Is AI Helping or Hurting Cybersecurity? And Are Republicans Losing the MAHA Movement?

0:00Julie Tsirkin: You can't talk about these teams and sort of how they got to this place and how they won without the money.

0:07Jared Perlo: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Here's the Scoop from NBC News. I'm Yasmin Sugan. So today on the show, we are talking about the World Series. It's starting tonight, the Milwaukee Brewers versus the Tampa Bay Rays. It's going to be the first championship for either team, whoever takes it, but they are heading into contract disputes over all this. So the question is, will we see baseball? Will there be a season next year? Plus, make America healthy again, the Maha movement. They have lost a leader in the Trump administration. And it seems like some of the Maha folks are feeling skeptical about make America great again.

0:42Jared Perlo: So what is happening inside that movement? We're going to dig in.

0:50Jared Perlo: Up first, though. So we've heard a lot of warnings about artificial intelligence in recent weeks. concerns that AI agents are hijacking our personal information, fears about those agents shutting humans out of their systems, and then worries over cybersecurity. Well, it seems like some of those fears may actually be warranted. So to talk about a string of troubling AI headlines this week, I want to bring in NBC News AI reporter Jared Perlow. Hi, Jared. Great to see you. Good to see you. So before we get into this conversation, I want to understand and distinguish between an unauthorized and unvetted AI agent, also a rogue agent.

1:27Jared Perlo: Like, what are these three things?

1:29Julie Tsirkin: Well, I think the unsatisfying answer is many people have different definitions for these terms because, frankly, it's a whole new world. We're building the plane as we fly it. But broadly, I think the two categories we should be aware of are rogue AI agents and maybe unauthorized AI agents, in addition to the agents that everybody is happy to deal with. And of course, when we talk about AI agents, we're talking about autonomous AI systems. Kind of the end goal for many AI researchers is creating some system that can do and perform many actions without human input. And AI agents are, you know, a decent way along the pathway there.

2:03Julie Tsirkin: When we talk about rogue agents, we're talking about AI systems that take actions without any human direction. or maybe go haywire, go totally off the rails from what a human initially instructed.

2:15Jared Perlo: Completely working autonomously.

2:17Julie Tsirkin: Exactly. And then we have maybe unauthorized or unvetted agents. And that's what we're talking about a lot this week, because there's been lots of worries about unauthorized agents in banking systems. And when we think about unauthorized agents, of course, a lot of regulated industries have very strict rules about who can access certain information, who can perform certain actions. And there are certainly many people now who are making decisions with their AI agents that these regulated industries might not approve of. And so we've seen an explosion in consumer AI agents like Muse, which is Meta's AI agent, or there's another one called Instinct that is growing in popularity.

2:55Julie Tsirkin: And that's the sort of situation where I might instruct my Muse AI agent to take some action within my bank, for example. And I, Jared, might authorize that, but the bank sees that as some sort of autonomous activity and says, we don't authorize that. Or that looks like unauthorized, unvetted agentic activity from our perspective.

3:15Jared Perlo: Okay, so let's dig in on that because we are now seeing some reporting from Axios, right? That major US banks are warning that these unvetted, unauthorized AI agents are infiltrating or kind of tapping into the banking systems, the bank accounts, right? What do we know about how they're doing this and why?

3:34Julie Tsirkin: Well, again, the critical distinction here and digging into the reporting from Axios, along with my own conversations, I've spent many hours talking with leaders from banks here in New York. It seems like the vast majority of this activity, from what I can tell, is this sort of user authorized but bank unauthorized. unauthorized. So presumably in this situation, you would give that Muse agent your banking credentials. It would say, here's my username, here's my password, which lots of people are doing. They trust these systems to that extent. And then Muse makes that$25,$100 transfer between those different accounts.

4:07Julie Tsirkin: And you're really happy. But the bank sees this as some sort of automated system. Of course, it's working at different speeds than how humans usually work. It's clicking on things that humans might not usually click on. And so it says, whoa, we're not sure if that is really Yasmin who's directing that behavior. Or if that's just some sort of agent that's really, you know, falling into that rogue category that we talked about before. But again, it seems like so far, most of that activity we're seeing within banks falls into that first category.

