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Breaking News: Sources Say Faulty A.I.-Assisted Intel Report Nearly Triggered A U.S. Military Operation; Mullin Defends ICE Actions After Altercation With Teens; Teen Driver Detained By ICE Describes Physical Altercation; Former "American Idol" Contestant On Trial For Wife's Murder. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired September 18, 2026 - 15:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: A.I. report nearly triggered a U.S. military operation in the Middle East.

Plus, the DHS secretary defending ICE actions, after a now viral video appeared to show an officer hitting a Texas teen repeatedly.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: And later, three major U.S. airlines cutting cheaper flights from their schedules in response to high fuel prices.

We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN Breaking News.

SANCHEZ: We start with the breaking news. Sources tell CNN the U.S. military nearly launched an operation against a Chinese vessel based on faulty A.I.-generated intelligence. Sources say that military planes were already scrambling and armed service members were ready to board the ship before the military discovered the mistake. One source said that error almost started a war. CNN's Zachary Cohen is here with this exclusive reporting.

So, Zach, help us understand how this false report came to be, how close the military actually came to launching this operation.

ZACHARY COHEN, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Yes, Boris. In this instance, we are told that a special operations analyst queried a chat bot about some intelligence reporting related to this Chinese ship's manifest and also used A.I. tools to effectively fuse open- source intelligence with some of the more sensitive compartmented intelligence that's in the U.S. government's holdings, and ultimately used A.I. tools as well to produce this report that looks like an average intelligence report that's produced by the U.S. intelligence community and one that's very trusted historically by the U.S. military.

And so, it's unclear if this analyst was using a commercial chat bot or using one of the internal U.S. government-sanctioned systems. But we're also told that, fundamentally, there's not much difference between the two. And the real concern here is that, once it was disseminated, that effectively the U.S. military immediately responded, spinning up towards a potential operation to board this vessel.

And because of the intelligence that was indicating that this vessel was carrying components of a nuclear weapons program, we're told that it became so close that U.S. military aircraft were in the air by the time that U.S. officials took a deeper look at the intelligence report itself, determined that it had been produced and generated with the help of A.I., and that this chat bot had ultimately mischaracterized or misinterpreted, misunderstood what was actually on board that ship. And so this was all playing out in a matter of moments.

And while the operation ultimately never took place, it is interesting that this got through largely unvetted until the very last moment.

SANCHEZ: Zach, you're learning that this may be the most egregious incident, but not the first.

COHEN: Yes, that's right, Boris. This type of A.I. hallucination, as it's called, is something that we're told has been seen across the U.S. government since there has been this Trump administration-wide push to really incorporate A.I. not just in the military, but across all federal agencies. And within the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has really made it a priority to have the military be more experimental when it comes to A.I. That was part of his strategy they had laid out earlier this year.

But again, sources are telling us that while A.I. is intended to help make the military move faster, one source putting it this way, it helps you get to a bad idea faster.

SANCHEZ: Zach Cohen, thanks so much for that great reporting.

KEILAR: Let's talk more now about these troubling new developments. We have professor of computer science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport, with us, and lead global security analyst for the -- for Washington Post Intelligence, Josh Rogin, with us.

This is really an alarming report, you guys. I -- I just wonder, Cal, what is your reaction to this idea of a faulty report using A.I.? And it really seems they did not catch it until the very last minute.

CAL NEWPORT, PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY: Well, I'm alarmed that they misunderstood what these tools can and can't do to this extreme. To think that a chatbot is going to act like a human intelligence source and actually check and vet and give you accurate information is not how these LLMs actually operate. I see it's a failure of the deployment of the tool, even more so than it's the tool itself doing something worrisome.

SANCHEZ: Josh, just last night we were talking about Chinese skepticism when it comes to U.S. claims amid, you know, leaders of industry and experts that A.I. is rapidly growing out of control and that the guardrails need to be put on. We've got to pump the brakes. How do you think they see this story now that we apparently came close to breaching one of their ships?

JOSH ROGIN, LEAD GLOBAL SECURITY ANALYST, WASHINGTON POST INTELLIGENCE: Yes, it's clear that the United States and China are talking past each other on A.I. We've got our own A.I. issues and problems. A.I. is being used in the military and intelligence and in warfare in new and unprecedented ways, in ways that we can't understand. When it makes mistakes, we can't figure out what happened.

[15:05:07]

The Chinese are using A.I. differently. They're using it to hypercharge their hacking, to increase their internal repression and surveillance, and then to interfere in societies all over the world. So, we've got our A.I. problems. They've got theirs. But there's not a lot of overlap. So, I don't think there's a lot of real room for cooperation, unfortunately.

