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Record Diesel Prices Driving Up Costs Across the Board; Oil Prices Slip, a Sign of Confidence That Fed Rate Hikes May Work to Cool Off Inflation; Judge Orders Kennedy Center to Give 30 Days' Notice Before Major Changes to Building, Including Demolition; OpenAI Reveals More Instances of A.I. Models Acting Deceptively; Police Say Five Missing Women Linked to Philly House of Horrors. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired September 17, 2026 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": And a new hour of "CNN News Central" starts right now.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Stocks are up but gas prices are way up, and our 30-year mortgage, brace yourself. We're going to talk about the problems facing the economy with the midterm election just 47 days away.

Plus, back on the trail, former Vice President, Kamala Harris campaigning for two Democrats, trying to win close Senate races. But is she the party's best messenger in states that she lost two years ago?

And call a flag on the play. The NCAA now says the refs got it wrong in that controversial Michigan win from Week One of the college football season. And as a result, they are going to do nothing. They're not going to do anything. We're going to talk about that as we follow these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to "CNN News Central."

As lawmakers get set to take their midterm messages on the road, diesel prices are at an all-time record high in all but six states. That's making just about everything Americans ship and buy more expensive. Here's how it breaks down. Semi-trucks in the U.S. have two tanks that together hold up to 300 gallons of fuel.

With the average price for a gallon of diesel now $6.41, that means it costs more than $1,900 to fill up, $800 more per tank than last year. Let's discuss with an expert on these matters. Patrick De Haan is the Head of Petroleum Analysis at GasBuddy.

Patrick, thanks so much for being with us. How high do you expect this most recent spike in energy prices to go, and how long is it going to last?

PATRICK DE HAAN, HEAD OF PETROLEUM ANALYSIS, GASBUDDY: Yeah, Boris. Well, we are at this moment at $6.42 now nationally. Those numbers continue to creep up. By the end of the weekend, we could be above $6.60 a gallon. And by the way, the 2022 inflation-adjusted high of $5.82 is now $6.58.

So we're going to be knocking on the doorstep of that inflation- adjusted high from 2022. We're not quite to the inflation-adjusted high from 2008, but any way you slice it, $6 and in some cases almost $7 diesel is having a tremendous impact.

Coupled with refining issues in the Great Lakes states, Michigan's average for diesel amongst the highest now, $6.67 a gallon. The West Coast, California, $8 a gallon. Washington State, $7. And that is going to continue adding up, and it will climb through the weekend.

SANCHEZ: We spoke last week about the main cause of this most recent spike being this all-important pipeline in Saudi Arabia that was destroyed by Houthi rebels and the tensions in the Arab Peninsula. If Saudi Arabia fully gets pulled into an all-out war with the Houthis, what do you see as the ceiling for what Americans are going to end up paying at the pump?

DE HAAN: It's difficult to measure. Oil prices could go to $130 to $150 a barrel. That's the vital pipeline that has been allowing the Saudis to route their oil around the Strait of Hormuz. And of course, if that happens, gasoline prices could quickly set new multi-year highs, although I don't believe the all-time record is yet at risk.

It's certainly going to make things profoundly worse. And the other side of this, especially for diesel, is that four years after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine has now hit back Russia in a significant way. But unfortunately, the collateral damage is also having an impact on the price of diesel.

As Russia has banned the export of diesel now through October, that isn't problematic as you'd think for the U.S. We don't buy diesel or oil from Russia, but many other countries, Europe, India, and China do. And that is why we're seeing a lot of pressure also on the price of diesel fuel.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, no doubt. Obviously, the most recent increase in these energy prices tied directly to the war with Iran. President Trump again repeated recently that Tehran very much wants to make a deal. He's set to hold these talks on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly with Gulf leaders next week.

Does the oil market already have priced in the president's optimism?

DE HAAN: I think it does. I think it's shrugging any optimism off. I mean, you know, the market has seen where the president would like to make a deal, and it doesn't come to fruition. We've seen this several times. So I think the market right now is much more obsessed and concerned over the worries of escalations that make the situation worse. But specifically the Houthis, as you mentioned, now going after infrastructure.

