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CNN International: Judge Orders Trump To Restore WH Access To CNN, MS Now, Politico; Open A.I. Agent Hacked Australia's Government Health Care System; Tropical Storm Nolo Triggers Hurricane Watch In Hawaii. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired September 24, 2026 - 04:30   ET

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

[04:30:00]

POLO SANDOVAL, CNN ANCHOR: The industry needs international standards and cooperation. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, all delivered remarks separately to the council on Wednesday. They urged world leaders to come together to manage the threats posed by developments in A.I. capabilities. Here's part of what the two A.I. leaders had to say.

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DARIO AMODEI, CEO, ANTHROPIC: I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today. For all the differences of the people in this room, we must put aside those differences in order to confront this global opportunity and global threat that is being presented to us at the same time. No leader, no company, and no nation can manage this alone.

SAM ALTMAN, CEO, OPENAI: It doesn't matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10 percent or 1 percent or 12 percent or 0.1 percent. None of these levels are remotely acceptable, and we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case that will be able to keep under human control.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANDOVAL: Altman is also suggesting that creating secure channels to share information between governments on emerging threats. We're also learning of a new incident involving A.I. agents going rogue. Australia's Prime Minister saying that an OpenAI agent hacked into a database of the country's national healthcare system, accessing public and non-public files.

The incident happened in June, but OpenAI says that it only became aware of it in August. The Prime Minister said that he spoke to OpenAI's CEO at the at the UN and also expressed Australia's extreme concern. Hanako Montgomery is joining me live from Tokyo with more on this. So, Hanako, just start off by just really underscoring the significance of this particular incident that we're just learning about.

HANAKO MONTGOMERY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Polo, I mean, this is the first known case of A.I. hacking a government network, and it's also just the latest example of A.I. agents going rogue and working in ways that their human operators never intended. Now, as you mentioned, the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expressed extreme concern to Altman himself, and here's what he explained happened to reporters during the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. This is Albanese. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA: No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing. Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network. Nonetheless, this situation is obviously unacceptable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MONTGOMERY: And Polo, as you heard the prime minister say just then, no personal information was breached. But we do know that this A.I. agent got into Australia's Medicare statistics database, and we also know that it accessed both public and non-public files, including aggregate health statistics and internal file names, and also according to an OpenAI spokesperson, the agent even wrote files into the system.

Now, as you mentioned, Polo, this incident, the security breach, happened back in June when one of the OpenAI agents was conducting some research into healthcare costs and systems. It encountered some security blocks, and it actually bypassed those to get access to this information that it wasn't authorized to actually access.

Now, OpenAI, however, only got word that this actually happened two months later in August when it was conducting some tests and some research into its model's activity, but Australia's government was warned even later on September 10th after the company sent a notice to a generic inbox, and Albanese said that this delay was unacceptable, and he also urged OpenAI to improve their notification systems.

Now, Albanese also said that a forensic investigation has been launched that the government is also considering legal action, and that potentially three other government networks may have been affected by this security breach. But again, these investigations are ongoing, and we don't have the full picture as of yet.

But Polo, I mean, as you pointed out, this really just adds to the widespread concerns here about A.I. guardrails, about using A.I. safely, as we've been hearing at the United Nations General Assembly this week. But also, important to know, Polo, that this is not the first time that an OpenAI agent has hacked into another system before. Earlier this year, we got word that OpenAI hacked Hugging Face, another A.I. company.

So again, Polo, just more and more concerns and examples of A.I. agents acting rogue and acting against the rules that their inventors created. Polo. SANDOVAL: Each one of those cases certainly fueling those concerns that you lay out. Hanako Montgomery joining us from Tokyo. As always, grateful for your reporting. Thank you.

[04:35:00]

And still to come in this hour of CNN Newsroom, we'll talk super El Nino conditions. They have made Hurricane Polo grow stronger at one of the fastest rates on record. We're tracking the storm and what it could mean for the region. Stay with us. You're watching --

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[04:40:00]

SANDOVAL: Welcome back to CNN Newsroom. I'm Polo Sandoval, live in New York. Journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico could soon be back at their posts at the White House in just a few hours. A federal judge has ordered the Trump Administration to immediately reinstate their access to the White House. Timothy Kelly says that revoking their press badges was done without constitutionally adequate due process.

