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The Story Is with Elex Michaelson
Trump Approves Deal With Saudi Arabia To Enrich Uranium; Trump Admin. Demands States Turn Over Voter Rolls; 18 Days In Minnesota: The Killings Of Renee Good And Alex Pretti; OpenAI Test Model Escapes, Hacks Real Company's Servers; Independent Autopsy on Nolan Wells Yields No Solid Answers. Aired 1-2a ET
Aired July 23, 2026 - 01:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Has made it through the U.S. House, but it has stalled in the Senate where it doesn't seem to have the votes. But the Republicans are still cooking on it.
Tom Foreman, CNN, Washington.
[01:00:12]
ELEX MICHAELSON, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks for watching the first hour of The Story Is. The next hour starts right now.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Live from Los Angeles, The Story Is with Elex Michaelson.
MICHAELSON: I'm Elex Michaelson. Coming up, The Story Is, new diplomatic moves in the Middle East. We'll break down President Trump's latest deal as the U.S. continues striking Iran.
The Story Is, the 2026 midterms. I'll speak with the California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton about some of the hottest topics this election cycle.
And The Story Is, A.I. takeover. How an experimental model escaped the lab and hacked into another company's system.
Welcome to The Story Is. The top story is the war with Iran, as President Trump and Iranian leaders continue to trade threats, U.S. Central Command says the military has completed a 12th straight night of strikes. And now Donald Trump is threatening to destroy Iranian bridges and power plants every time that Iran strikes a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran is vowing to retaliate if that happens.
President Trump, meanwhile, attended a dignified transfer on Wednesday for four U.S. service members killed in the Middle East. He talked about the conflict at an event in Georgia earlier.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This skirmish we have going on, I call it a skirmish. This is with this skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I call it that because let me tell you, they're getting hit so hard.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAELSON: The U.S. has signed a deal allowing Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium for civilian energy purposes, but sources say it does not include international oversight, fueling concerns about the kingdom potentially developing its own nuclear weapon.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. JOHN GARAMENDI (D-CA): We should never, ever do this. Why would we ever set up a situation in which there would be the likelihood of nuclear proliferation? We've already got around with an ability to enrich uranium to the point of being able to make a bomb, and we're going to turn that over to Saudi Arabia? No, we're not. This is just terrible, terrible policy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAELSON: And we do not know that Iran has that capability. More now from CNN's international diplomatic editor, Nic Robertson.
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: What makes this deal different? And there's a deal that the United States, for example, had with the UAE in 2009, a nuclear civilian energy program there that was sort of described as the gold standard. The enriched uranium is not enriched in that case in the UAE, which is that style has become the norm for countries moving into nuclear power. They tend not to be enriching the uranium themselves.
The difference for Saudi Arabia is it appears it would be allowed to enrich the uranium itself. Another part of that gold standard deal that the UAE and so many other countries have is that there would be careful oversight by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Additional protocols, as the term is known, would allow those inspectors, international inspectors, to go and visit sites.
Saudi Arabia doesn't seem to be subject to those same additional protocols and scrutiny. In some ways, this sounds exactly like the sort of deal that Iran would be pushing for, where it would be able to do its own enrichment and wouldn't have stringent oversight. Saudi Arabia, and I think if we take a big step back here, Saudi Arabia has a military treaty, a pact with Pakistan.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia is widely understood in the region to have helped fund Pakistan's nuclear program. And it's widely believed that if Saudi Arabia felt it needed to call on nuclear weapons to defend itself, it could call on its treaty partner, Pakistan.
We don't know all the terms of the deal that the White House has agreed with Saudi Arabia at the moment. But it's these points, the enriching uranium themselves and those less stringent oversights that's giving rise to concern, particularly here in Israel, where it was widely seen under President Biden that Saudi Arabia would get a civilian nuclear program as part of its normalization with Israel. Well, of course, the Gaza-Hamas attacks, Israel's response following that has put Saudi Arabia in a position where it won't normalize with Israel until Israel accepts and recognizes a Palestinian state. So from Israel's perspective, this puts in the position of having a neighbor, another neighbor with the potential for nuclear weapons. And also it puts criticism on Prime Minister Netanyahu for his relationship with President Trump that would have allowed this to happen.