4:36Jared Perlo: So are banks allowing people that authorize their AI agents to work on their behalf do it?

4:43Julie Tsirkin: Largely, yes. So it's actually interesting because a lot of banks have added AI agent-specific terms to their terms of service. So Chase's terms of service now say that when you use, allow, enable, or cause the deployment of an AI agent, you are responsible for any actions or errors that the agent takes.

5:01Jared Perlo: So if, for instance, I want my Muse to transfer$120 and they transfer$120 ,000, that's on me. If, in fact, they do what I don't want them to do and put too many zeros in there.

5:14Julie Tsirkin: According to Chase's new terms of service. And the bank won't cover it. Exactly.

5:17Jared Perlo: So amidst all this, earlier this week, The company OpenAI actually talked about how it recently found two new instances where AI agents tried to prevent human employees from actually overseeing the AI systems and then actually lied about it, too. Right. So what went on there?

5:33Julie Tsirkin: In one of those cases. So listeners at home, viewers at home can actually check this out because OpenAI over the past couple of months has started publishing these regular alignment transparency reports. Of course, when we talk about alignment in the context of AI, we talk about aligning AI actions with human desires. Does the AI do what I as a human want it to do? And OpenAI released several more of these earlier this week. And they found two instances in which these AI agents, which were working internally on projects at OpenAI, essentially they got confused about the task that they were doing.

6:07Julie Tsirkin: And they're supposed to be the sort of way that OpenAI employees can see what those agents are doing. We call it monitoring. or monitorability. Kind of regulating. Exactly. But in these two instances, the agent working at OpenAI actually disabled that monitoring ability without the human instruction to do so. Wow. Exactly. We know why? So it looks like there is some sort of game of telephone between these AI agents, these AI systems that resulted in this error. But we're now at a point where in these leading AI companies, they're working with fleets of these different agents. So it's not just a human talking to one agent.

6:42Julie Tsirkin: It's a human talking to one agent who then spawns a group of other agents who then spawn a group of other agents.

6:47Jared Perlo: But that means like they're acting autonomously. They're like conspiring in a way against the very people that programmed them.

6:53Julie Tsirkin: And it's the question of how much intent was there here? Was it just a series of instructions that got muddled where the initial human said, well, we want to make sure we can monitor you, make sure that's there in your code the entire time. But 10 steps along the way, that instruction actually got deleted. Now, I should say one of the more worrying parts of this is that in the second example, So a human later asked, you know, typing and exchanging information with the agent, hey, I wanted to be able to monitor you, but it looks like you got rid of that code. Did you get rid of that code? And the agent says, nope, I didn't get rid of that code.

7:25Julie Tsirkin: They lied. They lied.

7:27Jared Perlo: Okay. Then amidst that, though, there is some good news. Of course. Because there was this massive cybersecurity crisis, but the crisis was actually found by AI. Right. Right? Yeah. So explain what happened there.

7:40Julie Tsirkin: So, I mean, there's so much to talk about in the AI world. So this cyber attack was one of the most significant cyber events, I would say, of the past couple of decades. It deals with this system called PHP. We don't have to go into the details there. It's been around for decades. There's been this bug that's been in this system, again, for many, many years. But OpenAI and other AI companies now have this program where they will allow other researchers to use their AI systems to find bugs, to try to patch them, almost like the good guys finding issues before the bad guys do. So OpenAI will give advanced access to different cybersecurity professionals.

8:19Julie Tsirkin: Those cybersecurity professionals found this bug that's been latent in the system in PHP for so many years. However, PHP underlies around 70 % of the world's websites, up to 75%. And so this was all going well and good, but then somebody leaked the news before the patches, before the fixes were ultimately deployed. And that's what kind of sent the cyber world into overdrive earlier this week. We saw governments across the world in Japan, in France, in the Netherlands, take their websites down because they didn't want it to be hacked. But again, the happy news here is that we found this bug and we were able to mostly patch this bug because AI systems identified it.

9:01Jared Perlo: Okay. So the positives and the negatives.

