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CNN International: 25th Anniversary Of 9/11 Terrorist Attacks; Trump And Vance Close Out Two-Night GOP Event In Texas; Anthropic Blocked Attempts To Misuse Its A.I. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired September 11, 2026 - 04:30   ET

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

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SALMA ABDELAZIZ, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. I'm Salma Abdelaziz in London. A quarter century has now passed since the attacks on September 11th, and people around the world are gathering today to mark that somber anniversary. Nearly 3,000 people were killed on 9/11 in an attack that was orchestrated by Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Former U.S. presidents, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush are expected to attend the commemoration ceremony in New York, but President Donald Trump will head to a similar Pentagon event. CNN's Elex Michaelson spoke to a retired New York firefighter named Tim Brown. He was eating breakfast nearby when the first plane hit the North Tower. He's also author of the book, "The Greatest Love Lessons for Living with Extraordinary Courage Even After the Worst Day of Your Life."

He shares the heroism that he saw that day, as well as the lasting health effects he and other firefighters have suffered in the aftermath.

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TIM BROWN, RETIRED NEW YORK CITY FIREFIGHTER AND 9/11 SURVIVOR: The building across the street from my building was hit by Flight 11 at 8:46 a.m. that morning. My job was to go to the command post in the North Tower lobby. I saw many of my friends in that North Tower lobby, and every one of them who I talked with knew that if they went in that stairwell, they likely were not coming back.

And you know what, Elex? Every one of them still did it. Every one of them chose to go up those stairwells because people needed their help, and that is why I named the book "The Greatest Love" because at the end of each of their lives, each of these heroes' lives, the cops, the firemen, they chose because we have free will, they chose to go up that staircase and help people they didn't know.

ELEX MICHAELSON, CNN ANCHOR: Yeah, there was some news this week. The Mayor of New York released documents that showed that officials back then knew that the air quality was a lot worse than they were letting on, and -- and first responders, everyday New Yorkers continue to work in in not great conditions. We've seen so many sicknesses over the years after that. What's your response to this -- these latest documents.

BROWN: It is a very, very difficult question to answer. For context, I am sick currently with 9/11 cancer, so I am a part of hundreds or thousands of workers who are there, or survivors who are there who are sick. Just about everybody I know that was there is sick today.

So, with that context, what I personally would say is that what -- when I was there on the pile, when I was looking for my -- my brothers and my friends and any other innocent people, I did not care about putting a mask on my face. All I cared about was trying to get down through the rubble because we thought that there were still people alive.

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We didn't know that we wouldn't find anyone, but we really thought that they might be alive, including 100 of my friends.

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ABDELAZIZ: President Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have now wrapped their Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas. The president spoke for about 30 minutes, repeating his pledge to give American adults $5,000 dividends if Republicans keep control of the House and Senate and Vance urged Republican candidates to focus on the party's achievements and defeat the Democrats, whom he called lunatics.

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J.D. VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: We got to send a message this November that the country does not belong to the radicals. It does not belong to the bureaucrats. It does not belong to the highest bidder. This country was handed down to us by our parents and their parents before them. We received this national birthright, and we are going to fight for it by electing Republicans this November.

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ABDELAZIZ: Now, as we mentioned, the president spoke for about 30 minutes. This was much shorter than on Wednesday. He closed out the night with a musical salute featuring America the Beautiful, and he asked those attending the convention to swear that they would vote in November's midterm elections, even if they have to cheat like hell.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I'm not on the ticket. You got to pretend, I'm not on the ticket. You got to do me a big, the biggest favor you've ever done me. You've got to do this for me. You've got to pretend I'm on the ticket. I'm on the ticket. I'm on the ticket. He's on the ticket. Pretend I'm on the ticket, because this is going to turn out to be one of the most important elections.

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ABDELAZIZ: We have more now for you on that Republican midterm convention from CNN White House correspondent Alayna Treene in Dallas.

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ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: This was quite a night. The president closing out the Republican midterm convention for the second night in a row. I do want to apologize. We're actually still hearing some of the balloons that had fallen at the end of the speeches tonight. They're still popping behind me.

But look, even though the president closed it out, really the keynote speaker on Thursday was the Vice President J. D. Vance, and -- and sometimes it actually felt like an audition for 2028. One thing Vance did was he actually focused on a lot of the issues I know Republicans at large want their leaders to be talking about. He talked about affordability.

He talked about how he believes Democrats are anti-family and Republicans are pro-family. He specifically called out Abdul El-Sayed, of course, the U.S. Senate candidate who's running for Senate in Michigan, as being a foil, you know, a representative of what he argued were the crazy left lunatics who were taking over the Democratic Party.

