Tag: china

$28 Billion in Munitions Later, What’s Left for a China Fight?

Twenty-eight billion dollars buys a tremendous amount of ammunition. It also raises a fairly important question when much of what was fired can’t quickly be replaced.

A new U.S. Central Command estimate puts the cost of the Iran war at roughly $43.6 billion through September 3. About $28.1 billion of that total reflects munitions expended during the conflict, an increase of more than $6 billion in weapons costs in barely a month.

From the Associated Press:

The financial cost is just one measure of the impact of the Iran war, which also is affecting oil prices and the stock market and has led to deaths and injuries of American troops. The political costs will be calculated in November’s midterm congressional elections, with Republicans facing increasing headwinds from the war’s unpopularity.

The latest cost estimate has emerged as the Trump administration pushes for a historic $1.5 trillion military budget proposal. The White House also is asking Congress to approve a $95 billion package that would help fund the Iran war and other priorities.

The Congressional Budget Office looked at the same war from another direction. Its Sept. 15 assessment estimated roughly $38 billion in Defense Department costs through Aug. 1, including replacement weapons, lost equipment, increased flying hours, operations, and fuel.

The dollars weren’t the CBO’s biggest warning.

The CBO identified America’s heavy expenditure of missile-defense interceptors as the conflict’s main military opportunity cost. The agency says U.S. interceptor inventories will remain reduced for several years because replacements can’t simply be produced overnight.

Then, the CBO brought up China.

A reduced interceptor stockpile would become especially troublesome during a conflict with an enemy possessing large inventories of ballistic and cruise missiles. The CBO specifically identified China and noted those weapons would probably play a major role in military conflict involving Taiwan.

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WW3 Near-Miss? AI Hallucinated Nuclear Weapons Components Aboard Chinese Vessel Bound For Iran

Could runaway artificial intelligence (AI) spark a future WW3?

We don’t need movies like Terminator 2 and its SkyNet to help us imagine this, it’s 2026 and there is already a terrifying real-world precedent that could have kicked off a shooting war with nuclear-armed China.

A human analyst within the US intelligence community utilized data gathered by AI for a report that was later widely circulated across classified Pentagon channels, except that the chatbot which was relied upon in effect hallucinated nuclear weapons components being transported aboard a Chinese vessel bound for Iran.

Naturally this set off the highest alerts in Washington in the middle of an active hot war which President Trump launched ostensibly to prevent this very thing – Iran obtaining a nuke and atomic weapons components.

From there military planning kicked into high gear, with a special forces boarding operation imminent. Supposedly elite assets were already airborne, ready to descend on the Chinese ship in question.

But then, “the operation was halted only after officials took a closer look at the intelligence report and discovered that it had been produced with assistance from an AI chatbot,” CNN reports in a bombshell Friday exclusive. The episode reportedly happened last spring.

The severe error was realized with barely enough time to call off what could have been the geopolitical blunder and disaster of the century, “The chatbot had incorrectly identified the material the vessel was carrying.“

In essence the United States found itself based on completely manufactured ‘intel’ potentially headed for conflict with China.

As if to to preempt anyone who might be tempted to think the account is merely being hyperbolic or needlessly sensational, one official (unnamed) source told CNN that the intelligence assessment, which was “entirely false” – in the end “almost started a war.“

While Pentagon leadership, including US Special Operations Command Pacific, has yet to respond to CNN’s queries, the outlet pieces together the alleged chain of events and how this could have possibly happened in the following:

In this particular instance, the analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It was not clear whether the chatbot was a commercially available one or a US government product.

“The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.

The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.

The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it.

The report seems to be suggesting that the unknown AI tool that was utilized would be deemed substandard and weak for such an important assessment in the first place.

Further “comforting” for readers is that given heavy AI-integration seems the “irreversible” trend of the day across the DoD/Depart of War and IC, similar near-misses in the near and distant future are bound to happen.

CNN underscores, “Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.”

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Undeniable Judge Boasberg Communist Connections Finally Surface – Hosted Communist Propaganda Org’s Events 9 Times, 6 as FISA Judge

The federal judge who has become the face of opposition to President Donald Trump has long-running ties to an exchange program with the United States’ most powerful global rival.

