The Illusion Of Hard Power: Reflection On How Democratized Technology And Strategic Geography Broke The Superpower Monopoly On War

October 5, 2026

By Dawit W. Giorgis

Key Takeaways:

A former infantry officer argues that Vietnam, Iraq, and African interventions show firepower does not buy compliance when a population treats the fight as existential, and that external backing or neglect left long instability from Congo and Somalia to Libya and the Sahel.

The 2026 Iran war and Ukraine are presented as a cost inversion: cheap mass drones and missiles force million-dollar interceptors, and Hormuz pressure moved the contest into shipping, insurance, and energy; Ukraine’s sea drones against the Black Sea Fleet are cited as the same pattern.

The conclusion is that total destruction is politically and strategically unavailable, so China’s caution on Taiwan and future stability depend on defensive sustainability and compromise rather than regime change—an argument, not a demonstrated law.

Written from the unique perspective of a former infantry officer of the late sixties, this paper examines the paradigm shift in 21st-century geopolitics, in which conventional military dominance no longer guarantees political control. Tracing an evolutionary line from the ideological endurance of Vietnam to the urban insurgencies of Iraq, the paper argues that contemporary conflicts involving Iran and Ukraine mark a watershed in modern warfare. By pairing fierce nationalist resolve with cheap, mass-produced asymmetric technology, weaker states have triggered a severe industrial-economic inversion, bankrupting expensive Western defensive systems through supply-chain attrition. Crucially, the paper highlights how Iran successfully weaponized its strategic geography—specifically the Strait of Hormuz—shifting the center of military gravity into global shipping, insurance, and energy networks and holding global markets hostage. Confronted with the reality that victory against an existential defense would require total destruction, superpowers such as the United States, Russia, and an island-facing China are hitting a structural wall. The paper concludes that absolute military coercion is obsolete; future global stability depends on balancing defensive sustainability with soft power, diplomatic tolerance, and mutual compromise.

The Illusion of Hard Power

In 1967, I was a young officer training at the Advanced Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, alongside American officers. The ghost of the Vietnam War hung heavy over every field exercise, tactical briefing, and grueling march we endured. We were trained by men who had just returned from those jungles, and the lesson they drilled into us had nothing to do with a lack of American firepower. Instead, they forced us to confront the limits of willpower. We learned the hard way that you cannot militarily break an indigenous population when they are fighting for their own dirt. Fifty years have passed since my time in uniform, and as I get older, I watch the news and realize that our strategic leaders are still trapped in the same fallacy. We continue to assume that an overwhelming accumulation of military might can force a weaker nation to surrender its independence and existence. History has shattered that illusion across my lifetime, from Southeast Asia to the deserts of Iraq, and now to the tech-driven battlefields of Ukraine, the proxy conflicts of Africa, and the waters of the Persian Gulf. The basic reality of modern conflict is that military dominance no longer equals political control. When a nation views a conflict as existential, hard power can only achieve two things: death and destruction. It cannot buy compliance. Today, because the means of resistance have been cheapened and widely democratized, the pursuit of absolute control is a path toward mutual ruin. True strength for the future lies not in our capacity to destroy, but in our willingness to tolerate, compromise, and engage the world through mutual respect.

To understand why US military dominance is broken, we must look closely at how resistance has changed since my time. In the 1960s and 70s, US conventional doctrine was pushed to its limits. The United States dropped millions of tons of ordnance on Vietnam yet failed to achieve its political objectives. The failure was not a lack of tactical skill on the ground; it was a fundamental strategic failure to recognize that a population defending its homeland measures victory purely by its willingness to keep dying. Against deeply rooted nationalism, conventional bombing campaigns could not break the enemy’s resolve. As my generation learned through immense trauma, a democracy simply cannot sustain a war of indefinite casualties for non-existential goals. Decades later, I watched the next generation of American soldiers march into Iraq. While the initial conventional phase of that war was won in a matter of weeks through “Shock and Awe,” the secondary phase of controlling and governing the country was completely lost. Our political leaders were blindsided by the raw willpower of a population that flatly rejected a foreign occupation. The battlefield quickly evolved into a decentralized, borderless insurgency fueled by improvised explosive devices and urban terror. Iraq demonstrated what any seasoned infantryman fears in his bones: demolishing a state’s conventional armor and infantry is the easy part. Holding and controlling a hostile nation is politically, morally, and economically unsustainable. The sheer friction of trying to enforce compliance against an unwilling population eventually drains a superpower’s resources and erodes its domestic political capital.


