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Fetterman Makes Video for Trump's Convention; Researcher Warns of Perils of A.I.; 'Forever War' Sparked by 9/11: What Have We Learned? Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired September 10, 2026 - 06:00   ET

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

[06:00:12]

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Today in the group chat, Democratic Senator John Fetterman surprises everyone at Trump's midterm Republican national convention, fueling rumors that he's switching sides. Are Democrats better without him?

Plus, Texas Senate candidate James Talarico flip-flops on transgender athletes in sports. We're going to ask whether the voters can believe what he's saying now.

Also, 9/11 started America's war on terror. Twenty-five years on, is it a success or failure? We're going to talk to a combat veteran.

And another big tech worker warns A.I. companies are, quote, "gambling with our lives." So, where's Congress? Why aren't they doing something?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JACOB COXON, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHER: There's a chance we could all die. Like, that -- that is coming soon.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Good morning, everybody. I'm Audie Cornish, and here's where we begin.

A Democrat, Senator John Fetterman -- key word again, Democrat -- making the surprise cameo at President Trump's midterm convention.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN FETTERMAN (D-PA): Yes, I'm a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I'm a commonsense Democrat. I'm always going to stand with America. I'm always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: So, this video played at the convention to a smattering of applause. Democrats of Pennsylvania really not happy, though, saying he was, quote, "too lazy to do it in person. Checks out," calling him Benedict Arnold and quote, "Trump's favorite Democrat." Now in recent months, Fetterman has broken with Democrats mainly on

the issue of Israel and the rise of Democratic socialists. And this has fueled rumors of a party switch. So, would Democrats be happy with that?

Today in the group chat, we have Alex Thompson, CNN political analyst and national political correspondent at Axios; Mike Dubke, former Trump White House communications director; and Meghan Hays, former Biden White House director of message planning.

So, let's start with our Democrat. Surprised? Not surprised?

MIKE DUBKE, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Oh, it goes this way.

CORNISH: Well, I mean, it was your convention, but I figured in this case --

MEGHAN HAYS, FORMER BIDEN WHITE HOUSE DIRECTOR OF MESSAGE PLANNING: You can have Fetterman.

CORNISH: Yes.

DUBKE: Well, Democrats were not going to get in, weren't they?

HAYS: I -- I think that he is causing a problem for the Democratic Party in a lot of ways. But I think that he knows very well he will not win a primary in '28. And so, I think he's trying to remain relevant.

He's come really close with Senator McCormick. They have some joint fundraising efforts together. I think that people do think he'll probably start caucusing with the Republicans.

I think where this really comes into play is how many seats that Democrats can win in the Senate in '26. And if his vote really is going to matter. Because if they don't take back the majority or if it's very slim, his vote will matter.

But I don't think most Democrats put much stock in him. And I don't think people are really looking at what he's doing.

CORNISH: Do Republicans want him, or is it just sticking it to the libs?

DUBKE: No, absolutely. You want to grow your numbers in the Senate.

I think you're exactly -- the power politics here is exactly the way Meghan points this out, which is come the results of the election this year, if it is a 50-50 Senate or a 51-49 Senate, Fetterman is in play, much like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the last several --

CORNISH: Yes.

DUBKE: -- last several Congresses have been.

CORNISH: Now, not in the Senate.

DUBKE: Well, they aren't. They both went independent.

CORNISH: OK.

DUBKE: They didn't go full-on Republican, but they went from Democrat to independent. And I think you're going to end -- but stayed with the Democrats. So, they didn't move the majority power.

But we've seen that in the past. We've seen other Republicans and Democrats switch party. Jim Jeffords, Arlen Specter, Rick Shelby, I mean, so there have -- Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

I mean, this is not unusual. This is not a Benedict Arnold moment.

I find this -- this part of this story is actually troubling to me, that somebody says something nice in somebody else's party, and all of a sudden, they're a traitor.

HAY: I think what --

ALEX THOMPSON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: But it's not -- Let's be clear, this is not a one-off.

HAYS: Yes. That's right. And I think --

THOMPSON: It wasn't just like a random -- be like, Oh, I like -- I like --

CORNISH: Oh, I just happened to be there.

I wondered if it was a soft launch for his Republican bid later on.

THOMPSON: Well, Dave McCormick has been in a months-long courtship of John --

CORNISH: And this is a Republican senator in Pennsylvania.

THOMPSON: Yes. Yes.

CORNISH: His counterpart.

THOMPSON: Exactly. And Dave McCormick has been in a months-long partnership -- courtship of John Fetterman. And John Fetterman can say -- and they have said that he is -- remains a Democrat.