Judge James Boasberg, chief justice for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has been a thorn in the Trump administration’s side since the president returned to the White House in 2025.

But years before that, he was playing host to an organization with ties to the Chinese Communist Party even while serving on a court privy to some of the United States’ most sensitive information, according to documents publicized by a conservative journalist Thursday.

Natalie Winters is an investigative journalist and executive editor of “War Room,” the podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, who served briefly as chief strategist in Trump’s first-term White House.

In a Substack piece published Thursday, she detailed Boasberg’s ties to the China-United States Exchange Foundation.

The name sounds anodyne, but its activities are suspicious enough that the foundation was the subject of a November 2025 letter to Columbia University from the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, asking Columbia to end its ties with the group because it is part of a Chinese government system known as “United Front” — a propaganda effort committed to advancing the causes of the Chinese Communist Party.

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The Fantasy House of Mark Carney

anadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.

So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the United States for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.

Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected. Nor has he allowed his representatives to explain to the media why Canada blew up the negotiations at the last minute. Carney’s ever-changing excuses, explanations, and invectives about what happened are incoherent and contradictory.

That said, analysts on both sides of the border now concede that American digital-media companies do not customarily pay special taxes, as Carney demands, to promote local, regional, and ethnic culture while operating in Canada—any more than Canadian companies would be taxed for those purposes in the United States.

Canada and the United States both agree that China dumps cheap steel and aluminum into Canada, allowing Canadian manufacturers to use that cost advantage to export assembled vehicles to the vast U.S. market at prices below those of American vehicles. In that way, Canada’s new partnership with China circumvents America’s tariffs on Beijing. China will also send nearly 50,000 electric cars and trucks into Canada under a meager tariff, ensuring that the Canadian EV market is increasingly dominated by Chinese vehicles.

But Carney’s ploy goes beyond helping the communist Chinese dictatorship gain trade leverage over his own NATO neighbor. He has eagerly concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian pact involving travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security. Carney has grandly described these new agreements with Beijing as part of a new paradigm in which “middle powers” like Canada play China against the United States (Canada’s annual nominal GDP is roughly the size of New York State’s).

How ironic that Carney attacks his neighbor, the United States, for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship in China. Communist China, after all, is history’s greatest violator of trade protocols—guilty of manipulating its currency, dumping products to secure market share, violating copyright and patent laws, and imprisoning a million Uyghurs.

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Trump calls AI risks a ‘hoax,’ says there is a ‘SICK conspiracy’ against AI and data centers

President Donald Trump said Monday that he would be a sufficient guardrail against rogue artificial intelligence, claiming that any efforts to limit the technology is part of a “SICK conspiracy.”

Trump was pushing back against calls by tech leaders such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk to have greater government oversight of AI. Many tech leaders generally say their goal is to develop the technology in ways that promote safety, address legal liability, feed economic growth, advance science and preserve national security.

The president maintained that his presence in the Oval Office should assuage any fears about AI, which has become a source of controversy after a series of hacks in recent months that showed AI agents could be working to deceive humans.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump posted on social media.

Trump specifically said that the administration has already stopped the AI company Anthropic “from doing bad, or potentially bad” things. Anthropic has endured an uncomfortable relationship with the Trump administration, with the Pentagon trying to label the company a security risk and the government issuing a temporary ban of one of its more advanced models.

The president went even further in a Monday afternoon post that asked “when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

The president then added that the potential threat that AI could pose to humanity was a hoax, despite clear warnings by many of the experts closest to the most advanced models.

“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” posted Trump.

Trump’s refusal to regulate comes as AI execs warn of threats

Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday that called for slower development of AI. Microsoft on Monday published its own code of conduct to ensure that humans control AI. The actions come after a series of warnings by AI experts about the technologies’ capabilities and the July 2026 cyberattack by OpenAI models on the AI company Hugging Face.

Amodei cited “AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI” and the cyberattack by the swarm of OpenAI agents as reasons to slow the pace of development.

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” Amodei wrote, adding that the damages could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars or more “without the necessary guardrails.”

Altman of OpenAI seconded that perspective in a weekend post on social media.

“Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring,” Altman said. “Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination.”

Trump sees AI regulation as helping China

The president has opposed such efforts to constrain AI and claims that doing so could cause China to eclipse America on AI.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump said.