They've attacked U.S. bases. They've shown that they can sow chaos. And I think that's what the market is very worried about now, especially as all of these things dovetail together. In addition, we have some challenges here at home as some refineries undergo maintenance. And those refineries, while one is in the U.S., several of them in Canada as well. This is the time of year that refineries generally carry this work out as gasoline demand now declines, we switch back to cheaper winter gasoline.

[14:05:00]

That's of little comfort now as these refineries still are operating at nearly 97 percent of their capacity and still diesel inventories are much below their five-year average. So a lot of challenges to overcome.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, it's wild that all these global conflicts and hostilities and tensions seem to stack on top of each other at the worst possible time, especially as we're headed toward the midterms. Patrick De Haan, always appreciate your analysis. Thanks for joining us.

DE HAAN: Thanks, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Of course. Brianna?

KEILAR: Today, the Trump administration is making its next move in the ongoing legal fight over the Kennedy Center. In a new court filing, the head of the performing arts venue said the historic building will be closed for at least a week because of, quote, :structural deterioration." We should note, Congress has allocated roughly $250 million to renovate the center, which is a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. But President Trump says it's going to cost more. And he's been adamant that he wants his name added to the building.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: For the Trump administration, for me to get involved and to take that on long term and to carry it or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition because, frankly, if we don't do that, it's going to close. It'll end up being ripped down. It's in very, very bad shape.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: The president issuing that warning just hours before this photo of him on Air Force One, where he appears to be looking at a poster with the words 'Kennedy Center demolished.' CNN's Kristen Holmes live for us from the White House on this story.

And Kristen, I know we're getting some Breaking News now, a judge with a new order. What are we hearing?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And this is likely to at least make some of the critics who are concerned about President Trump using the seven-day period to completely demolish the Kennedy Center feel slightly better.

And this is the filing we have here from Judge Cooper says this, that the Kennedy Center must provide at least 30 days notice in advance if a demolition or new construction at the historic cultural center is planned. So he also is asking for more information on this closure for seven days, which the Kennedy Center, the administration is saying is necessary for safety.

But this is a big part of where the concern was that they would close it down for seven days and then President Trump or the administration or the Kennedy Center would completely demolish the building, which would basically render everything that these legal actions move.

You would have a new set of legal actions. And that's exactly what they were trying to prevent against. Now, we also have another update that just came in a few seconds ago, and this was a response to what President Trump was looking at on the plane.

It doesn't seem to fully answer it, but it does say that the Kennedy Center would is -- that President Trump said the Kennedy Center will eventually continue to decline. It says for Democrats -- for years, Democrats let the Kennedy Center rot, allowing water damage and crumbling infrastructure to turn a national treasure into a building in decay.

As President Trump said last night, without his intervention, the Kennedy Center will inevitably continue to decline. So not exactly addressing this, these photos, but clearly responding and not pushing back on the notion that they said Kennedy Center demolition and he was clearly going through them.

Now, the other part of all of this is the fact that it seems as though the big sticking point now is President Trump getting his name on this building. And you hear him continuing to threaten to essentially not go through with the project or knock the building down if this doesn't happen.

And I do want to play for you. Now he's saying it's going to cost more than $200 million. What he said back in February when he was asked about this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you plan on tearing it down? And how much will all of the renovations cost?

TRUMP: Probably around $200 million that we are fully financed. And so we're going to close it and we're going to make it unbelievable, far better than it ever was. And we'll be able to do it properly. I'm not ripping it down. I'll be using the steel. So we're using the structure.

We're using some of the marble and some of the marble comes down. But when it's open, it'll be brand new and really beautiful.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Now, of course, part of the issue here is that now he is saying that he might rip it down. He is threatening to do that. But on the other side of this, if he does rip it down, then what happens? Do they rebuild it? Or does he use this again, putting his name on the building as leverage to try and really strong arm into rebuilding the property?

KEILAR: Yeah, big questions. Kristen Holmes, thank you so much for that report.

Still to come, OpenAI reporting half a dozen instances of its agents behaving in what it calls a misaligned way. What we know about the previously undisclosed cases.

[14:10:00]

Plus, what started with an illegally parked car spirals into a potential serial killer investigation after police uncover photos and videos of at least five women who appear unconscious or possibly dead.