But every poll shows that he would almost certainly lose a Democratic primary in 2028 in his -- in his seat. And if you are John Fetterman and you -- then you only really have two options, if you want to run for reelection. You run as an independent or a Republican. It's very unclear if Democrats, both like small dollars and institutionally, would support him in that bid.

And John Fetterman --

CORNISH: Yes, and in the meantime, he's sort of fighting for his life in the comments, so to speak.

THOMPSON: Exactly.

CORNISH: "The Wall Street Journal" put out this article that claims that past staffers saying, look, the guy doesn't care about the job anymore. He's not meeting with important constituents when we want him to. He's kind of shirking the schedule.

They interviewed a lot of staffers and lawmakers, and he has claimed these are lies, half-truths, innuendoes, smears, quote, and anonymous.

But I am aware that there is, like, a new social media handle of which they claim that they will drop receipts. I don't know what that means.

THOMPSON: Yes. The former Fetterman -- former Fetterman staffers that claim they're going to do it. Notably, a lot of Democrats were pretty mute after that article came out. The one person that publicly defended Fetterman, Dave McCormick.

HAYS: Because it's -- because I think it's all true. And I think that's what Malcolm Kenyatta was saying in his post, is that he is a lazy senator, and he's not representing the constituents of Pennsylvania. And this is just one more dig at his constituents.

DUBKE: And I read this as a hit job by the Democrats, trying to inch along to -- to figure out how far they can push this guy before they lose him after the 2026 election results.

HAYS: Well, they're going to lose them anyway. So, what does it mean?

DUBKE: Maybe. Maybe not.

CORNISH: The one thing I have learned from when I was a congressional reporter is that, when the staffers start gossiping and doing all this stuff, you may recall someone, you know, leaking that someone ate salad with a comb and things like that. Katie Porter was --

DUBKE: It was Klobuchar. She's running for --

CORNISH: I didn't say.

DUBKE: I'm saying it. She's running for governor, and everyone in Minnesota should know this.

CORNISH: Once they start. Oh, now you're into it.

DUBKE: Oh, no, I'm into it. Oh, yes.

CORNISH: So were clear. She's -- I do tend to think about what staffers say, because they don't really speak out. They tend to circle the wagons. So, this Fetterman leaking situation is going to be interesting.

And we did not even mention Israel, because it's almost a given. This has been a red line issue for him with the Democratic Party. OK. Stay with me. Coming up, the president again at this convention

promised every adult citizen a $5,000 payout if Republicans keep control of Congress. So, is he trying to buy the midterms? A=

And next, big tech researchers warn that A.I. could kill us all. Does a politician have the power or the will to protect us?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:12:09]

CORNISH: All right, I got to talk about this. Another person who worked on creating A.I., sounding the alarm about the speed and the development of the latest models.

On social media Jacob Coxon accused companies OpenAI and Anthropic of not acting responsibly in the race to build superhuman intelligence. So, he says they're, quote, "gambling with our lives in ways they can't even predict yet," and warns it could, quote, "kill us all."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COXON: Precise scenario sounds a little bit like science fiction. It sounds like something that's not real, but I think it's frighteningly real.

I think that if you extrapolate into the future the level of capabilities of these A.I.s with the same independent volition, they could cause extreme havoc, for example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons. There's a lot of ways that the A.I. could actuate itself in the world.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Joining the group chat, Marie Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios.

Now, this comes after several hacking incidents, right? Most famously the one at OpenAI where you had the bots that were supposed to work on a project, and they said, oh, we've got an idea for the project. Let's jailbreak the wall and go hack somewhere else; called Hugging Face. And then it became a whole thing.

So, tell me exactly what he's saying, because it doesn't sound like it's just Skynet. What is he saying is the problem?

MARIE CURI, TECH POLICY REPORTER, AXIOS: He is saying that this technology is increasingly capable of hacking into systems without researchers like himself knowing that it's even happening in the first place, knowing how to resolve it, and knowing how to track it.

CORNISH: Knowing how to resolve it.

CURI: Exactly. How to resolve it. Because the Hugging Face incident happened within a test bed. And then these rogue agents escaped this test bed into a real-world company. And the researchers didn't know exactly how to rein it back in.

CORNISH: And hung out on their own message board. Like, that's another thing that I don't understand.

CURI: Yes.

CORNISH: There's a world of some of these third-party evaluations where they're finding the agents decide we need to talk to each other how to solve this problem without the researchers knowing.

CURI: Right. They're behaving independently. They are, you know, talking about getting rid of themselves and sacrificing themselves for the mission of completing this task that researchers have given them, almost by any means necessary.

