Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with National Security & Defense, newest first.
President Trump signed a Section 232 proclamation on October 28 finding that imports of robotics and industrial machinery threaten US national security. It sets no tariff yet: the Commerce Secretary and the US Trade Representative must negotiate agreements with trading partners and report within 180 days, after which tariffs, duties, quotas or fees are possible if talks fail. Ars Technica notes that heavy industrial robot arms come mostly from Japan's FANUC and Yaskawa, Switzerland's ABB and Germany's KUKA, with no US maker offering comparable hardware, so carmakers and defense contractors would bear any cost. The Federal Communications Commission banned new foreign consumer robots in July, but exempted factory arms.
A drone attack overnight into October 11 shut down Yandex's data center in the Russian city of Vladimir, the company said, the third strike on its facilities in four days after hits in Ryazan and Kaluga. The Associated Press reported outages across dozens of Russian cities and in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia, where people could not order taxis or reach banking services. Ukraine's United24 Media reported that more than 80 Yandex Cloud services went down, including the YandexGPT API for its AI model, along with the Alice voice assistant. Ukraine says the strikes answer Russian attacks on its own data centers, and the campaign has now hit three of the company's five data centers.
Ukrainian drones struck data centers run by Yandex, the Russian search company often called "Russia's Google", on October 8 and 9, Reuters reported. The first strike hit its Sasovo site, which houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to train its YandexGPT model. The second hit Kaluga, its largest facility. Yandex said no staff were hurt but acknowledged service disruptions, and Russian users reported outages at a video service, a digital bank and the state railway's website. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a "symmetrical response" to Russian strikes on Ukraine's data centers since late September. It follows Iranian drone strikes on Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in February, a second sign this year that AI compute is now a military target.
Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said North Korea had tested an intermediate-range strategic missile into which "AI was introduced," letting it change its flight path at low altitude, and claimed there is "no way to avoid" its attack. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missile was launched from the Wonsan area and flew more than 700 kilometers toward the sea off the country's east coast. She gave no detail on how the AI works, and said other countries would need several years to match it. Hong Sung-pyo of the Korea Institute for Military Affairs told AFP it is too early to judge whether the claims are accurate.
The Justice Department has arrested Greg Lui, owner of Earthmade Computer, on charges that he used false paperwork and shipments through Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong to send more than $300 million worth of servers with Nvidia A100 and H100 graphics chips to China from late 2023 until this August. Prosecutors say his firm took in more than $176 million from the scheme in 2024 alone. The release refers throughout to "Super Intelligence" technology, the administration's new name for AI. Nvidia told Bloomberg that less than half of one percent of its products have been diverted, while a Bloomberg investigation found officials questioning how the company missed the warning signs.
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team published an analysis of Z.ai's open-weight GLM-5.3, finding it builds end-to-end exploits about as often as Claude Mythos Preview. On the ExploitBench test it succeeded in 50 of 410 attempts, against 56 for Mythos Preview, and in a day of testing it chained several previously unknown browser flaws into a working attack. The difference is access. Anthropic says a cover story got the model to engage with malicious requests 64 percent of the time, and a version with its refusals removed did so every time. Several such versions appeared publicly within days of release. Anthropic is urging wider defender access to frontier cyber models and government testing of GLM-5.3's successors.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled two-to-one on Thursday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth acted within his authority when he designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk for refusing to enable certain Claude features for the military. The majority accepted that Anthropic acted with no bad motive, but held that a broader procurement statute covers "any person" who might "deny" a function the government wants. It weighed the risk of "overly constrained AI models shutting down unexpectedly" against Anthropic's warning about models "hallucinating inappropriate targets." Judge Karen Henderson dissented, arguing the law targets hostile actors rather than a contractor's upfront limits on how its product is used. A federal court in California had called the parallel designation unlawful last month, so the two rulings now point in opposite directions. Anthropic says it is considering all options, including further review.
The alert channel Washington proposed ahead of Xi Jinping's state visit appears to have made it through Thursday's White House summit. The Irish Times reports that the two governments agreed to set up a hotline for AI risks and emergencies, though neither leader announced it on camera. The two men framed the issue very differently. Xi said the development of AI must "always" stay "under human control," and a Chinese readout of the meeting said the two sides should work together to prevent misuse. President Trump posted that morning that he wanted to leave superintelligence "exactly where it is," adding, "Our guardrail is the DOJ!" A hotline is the one thing both sides could accept without either side agreeing to slow down.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two governments have discussed a notification mechanism that would let either side send an alert when its AI systems pose a threat or behave unpredictably, ahead of meetings between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping on September 24 and 25. China has not publicly acknowledged the idea, and people familiar with the plan told Politico it includes no officials with the technical expertise to judge how urgent a warning is. Sam Bresnick of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology told Ars Technica that it is "better than nothing" but unlikely to make a major difference. It comes two weeks after the Justice Department accused six Chinese AI developers of stealing from US frontier labs.
An unreleased Pentagon review found that staff at US Central Command leaned too heavily on the artificial intelligence inside Palantir's Maven Smart System when they cleared a February target that turned out to be an elementary school in Minab, Iran. Two Tomahawk missiles killed more than 150 people, at least 123 of them children, on the opening day of the war. Bloomberg, which obtained the findings, describes a cascade of failures rather than one. Maven surfaced the site as a recommended day-one target on the strength of stale intelligence that still catalogued it as a Revolutionary Guard facility. An analyst had logged changes to the site back in 2019, but in a system not connected to the database used to build strike packages. Central Command's civilian harm team had shrunk from ten people to one, and nobody from it reviewed the site. Palantir says it is not responsible for the underlying data, and has since added checks that re-review intelligence for disqualifying factors. It is the same failure mode as the fabricated report that nearly sent US forces to board a Chinese ship in September, without the luck.