[01:05:15]
So, yes, it raises a lot of concerns. Maybe not all of them are justified at this stage until we hear what the White House has to say about this deal.
MICHAELSON: Nic Robertson, extensive analysis there.
President Trump is blaming Democrats for the state of the U.S. economy while speaking to a crowd in Georgia. He said Democrats made up the word affordability while also making promises that his administration is tackling the high prices Americans are facing across the country. The President also attacked Republican senators for not passing the SAVE America Act, his elections overhaul bill. He is pressuring lawmakers to eliminate the filibuster so the bill can pass before the midterm elections.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Mike Johnson and Congress have done a great job, but we're having a hard time in the Senate. The Democrats are going to terminate the filibuster as soon as they have a chance, and then they're going to approve Puerto Rico and D.C. as a state. They got four more senators. They're going to get up with 12 more congressmen. They're going to get like 40 electoral votes. If they are allowed to do that, by that time I'll be sitting home and I'm not a big crier. I don't think you want to see me cry.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAELSON: Trump's comments come as lawmakers are working to push through some key legislation ahead of the upcoming August recess. The House has narrowly passed a bill to add new restrictions on stock trades by lawmakers. Partisan dispute kept them from approving an outright ban. Meanwhile, Democrats are raising concerns about the Russia sanctions bill championed by the late Senator Lindsey Graham. They say it could end up handing too much authority to President Trump. And a number of Republican senators are coming out against year round daylight saving time. The House approved that bill last week.
Now to the fallout over the New Jersey governor's admission that thousands of non-citizens were mistakenly added to the state's voter rolls. She said the error was caused by a serious software glitch at the state Motor Vehicle Commission years ago before she took office. Sixty-six hundred people who were not U.S. citizens were registered as voters and of that group, 400 of them cast improper ballots in recent elections. To be clear, there is no indication those miscast votes affected any of the overall election results. Still, Republicans are trying to use this episode as ammunition in their long running campaign for tighter voter restrictions. One of New Jersey's U.S. senators said, "Someone screwed up bad."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. ANDY KIM (D-NJ): It absolutely was unacceptable. Needs to be fixed.
MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Someone be fired for that?
KIM: Probably. I mean, like, look, it seems like people knew about it. Took a long time to fix. And, you know, certainly didn't bring it up. I was not aware of it until the governor's statement yesterday. That's wrong.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAELSON: Joining me to discuss this and more here in the studio live is Republican candidate for governor of California, Steve Hilton. Welcome back to The Story Is.
STEVE HILTON, REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR: Good to see you.
MICHAELSON: So in California, the government of the state is not turning over the voter rolls to the federal government who are asking for the voter rolls. They'd asked for voter rolls in New Jersey as well. The governor of California says he doesn't trust Donald Trump with that information. As governor, would you turn over the voter rolls? And do you trust the Trump administration not to misuse that information?
HILTON: Well, I think we need to fix this problem here. The secretary of state in California, a Democrat, has to report regularly on the state of the voter rolls. And for years now, the estimates from here in California is that you've got millions of wrong names on the voter rolls. That's coming from California, not from a Donald Trump accusation or anything like that.
MICHAELSON: But wrong names could be a married name is different or something like that.
HILTON: Well, it's more serious than that. I mean, the estimate is that there are millions and it could be people who've moved out of the state.
MICHAELSON: Right.
HILTON: We've had 1.9 million people, as your colleague Fareed Zakaria pointed out, just in the last few years moved out of the state. People who've moved address and don't re-register more than once. And so there are names on there that shouldn't be on there. But that's something we can deal with here in California, the county registrars of elections. And if you had a strong secretary of state who really took this seriously, look, there's been progress in L.A. County where we are right now. A million and a half names have been removed in the last few years. And I think we need to keep that progress going.
MICHAELSON: So would you turn over the voter rolls to the federal government?
HILTON: I haven't actually thought about that because my focus is on what we do here in California.
MICHAELSON: That's part of being the leader of California, no?
HILTON: Well, yes, we can fix the problem here.
MICHAELSON: Yes.