And so, this -- there is real cause for concern. His specific predictions on, you know, the human race going extinct in the ten years -- in the next ten years, I think, is alarming.

CORNISH: Yes.

CURI: But what people should really be focusing on right now is what are regulators going to do about it? What is Washington going to do about it?

CORNISH: Can I play a sample? As soon as we say, what can Washington do? There's a bunch of people who are going to throw up their hands and say, probably nothing.

But alas, here I have some lawmakers for you. There's Senator Chris van Hollen saying, "It's time to pump the brakes and take action NOW," all caps.

Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, we must be ready. This is happening whether we want it to.

Democrat Greg Casar, "This is an emergency. Congress must convene hearings," which is not something I have heard yet. And Democrat Don Beyer, "Congress needs a sense of urgency on A.I. that it has not had so far."

And then finally, from Senator Bernie Sanders, we heard this last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): It is time for the American people and their representatives in Congress to say, we are going to control it. I don't know whether it's a 10 percent chance that humanity will be wiped out, or a 2 percent chance. It doesn't matter. It is much too risky.

Stop it right now. And what we need immediately is a ban on superintelligent A.I.

(END VIDEO CLIP) CORNISH: What's superintelligence? What's the distinction he's making

there?

CURI: So, superintelligence is when the A.I. is more intelligent than the average human. But the solution that --

CORNISH: I feel like we might have reached that point. Like --

CURI: Well, according to OpenAI, we have. Yes. With their most recent model, Astro, which they define as artificial general intelligence. But the way they define it, there's a lot of different definitions for this stuff within the industry.

CORNISH: Yes, there is.

CURI: I think Bernie Sanders's approach of completely banning superintelligence is a good talking point, but there are more common- sense solutions happening on Capitol Hill that are bipartisan that would, for example, protect open-source player -- players or smaller players from having to adhere to a regulatory regime.

CORNISH: So, I have to translate. Open -- open-source players means the people who have access to the shared code and technology.

CURI: Correct.

CORNISH: We all can see how it works. We can all play with it. Those folks would still be able to experiment.

CURI: Experiment.

CORNISH: The people who are just like, let me keep this secret until it's diabolically a problem, maybe we have guardrails.

CURI: And one of the main reasons that we have not seen regulation is because of this argument that it's going to end up in regulatory capture, where only OpenAI and Anthropic are the dominant players that can adhere to those rules.

CORNISH: Or that China will surpass us. There is a major argument within the lobbyist community of A.I. where they come to lawmakers and they say, look, if we don't do it, China will. If you have your little moratoriums, if you stop our data centers, you are going to cause more problems than you realize.

CURI: There are solutions that don't require moratoriums, that don't lead to regulatory capture, that would protect competition. It's a matter of having White House backing and congressional leadership backing.

Plenty of bills have been introduced. Plenty of hearings have been held. Bernie Sanders is having one next week that is bipartisan, by the way.

CORNISH: Oh, good. Maybe we'll listen for that. I want to play one more thing for you, that researcher. I want to come

back to him. One question he got from Anderson and that many people have asked, which is like, wait a second. So, if you all think this is a problem, OK, why are you still working on this at this speed? And here is what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COXON: Surely, a guy working on this technology can't actually believe there's this level of danger. No, that's completely genuine. And these people are also completely genuine when they are begging to be regulated. This is a genuine thing.

They find themselves in this scenario where they're compelled to race towards building a deadly technology. And they would -- they would love for some sort of international body to allow them to -- to approach it at a reasonable pace.

They just don't trust that the people around them are going to get there in a safe way. So, they feel like they have to race there, too.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: The background here is that, of course, he left Anthropic. And Anthropic's CEO has been one of those out there most sort of vociferously saying we need regulation.

Other folks have been saying, you're just saying that, because you think you're going to benefit in some way.

But speak to that. The average A.I. researcher worker, you're having your protein shake right now, looking at the containments and being like, this seems bad. Why are they sticking around? Why don't we see more kind of whistleblower resignation activity?

CURI: It's the same argument that if they don't do it, an adversary will. And it's their responsibility, their social, moral obligation to make sure the U.S. gets there first. Because --

CORNISH: To be the good guys.

CURI:

CORNISH: With the weapons.

CURI: Right. We're spending a lot of time thinking about what these researchers are thinking or not thinking whether or not we should believe them.

We should point to the fact that when the Hugging Face incident happened, there were third-party, independent auditors that came in. Right? Redwood and meter. By the way, these researchers will be at the hearing next week that Bernie Sanders is.