KEILAR: This report comes in the middle of calls for international cooperation on A.I. You have A.I. experts saying there's no other way around this, right? This has to happen. How do the Chinese look at that.

ROGIN: I think they -- the Chinese are skeptical of our calls for international cooperation. They think they're in a race with us. And if they think they're in a race with us it's kind of hard for us not to be in a race with them. And that's just the way it is. And at the end of the day the Chinese government is, you know, a dictatorship that's nationalist, and socialist and doesn't really want to cooperate with us so much. They want to beat us. They want to compete with us.

So, we can try. It's worth trying. But the record shows according to a hundred percent of the evidence that when you sign a -- an A.I. or a -- a nuclear or a cyber hacking document with the Chinese government it turns out not to be held up. It turns out that they're not actually trustworthy.

SANCHEZ: Cal, how -- how do you see this race between these two global powers. How far behind is China and -- and how quickly can they catch up?

NEWPORT: Well, I think partially China and some of the labs in the U.S. are thinking about A.I., its possibilities and its threats differently. In particular, OpenAI and Anthropic are very connected to this futurist movement idea from Silicon Valley that we need to get to super intelligence first. We need to create this all powerful A.I. being. China doesn't share this type of thought. So, they're thinking about making models that are more economic models that can be deployed more widely where some of our top labs are thinking about how quickly can we get to creating these all powerful beings.

And I actually think the influence of that ideology on some of our labs is picking us off path from what we should be doing which is building safe useful products and trying to stay economically ahead.

KEILAR: The U.S. has tried to slow China down in some ways, right? But China doesn't want to be slowed down. It finds workarounds. How do you see those efforts. What do you think about what the U.S. has done in a certain point. Are there just limits on that? NEWPORT: Well, the expert controls on the most powerful GPU chips

which you use to power the most advanced models. That led China to get more creative. So, they worked on making models that could do more compute with less inference get better results without having to use the big chip.

So, the major A.I. labs are building the automotive equivalent of F1 cars here in the U.S. while China is building the Hondas or the Toyotas a very useful car that's not as flashy.

SANCHEZ: I -- I wonder Josh what this means because you -- you have President Trump some would argue undercutting U.S. efforts to keep China's progress at bay by offering them access to technology that they didn't have otherwise.

ROGIN: Right. Chinese President Xi Jinping will be here in Washington next Thursday. They're going to have a summit. They're going to have a state dinner. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent is meeting with his Chinese car counterparts this weekend. A.I. is on the agenda. There's also trade. There's also Taiwan and there's also technology. Those are the four things that are going on.

And what we know is that President Trump doesn't want to regulate A.I. He said it. He thinks it's all a hoax. So, they're not going to agree to regulate it. They're just going to agree to sort of agree to sort of keep talking about it. Maybe that's the best we can do. But as far as our strategy on A.I. and China strategy, there's really no overlap. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.

KEILAR: So, where does that leave us, Cal.

NEWPORT: Well I do think on the American side we do need to think about regulation. I think we do need to be worried internally by some of the experiments that are being run at some of these labs which I think are somewhat reckless. And I do think they're being driven in part again by the Silicon Valley ideology of we want to get to superintelligence.

So, it looks like the adults in the room need to stand up and say we need to be redirecting this industry in productive directions and we need to dial down the rhetoric around existential dread and these unavoidable super intelligences.

SANCHEZ: Cal Newport, Josh Rogin, thank you both so much.

ROGIN: Thank you.

KEILAR: Still to come, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin reacting to a viral video of a disturbing encounter between ICE officers and two Texas teenagers.

SANCHEZ: Plus, why President Trump is largely missing from Republican candidates TV ads this election cycle.

And later, a former American Idol contestant on trial Caleb Flynn accused of shooting his wife, Ashley, and staging the crime scene. That story next.

[15:09:49]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:14:12]

SANCHEZ: Today, the head of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, is defending the actions of ICE agents after two Texas teens were detained following a physical altercation. Video that has now gone viral appears to show the agents pulling one teen out of a car before an agent repeatedly punches him in the face while he lies on the ground. The mother of one of the teens say they were heading to enlist in the Marines. Here was Secretary Mullin's response.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARKWAYNE MULLIN, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: That's the first time I've seen it. For me to sit back and say from a video that was filmed on a -- on a phone to say it was acceptable. It was not acceptable. I don't know what the resistance level was. Obviously, they were struggling with the individual. You can clearly see that. We tried not to escalate it, but we have to match whatever resistance they're having.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: The teenager who was driving was going to sign up to serve the United States of America. He's a United States citizen.

