NERMEEN SHAIKH: A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, ordering the administration to restore their White House access for 14 days. A lawyer for the outlets described the decision as a, quote, “strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law.”

We begin today’s show with one of the world’s leading advocates for press freedom, Maria Ressa. In 2021, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.

AMY GOODMAN: Maria Ressa is the founder and CEO of the Philippine independent news site Rappler, and she’s a former CNN journalist. Among other places, she covered East Timor. She’s also the co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

But we’re going to begin with this breaking news from overnight, Maria Ressa. A Trump-appointed judge has, at least temporarily, halted the ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Can you talk about the significance of what Trump has attempted to do and, for the first time, the solidarity expressed by the Washington press pool, that refused to fill in for CNN, and so you couldn’t hear Trump’s voice?

MARIA RESSA: Well, it was incredible. And, you know, my outlet, actually — my president banned both our reporter and me from the palace at that point. So, to see the kind of solidarity that the American media did on Friday was incredible.

But, look, in terms of the reaction, the reaction is everyone knows this is unconstitutional. And I struggle when I say that. As a reporter, you sit there and you go, “Do we say it’s unconstitutional or not? Are we supposed to not say that?” Right? This is the dilemma of a reporter in the age of a death by a thousand cuts. We can’t normalize the lies or the impunity that is around us.

And so, in this case, this particular judge has done this before. And this was during Trump’s first term, Jim Acosta. He judged for press freedom in the same way. And it’s a simple thing. It’s a constitutional move. Whether the Trump administration has already said that it will go ahead and appeal this, you know, for all of that, at this point, people are standing up for rule of law. People are standing up for press freedom. And that’s incredibly important, because we live in an age where you can’t take these things for granted. And having lived through it, there are costs to standing up, but there are greater costs to giving up.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Maria Ressa, we see that you’re in a car on your way to the United Nations. Let’s turn to artificial intelligence. You’re the co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, and AI took center stage at the U.N. on Wednesday, when the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic briefed the U.N. Security Council. The meeting came as Australia revealed that a rogue OpenAI tool hacked into Australia’s national healthcare database in the first known case of AI hacking a government network. Maria Ressa, you were at the Security Council as these CEOs testified. What was most striking to you and most important among the things they said?

MARIA RESSA: The mood in the room was actually really fascinating, and the kind of consensus that you see among many of the nation-states. First, let me tell you about the thematic brief that my co-chair and I or that the panel came out with on Monday, which showed you exactly what it was. We tried to answer four questions. Question number one was, you know: What actually happened? Question number two is: What trend does that show? And then number three: What do we not know? And number four is: What would be completely irresponsible if we do not act? This is to help policymakers deal with this. That’s part of what this independent panel is supposed to do, to give you the facts. And along with those tech CEOs, who all have their own interests, you also had Yoshua Bengio, who’s my co-chair, speaking there, right?

And what’s the consensus among the majority of it? It seems like everyone knows that AI is now the rogue AI, including the secretary-general, saying again this week that it is out of our control. That’s in our preliminary panel report that we released on July 1. This, the frontier models cannot be controlled, right? And so, there’s several questions. Who’s accountable? The tech CEOs were there, but as was Hugging Face. And one of the most interesting things Hugging Face, the CEO of Hugging Face, was that he couldn’t even use the commercial models to help defend against the attack, because of the way it was designed. And so, what did he do? He used — he went through Nvidia and used an open-source Chinese model. That was fascinating to me, because it showed both sovereignty, and it showed you the kind of power and control a small group of people will have.

So, overall, in that room, people said it’s time to put guardrails in place, except for some exceptions. And, of course, notable is the United States. Michael Kratsios came through. One of the first things he said was “super intelligence, formerly known as artificial intelligence,” and then walked against, spoke against any kind of global, multilateral solution. As a member of the panel, the reason we exist is because the United Nations General Assembly created an expert group, 40 of us from 37 different countries, nearly 50/50 male-female — right? — to try to help the world come up with a collective solution. We cannot have a small group, one country with 75% of the world’s compute power, and a small group of companies deciding the fate of humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about China. You, of course, are from the Philippines. If you can talk about, you know, the fact that China has more regulations in place than does the United States? What kind of regulations? You have Xi right now meeting with President Trump in Washington, D.C., tonight a major state dinner with heads of the tech billionaires, the CEOs of these companies.