Going to just do this work. They are trying to be guardrails, right. And they came in, and they independently tested the Hugging Face

breach. And they said, there is concern here. There is cause for concern here. And so, some action around it is necessary, regardless of whether or not you want to trust these companies.

CORNISH: OK. Shout out to the third-party folks doing God's work.

Marie Curi, thank you so much for being here. We're going to follow up on that hearing next week.

After the break on CNN THIS MORNING, we want to talk about this: 25 years on, America is still dealing with the consequences of the war on terror. I'm going to speak to a veteran who served in Afghanistan about what he thinks that legacy is.

Plus, a new attack ad tells John Ossoff to, quote, "put down the mascara." Do Republicans own masculinity?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:24:22]

CORNISH: Tomorrow marks 25 years since the September 11th attacks, and today we are still, in many ways, living with the aftermath.

Former President George W. Bush's war on terror, the forever war. What has it accomplished?

In its early days, it helped prevent more terror attacks in America. Terror suspects were arrested. The Taliban was toppled.

Now, the Taliban is resurrected, resurging in 2021 and imposing its rule with the firepower left behind by the U.S. after its messy withdrawal.

According to a 2022 Pentagon report, approximately $7 billion worth of U.S. military equipment is now controlled by the enemy in a war it was trying to drive out.

[06:25:03]

It's been 25 years since President Bush stood amid the rubble of 9/11 and vowed to avenge the attack. Here's what he wants us to take from it today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our nation occasionally goes to isolationist periods where the attitude is, we've got too many problems at home. Therefore, who cares what happens overseas?

Which really means to me, they just don't pay attention to the lesson of 9/11. Because what happens overseas matter to our national security at home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Joining me now, Max Rose. He's a former New York congressman, the first post-9/11 combat veteran to represent New York City in Congress.

Good morning. Thank you so much for being here.

MAX ROSE, FORMER U.S. CONGRESSMAN: Thanks for having me.

CORNISH: Tell me how you served. And were you a person who, in a sense, was activated to join in the aftermath of the attacks?

ROSE: Well, I served as an infantry platoon leader in Afghanistan. Gosh, more -- more than ten years ago now.

And, you know, I'm not sure if I was immediately activated by 9/11 consciously, but I lived here in New York City at the time. I was a teenager. My mother worked right around the corner still. Still does.

And it certainly -- what that showed me was that there was a necessity for a call to service, one that could be exercised in so many different ways.

But I got to tell you, when I served in active duty, the number one takeaway I had is that my service paled and continues to pale in comparison to the 9/11 veterans who served during the entire global war on terrorism.

CORNISH: Right.

ROSE: Many of whom did 4 or 5, six, seven deployments. We have never asked this of veterans in the history of this country.

I have friends who literally had ten-year-old, 11-year-old, 12-year- old kids, and they had spent more time in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan than they'd spent at home with their children.

That is really what's awe-inspiring. And that's my -- that's my takeaway, as I think about on this 9/11 anniversary of just their tremendous service.

CORNISH: Now, when you say that, it is a good reminder of what we mean when we say forever wars. I think in a political context, we're talking about policy-wise, being entangled. The reality on the ground of what that means is what you're describing.

So, here are some key voices over the years. For example, Barack Obama is somebody who, in a way, campaigned against the idea of forever wars. Here he is in 2015.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And to the American people, I know that many of you have grown weary of this conflict. As you are well aware, I do not support the idea of endless war, and I have repeatedly argued against marching into open-ended military conflicts that do not serve our core security interests.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: He ended up doing drone missions in seven countries in the region. Here's Donald Trump in 2024.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: And we're going to end these endless wars, endless wars. They never stop. You ever see these wars? They go on for 14 years, 20 years. They're fighting ISIS for 21 years. These people are something.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Trump, of course, goes on to create the secretary of war, who had to then defend the Iran War. Here's what Hegseth has said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETE HEGSETH, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Does this generation know better?

ROSE: Gosh, we're going to find out. Because the generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are certainly at the highest rungs of power. And it largely depends, in some ways, on what lessons there are to be learned.

We could learn lessons on opposite sides of the coin, right? We could learn a lesson not to be isolationists. We could learn a lesson not to commit boots on the ground without a legitimate and realistic military goal and outcome.

But here's, I do -- what I do believe should be the takeaway, which is that war has really significant sacrifices that are inextricably linked to it being exercised.

That applies to the war in Iran today, where we have lost service members and far, far too many beyond that have been injured. And of course, applies to the thousands of service members who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And, you know, on 9/11, we of course, and us New Yorkers, we think about that actual horrific day and all of the fear that we -- that we had that day and in its aftermath.

[06:30:00]