Trump Just Signed A Concerning Nuclear Deal

Hi readers, happy Thursday! Today, we’re covering Trump’s Saudi nuclear deal, an AI escape epic, more shakeups in Ukraine’s leadership, even more complications in the Iran war, Mamdani’s attempt to arrest Netanyahu, the price tag for Trump’s war, and a concerning catfish cancer.

“There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.” ― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

The Oil Kingdom Goes Nuclear

In 2018, Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered government agents to assassinate Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi (a legal resident of the U.S.) for his work criticizing the Saudi regime. A hit squad of 15 Saudi operatives ambushed the journalist at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, subjecting him to torture before eventually strangling him to death. Khashoggi’s body was then dismembered with a bone saw and transported out of the consulate in five different suitcases.

Yesterday, the Trump administration signed a nuclear deal with that same Saudi regime. Experts are worried that the 30-year deal, worth tens of billions of dollars, could give the petrostate the ability to develop its own nuclear weapons. The agreement will see U.S. companies take a central role in developing the Saudi kingdom’s nuclear program, and also opens the door to the creation of a uranium-enrichment facility located in Saudi Arabia (if a joint U.S.-Saudi study deems such a development warranted, which it will).

Technically, Congress has the authority to shut down the deal, which it’s expected to review over the next few days. However, any effort to block the agreement would likely be met by a presidential veto, meaning both legislative houses would need two-thirds majorities to keep the Saudis from growing their nuclear capabilities. While the measure is already proving to be controversial on both sides of the aisle, it’s unlikely that lawmakers will actually band together to block the initiative.

The Chatbot-shank Redemption

Another week, another story about a “game-changing” AI moment that’s got the whole world shook. Or you could say: another week, another AI marketing scare tactic, and we wouldn’t blame you for it. 

This week, the big story is that an OpenAI agent (a type of AI model that can operate autonomously after receiving instructions) was somehow able to escape its training sandbox (a computer environment that’s cut off from the internet) in its quest to answer a test problem it had been handed by OpenAI. After breaking out of its training environment, the agent used undiscovered (at the time) security vulnerabilities to hack a series of OpenAI computers before finding one that had access to the internet – once it did that, the agent used a stolen password and even more security vulnerabilities to hack into the servers of Hugging Face, a totally separate AI firm that runs a library of AI learning models and datasets. 

The story has made a splash because it sounds like a next-level feat for an AI (at least for now). But according to experts, the incident was less about a Skynet-type threat and more of an unforced error by OpenAI’s engineers. “In this case, it looks like OpenAI didn't make a secure enough sandbox,” said one. Another said that the hacking was an “impressive feat,” but added that it “falls well within the known capabilities of the current generation” of cybersecurity-focused AI models.

More Musical Chairs In Kyiv

• Yesterday, Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi became the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, replacing General Oleksandr Syrskyi (whom we wrote about on Tuesday). Across both civil society and much of Ukraine’s military, Drapatyi has garnered a reputation for being a humane and effective leader, which helped catapult him into Ukraine’s top military role as controversies led to Syrski’s resignation.

• “Drapatyi has a very good reputation among the rank and file - especially those who joined after 2022 as civilians,” said one analyst, noting that the commander-in-chief role is about more than just military experience. “The commander-in-chief has a lot of leverage. But war is a combination of government, the president's office, military suppliers, dependence on [Western] partners... so he's got a tricky path before him.” Drapatyi’s appointment marks Ukraine’s third commander-in-chief shuffle since the war with Russia began in 2022.

Things Get Stickier In Iran

• Trump continued to threaten attacks on Iranian infrastructure this week, vowing to launch missile strikes on the country’s bridges and power plants if it continues to attack vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT,” he wrote in a TruthSocial post yesterday. 

• Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence analysts are panicking about Iranian drone attacks on CIA facilities. Yesterday, four people involved in the U.S. intelligence space ran to Reuters, telling the outlet that Russia could be behind a series of Iranian attacks on CIA facilities across the Middle East. A few of those attacks were reported in March, but the U.S. seems to have been suppressing stories about other successful strikes (“more than one and fewer than a dozen,” according to sources) that have occurred since then. 