MULLIN: We wasn't arresting him.

[15:15:03]

BASH: Do you think Americans now need to be -- do you think Americans now need to be carrying around proof of citizenship? He was then later released, but he was arrested. Do Americans need to show proof of citizenship now? Carrying them around.

MULLIN: If you -- if you're an American citizen, you have no reason to fear. Just like if you're not breaking the law, you have no reason to fear law enforcement.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: CNN's Ryan Young has more on the reaction to all of this. Ryan?

RYAN YOUNG, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Boris. This is really exploding on social media. People having a lot of questions about what the next steps could be. What exactly happened? What we do know is at some point, one of those ice agents did give commands to one of the teenagers to get out of the road and to stop following them because one of the teams and obviously the passenger left that side of the car was in the street filming as ICE was detaining someone else.

And as we show you this video, you'll see that red Honda that's in the distance there and someone's from -- recording from behind and they're screaming over and over. They are minors. They are minors.

After they asked that team to get back in the car, apparently, there may have been a point where that team uses social security card to slap it on the window of the ice agent. And that only accelerated this situation into something that it became this confrontation. Once that agent entered the car, they did deploy what appears to be pepper spray in the car.

In fact, you'll see the driver get out the car at some point and be sort of shaking from that chemical agent being spread in that car. And then both ice agents try to get the passenger contained and under arrest. And that took some time. And then you see the blows being put on him several times. I think that part should be coming up in the next few seconds here.

The thing that we're also trying to look at is whether or not these ice agents were burning body cameras, because we don't know what preceded this. All we know is the story that the driver is telling authorities and also us about what exactly happened here. But take a listen to that driver. Talk about this detainment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LUIS OCHOA, DRIVER OF CAR: ... an ICE raid on a red Ram truck. We stopped to record, right? And when we were recording, my -- my friend, J.C., gets smacked by one of the agents. The woman hits him with the door, and that's when everything starts -- all -- all those little starts, where the woman chases him back to my car. Once inside my car, she put his elbow on his neck, and I was like, Miss, please stop. He's a minor. Don't treat him like that.

TERESA OCHOA, MOTHER OF LUIS: He is a minor. It's traumatic enough for an adult. For something like this to happen to him is really tough. It was eight hours without hearing from him. They wouldn't give me any information. They behaved very badly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

YOUNG: Yes, Boris, just to be clear, we reached out to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District to see if any more charges would be pressed for these teens. As of right now, we're not aware of any charges that are going to be pressed against them. We've also asked, obviously, if ICE has anybody camera video to see what may have led up to this.

So, these are two questions that's out there. Of course, DHS is saying these two were agitators in this situation. And that's why they had to go hands on. And that's why they had to detain them for the -- eight hours.

So, right now, just a lot of questions about procedure. The one thing you will see, though, in this case is that it didn't escalate even further because the ICE agents say they were actually trying to deescalate the situation as they believe their agents were being followed as they were trying to detain someone else. Boris.

SANCHEZ: Ryan Young, thank you so much for that reporting. Brianna.

KEILAR: We're joined now by Deborah Fleischaker. She's a former DHS executive secretary and former ICE acting chief of staff during the Biden administration.

I wonder what your reaction is to the incident, what you can see of it, what you've learned about it and the secretary's response.

DEBORAH FLEISCHAKER, FORMER DHS EXECUTIVE SECRETARY UNDER PRESIDENT BIDEN: I think on first glance, it's -- it's really troubling. Now, we don't know everything about the incident. There's a lot we don't know. And that makes it hard to draw firm conclusions. But I think we do know a couple of things. It appears that the agents were wearing body worn cameras.

And so, my first big question is, why hasn't that footage been released? If the agents were acting appropriately, the department has the mechanism to release that footage quickly. They haven't done it. And it raises questions for me about why they haven't.

KEILAR: So, the attorney for the driver said his client said at least one of the teens got out of the car and was recording the officers, that the passenger approached the officer's car and slapped his Social Security card on the window. The TikTok user who recorded the video remarks as he's recording at one point, it's because he got out of the car and started hitting the window and ICE got him. How could those possible factors affect a potential investigation?

FLEISCHAKER: Look, I think you have to balance the -- the people watching an ICE operation can't interfere with the operation. So, if there was interference, ICE does have some grounds to respond to it. What they want is for people to go away and stop interfering, not to necessarily do a takedown and use force.

At the same time, people have a First Amendment right to -- to use their cameras and to record what they're seeing. And so, you know, I think, again, there are a lot of factual questions that the body worn camera footage should answer. The question I have as to why it hasn't been released.