President Trump, for his part, he announced the ban last week, initially claiming the reporters' coverage was overly negative and "fake news." Well, he later alleged that their stories were a threat to national security. That was the argument that was presented by the Department of Justice. Well, the judge also rejected that argument, saying that the government offered little evidence to back up that assertion.

The lawyer representing the news outlets telling this to CNN, "This is a strong this strong ruling, vindicating freedom of the press, due process, and the rule of law. We greatly appreciate the court's swift action." We spoke earlier with CNN's Senior Political Analyst and Bloomberg opinion columnist Ron Brownstein as he reacted to this ruling.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: The First Amendment to the Constitution. I think it made it very hard for the administration to prevail in this, but I still think it was -- it has been so far an extremely revealing episode because Trump continues to test on almost an endless variety of fronts.

His ability to roll back what we have understood to be the traditional buttresses of the democratic system, and so far, the courts have stopped most of these major attempts, whether it's from the you know to use the postal service to control mail balloting or this or attempts to get state voter rolls.

But strikingly along the way and again in this episode, virtually no congressional Republicans came out to oppose him. There really is no cost to him from these repeated probes, and this is far from the last time we will see him try something like this, whether it's with the media or state voting rules or intimidating voting groups and so forth. As long as there is no consequence, I think he continues to press forward.

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SANDOVAL: And let's go back to Saturday when CNN and other outlets were first denied access to the White House grounds. CNN Senior White House Reporter Betsy Klein was one of them. Here's how she described those initial moments over the weekend.

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BETSY KLEIN, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: So, I walk in, I tap my badge, and it beeps a couple of different times. It turns red, blue, and green, and it didn't accept my PIN number. The Secret Service agent in the guard house with whom I have been friendly in the past, asked to see my badge, and I handed it over to him. He told me that it had been deactivated. I asked him if he could provide an explanation as to why it had been deactivated. He said he had no further information.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANDOVAL: The temporary restraining order restoring the reporters' White House White House access will remain in effect for 14 days, according to that order from the court. We'll continue to bring you updates as the story does continue to develop, and as at 4:42, I understand we haven't heard yet from the White House.

Now to weather. Tropical Storm Polo has its sight set on Hawaii and is forecast to become a major hurricane as it approaches the island chain. It will be I should say that that's actually Hurricane Nolo. It will be Hawaii's third brush with a hurricane this season. The hurricane watch is in effect on the Big Island.

Nolo is forecast to skirt just south of the island on Saturday. Nolo also likely to bring some heavy rain, possibly leading to life- threatening floods and mudslides, as well as some wind damage and also dangerous surf. Again, those are two storms. The other one, of course, Hurricane Polo.

The storm, it is forecast to turn north in the coming hours, increasing to hurricane strength, and it could then head towards the Big Island, making its closest approach as a Category Three storm, before eventually turning back west on Saturday.

All right, now to Hurricane Polo. We are tracking slowly and very closely as it continues to move through the Pacific. Hurricane Polo, according to the National Hurricane Center, is being described now as an extremely powerful Category Five hurricane. Right now, the storm's outer bands are moving across Mexico's southern coast, and officials are worried about heavy rain and potential flooding in some of those areas, which you see there on that (inaudible) photo.

Mexico does have its closest -- it does -- it's already closed several of its ports on the Pacific coast as a result. But the National Hurricane Center is forecasting the storm -- that the core of it that it won't make direct landfall in Mexico. In fact, they're predicting that it will turn in the coming hours, and then eventually move further out to sea.

Hurricane Polo has been gaining some strength from conditions made by the Super El Nino phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean, and the storm went through a pretty quick rate of rapid intensification in just the last couple of days.

[04:45:00]

One of the fastest on record in the Eastern Pacific, and that's according to the National Hurricane Center. Joining me now from Stanford, California, is Henna Hundal. She's a five-time delegate to the UN Climate Change conferences. Henna, so good to see you again. Thanks for joining us.

HENNA HUNDAL, FIVE-TIME UN CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE delegate: Great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

SANDOVAL: Obviously, a lot of people are talking about the storm right now that's churning in the Pacific. It's uniquely named, but it is certainly posing a very serious threat here. Can we see this rapid intensification of Hurricane Polo earlier this week as just one indicator of El Nino's influence on weather patterns?