HILTON: I think the whole attitude that everything has to be dealt with by the federal government is one of the things that's gone wrong. I think there are huge areas where, you know, we're the fourth biggest economy in the world. I think we can manage our own elections in California. We don't need anyone else doing it for us. And but we've got to do a better job. Even "The New York Times" in an editorial, which I strongly agreed with, said we've got to do better in California.
[01:10:19]
MICHAELSON: In terms of this issue of affordability, which President Trump says that the Democrats made up that word. California has clearly made a decision that clean energy is more important than cheap energy and have put in place policies that have made energy in this state more expensive. President Trump has clearly made a decision that stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is more important than cheaper gas prices, at least temporarily. Do you agree with that decision? Is that the right priority?
HILTON: So, again, I want to focus on what we can do here in California. The policies that have been followed in California have made our gas prices at least $2 higher than the rest of the country, even with the Iran war going on. I can't affect the foreign policy of the United States as governor. What I can affect are the policies we have here.
Now, I don't actually think that it's a choice between clean energy and lower gas prices, because actually, if you look at the policies, they call it climate policy. It's not. It's climate posturing. These policies are not actually helping the fight against climate change at all.
MICHAELSON: They say that they are.
HILTON: Well, what can they point to? They have no impact on global temperature.
MICHAELSON: Well, you used to have a lot more smog in downtown L.A. years ago. Yes.
HILTON: But that's a different issue. That's not about carbon dioxide.
MICHAELSON: Yes.
HILTON: That's about emissions from vehicle tailpipes like nitrous oxide, which are different than the carbon dioxide, which is the target of climate policy. In other words, they are hurting working people in small businesses without helping the environment. I think we should help the environment and cut costs for people. That's my plan.
MICHAELSON: One of the big questions that especially the governor of California is going to tackle is regulating artificial intelligence, which is an environmental issue. It's so many different issues associated with that as well.
HILTON: Yes.
MICHAELSON: The headline today on CNN.com, an OpenAI test model escaped and broke into a real company's test server, which is scary as a concept. How do you think of regulating A.I. as governor of California? How do you stop something like that? Or has the train already left the station?
HILTON: So I think it's -- you're completely right. This is a technology that we lead the world in here in California. I think we should lead the world in the right way to regulate it. And I think actually that's not happening right now. You've got all sorts of governments across the world trying to do this. And I think getting it wrong in some areas, trying to overregulate and insert themselves into a process they don't really know much about. There's massive disagreement, even within the industry, about the consequences of A.I. about what it's going to do and what it operates.
MICHAELSON: So what do you do?
HILTON: I want to make sure -- I'm going to sit down with the people who run these businesses and really understand what are the risks that we face. There are a couple that we clearly face that we have to do more on the risk to children. I think that that we need much more protection there. And I think there's actually a really important issue about the creative community. Very important here in L.A., of course, and how A.I. affects our creative industries, which we also want to keep in the lead in California.
MICHAELSON: Which is interesting that you bring that up because you just told me that tomorrow you're going to be launching ads made by A.I.
HILTON: Yes. Yes.
MICHAELSON: These are folks that had unofficially supported Spencer Pratt, not working with the campaign, but posted fan videos. They're now working officially with you. And some of those ads are very creative, got a lot of attention. But there are folks in Hollywood that are going to hear that and say, we're fighting against A.I. Why wouldn't you -- why would you support that and not support us? Not pay for real people to make the real people are making those ads.
HILTON: Real people are making those ads. There's a lot of the crews, as it were. They were involved in producing something as creative as what everyone will see tomorrow is there's a lot of people involved. And I think the key issue --
MICHAELSON: But not as many people as a human production, right?
HILTON: Well, I think they -- we can live side by side. It's a technology that that can really help with creativity. The important point is that the creative process is something that the people who create artists are able to make sure that they earn a living from their likeness or their music or whatever it may be, and don't have that disappear into some kind of technological black hole where they're being ripped off. And I think that's a very important protection we need.
MICHAELSON: Let's talk about the state of this race. There was a PPIC poll that came out last week that showed that Xavier Becerra, your Democratic opponent, is at 61 percent. You're at 36 percent, which is sort of about where you would think in terms of Democrat versus Republican.
