Military & security

Introduction New research from AI Now demonstrates a critical attack vector in popular AI agents, built by Anthropic and OpenAI, when used for defensive purposes that actually turn the agent against its user. Read the full blog post explaining the proof-of-concept exploit and a policy brief with key takeaways below. The post Double Agents: Defensive AI Agents Magnify Cyber Risks appeared first on AI Now Institute .

Exploit Brief We are revealing a proof-of-concept exploit that enables remote code execution in Anthropic’s Claude Code CLI (with Claude Sonnet 4.6 & 5, Opus 4.8) and OpenAI’s Codex CLI (with GPT-5.5) when employed to defensively assess the security of an open-source or third-party library. Our attack only requires an out-of-the-box configuration of Claude Code […] The post Friendly Fire: Hijacking Defensive Cyber AI Agents for Remote Code Execution appeared first on AI Now Institute .

Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes—that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club—jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more measured than some of the breathless headlines about it, and the advice they gave is pretty much the standard advice everyone gives—albeit with newfound urgency. Internet risks are nothing new, and cybera

Cyber defence firm BlockAPT has launched Pivotra AI Essential, an AI-powered cyber defence solution built specifically for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the financial services space to help them keep up and stay protected in the era of machine-speed cyber threats.

Editor’s note: This is the second article in a limited series celebrating American defense technologies born from wartime and their effects on broader national security, politics, and society. This series will run for several weeks to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, and winners will be selected by a reader vote undertaken through our newsletter later this summer. Prior installments can be found at the Arsenal of Innovation page. The most produced American military aircraft of World War

"HalluSquatting" weaponizes LLMs' inability to say "I don't know."

Andy Burnham is near-certain to succeed Keir Starmer as UK prime minister. He will inherit a world in which technological leadership increasingly shapes economic prosperity, military capability and ...

The US Federal Communications Commission ⁠said on Tuesday it is adding California-based Digitalsystem Technology to a list of companies posing risks to US national security, citing links to Chinese telecoms firms and its ownership by a Chinese national. The FCC also said ‌it was denying the Los Angeles-based IT company permission to provide international telecommunications services, saying it could be exploited by Chinese threat actors. “There is significant risk that the government of China and

Cyber intruders accessed the unclassified network being used to help support World Cup games around the U.S., a senator said last week.

Lieutenant General John (Jack) N.T. Shanahan, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, helped shape the Department of Defense's approach to artificial ...

A USAF cadet and a Lincoln Laboratory researcher found AI chatbots can help nontechnical service members produce viable software applications for their unique problems.

New defence spending offers little clarity on the future direction of military space.

The European Central Bank has told banks to draw up action plans to address AI-enabled cyber threats, warning that emerging models such as Anthropic's Mythos have "potentially profound implications" for the resilience of IT system.

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved high visual fidelity and broad adoption, but remain vulnerable to safety violations when adversaries exploit them to synthesize illicit content. Existing alignment paradigms, from input sanitization to structural feature pruning, are largely organized around unsafe concepts explicitly exposed during filtering, editing, or localization. This leaves a blind spot for visual synonym attacks (VSA), a jailbreak where benign-looking prompts elicit prohibited

Faults on a cyber-physical system (CPS) are too rare and unrepresentative to characterise, or even to select a model on, so detection must instead model normal behaviour; the standard point-adjusted evaluation, however, rewards detectors that never do. CPS normal behaviour is the union of many imbalanced, curved, thin-fringed operating regimes rather than a single blob; we state this structure as ten assumptions (A1-A10), abbreviated Massive, Implicit, Imbalanced Multimodality (MIIM). We model t

Quantum computing shifts cyber security into a new era in which encrypted data could be stolen today only to be decrypted years later.

The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have exposed a strategic reality that military planners are only beginning to confront: In a data-centric age, digital infrastructure has become part of the battlespace. Data centers and cloud regions are now the digital backbone of military power and economic prosperity. As such, they present attractive targets for rapidly proliferating long-range strike systems, drones, and cyber capabilities. As the protective value of physical distance erodes, strategi

To sustain future maritime operations, the U.S military will need to run supplies through an environment that spans thousands of miles of open ocean, denied ports, contested straits, and archipelagic chokepoints against adversaries that have spent decades studying how to target American logistics. That problem does not require one identical vessel for every mission. It does require a more common family of watercraft for the manned ships that carry cargo and vehicles inside a theater, built for s

This week’s NATO summit in Ankara takes place at a pivotal moment in the alliance’s evolution – and for US–Europe relations. In Ankara, the agenda will rightly focus on defence spending targets and ...

Last month, CISA held additional stakeholder town halls on the forthcoming CIRCIA final rule after a now-resolved DHS funding lapse this spring delayed the meetings.

Tech giant Alibaba Group Holding has secured a temporary legal reprieve that effectively allows it to resume lobbying in the United States, the latest development in its dispute with the Pentagon after the firm was included on a blacklist of companies deemed to support China’s military. A judge in the Northern District of California on Sunday ordered the Department of Defence not to enforce a lobbying prohibition against Alibaba while the court considered the firm’s constitutional challenge to..