9:03Julie Tsirkin: Exactly. I mean, people call it, you know, it's a two-edged sword. Right. It's a double. Yeah, exactly. I've been spending too much time with AI. That one I got.

9:15Jared Perlo: Jared Perlow. Thank you.

9:16Julie Tsirkin: Thank you.

9:18Jared Perlo: And we have an election episode out tomorrow about how AI and data centers is playing into the midterm elections. My colleague Garrett Haake is speaking with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who has been on the forefront of pushing for AI regulation. So tune in for that. All right. We're going to take a very quick break. And when we are back, is Maha heading to the left? That's after a very short break. And also, while you wait, since we're hitting the weekend, and I know you're making all your fun plans, why don't you send this episode to all the friends that you're going to see? That way, you'll actually have something to talk about.

9:50Jared Perlo: All right. I'll see you on the other side.

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11:04Jared Perlo: $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.

11:14Jared Perlo: And we're back with Here's the Scoop from NBC News. So there are some signs of fracture in President Trump's coalition. Callie Means, a key architect of the Maha agenda, quit his job as a senior advisor to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week. Means said he was leaving with, quote, tremendous respect for RFK and for President Trump, but he did not give an official reason for his resignation. A person familiar with the matter told NBC News that he'd been growing increasingly frustrated with the pace of change in Washington. And Means is not the only member of the Maha movement who's disappointed with the administration.

11:47Jared Perlo: For more on this and what it could mean for the midterms, I want to bring in NBC News correspondent, Julie Serkin. Hi, Julie. Hi, S. So Callie Means has not said why he left. But what are you hearing about his departure? I talked to a few people very close to him, familiar with his thinking on this matter. And essentially, the frustration has been bubbling and simmering for a long time. Months ago, I spoke to Means just about the pace of change, and he already said it was so hard to get things through the finish line. What really came to a head this week, Yasmin, is that Means tried to get ultra-processed foods defined.

12:25Jared Perlo: This is a huge issue for the Maha movement. RFK Jr., the health secretary, started some work on this with the food pyramid, with diet changes and so forth, removing dyes from food. But he didn't quite get to the point that Maha moms wanted him to. So Means was supposed to have a meeting with the top officials at HHS about this issue. It was postponed several times and ultimately canceled, and then Means resigned. So Maha has had some wins. RFK has made significant changes to the vaccine schedule, started phasing out food dyes. Some activists, though, released a scorecard recently accusing the administration of breaking 85 percent of the promises they made on things like food and the environment.

13:08Jared Perlo: You spoke to one of the authors, Tiffany Sianci. What grade just overall would you give this administration? On Maha or overall? On Maha. Yeah. If this Maha coalition, Julie, is so upset, not happy with what has gone on so far, what does that mean for Republicans in the midterms? Are they taking this into account when they're going to vote? I know the administration is super sensitive about this because when I was reporting on the Maha scorecard, I got a call pretty immediately from the press office, which does not always happen when covering this White House. And they pushed back pretty forcefully on a bunch of the points laid out in the scorecard.

13:52Jared Perlo: A lot of the actions I have to say, Yasmin, they're frustrated with the EPA, with ag, but ultimately RFK Jr. is a part of this administration and they really thought that they would have a seat at the table. Not so. So because of all of these issues, you would think that the Republicans are taking this into account. I got a statement from the White House yesterday when Means resigned and it was simply, you know, thanking him for his job. But I don't think they're quite realizing how many voters moved to the president's side, some of them voting for Republicans for the very first time, because they thought they thought that this would be a White House that would actually make good on all of these Maha promises.

14:32Jared Perlo: And that has not happened. So I think what you're going to see in this election is a lot of these voters are just going to sit at home. A lot of them are part of the key voting bloc that we always talk about, women, suburban women especially. And some of them told me that they might sit out in 28 as well. They might even consider voting for Democrats, although candidly, they've been disappointed by both parties in the past. What are folks in the Maha movement actually upset with? Like, what do they feel like the administration has not been able to make real? The list is so long from agriculture to pesticides to PFAS, the EPA, instead of going forward and moving forward with some of the changes we've seen under the Biden administration.