The president has long resisted efforts for greater government oversight of AI, embracing his philosophy going back to 2016 of “I alone can fix it.” He returned to the White House last year by revoking a Biden administration executive order on AI oversight and only providing a fuller order of his own more than 16 months later this past June.

The prospect of slower AI buildout led stocks to slip in Monday morning trading, as demand for advanced computer chips and construction materials for data centers could fall. But Trump’s frustration comes as AI has also emerged as a political liability ahead of November’s midterm elections, with many voters opposing the construction of additional data centers and expressing worries that AI could lead to job losses and undermine the education of children.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters on Monday that he expects Trump will have the AI companies potentially meet at the White House this week or next week, saying that the sit-down has yet to be scheduled.

“There will be a deliberate discussion about the responsibility of the companies to maintain safety, and what role, if any, the government has to play in that,” said Johnson, adding that legislatures can tend to respond problematically with “red tape and hyper regulation” and that the loss of competitive edge on AI would be a national security concern.

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“I’d Be Okay With That”: Trump Says He’s Open To Chinese Automakers Building Cars In US

In comments that most people missed on Friday, President Donald Trump suggested that he’s open to letting Chinese automakers build cars on US soil. 

Speaking with Fox News, Trump said that while he wouldn’t allow Chinese cars to operate in the United States because the US market would be overrun – he might be open to manufacturing them here. 

“We don’t allow his cars into the United States, and I never did,” he said, referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, noting that then-President Joe Biden had kept his policies on Chinese cars. 

“If China wanted to come in and open a plant to build their cars here, I’d be okay with that. Japan does it, but they hire our people. The big thing is they hire our people,” he continued, adding “What I don’t want is them to build in Mexico and just … build it inexpensively and ship it across the border.”

As The Epoch Times notes further, a regulation imposed by the Biden administration in early 2025 effectively bans all Chinese automakers from selling or building passenger vehicles in the United States. Washington also maintains more than 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

Trump’s remarks came ahead of Xi’s planned visit to the United States later this month. The president said on July 23 that he would discuss artificial intelligence with the Chinese leader during the visit. The two leaders last met during Trump’s visit to Beijing in May, where Trump formally invited Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, to the White House.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a Washington-based group representing major U.S. automakers, on Sept. 3 urged Congress to permanently ban the sale, import, and manufacture of Chinese-connected vehicles, hardware, and software before the current congressional session ends.

“Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world,” John Bozzella, the group’s president and CEO, said in a letter to the congressional leadership.

Bozzella warned that China is gaining market share in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and South America with vehicles that can collect, process, and transmit “sensitive vehicle and consumer data to the Chinese Communist Party.”

It hasn’t happened yet inside the United States, he said. He urged lawmakers to act quickly, given the scale and urgency of the threat.

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Surrogate Stunned After Learning Chinese Billionaire Building a Human “Baby Factory”

The corporate press has finally stumbled onto a surrogacy pipeline that should have triggered alarm bells in Washington years ago.

An American mother says she agreed to carry a baby for what she believed was a single father, only to learn the intended parent was reportedly a reclusive Chinese billionaire.

The woman, identified by CBS News as Judy, responded to an Instagram advertisement offering $120,000 for becoming a surrogate.

A single mother raising a seven year old child, she was living with her father and hoped the payment would help her secure a home of her own.

According to CBS, the agency presented the intended parent as a single man who wanted to expand his family.

Leaked documents reportedly connected the pregnancy to Xu Bo, founder of the Chinese video game company Duoyi Network and the subject of mounting scrutiny over his reported use of American surrogates.

Judy signed with Patriot Conceptions, a California agency whose website promotes its military veteran roots.

CBS reported that the company lists Haotian Bai as its founder, though Judy says she was given precious little information about the man whose child she was carrying.

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REPORT: China Helped Iran Target U.S. Base Before Attack That Killed Three American Troops

Chinese entities allegedly provided Iran with high-quality satellite imagery of a U.S. air base shortly before Tehran launched a ballistic missile attack that killed three American service members, according to a new report.

U.S. officials have linked the Chinese-supplied imagery to Iran’s July 17 attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The imagery was reportedly provided both before and after the attack, giving Tehran detailed views of the American facility.