HUNDAL: That's a good question. You know, I think between Hurricane Polo, the effects of El Nino, and the conversations that are unfolding at New York Climate Week, I think the convergence point here is that we're really dealing with a more complicated climate risk landscape.

You know, Hurricane Polo. It climbed its wind speeds more than 100 miles per hour within a matter of practically one day, going from a tropical storm to a Category Five hurricane. In the backdrop of El Nino, we're seeing how this natural climate phenomenon can really shift risk across entire regions, and I think all of these questions were forced to confront at an event like New York Climate Week, juxtaposed right next to the UN General Assembly. We think about what we really do with this information when we're dealing with all of these superimposed hazards.

SANDOVAL: Yeah, but my understanding is that Hurricane Polo basically just fed off this unseasonably warm column of very deep water off the coast of western Mexico, and now we're left with this historic storm, and I'm glad you mentioned to Climate Week here in New York. I'm just curious how weather events like this storm in the Pacific are influencing the conversations that are happening here in New York among folks who are genuinely concerned about this climate crisis. Of course, referring to Climate Week.

HUNDAL: Yeah, you know, I think one of the aspects that I'm really heartened to hear -- hear about, and that I'm really keeping my eye on, is the shift in the conversation from setting these ambitions by governments to actually how do we implement them in terms of improved infrastructure, climate finance, energy systems, and -- and community resilience.

I think when we think about an event like the UN Climate Change Conference, which is just a few weeks away, that's where we have government actors coming together to set these commitments. But an event like Climate Week in New York, you have civil actors, civil society, philanthropists, a lot of ordinary citizens who are actually part of the implementation of these promises on the ground.

And so, I think it's a really interesting time to see the juxtaposition of this -- this event, this Category Five hurricane happening alongside the opportunity for actors from all over society to convene to discuss the implementation of some of these strategies that will actually help communities prepare.

SANDOVAL: So, it sounds like there are actually discussions right now happening at Climate Week that -- that should give us some encouragement about efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate -- on climate, I should say.

HUNDAL: Yeah, you know, I would say from an event like -- like Hurricane Polo, the bottom line is that we understand that the research is pointing to the increasing intensity of tropical cyclones as a result of climate change, as a result of greater warming of sea surface -- sea surface temperatures. And so, what does that look like on the ground?

That looks like a greater proportion of Category Four and Five hurricanes, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And those are the most destructive, the most damaging to human life, property, and infrastructure. And so, that's where really, we need that involvement of community, of civil society, of civil actors to think about what the preparedness and what the solutions will look like on the ground.

SANDOVAL: Of course, we just read a headline on CNN.com that a super- sized El Nino could cause more than 450,000 heat deaths by February of next year. It's an incredibly sobering number, and just another reminder in addition to that storm in the Pacific. Henna Hundal, as always, great to have you with us.

HUNDAL: Thank you. Appreciate it. it.

SANDOVAL: All right, coming up next here on CNN Newsroom. Bombshell testimony in the murder trial of a former American Idol contestant who's accused of killing his wife. The husband's ex-mistress takes the stand. Just ahead.

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[04:50:00]

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SANDOVAL: Well, the murder trial of former American Idol contestant and church worship leader Caleb Flynn is expected to resume in Ohio in the coming hours. Flynn is accused of fatally shooting his wife Ashley in February and then staging the scene to look like a break-in. He has pleaded not guilty. His ex-mistress is expected to return to the witness stand after testifying for several hours on Wednesday about their nearly two-year affair. During that time, she told jurors about how their relationship

developed after they met at church. She read aloud dozens of their text messages, including many where Flynn expressed how much he hated his wife and that he wished she were dead. Prosecutors say that the affair was the motive of the killing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How often would he make statements about wanting Ashley to die?

ALLEIGHA BOTNER, FORMER MISTRESS OF CALEB FLYNN: That's probably at least once a month.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[04:55:00]

SANDOVAL: Asked about how she feels about Caleb Flynn now, the woman says that she hates him and believes he murdered his wife. Again, he's pleaded not guilty. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Polo Sandoval. Our breaking news coverage continues with CNN Headline Express in a moment.

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