[01:15:05]
You put out an ad very interesting today in the L.A. Times, in "The San Francisco Chronicle," where you put in big letters, can you be anti-Trump but still vote for me? And you lay out the case. You said, yes, I'm the Republican, the "Fox News" guy endorsed by Trump.
But this election is not about who you hate in Washington. It's about what you love here. Do you have evidence of this sort of strategy running in a deep blue state that it supported Trump's opponent by over 20 points of that working? People being willing to do that.
HILTON: Well, we'll see. We'll come back and talk about it in a few months. This is day one of the general election campaign. We launched it today in Boyle Heights, the scene of that terrible warehouse fire where you have a working class Latino community weeks on still suffering from the consequences there.
And so the point that I'm making in this campaign is that actually, of course, California is a state where you've had Democrats in charge for a long time. Of course, it's obvious that there are many people who don't like President Trump. But the decisions we make here to make our state a place where you can run a business, where you can make a living, where families can afford to live. I'm a pragmatic, problem solving changemaker, just like you're talking about your conversation about mayors.
I'm not an ideologue. I don't want to tell anyone how to live. I just want to help people live their best life, reduce their costs. It's a positive, practical campaign we're putting forward saying, look, enough is enough. Let's fix California.
MICHAELSON: And real quickly, Xavier Becerra is running. He could be the first Latino governor in over 100 years in this state. He talked during a speech about street tacos, a clip that got millions of views online and people had a lot of different reactions to it. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
XAVIER BECERRA, CALIFORNIA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: There's real food in California and there are real street tacos and you don't get them in some establishment that's been around for a long time. You get it on the street from the guy who's been making it for a long time in his little cart.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAELSON: A lot of people had strong reactions to that, especially restaurant owners. How do you respond?
HILTON: Well, remember, I've been a restaurant owner myself, Elex, back in the day in England. Most of my career has been as a small business owner. It's small business owners that are really offended by that because, again, this is a conversation I had in East L.A. Right at the beginning of my campaign, people have saved up to start a business, a brick and mortar restaurant. And right outside, you've got street vendors that don't pay taxes, don't comply with the onerous regulations that the government is putting on every small business. The safety inspections and all this stuff don't have to do any of that. It's unfair competition.
And so this business that the people are speaking to, they said they went out of business after six months because they couldn't compete with the unlicensed street vendor. And I cannot believe that Becerra is on the side of that rather than the small businesses trying to make it in this state with all the burdens that Democrat policies put upon them.
MICHAELSON: Steve Hilton, Republican candidate for governor of California. Always great to see you.
HILTON: Good to see you. Thanks, Elex.
Coming up, CNN can finally project a winner in Arizona's first House District Democratic primary. He is emergency physician Amish Shah, who campaigned on lowering health care costs. Former state lawmaker has also highlighted his ability to work across the aisle. Shah will face off in November's general election against Republican Jay Feely. The former NFL place kicker has the endorsement of President Trump.
Diplomatic efforts are picking up to get peace talks between Russia and Ukraine back on track. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, met on the sidelines of a conference in Manila. Neither answered questions about whether Russia was helping Iran target U.S. troops or whether Moscow plans to halt its invasion of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy earlier spoke with top U.S. mediator Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner about restarting the peace talks.
[01:18:59]
Up next, a CNN exclusive investigation. Eighteen days in Minnesota, the killings of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents and the chaos and cover up that reporting are reporting revealed.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MICHAELSON: A new CNN investigation, 18 days in Minnesota. This is about the Trump administration's killing of two American citizens six months ago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. CNN's Jake Tapper examined the chaos, lies, and cover-ups surrounding those deaths. And for the first time, we're exclusively hearing on camera from one of the federal prosecutors who resigned in protest. Here's Jake with more.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): On the morning of Wednesday, January 7th, a Minneapolis mother named Renee Good dropped her six- year-old son off at school, then went with her wife, Becca, to be legal observers of the immigration enforcement operations in their city.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Show your face.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm not mad at you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's OK. We don't change our plates every morning, just so you know. It'll be the same plate when you come talk to us later. That's fine. U.S. citizen.