[15:20:03]

I would also say that it is very hard to take the department's statements at -- at face value anymore. They have been shown to be untruthful too many times, and it makes it very difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt.

KEILAR: Well, certain -- in kind of the same vein, separately, an ICE officer pleaded not guilty today to federal charges that he lied about being attacked before he shot and wounded a Venezuelan national in Minneapolis earlier this year. Christian Castro is his name. The officer also appeared in state court on assault charges this week. And Minnesota authorities in this case have really been at odds at the Trump administration over who should be handling any charges against Castro. How are you seeing these two cases? FLEISCHAKER: Well, I mean, look in -- when there is a deadly use of

force like there or a -- a serious use of force like a discharge of a firearm, somebody's got to investigate that. And normally, state and local can work together. But the federal government has proven completely unwilling to cooperate. And so, the state is trying to step up where the federal -- where the federal government has stepped back. That's an appropriate use of the state authorities. And normally the federal government would participate with the state as it investigates a potential crime.

Right now, what we're getting is interference and defensiveness. In support of a mass deportation agenda, they -- they -- they reflexively are defending everything that the -- that their agents do. And a good, thoughtful law enforcement takes the time to figure out what went wrong. And if an agent did something wrong to handle it, that doesn't seem to be happening anymore.

KEILAR: A close ally of Secretary Markwayne Mullin had been tapped to be ICE director -- the nominee for ICE director, I should say, a former Oklahoma State Trooper Lance Schroyer. The White House pulled that nomination yesterday. What's your reaction to that?

FLEISCHAKER: My reaction is that the White House controls immigration policy and that Secretary Mullin doesn't.

KEILAR: Deborah Fleischaker, thank you so much for being with us.

FLEISCHAKER: Thank you.

KEILAR: Appreciate it.

Ahead, testimony is underway in the murder trial of former American Idol contestant Caleb Flynn. We'll have details next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:26:54]

KEILAR: Let's go back now to the Caleb Flynn murder trial happening right now in Troy, Ohio. Flynn, who is a former American Idol contestant, is on trial for shooting his wife to death back in February. The jury has just seen police body cam video of the moment that authorities arrived at the family residence following Flynn's frantic 911 call. CNN's Jean Casarez is here to walk us through that moment. Jean, tell us what happened.

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, this Troy police officer, Alexandra Giampapa, was one of the first to arrive on the scene. There were a couple of others before her, but she walks into the house and there is the now defendant sitting on the sofa. It is very clear video. Let's watch a little bit of it because we're going to hear audio. We're going to hear the defendant speak. We're also going to hear the police officer trying to calm the defendant down. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Can you -- do you want to sit down?

CALEB FLYNN, FORMER "AMERICAN IDOL" CONTESTANT: No.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Okay.

FLYNN: Is she -- is she gone?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Look at me. Look at me. Take a breath, okay?

FLYNN: I can't. I can't --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Look at me. I need you to breathe, okay?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) ...

FLYNN: What do I do with my daughters? What do I do with my daughters?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right now ...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) ...

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right now, I need you to breathe, okay?

(End VT)

CASAREZ: All right. So, an officer had just come out of the bedroom where Ashley Flynn was. And we have learned today that she was shot two times, conceivably, as she slept on her side. The officer had come out saying she's gone. And this is when he breaks down. He breaks down in court. He was going hysterical in the living room. The officer trying to calm him down.

But when he was questioned about where he was, when this intruder came in, he said to the first officer on the scene that he had been sleeping on the couch, because he had a cough. And he heard something. He woke up -- that's a garage right there where he says the intruder was right there. And -- and officers combed that. They found nothing.

But he said that he had gone into his children's bedroom, two preteen daughters in their bedroom. And he had been with them when he heard it, the shot. And he had been with them when he heard it. But later telling officers that she was shot two times in the head. So, those inconsistencies. And we're in the prosecution's case.

As you can see right there, the officers are combing that garage because his truck, which is that vehicle right there, it had the center console open. And he had said that he kept his handgun in his truck. So, the console's up. No handgun is there. The gun was never found. It was a 9-millimeter gun, he told authorities. And ballistics, the prosecution said in openings, is going to show that the bullets that went into her head were from a 9-millimeter gun.

The defense saying there's not enough here to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. It's conjectural. The investigation was shoddy. It was fast. They arrested him three days after this happened. And that does not give the victim in this case any justice at all.

[15:30:04]

KEILAR: All right, we'll see. Jean Casarez, thank you so much.