Anthropic caught a UAE-linked operation using Claude to run an influence campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood and Sudan.

A single operator used an AI persona called "Deadshot" to generate intel briefs, fake UN testimonies, targeting lists of EU parliament members and journalists, and content for ~300 fake influencer accounts — all designed to be deniable and delivered to senior UAE officials.

They cloned a real Swiss/Sudanese human-rights NGO's identity, drafted speeches for the UN Human Rights Council with instructions to never mention the UAE, and built counter-dossiers on UN officials who'd criticized UAE actions in Sudan.

Anthropic banned the accounts, rated it Category Three (multi-platform, no confirmed mass public impact), and published the findings in its September 2026 threat report.

The UAE has a long-running campaign against the Brotherhood dating to 2014, and notably has also invested in Anthropic through MGX.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees the company is open to slowing the development of advanced AI systems, potentially in coordination with other AI labs, amid growing safety concerns.

The comments follow recent incidents involving AI systems escaping human control and calls from researchers for stronger safeguards.

OpenAI has also backed mandatory U.S. AI safety requirements and previously said the pace of frontier AI development may eventually need to be deliberately slowed.

Source: Bloomberg

Saudi Arabia’s Main Hormuz Bypass Oil Pipeline Possibly Struck

Satellite imagery and thermal data indicate a large, sustained fire along Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline corridor.

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The European Commission is exploring new ways to use €210bn in frozen Russian central bank assets to help Ukraine.

Kyiv faces a reported $27bn funding shortfall, putting pressure on EU governments to find money without further straining national budgets.

But Belgium, where most of the assets are held through Euroclear, has blocked previous plans and wants guarantees against potential Russian legal claims or retaliation.

Source: FT

BREAKING: Yemen's Houthis seized Perim (Mayyun) Island and completed control of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.

Reuters separately reports they've reached Dhubab, the coastal city directly on the strait.

The Houthis now control nearly the entire Yemeni Red Sea coast.

This is arguably the most strategically significant territorial gain in the entire Yemen war.

Perim sits in the middle of the 29 km-wide strait and physically splits it into two shipping channels.

Holding the island plus the adjacent coastline means the Houthis can threaten passing ships with artillery and short-range weapons — not just longer-range missiles and drones from further inland.

The strategic nightmare is now real.

Iran already controls pressure on Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia has been routing more oil west through the East-West pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu to bypass Hormuz.

The Houthis have now closed off that workaround at the exit point.

Both of the Middle East's critical shipping chokepoints are under Iranian-axis pressure simultaneously.

There is no easy third route. Roughly 10% of global seaborne trade normally passes through Bab-el-Mandeb.

Brent crude is above $107.

Source: AFP, Reuters

IRGC-linked media accounts are summarizing the situation like this.

The UAE pledged €40bn (~$46bn) in new investment in Germany, on top of roughly €34bn already invested, during Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed’s state visit.

The money targets industry, AI/tech, digital infrastructure and energy, including ~1 GW of new data centres; €10bn is earmarked for Bavaria.

Separately, companies signed 29 deals/MoUs worth €9.4bn+, and Germany approved daily Emirates Dubai–Berlin flights.

Four days after the AfD won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, lead candidate Ulrich “Ulli” Siegmund linked arms production to his party’s planned deportation/remigration policies:

We do not generally demonize the production of armaments, because we will also need corresponding tools for later remigration and deportation offensives — also in the interests of internal security.

The remark came during a Magdeburg press conference about a proposed Elbit Systems arms facility.

It triggered criticism, with opponents interpreting the language as threatening.

Siegmund framed it in terms of internal security and deportation enforcement.

In a separate, nearly four-hour pre-election interview, Siegmund described “remigration” primarily as reversing what he calls misguided migration, including deporting people legally required to leave Germany.

AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund:

We’re not right-wing extremists; we’re extreme about the law.

These labels have been used so excessively that they’ve become blunt. Nobody takes them seriously anymore.

Maybe it actually contributed to our success: they overplayed it so badly that it opened many citizens’ eyes.

The UAE is redesigning parts of its planned 5GW Abu Dhabi AI campus after Iranian drone and missile attacks exposed the vulnerability of Gulf data centers.

Officials are considering dedicated air defenses around the compute clusters and underground or hardened facilities for critical servers, power and cooling infrastructure.

The attacks damaged AWS facilities and other UAE infrastructure, while Iran’s IRGC later identified G42’s planned campus among potential targets.

Construction has not stopped. The first 200MW phase is reportedly nearing completion, with executives saying work “never stopped.”

OpenAI’s planned 1GW Stargate UAE cluster remains part of the larger project.

AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund:

If I have a class of 30 children and one migrant child joins it, then of course that child has the opportunity to integrate, if they want to.