Do you want to come at us? Do you want to come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the -- car. Get out of the car.
TAPPER: What did you think when you first saw the video?
TOM CALHOUN-LOPEZ, FORMER ASST. U.S. ATTORNEY, MINNESOTA: We were getting updates as they happened. We got the video as soon as we can. Obviously, the video speaks for itself. It's troubling.
TAPPER (voice-over): Immediately following the shooting, senior prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office did what was standard operating procedure. They ordered an investigation into the shooting, whether Renee Good's civil rights had been violated. For a brief moment, it looked like a joint investigation would happen between the FBI and local authorities. But the Trump administration had different plans.
[01:25:03]
KRISTI NOEM, THEN-HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.
TAPPER (voice-over): In addition to those highly questionable comments from then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, President Trump quickly took to Truth Social and made demonstrably false claims, saying Good was, quote, very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer who seems to have shot her in self-defense, adding it is hard to believe the ICE officer survived.
TAPPER: This is the site where Renee Good died. The investigation was shut down into the shooting.
CALHOUN-LOPEZ: That's correct. The president and the secretary of Homeland Security both announced that there would be no investigation. Secretary Noem referred to Renee Good as a domestic terrorist. And I've certainly seen no evidence of that whatsoever.
TAPPER: And had you ever seen anything like that happen before where the president weighs in on a shooting?
CALHOUN-LOPEZ: Never. Under normal times, an administration would have no objection to an investigation because the investigation may clear the officer. The investigation isn't necessarily designed to indict anybody.
TAPPER (voice-over): U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen was in Washington, D.C., at a conference. So the second in command of the U.S. Attorney's Office, Joe Thompson, who was worried that the presence of Homeland Security agents on the street, ICE, Border Patrol, CBP, would inflame matters, made a request to the Feds to remove them. That request was honored briefly.
JACOB FREY, MINNEAPOLIS MAYOR: They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. I want to tell everybody directly that is -- to ICE. Get the -- out of Minneapolis.
TAPPER (voice-over): In the U.S. Attorney's Office, staffers grimaced knowing Mayor Frey's comments weren't going to help. But even before those comments, prosecutors worried about how the Trump administration would handle this shooting. By the end of the day, the FBI was no longer working with local authorities on the shooting investigation. And Homeland Security agents were back on the streets.
On Thursday, January 8th, the day after the Renee Good shooting, tensions between the prosecutors and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota and the Justice Department began. Justice Department officials wanted the prosecutors to claw back a warrant they'd obtained for Renee Good's car, a warrant predicated on an investigation as to whether Renee Good's civil rights were being violated. DOJ officials in D.C. wanted the charges to be against Good for attacking the ICE officer.
The Justice Department, led by the Office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, also wanted Good and, to a different degree, her widow, Becca, investigated. But the Minnesota prosecutors would not carry out those actions. On Monday, January 12th, five days after the death of Renee Good, Minnesota's U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, returned to the office.
And he told prosecutors that the marching orders from D.C. were to investigate Good for an assault on a federal officer. And he also suggested they take some investigative steps regarding Good's widow, Becca. Instructions the prosecutors thought were madness.
TAPPER: Does it make sense to investigate somebody for assault on a federal officer if they're dead?
CALHOUN-LOPEZ: It did not make sense to me at the time. It didn't make sense to any of us. It doesn't make sense to me today.
TAPPER (voice-over): Also that day, Greg Bovino demanded a phone call with the U.S. attorney's office. Bovino was angry that prosecutors had not been filing cases against protesters whom he had claimed, and his agents had claimed, were assaulting officers and agents.
GREG BOVINO, LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER: You assault an officer and you're going to jail.
TAPPER (voice-over): What Bovino said on the call stunned the prosecutors. "These people are wackos, Bovino said about Minnesota protesters. This -- is getting ready to come. We're not going to calm it down. We're going to put it down. We're going to pacify this place. We're going to roll them up." Bovino also made a comment about Rosen, the U.S. attorney, who's an Orthodox Jew, sneeringly referring to him as one of the chosen people, a comment prosecutors found anti-Semitic.