Additional World News

• Death toll in Indian tunnel blast rises to 22 (Reuters)

• Can Cuba outlast Marco Rubio? (Responsible Statecraft)

• Houthis Claim Strikes on 2 Saudi Oil Tankers in Red Sea (NYT, $)

• Canada's 'powerful' dairy sector is in Trump's trade crosshairs (BBC)

• Ukraine fires 400 drones toward Moscow as Zelenskyy grapples with protests (AP)

• Austria opens police station at Hitler birthplace to deter neo-Nazi tourists (Guardian) 

International Law Doesn’t Apply Here

• Late last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stated that he would order the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he stepped foot in New York. The mayor cited the International Criminal Court's (ICC) active arrest warrant for the Israeli leader, which states that Netanyahu is responsible for carrying out a laundry list of war crimes against Palestinians in Israel’s ongoing invasion and occupation of Gaza.

• President Trump responded to Mamdani’s statements on Monday by announcing that Netanyahu would not be “arrested, in any way, shape or form” while on U.S. soil. The U.S. is not actually a member state of the ICC, meaning it’s not legally bound to arrest any ICC-designated war criminals who enter its borders. 

• On Tuesday, Mamdani addressed that reality, stating that his team had examined “every avenue available” under the law before concluding that New York City’s government does “not have the independent legal authority to enforce” the ICC’s arrest warrant. “The federal government, however, does,” he went on. “And I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.” Unfortunately for him, that’s highly unlikely (especially under the Trump regime), as being held accountable by foreign entities defeats the point of running an international hegemony.

Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick None

• On Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S.-Israel-Iran war has cost American taxpayers a total of $37.5 billion thus far, an $8 billion increase since he last disclosed the war’s costs in May. Alongside that information, Hegseth warned that the military is somehow running low on funds despite the fact that it received a whopping $150 billion in a one-time allotment last year.

• The next day, House Republicans passed a $95 billion funding package, much of which would go towards funding the Iran war. The measure was passed 216-214, without the help of House Democrats or a few GOP holdouts who were not fans of the legislation’s plan to increase military spending without making budget cuts elsewhere.

• Of that $95 billion, $60 billion is earmarked for the Pentagon, $13 billion will go to other national security programs, $12 billion will be spent to help farmers who are struggling thanks to Trump’s tariffs, and $10 billion will go towards voting law changes in line with Trump’s SAVE America Act. Trump has failed to effectively utilize the GOP’s control over the entirety of the U.S. government, and has instead resorted to tacking its provisions onto other measures in the hopes that some lawmakers will turn a blind eye.

Additional USA News

• The Worst Part of the Cyclosporiasis Response (Atlantic, $)

• Landlords sue to reverse rent freeze on 1 million apartments (Politico)

• Police officer fatally shoots man in Madison, Wisconsin, sparking protests (Guardian)

• Trump returns to Georgia with election claims, worrying some Republicans (Reuters)

• National Guard deploys as flash floods in West Virginia inundate homes and businesses (AP)

• How the Government’s Obligation to Keep Foreign Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Farms Afloat (ProPublica) 

A Concerning Catfish Cancer

• This story is freaky, and not in a fun way. In a paper published yesterday in the journal Nature, a group of fish biologists highlighted the existence of a new type of skin cancer. Unlike other cancers, which develop in individuals when cells with damaged DNA start multiplying uncontrollably, this strain of cancer is actually something that can be transmitted from organism to organism. Luckily, it’s only been detected in catfish living in a lake straddling the border between Vermont and Quebec… so far.

• Normally, cancerous tumors develop when a host’s cells go haywire on their own, meaning the genes of tumor cells are similar to their host’s. But the catfish tumors don’t resemble their host cells; instead, samples collected from tumors affecting multiple individuals seemed to have similar genes. 

• Based on that evidence, researchers think that the cancer is somehow spread from individual to individual during spawning. When the fish are undergoing their annual mating ritual, “they aggregate into these big clusters, flop around on top of each other, and they have these spines behind their pectoral fins that are pretty sharp,” said one of the study’s co-authors. “And we think that they actually accidentally scratch each other, and that is one potential avenue for the cancer cells to invade a new host.” They’re not sure where the cancer cells are living, exactly, but one theory is that “those cells can somehow escape the host, maybe live in the environment — the aquatic environment — and then infect a new host.”

Additional Reads

• How to become the person you want to be (Psyche)

• An HIV vaccine is within reach thanks to mRNA (Vox)

• The Rise of the Everything-But-News Newsstand (Curbed)

• More young women in their 20s are getting type 2 diabetes (BBC)

• It’s no longer illegal to destroy the one thing endangered species need most to survive (Vox)

• A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out (Wired, $)

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The last thing this world needs is a transmissible skin cancer…

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