What he didn't do is mention a lot of topics Republicans want to avoid, things like Iran, tariffs, the presidential ballroom, all things Trump, I should note, actually did talk about on Wednesday. But look, at one moment, people in the crowd did break out into chants of JD 48. Vance trying to you know play it off. He argued that's too far in the future. We need to focus first on the midterms. But it did feel very much like a speech geared toward that potential presidential run.

As for the president himself, he came on, recycled a lot of the material we heard him give last night. But one moment that really stood out to me was when he asked the crowd to raise their right hands and pledge to bring their family and their friends to the polls on November 3rd. So help me God, I could hear them as they responded in unison. So help me God, they would go to the polls in November. That was really the purpose of this entire two-day event.

Then, one last thing I want to note, there was the classic balloon drop, as I mentioned. You can still hear them popping, but it was different from a normal convention where you have you know people who were being nominated. Instead, it was the president standing up there alone, swaying to the music as the balloons fell, kind of symbolic for a convention that was conceived by him for him.

So just keep that in mind as we look ahead to whether or not this will actually do what his team intended and convince enough members of his base to get out there on November 3.

(END VIDEO CLIP) ABDELAZIZ: To break down that convention with us. Joining me now here

in London is Laurel Rapp, the director of the U.S. and North America Programme at Chatham House. Good morning to you. I'm really looking forward to talking through this with you because President Trump seemed to take this carrot and stick approach with the audience. Right? He said, "If -- if we lose -- if the Republicans lose, you are going to lose your security and wealth under Democratic control." But also, here's a carrot, "I'm promising a $5,000 dividend if Republicans win." It kind of sounds like a bribe. Is it an empty promise? A real offer? Is it even legal?

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LAUREL RAPP, DIRECTOR, U.S. AND NORTH AMERICA PROGRAMME, CHATHAM HOUSE: Democratic leaders have surely called this a bribe. There are questions of legality of this $5,000, but the underlying piece here is Trump is trying to throw a lot of different things at the wall to try to bring out his most loyal supporters and to bring out those undecideds, those independents, the apathetic voters who probably will not show up in these midterm elections.

A lot is at stake here for the Republicans and for Trump, and so they are road testing this unconventional convention, which doesn't typically happen during the midterms. More of a campaign rally than a convention in its own right. But this is in the context of really lagging poll approval numbers for Trump and some sluggish Republican energy rolling into November.

ABDELAZIZ: So, are you seeing it as a -- as a sign of desperation, this $5,000 dividend. How -- how do you read it in the context of him trying to push again for what you say is a sluggish vote?

RAPP: Democrats are slated to win these midterms in the House. They probably will not make it over the line in the Senate, and this tracks against what we've seen across history. When you have an incumbent president who controls both the Senate and the House, there will be a blowback, and there will be a switch.

And President Trump remembers quite well those two years in his first term where there were investigations, impeachments, constraints on his budget spending, and so he is looking probably at any range of tools he has, including a tool that will cost the American taxpayer $1.5 trillion, by some estimates, this $5,000 Trump dividend, as he calls it.

That is something he has put on the table. What's interesting, though, is we didn't see any of the other speakers last night mention this Trump dividend. Vance didn't raise it, Ted Cruz didn't raise it, Don Jr., his son didn't raise it. So this is going to be questions about whether this is another promise that he's made, and he's made these before that haven't come through on these dividends, on these payments.

But this is something that his supporters in the room, when he when he announced it two nights ago, really -- really seemed to energize them, but has really created a firestorm more broadly among the political class.

ABDELAZIZ: And you saw from our reporter there, who was -- who was inside the convention, those chants of JD 48. He delivered some of the closing remarks amid the speculation, of course, of a run for 2028. Was this convention an audition to inherit Trump's movement? Did it demonstrate that he has command over the MAGA coalition without Trump on the ballot in the future? How did you see that moment with J.D. Vance on the stage?

RAPP: It -- it did seem a bit like an audition for 2028. J.D. Vance is one of the front runners alongside Secretary of State, National Security Advisor Rubio. Leading into these next two years, we're going to see J.D. Vance test these messages more forcefully. He came out swinging very hard in a fiery speech last night, calling Democrats the party of hatred.

Very strong language against those he will potentially run against two years from now. Look, he has big differences though with President Trump, and what you didn't hear him say was the word Iran. You didn't hear him talk about the Middle East and the U.S. role in the world. This was a very domestic speech.