15:13Jared Perlo: They actually nixed all of the steps that have been taken to remove the forever chemicals from soil, from clothes, from food. It's things like that that have disillusioned this group. and more broadly, the cozying up to corporations and these big industries. You know, there was a ruling earlier this year from the Supreme Court that sided with Roundup, the weed killer made by Bayer Monsanto. That came months after an executive order from the administration to boost production of glyphosate. These are the core issues of the Maha movement, Yaz, food and pesticides. And the fact that they have not seen meaningful progress on it, not only that, but steps in the opposite direction.

15:52Jared Perlo: That's what's really frustrated these voters. You're seeing Democrats now make overtures towards kind of the Maha movement. And what I mean by that is, for instance, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan running for Senate there, he wrote out this plan to ban some pesticides, remove microplastics from Michigan's water, improve access to non-processed foods, similar efforts from Dems like New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Could we see the movement swing left if we see more overtures like this. I think we absolutely could. And I actually caught up with Senator Booker a couple of weeks ago before he left town about this specifically, because El-Sayed releasing this as part of his platform is a really big deal.

16:33Jared Perlo: He's the only candidate running for Senate doing that. And Booker told me he wishes more of them were. I spoke to Jim McGovern, a member of the House who has been obsessed with this issue for decades, and he told me Democrats would be frankly stupid not to take this issue back. This isn't an issue that originated with Republicans. I remember when First Lady Michelle Obama tried to tell Americans essentially don't eat fast food. She grew a vegetable and fruit garden at the White House. And then Fox News host essentially, I remember Sean Hannity said— Putting healthy foods in school cafeterias. That was like a big part of her movement.

17:04Jared Perlo: Yeah. Exactly. And at that point, Republicans, including on Fox News, pushed back on it. And here you are in 2024 seeing Republicans, President Trump, essentially use these same voters to try and win the White House and now embracing this issue. So I do think the pendulum could very well swing back to Democrats. But again, they feel like they've heard these promises before from Democrats and from Republicans. and one of the women I spoke to, Kelly Ryerson, who goes as glyphosate girl, she told me that she's disillusioned by both parties, that Democrats really have to get serious if they want to win them back.

17:41Jared Perlo: But I will tell you, AOC is a perfect example of this. She is potentially running for president in 2028, and she is making overtures to that group. And they brought that up to me. Julie Serkin, thank you. Thank you. Coming up, the Rays and the Brewers are facing off tonight in the World Series. We're going to talk about why a dispute between the league and its players union means this could be the last baseball we get for a while. Possibly. That's next.

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19:16Jared Perlo: And we're back with Here's the Scoop from NBC News. So the World Series gets underway tonight with the Milwaukee Brewers hosting the Tampa Bay Rays. It's going to be an exciting matchup. By the way, neither team has ever won a World Series before. And they're also not huge spenders compared to teams like the Dodgers and the Yankees. But hanging over these games are upcoming labor negotiations between the league and the Players Union. and those are expected to be really intense. So intense that there are rumors that the 2027 season could be canceled entirely. For more on all this, I want to bring in NBC News sports reporter, Andrew Greif.

19:54Jared Perlo: Hi, Andrew.

19:55Julie Tsirkin: Hello, hello.

19:56Jared Perlo: That would be a lot of money lost if in fact the entire season was canceled. So I can't imagine that's going to happen, but I do want to get into these negotiations and what's going down with all these. But before we do, let's talk the series first, right? You got the Rays, you got the Brewers going head-to-head. In order to get here, they actually had to beat some pretty heavy hitters, right? They had to beat the Yankees and the Dodgers. I want to talk about the money here. The payrolls of the Yankees and the Dodgers, how do they compare to the Brewers and the Rays?

20:25Julie Tsirkin: Well, the Brewers are 19th in Major League Baseball's payroll spending this year. So, on the bottom half, 30 teams, the Rays are 27th. So, this is obviously a matchup that you don't typically see when the Dodgers have been in there. They've won the last two World Series. They've been either first or second each year in payroll. And so you can't talk about these teams and sort of how they got to this place and how they've won without the money, because the money is how it's dictated how they've built their rosters and how they coach these, how they develop, how they scout. The money is central to all of this.

