Saturday, October 17, 2026

Pentagon moves to triple Patriot, quadruple THAAD interceptor production

The Defense Department on Monday announced framework agreements with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin aimed at expanding production of critical Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptor components as the military seeks to replenish missile inventories through expanded, long-term production capacity.The agreements come as demand for Patriot and THAAD interceptors has increased…

US Air Force jet engine manufacturing plagued by ‘significant challenges’

Dissatisfied with the quality of the engines for its fighter jets, the U.S. Air Force is looking for new engines — and perhaps new manufacturers.“The current industrial base has demonstrated significant challenges, including production delays, quality control issues, and critical obsolescence (i.e., diminishing manufacturing sources and material shortages) across key engine components,” warned the Air…

Attackers are targeting open-source AI just as Big Tech is embracing it

The future of AI will be driven in significant part by startups and small players using open-source software to make their own, cheaper, more efficient versions of Claude or ChatGPT, tech leaders finally admitted this week. For companies like AWS, the challenge now is protecting those public tools from increasingly sophisticated attacks from China, Russia,…

Shock wave

Imagine an alternate near-future in which the U.S. military had more vigorously pursued the development of hypersonic weapons. When a major U.S. Air Force exercise deploys such weapons to Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, it surprises Chinese military leaders who believed that U.S. hypersonic missile development had been stymied by underfunded research, technological gaps, and a…

Anthropic confirms its AI breached 3 organizations during testing

Anthropic’s flagship artificial intelligence model Claude gained unauthorized access to the networks of three different organizations, the company announced following internal cybersecurity audits of its routine model evaluations.  In a press release posted Thursday, Anthropic said that, following the containment breach of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.6 and subsequent attack on Hugging Face’s systems, Anthropic conducted an audit…