LAH (on camera): This was from a roller coaster.

GUILLEN: Exactly.

LAH (voice-over): Six days later, then 25-year-old Naomi Greer- Wilkinson got on the X2 roller coaster. She collapsed after she got off the ride and was rushed to the hospital where Pam Guillen was being treated.

Doctors who treated both Naomi Greer-Wilkinson and Pam Guillen say the severe brain injuries were the result of a traumatic rapid acceleration-deceleration event experienced while on the X2 ride.

ARTEMIS GREER, MOTHER OF HOSPITALIZED RIDER: I do remember one of the surgeons storming through the E.R. and yelling: "How many is it this month? They've got to shut that ride down." He was furious.

LAH: Here's what Six Flags says that makes the X2 roller coaster different. The seats spin 360 degrees forwards and backwards independently around the track. Riders plummet 200 feet at speeds of up to 76 miles per hour, with two so-called raven turns, or half-loops that turn into sheer drops.

In three lawsuits filed against Magic Mountain, riders say the park deliberately hid evidence from the public and riders like them.

DORDICK: If people voluntarily choose to ride a roller coaster, they don't assume a risk of death or catastrophic brain damage for some family fun.

LAH: Wilk stood next to Pam Guillen and Naomi Greer-Wilkinson's parents at the news conference filled with regrets. He was hurt just months before Naomi and Pam.

WILK: I cannot help but feel, if I had reported it, maybe, maybe something would have happened. Maybe Magic Mountain would have taken it more seriously, and they would not have been injured.

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BROWN: Kyung Lah, thank you for that important reporting.

And those lawyers tell us the lawsuits will likely be filed in the coming weeks. CNN also reached out to Six Flags, which says it won't comment on pending litigation. The X2 ride isn't running right now, although the company is not saying why.