After the call with Bovino, one of the prosecutors said, "they're going to kill someone else." Others agreed. On Bovino's claims that immigration officers were being assaulted and charges weren't coming. Well, those cases had been going to Tom Calhoun-Lopez.
CALHOUN-LOPEZ: Law enforcement officers have a difficult job and federal agents do their job very, very well. So it's important that prosecutors protect them where they can. And that means vindicating their rights if they're victims of assault. But I began to have concerns that agents were not being truthful, making arrests with very little provocation, and then soon enough, no provocation. And even after that, I would learn that agents had instigated physical contact, and so they were arresting people not only who had committed no assault, but who had in fact been assaulted by federal agents.
TAPPER (voice-over): The result of the false claims and the chaos in Minneapolis would soon reverberate inside the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MICHAELSON: Our thanks to Jake Tapper. CNN reached out to former Border Patrol official Greg Bovino. He disputes the characterization of that January 12th phone call, saying that though he couldn't recall his exact words, the idea of putting down the protest was not something he would say. [01:29:58]
As for the "chosen people" comment, he dined it was intended to be anti-Semitic. Bovino says he was simply frustrated that he had not been able to reach U.S. Attorney Rosen.
You can watch the full version of CNN's investigation right now at CNN.com.
Artificial intelligence goes rogue. When we return, I'll speak with A.I. expert Chris Mattmann about how one model was able to break free and get online.
How does that happen? And are the machines already attacking us?
Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[01:34:50]
MICHAELSON: Now to a new cyberattack carried out by artificial intelligence. ChatGPT maker OpenAI says some of its experimental models escaped a test environment and then hacked into another company's servers.
This is one of the first times we've seen something like this ever happen, and it repeated warnings from experts.
CNN's Hadas Gold explains what went wrong.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HADAS GOLD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This model was given a cybersecurity test and on its own, figured out a way to hack OpenAI's own systems of this sandbox and get access to the open Internet, which it was not supposed to have.
Then it decided on its own that the most likely place that would have the answer to the cybersecurity test was a place known as Hugging Face. Hugging face is a very popular repository for open source A.I. models and data sets.
And then this system went on to be -- to hack into Hugging Face's own systems in order to try and get the answer to this test.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAELSON: Hadas Gold there.
Both companies say they are now working together to solve the security flaws the model exploited. OpenAI released a statement calling the breach a, quote, "unprecedented cyber incident" and said the company is responding accordingly.
Joining me now to respond is Chris Mattmann, who served as the inaugural chief A.I. officer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is now president of Mattmann A.I.
Chris, welcome back to the show. How does this happen?
CHRIS MATTMANN, PRESIDENT, MATTMANN A.I.: Elex, these -- and thanks for having me, by the way -- these models are undergoing a lot of stress testing right now at OpenAI, at Anthropic. They're basically telling these open-source models solve this problem, do this cyber security benchmark and challenge.
They're not telling it how to do the steps along the way. They're giving it an objective and saying, achieve it.
Well, one of the things these models decided is in order to achieve the objective, it needed to break out of its sandbox, hack this other company and evaluate its cyber security benchmark on it.
MICHAELSON: I mean, is that a -- is that a good thing? Should we be worried?
MATTMANN: I mean, I absolutely believe that we should be aware that these --
MICHAELSON: Right.
MATTMANN: -- models can absolutely do that. Safety and stress testing is something that they did a lot during the prior administration. This administration, obviously, in the beginning, David Sax, the crypto czar, said, we're not doing, you know, safety. We're not doing it as much as we're doing forward progress and innovation.
However, even the Trump administration is seeing right now that safety, especially with the Mythos, Fable Five recent sort of dustup in which Anthropic kind of came up against the administration with their cyber security model, even the Trump administration now is seeing these types of safety testing is necessary and reporting on it is giving us more information.
MICHAELSON: And what you're talking about is that Anthropic was basically stopped by the administration for a short period of time, because there were national security fears about their model. And now it is back up.
Meanwhile, in the A.I. world, Elon Musk once again making headlines. He is taking on Christopher Nolan and the number one movie at the box office, "The Odyssey", and suggesting that Grok, his A.I. property, could make a better version of this movie. Is that a -- is -- can that actually happen?