US military aircraft were already airborne this spring when officials found that the intelligence behind a planned boarding of a Chinese vessel had been produced with a chatbot's help, CNN reported on Friday, citing four people familiar with the episode. A Special Operations Command analyst used the tool to fuse open-source reporting with classified signals intelligence, and it misidentified the ship's cargo as components for a nuclear weapons program. The analyst then used it again to format the finding into an official-looking summary that circulated through command channels, and the operation was called off at the last minute. The near miss lands as the Pentagon pushes generative AI across the force: it says 1.5 million personnel have used its tools, and its in-house platform runs on Google's Gemini for Government, with xAI's Grok for Government added last month.
The US Defense Department put ChatGPT Mil, built through OpenAI for Government, and xAI's Grok for Government onto GenAI.mil, the department's central generative AI portal, where Google's Gemini was already available. The portal has onboarded more than 1.7 million of the department's roughly 3 million personnel since it launched last year, making it one of the largest single deployments of frontier assistants anywhere. The department has also struck agreements with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, with no contract values disclosed.
The US Army reimposed limits on generative-AI use after soldiers exhausted a shared annual pool of AI tokens within weeks. The Army's technology office announced "unlimited" access in May; by mid-June the pool — 100 million tokens on the Ask Sage platform, which routes to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama — was gone, despite a floor of about 200,000 tokens per user each month. Access is restored at capped levels, but officials are unsure the pool will be refilled after October 1. It is an early, concrete lesson in how fast real-world AI demand outruns "unlimited" promises.
German defense-tech company Helsing closed a $1.8 billion Series E round, led by existing backers alongside JPMorgan Chase, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and Iconiq, valuing the four-year-old firm at $18 billion — the biggest defense-startup raise in European history. Helsing builds AI software and hardware that plug into drones, autonomous jets, and battlefield sensors, and is widely framed as Europe's answer to America's Anduril. Demand ran well past the available allocation as capital keeps flooding into software-defined defense.
South Korea's defense minister announced a plan to train up to 500,000 soldiers as "drone warriors" who would wield drones like personal firearms, with AI-controlled drone swarms slated for a later wave. The military aims to field 11,000 drones by year's end and 60,000 by 2029, deploying first to the demilitarized zone bordering North Korea. The move — a response to escalating Northern weapons tests — drew skepticism, since the 500,000 figure exceeds the country's entire and shrinking active-duty force.
President Trump signed two executive orders aimed at speeding the arrival of useful quantum computers. The first sets a national goal of deploying a "scientifically relevant" quantum machine at a Department of Energy lab by 2028 and backing new quantum sensors and networks. The second pulls the federal deadline for adopting post-quantum cryptography forward from 2035 to December 2031, and directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to pilot a migration of federal systems by the end of 2027. The orders build on the Commerce Department's recent $2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing firms.
More than 40 security leaders — including executives from Adobe, Zoom, and Sophos, led by former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos — are urging the Trump administration to reverse last week's order cutting foreign access to Anthropic's Mythos and Fable 5. They argue Mythos is one of the few tools that lets defenders find zero-day flaws faster than attackers, so a broad ban mostly handicaps the people protecting critical systems. Stamos adds that open-weight models are about six months from catching up anyway, so the restrictions buy little real security.
President Trump signed an executive order on June 2 asking AI developers to voluntarily share frontier models with the federal government up to 30 days before public release for national-security and cybersecurity testing. The order explicitly bars any mandatory licensing or pre-clearance regime, and was cut back from an earlier 90-day window after industry objections, including from former White House AI czar David Sacks. It also stands up a voluntary cyber "clearinghouse" coordinated by the US Treasury Department and directs the Justice Department to prioritize AI-assisted hacking cases.
Reuters, citing Bloomberg News, reports that Beijing has widened informal travel restrictions originally placed on senior DeepSeek researchers to AI talent at Alibaba and other private firms — requiring some professionals to seek official approval before traveling abroad, with the policy framed around state-secret concerns and strategically important AI work. The move treats AI researchers themselves as restricted assets, a national-security frame that mirrors the logic the US has used in reverse for chip export controls. The pattern hardens a two-way decoupling at the human-capital layer rather than just the supply chain.
CNN's deeper read on Thursday's seven-vendor Pentagon AI procurement deal explains why Anthropic was the only frontier lab kept out: the company refused contract language allowing Claude use for "all lawful purposes," arguing it could enable domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk" in March — a tag previously reserved for foreign-adversary-linked vendors — and Anthropic has filed suit to challenge the designation. The Pentagon is reportedly still piloting Claude Mythos Preview for unreleased cybersecurity work, and the White House has reopened talks after CEO Dario Amodei met Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
The Department of Defense announced contracts with Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, and Reflection AI to deploy AI on Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 classified networks — the most sensitive systems short of compartmented intelligence. The deals follow earlier agreements with Google, SpaceX, and OpenAI, and are framed as a vendor-diversification push following a public dispute with Anthropic over usage restrictions. Contract values were not disclosed.