Amid pending proceedings before the ECtHR concerning summary expulsions and arbitrary detentions, in a context marked by over 120,000 documented push-backs on the Belarusian border, the Chișinău Declaration seeks to influence the legal framework within which the Court assesses such practices. The Declaration emphasises the fundamental duty of states to protect their borders and maintain national security in the context of instrumentalisation of migration, drawing on “democracy capable of defendi

The punk-rap duo Bob Vylan has filed defamation proceedings against the BBC in the High Court in Ireland, following its coverage of their 2025 Glastonbury performance, which the broadcaster described as containing “anti-Semitic sentiments.” The case stems from controversy over chants the band led calling for “death to the IDF [Israel Defence Force],” which the […]

What do you do when two identities that make up your deepest self find themselves on opposite sides of a moral and spiritual battlefield?I am Catholic. I have been one for over 20 years since I made the life-altering decision to join a friend for Mass one day. My faith became a spiritual and ethical foundation at a time I sorely needed it, so much so that for a time, I contemplated entering the priesthood, which replaced my previous career goal of entering the CIA. I eventually realized that tea

On October 23, 2025, the Department of Energy held a public meeting to discuss the development of voluntary agreements and plans of action under the Defense Production Act. As part of that meeting, a draft voluntary agreement was released to the accompanying docket and published in the Federal Register for comment. This notice publishes the "Nuclear Fuel Cycle Consortium" Voluntary Agreement approved by the Secretary of Energy, after consultation by the Attorney General and Chairman of the Feder

From Friday's Sixth Circuit decision in U.S. v. Farris, by Judges Eric Clay, Julia Gibbons, and Whitney Hermandorfer: Howe \[a court-appointed criminal defense lawyer appealing a drug trafficking sentence] filed two briefs---a principal br ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1572#7492)

This study examines the underlying causes of the gap between perceived artificial intelligence (AI) literacy and the actual competencies of defense personnel, and explores structured training initiatives that can support reliable and responsible decision-making in AI-mediated operational environments. Grounded in self-efficacy theory and the cognitive psychology of competence assessment, the study advances the theoretically motivated proposition that the routine use of intelligent systems may co

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are rapidly becoming foundational components of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), yet their complex cyber-physical architectures expose them to a broad and continuously evolving threat landscape. Existing cybersecurity solutions struggle to keep pace with the dynamic, data-intensive nature of AV ecosystems, leaving critical vulnerabilities unaddressed across perception, communication, and decision-making subsystems. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), enco

The Defence Investment Plan provides £5 billion for drone warfare.

Two new models from Chinese firms compete with top US mainstream and frontier models. Should cyber-defenders be worried?

The rapid growth of publicly available digital information has rendered manual open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis insufficient for modern intelligence, cybersecurity, and cyber investigation. Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems, capable of tool use, multi-step reasoning, and iterative intelligence generation, have emerged as promising solutions, yet evaluation frameworks have not kept pace with reported capabilities. This survey systematically reviews 74 studies and makes

Editor’s note: This is the first article in a limited series celebrating American defense technologies born from wartime and their effects on broader national security, politics, and society. This series will run for several weeks to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, and winners will be selected by a reader vote undertaken through our newsletter later this summer. Prior installments can be found at the Arsenal of Innovation page. The history of the semiconductor is an origin story for mod

For many observers, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s speech on the future of NATO, delivered in Brussels on June 18, 2026, constituted a perfect example of how the Trump administration is angrily abandoning the longstanding U.S. commitment to European security. The prevailing picture is that the administration is eager to shift the burden of Europe’s defense and is thus moving to withdraw U.S. forces from the continent, even though Europe is moving to do more militarily. Hegseth stated, “we’r

There is no doubt that safety alignment is an essential step in LLM training. However, conceptually it does not distinguish between various domains and the level of potential harm of a query, which creates significant complications in the fields like cyber security, where a model should not be constrained by its safety circuits to accomplish the goals of legitimate, authorized operations. In this work, we share our findings from a large scale abliteration experiment on 24 open-source LLMs and sh

Antitrust agencies have a habit of giving new labels to old anxieties. In artificial intelligence, the latest worry is that partnerships between large technology firms and startups are not partnerships at all, but mergers in clever disguises. In the first article in this series, we examined how Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) has ... Killer Theories and Acqui-Hire Alibis The post Killer Theories and Acqui-Hire Alibis appeared first on Truth on the Market .

What GAO Found The Department of Defense (DOD) continues to struggle to deliver technologies quickly and within budget. Since its last annual assessment, GAO found: Programs are delaying interim events and milestones for some of the costliest major defense acquisition programs (MDAP). DOD has increased its use of the middle tier of acquisition (MTA) rapid prototyping and fielding pathways—intended to be completed in 5 years. Some programs began on the MTA pathway with technologies that require m

During a recent conference on the People’s Liberation Army, I heard the same question posed to attendees and paper writers: “How would China react to U.S. force posture change X, Y, or Z?” or “How would the Chinese military respond to U.S. strikes in certain locations?” Having participated in dozens of unclassified wargames at the RAND Corporation and elsewhere, I hear a similar refrain when playing the “red team.”This is a reasonable and legitimate question. Policymakers and war planners should

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are increasingly deployed in every aspect of our lives and can be compromised through memory corruption vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to hijack the control flow and take over the system. Existing techniques mostly focus on detecting such attacks but respond by terminating or halting execution upon attack detection, which is not acceptable in CPSs used in safety-critical tasks, as interrupted tasks can have catastrophic consequences. Other techniques replace co

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are essential for monitoring network traffic and identifying malicious activities in modern cyber-physical, Internet of Things (IoT), enterprise, and distributed network environments. However, developing reliable IDS models remains challenging because attack behaviors evolve over time, realistic datasets are difficult to obtain, traffic records may be incomplete, attack classes are often imbalanced, and privacy constraints limit centralized data collection. Rec

Last fall, the U.S. Marine Corps had virtually no first-person view attack drones. That’s changed quickly. This episode is about how a team of marines at Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico went from a cold start to building a Marine Corps-wide first-person view drone training system. Ryan was pleased to welcome some great marines onto the show: Col. Scott Cuomo, CWO5 Steve Pearsoll, CWO3 (Gunner) Troy Hotaling, GySgt Jude Stewart, GySgt Justin Creasman, and Sgt Timothy Brockup.Since we recor