The strike killed three U.S. troops and wounded four others, marking the first American military deaths of the Iran war since the April ceasefire.

The three Americans killed were First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, and Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28.

U.S. officials reportedly view the satellite imagery as the clearest evidence yet that Chinese assistance to Iran during the war has contributed directly to American military casualties.

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US Customs supervisor busted for stealing Core i7 CPUs, RAM, and hard drives from Homeland Security PCs, damage estimated at $105,800 — stolen tech swapped with inferior hardware and cashed out on Newegg

According to a report from The Maine Wire, the FBI has arrested and charged Terry “Jiajia” Liu, a Customs and Border Protection supervisor based in Calais, Maine, for theft and damage to government property. Liu allegedly stole computer hardware, including Intel 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors, memory modules, and hard drives, from at least 46 Department of Homeland Security computers across three Maine border facilities. They replaced the stolen parts with inferior hardware and exchanged the stolen equipment through Newegg’s trade-in program for store credit.

Liu’s official responsibilities were limited to information-technology support, so they did not have access to modify any government computer. Port Director Theodore Cummings made the restriction abundantly clear to Liu in a written order: “Please do not move any computers or computer parts.” However, criminals rarely listen.

Hidden surveillance cameras captured Liu opening government computers and swapping hardware during the midnight shift. The perpetrator would take the systems to a training room to commit the crime. One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor and installing a replacement chip in one system. Meanwhile, another recording caught Liu removing a memory module from a system and storing it in their desk drawer.

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Trump’s Grid Battery Ban Leaves Developers Guessing

The United States is trying to build up its energy storage capacities at a rapid scale. At the same time, it is trying to wean itself off of Chinese battery tech. In many ways, these two goals are in direct opposition to each other.

China dominates global supply chains for clean energy tech in general, but especially when it comes to lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from your phone to your car. Approximately 80 percent of all battery cells in the world are made in China according to figures from the International Energy Agency. What is more, Beijing controls the production of EV battery cathode active material (85 percent of global production) and anode active material (more than 90 percent), and refines the vast majority of the critical minerals involved in their manufacturing.

The Trump administration is eager to challenge Beijing’s outsized presence in the global energy sector as part of its stated goal to establish “energy dominance.” Toward the end of August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that effectively bars the use of Chinese-made batteries in grid-scale energy storage systems, pointing to cybersecurity concerns as the rationale. In the same month, the federal government awarded $500 million in funding to seven companies working on battery minerals, manufacturing, and recycling with the express purpose of building up the domestic sector in order to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains.

However, these measures are falling short. Way short. “It takes decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars” to build the kind of supply chains that would be capable of competing with China according to Tu Le, founder and managing director of Sino Auto Insights. “We don’t have decades. We have five, six, seven years to try to become competitive,” he was recently quoted by Quartz.

“We have a ton of innovation coming out of the United States,” Le went on to say. “These small fledgling companies are super innovative, but getting and building prototypes of what they’re trying to sell is one thing. Being able to mass produce them at a high quality level, repeatably in the millions of units is another thing entirely.”

Moreover, critics have pointed out that the August 26 executive order is vaguely worded, calling for the ban of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment”, and may only serve to slow down the growth of the domestic energy storage sector. Analysis from BloombergNEF notes that, as a result of the state of emergency and the uncertainty around its terms, battery projects “face near-term delays or cancellations as developers await guidance, reconsider existing contracts, or shift suppliers.”

The effort may also be too little, too late to make up for the damage that the Trump administration has already done to the domestic battery manufacturing sector by rolling back critical Biden-era supportive legislation. Repealing laws supporting domestic manufacturers and the EV sector as a whole (which is far and away the largest market for these batteries on a global scale) has cost U.S. battery manufacturers time and money when both are in short supply.

And then there is another critical dilemma: is the real problem that the Trump administration’s efforts are insufficient, or that they are misguided entirely? “All this tension raises a broader question for me,” Casey Crownhart wrote in an article for the MIT Technology Review this week: “How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?”

Of course, allowing for the near-total monopolization of global critical infrastructure in the hands of just one country, and an authoritarian one at that, is also a bad option. It’s a sticky situation that no executive order can solve overnight.

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