Americans are marking the very somber anniversary of September 11th today. It's a day that reshaped the U.S. role in the world for decades to come, and those included two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. J.D. Vance was a Marine in Iraq at the time. Part of his -- his book was -- was about those experiences.

And so he ran years ago on a ticket of ending forever wars, of ending American entanglements and overseas commitments that the U.S. can't win. But he has been dragged into the Iran war, and that's going to be a challenge for him as he navigates these years ahead. Loyalty to the president and his Iran war, while also differentiating himself in a war that is going in a -- in a quite negative direction.

ABDELAZIZ: Laurel Rapp from Chatham House here in London. Thank you so much for that breakdown of that convention. There's so much more to come here on CNN Newsroom. We're learning there was a possible attempt to use Anthropic's artificial intelligence to develop bioweapons. CNN's A.I. correspondent Hadas Gold will give us the details.

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ABDELAZIZ: The artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it has blocked multiple accounts from possibly trying to use the company's A.I. models to develop biological weapons. This is from a report that was published Thursday. Anthropic also noted it had disrupted efforts to use the company's A.I. models for surveillance operations, scams, and the development of conventional weapons like drones and missiles. CNN's Hadas Gold has the story for us.

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HADAS GOLD, CNN A.I. CORRESPONDENT: Anthropic issued this lengthy report into what they said was malicious activity they spotted on their A.I. system Claude over the past eight months, and this wasn't just regular people messing around with an A.I. chatbot. Anthropic says these were state-sponsored propaganda groups, these were scientists, these were criminals, and these were politically motivated individuals. Anthropic says one of the most concerning cases of malicious use of Claude were five cases where they say they spotted people using Claude in ways that could have helped them develop biological weapons.

Anthropic calls this one of the most serious risks of frontier A.I. models. They say that they spotted research into things like infectious diseases like bird flu, as well as novel venoms and toxins. As part of the report, Anthropic said the following. They said, "The cases we share here are not typical misuse, but rather examples of the most notable and novel threat activity we have identified to date. We're publishing this work because we believe we have a responsibility to disclose malicious misuse of our services."

Now, Anthropic says that they shut down this malicious activity, even though it wasn't entirely clear whether the scientists who were working on this were just doing legitimate research or whether they were actually trying to create biological weapons. But Anthropic says that in this case they wanted to err on the side of caution even though you can do legitimate research that would involve these questions around biological weapons.

In the other malicious cases an anthropic said that they spotted these include things like Claude being used to develop software for weapons design and development, as well as state propaganda use.

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This case of Anthropic saying that they spotted the malicious activity and were able to shut it down is actually a reason in support of these closed models. Closed models being models that come out of companies like Anthropic, like OpenAI, where the models themselves live on those companies' systems, and what that means that they're very advanced, but also that the companies have the ability to monitor everybody's activity and see what's actually going on, being able to see malicious activity like this and being able to shut it down.

The open models that we're seeing come out of places like China that are very popular. They're very cheap, and -- but you can download them to your own systems, modify them, you know, customize them to do whatever you want them to do. But those companies lose the ability to monitor the activity of what is happening on their systems.

And this situation of A.I. being used to help create bioweapons. This is exactly one of the reasons why we're hearing so many warnings and sort of doom predictions coming out of the A.I. industry recently, out of that former Anthropic researcher who quit over safety concerns because they are worried about exactly this, about A.I. being used in nefarious ways.

Whether it gets into the wrong hands, and the scientists, you know, are the bad guys and trying to create biological weapons on purpose, or whether it's A.I. agents working on their own who go rogue and do something that the humans did not intend for them to do. That's the reason for all of the fear right now. Hadas Gold, CNN, New York.

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ABDELAZIZ: Now, a very unlikely group has joined the push for regulation of artificial intelligence technology. A group of 30 robots staged a protest outside Poland's digital affairs ministry this week, calling for greater oversight of A.I.. The demonstration was organized by Democratism. This is a movement encouraging debate on how A.I. and robotics can affect the labor market.

Now, please stay with us. There is so much more news to come here on CNN.

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ABDELAZIZ: A drone light show is part of the tribute that is marking the September 11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, 25 years ago today. The drones featured two 977 lights, one for each of the lives lost during that attack. The lights rose over New York Harbor before assembling into the outline of the Twin Towers.

Organizers say the aerial artwork was made by artists, 9/11 families, survivors, and first responders. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Salma Abdelaziz in London. CNN Headline Express is coming up next. Thank you. See you guys tomorrow.

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