MARIA RESSA: Look, in some ways, when you really look at it, for their citizens, the Chinese tech has far more safety measures in place. So, for example, the TikTok, the version of TikTok that is out in China has child safety measures in place, that the Silicon Valley, that others, the commercial models, are just now starting to talk about and to put in place. But, of course, what’s the biggest problem in this, right? Well, Tiananmen Square doesn’t exist, right? So, I think this is one of the — this is a creative destruction moment, and the ability to not work together will have massive consequences.

One of the lessons I learned in being part of this panel from — with 37 countries — we have Chinese, we have Russian. I mean, we are geographically aligned. And what was fascinating is that we weren’t fighting based on ideology. The debates, the most stringent debates, did not occur from Russia or China or the United States. It didn’t matter, because we all agreed on safety measures. Where the most stringent debate — and I said this at the U.N. when we released the report, right? The most hair-tearing moments were between those of us and Big Tech, right?

So, that’s — it’s actually — it’s an incentive structure that we need to prevent, right? Big Tech will tell you that they’re caught in a race. Silicon Valley will say this, that they’re caught in a race that they must win; otherwise, China — otherwise, China will win. This isn’t completely true. And part of it is — it’s there. It’s a bogeyman. But if you look at just — and this is in the preliminary panel report — in terms of compute power, the United States has 75% of the world’s compute power, China has 15%, and the EU, which has put in place the most safety measures for the rest of the world, for us and the rest of the world, is only 5%. Right? A small group of countries and companies should not be determining the fate of the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Maria Ressa, now, we know you have to go, but a very quick final question. We’ve spoken to you before about the spread of misinformation on social media. You’ve expressed concerns about how this could be multiplied with artificial intelligence. If you could elaborate?

MARIA RESSA: It already has, Nermeen. If you look at the internet today, 53% of the traffic on the internet is now nonhuman, right? We’re going to deal with AI slop. And the three waves that artificial intelligence — the three waves, right? Social media hijacked our attention, so there’s the attention economy. That hasn’t been solved. And this is part of the problem, the compounding harms that have not been addressed. So, social media, attention economy.

The large language models rolled out in two ways. The second is chat — are chatbots. The chatbots that are there hack intimacy, right? It’s sycophantic by design to keep you scrolling. That shouldn’t — that brings harms on its own way. We can talk about that more.

But the last one is what we’re talking about now, which is agentic and multi-agentic. Every step of the way, we lose just a little bit more of our humanity. The attention economy, that has brought narrative warfare and has pushed the world 72% — 74% of the world is now under authoritarian rule. That’s V-Dem. We’re electing illiberal leaders democratically. The chatbots is hacking our intimacy, and agentic AI, literally, I’d be careful what you give to an agent that we know can’t be controlled. Well, that agentic is taking away agency.

So, to go back, look at the policy. It’s time for lawmakers to act. If you don’t act now, it’s state and tech. We’re seeing a tech coup in plain sight. So, it’s — and to push states to act, we, the citizens, should demand better.

AMY GOODMAN: Maria Ressa, we thank you so much for being with us. I actually expect we could have you on for the whole hour, because if you think you’re going to reach your meeting on time — I mean, I’ve been talking to people who go one city block near the U.N. right now, and it takes them an hour to drive from one end to the other. But we’re going to let you go, co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, co-founder and CEO of the Philippine independent news site Rappler. She also received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.

Coming up, we continue our discussion on the U.N. Security Council meeting on AI, where the tech billionaire CEOs testified on Wednesday. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Pavan Guru,” Sonny Singh in our Democracy Now! studio.