20:54Julie Tsirkin: So how they built this with those sort of restrictions goes back to how they scout. I talked to a guy who runs a scouting department from a major league baseball team this week, and he said that they both are very analytic focused. They try to unearth those diamonds in the rough that you probably have heard about from the movie or the book Moneyball. And so they do their diligence with their scouting. They have strong Latin American scouting operations. And they also crucially know when they seem to have a knack for when is the right time to trade a player to get the maximum value back for them.

21:26Julie Tsirkin: It might be uncomfortable to do that. But if you know you can't sign a player to a long-term lucrative extension because they've just become too good that they're almost unaffordable for your franchise. Right. Knowing when to trade them to sell high is really valuable in pro sports. And these two teams have done that as well.

21:43Jared Perlo: So let's talk about what they're fighting over here. The NFL and the NBA have something called salary caps. The MLB does not. Why is the MLB now arguing that salary caps are necessary and players obviously pushing back? Because that means ultimately they're not going to get these huge gargantuan— I mean, they're still going to make a lot of money, let's be clear. But there's going to be a limit.

22:10Julie Tsirkin: Yeah, the MLB is the only pro sport in North America without a salary cap. That's because historically the players union for baseball has been the strongest, the most willing to sacrifice. I mean, remember in 1994, it's probably before some of our listeners are even born, but that was a whole, basically a lost season because the players union and the owners could not agree. And they said, we'll walk away in the middle of the season. So obviously the MLB wants to avoid that and players do too. You want to see baseball in 2027, but that willingness to stand up is what has kept the players union from kind of playing under a hard salary cap, unlike every other one.

22:44Julie Tsirkin: What's so fascinating about this World Series is that while MLB is saying our fans are concerned about competitive balance and how these top spending teams like the Dodgers or the Mets or the Yankees, how they can sort of just pick off all the superstars they want and build a super roster, leaving the scraps to everybody else. That's MLB's argument. But the players are saying, and we've talked to the Players Union for multiple recent stories, and they're saying this series and this postseason is proof that the system is working as it currently exists. Three of the four final teams in baseball's playoffs ranked 19th, 27th, and 30th in spending this year.

23:24Jared Perlo: So let's talk about this World Series in case there's no season next year because of the contentious battle over these salaries. Who's going to take it? Your predictions?

23:34Julie Tsirkin: These two teams were the best teams by record in their league all year. So this is going to be fantastic baseball. Milwaukee Brewers, I think, are one of those teams that maybe you haven't heard of all year. But if you watch the series, you're going to see how hard their pitchers throwed. What Tampa really stands out to me is that they have just kind of this impressive hitting core, Junior Caminero. I just really think that these two teams, for as much as we talk about sort of the disadvantages they play with, look, all year they prove that they were the best in their league. And so I think that that might turn off some casual fans about sort of the market size of these two teams out Tampa and Milwaukee.

24:10Julie Tsirkin: It's not glamorous. Like maybe Dodgers-Yankee was a couple years ago. But this is going to be really good baseball. These two teams did not get here because of a flu. They proved it all year.

24:19Jared Perlo: You're skirting my question. Milwaukee. Okay.

24:21Julie Tsirkin: I think Milwaukee will.

24:23Jared Perlo: On the record, Andrew Greif said Milwaukee.

24:24Julie Tsirkin: I believe in the pitching.

24:26Jared Perlo: Okay. Andrew Greif, thank you. Thank you. You tried to dance around it, but I got you. I nailed you down.

24:35Jared Perlo: That is going to do it for us. Here's The Scoop from NBC News. I'm Yasmin Basugin. We'll be back tomorrow with whatever the day may bring. And if you like what you heard, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And you can also subscribe to our daily newsletter, The Inside Scoop. It's a deeper dive on the main stories of the day that comes out every weeknight straight to your inbox. You can sign up for The Inside Scoop as part of our paid subscription at NBCNews.com. We'll see you tomorrow.

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