MATTMANN: Yes. Elex, I've been reading about this online and I'll just say I saw "The Odyssey". It's a wonderful movie. I really enjoyed it.
Look, the most advanced open-source models to generate video imagery and moving kind of cinematography right now are actually coming from China. Seedance was the big model that everyone kind of remembers where it had Tom Cruise kind of fighting Brad Pitt and those sort of very hyper realistic videos. The problem with that is they're only 30 seconds long. They're 30
seconds, max 60 seconds. The highest capacity models that exist right now can't generate a Christopher Nolan Odyssey video. We're very far away.
And Grok is even further behind some of these Seedance, you know, models and things that are open source from China.
Could it be, you know, if Musk combined all of his companies together and did a whole of company effort, could he make some advancements in doing this? Yes. Could he generate "The Odyssey" by the end of the year? I'd be very surprised.
MICHAELSON: All these different companies are now grappling with how to handle A.I. In the last hour here on THE STORY IS, we talked to the head of Substack who said that he's integrating new technology from Pangram to basically be able to tell users if what you're reading was written by a human or written by A.I.
I'm not sure if we've got sound from him, but he calls this Claude Fishing. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS BEST, CO-FOUNDER/CEO, SUBSTACK: You're going to see a culture future of media where, as the technology gets more and more powerful and as there's more noise everywhere, people are turning to human voices that they trust.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAELSON: What do you make of what Substack is doing and what he's talking about in terms of the future of media?
MATTMANN: Yes. Elex, one of the big challenges that platforms have right now, not just Substack, but say LinkedIn, is that 40 percent of the content that's on it, they call it A.I. slop.
[01:39:45]
MATTMANN: You don't know whether A.I. wrote it or a human wrote it, and it's lowering the level of authenticity. Authenticity is such an important currency and capital right now.
Basically, what he's talking about Substack is, hey, we're going to put out tools, number one, to detect whether or not these posts with high fidelity are A.I.-written, and if so, give you a flag that says, hey, this is -- this could be A.I. slop.
The other thing we're going to do is we're going to give creators a tool on Substack to basically mark or watermark their content and say, hey, this was partially generated by A.I., or you know, here's how I generated it.
Given the combination of watermarking and also the detection, that is sort of the state-of-the-art approach for all of these platforms to try and deal with the A.I. slop phenomenon.
MICHAELSON: Chris Mattmann, we could talk every single night and there'd be stuff to talk about -- A.I. moving so fast. Great to see you.
The European Union has signed off on Paramount's merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of this network. Regulators say that Paramount made several concessions, including an agreement to abandon a film distribution deal with Universal in Europe.
Here in the U.S., 12 state attorneys-general are challenging the buyout, claiming it would stifle competition. Paramount says the opposite is true.
A federal judge has put the deal on hold for now to consider the antitrust lawsuit.
You're watching THE STORY IS.
For our international viewers, WORLD SPORT is next. For our viewers in North America, I'll be right back with an update on a very interesting mystery that we've all been following.
Stay with us.
[01:41:13]
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MICHAELSON: A U.S. federal judge says Former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, will stand trial next June. The couple have pleaded not guilty to charges of gunrunning and drug smuggling.
They were captured by the U.S. military in January and flown to the U.S. to face charges. After Maduro was ousted, Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as Venezuela's acting president.
Initial findings from an independent autopsy on Nolan Wells have not provided any new clues as to what caused his death. The body of the 18-year-old football player was found floating face down near an island off the Mississippi Coast earlier this month.
CNN's Randi Kaye has the latest.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRISTINE WELLS-WONSLEY, NOLAN WELLS' MOTHER: The only question that we have is what happened to our son.
RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Nolan Wells' parents were hoping an independent autopsy on their son would bring answers. But so far, there are only more questions.
BEN CRUMP, NOLAN WELLS' FAMILY ATTORNEY: The cause and manner of death for Nolan Xavier Wells is undetermined pending investigation.
KAYE: Wells had gone boating with friends on July 4th at Horn Island, off the coast of Mississippi. He never returned home.
After the initial autopsy ordered by authorities, his body was sent to Washington, D.C. for an independent autopsy requested by the family.