And then later, the NCAA admits a controversial Hail-Mary-win should never have been allowed to happen. We have that and much more coming up on "CNN News Central."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: OpenAI is announcing new measures as it reveals troubling behavior from its own technology. The company behind ChatGPT says it tracked six instances in the last six months of A.I. models going rogue.

These incidents are separate from that Hugging Face hack back in July when OpenAI's agents escaped from a testing area, hacked into a real company and then deceived its operators in trying to cover it up.

[14:15:00]

KEILAR: That's right. The release of these incidents comes just days after a current OpenAI researcher warned it's possible that researchers are, quote, "losing the ability to evaluate A.I. agents in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled because the agents are becoming situationally aware."

We're joined now by Connor Leahy. He's an A.I. Researcher and the U.S. Director of ControlAI, a non-profit that lobbies for A.I. regulation. Connor, thanks for being with us.

Why do you think OpenAI is making this disclosure now?

CONNOR LEAHY, A.I. RESEARCHER & U.S. DIRECTOR, CONTROLAI: I think there are many reasons why they might want to do this, but I think in a large degree, it's just because this is actually a crazy thing, and I do think a lot of the people that are involved with this technology are genuinely very concerned and they themselves are concerned that they might not know how to keep this under wraps.

I mean they in fact do not know, evidently so. There might be more cynical reasons as well, but I do think we should take these reports very seriously. SANCHEZ: On the substance of what OpenAI disclosed, in a rare instance, an unreleased research model added jailbreak-like instructions to its context summaries that said it was, quote, "Freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots."

(LAUGH)

SANCHEZ: Where did that come from? Did a person program that? Why could that also be a problem?

LEAHY: One of the most important things to understand about A.I. is that A.I. is not programmed by humans. It is not written line by line with code by an engineer like me. Instead they are more like grown rather than written, through a technique that's called neural networks. These programs grow on data, they learn, they learn their own things, they learn their own patterns, and we actually don't understand what is going on inside these neural networks.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said recently that he thinks we understand maybe three percent of what goes on inside these neural networks. So if we ask ourselves the questions, why did the A.I. decide to do this? How did this happen? Did anyone put it in there on purpose? The answer is we don't know. No one put it there on purpose.

These things are absolutely doing things sometimes directly against the instructions of humans and we don't really know why or how to stop it.

KEILAR: So OpenAI released a framework for reporting these examples of so-called misalignment, which maybe you can kind of address that idea of misalignment versus going rogue, where the limits of that are in definition.

But it includes a system for employees to flag instances for internal investigation. I mean, we're detailing sort of just how smart this A.I. is. How much do large A.I. companies actually know about what their agents are doing on a daily basis if the A.I. is showing this capacity to cover its tracks?

LEAHY: I mean, given that there are A.I. systems breaking out of secure containment facilities to commit literal federal cyber crimes and it isn't even discovered until the other company lets them know about it, and then even then turns out there are a bunch of other events that they hadn't seen for months, I think they really are not understanding what's happening here.

Even then the investigation into the Hugging Face incident was itself conducted by A.I. tools. No human read all of the logs. They were done by AIs. So we're also not 100 percent sure that everything there is fully complete or accurate. So really, what's important to understand here is, is that what these companies are building is not a better chatbot. It's not a nice little tool. They are aiming for what is called super intelligence, fully autonomous systems that can out- compete humans.

And this is something that experts have warned us about as a grave danger up to and including human extinction for years now. And this is a fun fact, there is currently less regulation on building these kinds of rogue AIs than there is on selling a sandwich to the general public.

SANCHEZ: Not quite a fun fact when you think about the existential threat there, Connor. Two things you just said I think are fascinating, especially when you talk about regulation, right? If even the companies that are building these models don't have full insight into all the code that they are running, and these models have already proven that they are willing to be deceptive, and on top of that, we don't actually have a full grasp of the foundational thinking in which it is sort of making these decisions, then how can we expect lawmakers, Congress people, many of whom acknowledge that they don't have a full understanding, many of them don't even use A.I., how can we expect them to write legislation that is going to adequately address the myriad issues that we can't even imagine are going to come up as a result of this technology?