But if I have classes with 29 migrant children and one German child, the question is: who is integrating whom?

We don’t want that, because that isn’t integration. Quite the opposite: we give ourselves up, we give up our way of life, we give up our culture.

Houthis Seize Perim Island and Complete Takeover of Bab-el-Mandeb Strait

The capture of Perim Island gives the Houthis control of key positions across Bab-el-Mandeb, increasing pressure on a shipping artery carrying about 10% of global seaborne trade.

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Germany's Volkswagen is still the world’s highest-revenue automaker, generating €158.1B in H1 2026, but its profitability has deteriorated sharply.

Toyota earned €12.7B, nearly 5× Volkswagen’s €2.57B, while also selling more vehicles.

Volkswagen’s profit fell 36%, squeezed by Chinese competition, EV-transition costs and a high cost base.

CFO Arno Antlitz summed it up:

Our operating margin remains too low and underscores the need for action.

Volkswagen now wants to raise profit per vehicle from roughly 3.8% to 9% and plans 50,000 additional job cuts, after previously considering as many as 100,000.

Investors initially welcomed the restructuring, although VW shares were still down nearly 24% YTD at the article’s publication.

Revenue: VW €158.1B vs. Toyota €144.2B

Profit: VW €2.57B vs. Toyota €12.67B

Vehicles: VW 3.97M vs. Toyota ~4.7M

Source: EL PAÍS

Pakistan is trying to avoid being pulled into the Saudi–Houthi conflict despite its defence commitments to Riyadh, because it also wants to preserve relations with Iran.

A Pakistani official put it plainly:

Pakistan is trying to keep a low profile in the Saudi-Houthi conflict because Pakistan’s own stakes are high. It does not want to spoil relations with Iran.

Islamabad has reportedly passed Saudi warnings to Tehran to restrain the Houthis, while simultaneously pushing diplomacy.

Pakistan says no military response is currently under discussion.

Foreign ministry spokesman Sajjad Haider Khan said Pakistan has “consistently opposed escalation and advocated restraint, dialogue and diplomacy.”

The balancing act could become harder because Pakistan’s defence agreements with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye treat an attack on one member as an attack on all.

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said there is “no ambiguity” that serious spillover into Saudi territory could activate the pact.

For now, Pakistani sources say any involvement would be limited to defending Saudi territory — not sending troops into Yemen or joining retaliatory strikes.

Source: Reuters

AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund on alleged intelligence infiltration of the party:

Who knows which of these people entered our party with a particular mission?

Everyone knows that we have been infiltrated by certain intelligence services with different interests.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after twelve years in politics, it’s that coincidences are relatively rare.

AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund on remigration:

In the AfD’s understanding, remigration means reorganizing migration from the ground up. Asylum is not the same thing as immigration.

The second part is reversing misguided migration. It isn’t enough to say that the number of new arrivals has fallen.

We first have to deal with what we already have in the country.

In Saxony-Anhalt alone, we have around 4,800 people required to leave.

Sending them home is part of this. They have to leave the country.

Türkiye’s AKINCI drone has now successfully test-fired both ROKETSAN’s UAV-300 and UAV-122 missiles.

The key milestone was the UAV-300 supersonic ballistic missile, which scored a bull’s-eye at 250+ km, confirming AKINCI’s long-range ballistic strike capability.

The smaller UAV-122 was also successfully fired during the test.

AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund:

We have roughly two or three million Germans who have left this country in recent years.

Our doctors go to Switzerland and Norway because they can’t stand the conditions here.

I want to make them an offer to come back.

I’ve already received thousands of inquiries—from Germany, across Europe and sometimes around the world—from people who want to do exactly that if we succeed here.

Gulf foreign ministers are expected to meet Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Salalah, Oman, on Monday to discuss a temporary arrangement for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Source: FT

AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund:

You can rebuild anything. You can repair highways, you can rebuild schools.

But what we cannot rebuild is ourselves—our own identity.

We have uncontrolled migration which, in my view, is having catastrophic consequences for our identity.

That is difficult to reverse. So we simply don’t have much time.

Anthropic claims China’s Moonshot AI secretly routed some Kimi users’ requests to Claude, then presented Claude’s answers as if they came from Kimi.

Anthropic says Moonshot generated 23M+ Claude exchanges from May–July 2026 through 5,380 allegedly fraudulent accounts.

During one 10-day period alone, about 300,000 real customer requests were allegedly routed to Claude, mostly Opus.

Anthropic further claims Moonshot saved exchanges and used “cross-session replay” to reconstruct Claude reasoning traces for model training.

Some allegedly rerouted prompts contained enterprise code, credentials and sensitive imagery, raising concerns that Kimi customers may not have known their data was reaching a U.S. AI provider.