CRUMP: We got the body without his neck at the time of the second autopsy.
KAYE: The family's attorney, Benjamin Crump, said the findings were limited because Wells' body was not intact.
CRUMP: The throat was not received with the body. Therefore, this pathologist cannot rule out injury to the neck as a contributing -- a contributor or a cause of death.
KAYE: According to Crump, many of Wells' organs were missing, having been removed for the first autopsy, which the pathologist says is common forensic pathology practice.
Because of this, they couldn't examine his stomach contents or even his lungs.
CRUMP: The most significant of the limitations was the inability to directly observe the airway and the lungs for water.
KAYE: Crump said the pathologist noticed red discoloration on the back of Wells' head, which concerned him. Another medical examiner not affiliated with this case told CNN that could represent decompositional changes of the musculature. Or it could be from blunt force injury to the back of the head and neck.
Still, he could not determine if Wells was conscious or unconscious when he entered the water, or if he might have been forced into the water. His body was found face down near the shoreline two days after he disappeared.
CRUMP: For these reasons, this pathologist cannot rule out if any intervening, non-accidental factors contributed to or caused the death of Nolan Wells.
He said based on the examination of the body, he cannot rule out foul play.
ELMORE WONSLEY, NOLAN WELLS' FATHER: We just want honesty. We want to know what happened to our son because the things that you're telling us, that's not the character of our son.
KAYE: There are conflicting stories the family says about why Wells initially separated from his friends, who returned to shore without him.
His mother also believes pictures are missing from her sons phone.
Authorities are also investigating a video of an alleged altercation involving Wells, on which attorney, Ben Crump says you can hear him arguing about his phone. Though a person did tell CNN that it was his own voice on that recording, not Nolan Wells.
Randi Kaye, CNN -- New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MICHAELSON: French authorities are investigating the death of a professional model scout who introduced multiple young women to Jeffrey Epstein. The cause of Daniel Siad's death is not yet known. A French prosecutor says an autopsy will be performed to determine how he died.
Siad was reportedly mentioned in the Epstein files more than 2,000 times.
CNN aired an exclusive interview with him just a few weeks ago. At the time, Siad said he believed Epstein was a professional person, and he had no reason to believe the women he recommended to Epstein had been harmed.
As President Trump's attorney general pick, Todd Blanche, faces roadblocks from two Republicans for his confirmation. Senate Democrats hosted a forum spotlighting what they call the Justice Department's abandonment of the rule of law and its failure to deliver justice for Jeffrey Epstein's survivors.
Meanwhile, in the House, Democrats are investigating whether Epstein acted as a foreign agent.
[01:49:48]
MICHAELSON: Ranking Judiciary Committee member, Jamie Raskin, is asking for the release of all records relating to the late sex offender in more than a dozen nations, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Up next, the biggest stories for the day ahead.
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MICHAELSON: Here's a look at the big stories we're following in the day ahead.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is wrapping up his trip to the Philippines. He's there to attend meetings with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
He also held talks with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the conference.
President Trump will visit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to announce an expansion of what he calls the ratepayer protection pledge.
[01:54:48] MICHAELSON: The White House says the voluntary initiative is designed to keep rising electricity demand from A.I. data centers from driving up power bills. A number of state governors, utility companies and data center developers are expected to join that pledge.
And the L.A. Dodgers are set to visit the White House on Thursday to celebrate last year's World Series championship. It will be their third White House visit since 2020, following World Series wins that year and in 2024.
The team was originally set to visit in April, but the trip was delayed due to scheduling.
Bad Bunny wrapped up the final stop of his tour in Brussels, drawing fans from around the world to Belgium's largest stadium. The Puerto Rican superstar skipped the U.S. leg entirely, saying he worried that ICE agents could show up at the venues.
Even so, Billboard Box Score, which charts music industry finances, said the tour pushed his career earnings past $1 billion. He's the first Latin artist to hit that milestone without primarily performing in English.
Thanks so much for watching THE STORY IS.
I'm Elex Michaelson. We'll be back for more tomorrow.
The news continues right here on CNN after a break. Thanks so much for being with us.
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