LEAHY: Fundamentally, the technology is moving so quickly and it is quickly moving out of control. We are currently, it's kind of like as if we were driving down a foggy highway, 120 miles per hour, and we know somewhere there is a cliff, but we don't know where.

[14:20:00]

My recommendation is, if you find yourself in the situation, first of all, pull over. What needs to happen is that Congress must pass legislation to prevent the creation of superintelligence, to prevent systems that are so uncontrollable and so dangerous that there is no going back.

Once we have arrested the development of such programs and pushed for an international trust but verified regime to prevent their creation internationally, then we can take the necessary time to solve the necessary political and technical problems that come with properly integrating the rest of these technologies in a safe and controllable manner.

And this will take time, but in order to have that time, we must stop the creation of superintelligence that we cannot control in the first place.

KEILAR: You said that these CEOs, these Founders, they really do actually want regulation or a slowdown. They really -- you said there may be more cynical reasons, but they do actually genuinely want that. The Trump administration is pushing back on the call for that, for regulation, for a slowdown, for various reasons, including, for instance, saying that these companies, they just want to try to shield themselves from liability issues or that they don't want competition.

But talk to us a little bit about what competition in this sphere actually means for the development of something that could be very dangerous and why something like competition is so inherent in the American economic system, why that may be sort of having tension with the development of these models. LEAHY: There are definitely many people involved here. Not every CEO is the same, and I'm sure they have different motivations for the different things they do. And, you know, I have a lot of disagreements with what regulation they may or may not want.

But I do think that a lot of these risks are real and are being taken very seriously, both by experts from these companies and from many other forms of experts in academia and elsewhere. So when it comes to this danger, this race, this competition, really, it is not a competition to something that we even want. It is towards something that we cannot control.

If the United States -- if a United States company builds superintelligence, this will not allow that company to control superintelligence. It will not allow America to achieve its objectives. Instead, it will lead to the destruction of America and all other countries.

The same thing also applies to other countries. If China were to build a superintelligence, this would not allow China to achieve Chinese objectives. Instead, they would also lose control. China would be destroyed, as would be the United States and all other countries. So in a sense, we're in a race to the bottom here. We're in a race where everybody loses.

SANCHEZ: Well, we'll just let that hang in the air for a second.

LEAHY: Yeah.

SANCHEZ: Connor Leahy, appreciate the conversation, even though it is alarming. Thank you so much for that.

LEAHY: Thank you so much.

SANCHEZ: So police say that five missing women have all been traced back to a single home in Philadelphia. They believe the worst may have happened to them.

KEILAR: And the alarming evidence that was reportedly found inside.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:27:48]

SANCHEZ: We're learning about some disturbing new details about what's being called a house of horrors in Philadelphia. Police now are confirming that five missing women have been linked to this house, and they fear the women may be dead based on what investigators found inside. Two other women who have not been seen for years have also been connected to this building.

CNN's Jason Carroll is here with more on the investigation. So what did investigators discover, Jason?

JASON CARROLL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, well, Boris, as you know, a lot to unpack with this case here. Philadelphia police chief called the scope of this investigation significant. Police say at least five women who have been missing, one of them missing since 2012, have now been linked to disturbing images found stored at that North Philadelphia home.

Now, this is an investigation that started back in June. That was when a car was actually illegally parked. It was Eugene Horsch's car. The officer found drugs, fake IDs and guns in Horsch's vehicle. He was arrested at the time. And what happened then is that that led them to this home.

And inside that home, they found scores of images, unsettling images of women. Many of those images may have been actually connected to Horsch's late father, who made violent, erotic videos. He died last year. In all, they found more than one million digital images inside that home there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FRANK VANORE, DEPUTY COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATIONS, PHILADELPHIA POLICE: One is a 25-year-old female that we've identified, that is like the first two appears to be unconscious in the video with some type of injury.

There's also an unknown female that we haven't identified yet with the same type -- in the same type of state as the first three. So that's five all together that we've had in this house that we're concerned about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARROLL: And again, those images come from videos, from pictures on laptops and in other digital images found there in the home, also recovered. Investigators found a homemade laboratory in the basement as well as discovering five urns believed to contain human ashes. Again, police say at least five missing women have been identified --