Yet this failure to understand the limits of hard power is not confined to the Middle East or Southeast Asia. When evaluated against my twenty-eight years as a UN peacemaking consultant across Africa’s most volatile war zones, the limits of conventional military coercion become even more starkly apparent. In all the wars I have witnessed on the African continent, there was always a degree of heavy-handed, unbalanced, or indifferent Western and global involvement that excluded local populations and created a legacy of perpetual instability. Cold War logic led to American support for the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For Washington, this was a low-cost transactional alignment; for the DRC, it left behind a legacy of systemic fracture and a perpetual war that refuses to heal. Similarly, American indifference during the Rwandan genocide left a scar on America’s declared role as an advocate for genocide and crimes against humanity, and its unwise, heavy-handed intervention followed by a disgraceful exit in Somalia fundamentally altered the regional landscape, leaving Somalia trapped in a cycle of warlordism from which it cannot recover. In Libya, a relatively low-cost NATO aerial intervention to overthrow Gaddafi resulted in a fractured state that became a breeding ground for human trafficking, weapon proliferation, and militia warfare that spilled across the Sahel. Historical alignments like the American-supported Charles Taylor created havoc and civil war across both Liberia and Sierra Leone, proving that short-sighted external backing yields catastrophic regional consequences on the back end.


Today, this cycle continues as global superpowers and regional actors treat the continent as a theater for cheap geopolitical disruption. In Central and West Africa, Russia uses its mercenary arm, formerly Wagner and now Africa Corps, as a low-cost tool to loot mineral resources and displace Western influence. Meanwhile, in the Horn of Africa, the absence of a clear, balanced US policy has allowed its allies, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to wage destructive proxy wars to secure their strategic and mineral interests. This echoes the historic “Françafrique” policies of control in West and Central Africa, where foreign dictation systematically excludes local people from the economic value chain. When war is supported, sponsored, or neglected by global powers, it becomes a negative-sum game where everyone loses. Because of these heavy-handed or neglectful policies, Africa’s true potential is suppressed, making it impossible to establish equitable, win-win trade or security architectures. Instead of being a robust global partner, these destabilized regions are forced into a state where they become involuntary exporters of instability through migration crises, piracy, and transnational terrorism. The West is then forced to spend trillions on reactive border security and counter-terrorism operations—a massive, unsustainable defense expenditure triggered by the long-tail consequences of original policy failures. Africa is left unable to heal itself, the West remains trapped in a cycle of reactive containment, and the global rules-based order faces an asymmetric threat to peace that cannot be solved by expensive weapons alone.


This structural failure of global foreign policy mirrors the tactical crisis we see on the modern battlefield, driven by the brutal mathematics of the Cost-Imbalance Doctrine. Modern warfare is no longer dictated by platform sophistication but by logistics, replacement speed, and lopsided economic exchange ratios. The collapse in the cost of commercial electronics, additive manufacturing, and open-source autonomous systems has shattered the traditional cost curve, tilting the strategic advantage sharply toward mass-produced, low-cost offense. The 2026 war involving Iran represents the ultimate, terrifying evolution of this trajectory, presenting a style of warfare that my peers in the seventies could scarcely have imagined. If Vietnam required dense jungles and Iraq required complex urban networks, modern asymmetric warfare requires only three things: basic, a determined population, universally manufacturable technology, and the strategic weaponization of geography. Iran effectively rewrote the global rules of engagement by manufacturing mass-produced, low-cost weapons—primarily twenty-thousand-dollar kamikaze drones and standard ballistic missiles. This has created a catastrophic economic and industrial imbalance for Western forces. Today, advanced militaries are forced to defend multi-billion-dollar assets like aircraft carriers by firing two-million-dollar air-defense interceptors at targets that cost less than a used car. When a five-hundred-dollar FPV drone or a thirty-thousand-dollar Shahed loitering munition forces a defender to fire a multi-million-dollar Patriot, THAAD, or SM-3 interceptor, the exchange ratio becomes unsustainable. This is no longer a war of tactical maneuver; it is a war of supply chain attrition, and the mathematics favor the cheap.


Furthermore, Iran’s true stroke of strategic genius was recognizing that its geographic position is a more powerful weapon than any nuclear arsenal. By sitting directly astride the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow maritime bottleneck through which twenty percent of the world’s petroleum flows—Iran shifted the center of military gravity entirely out of the mud and into global financial markets. By deploying its low-cost sea-denial arsenal to menace commercial shipping, it effectively nationalized a global commons. This strategy weaponized marine insurance networks, sent global energy prices soaring, and proved that controlling a geographic bottleneck allows a weaker state to hold the entire global economic system hostage. This is why Iran marks a watershed moment: it demonstrated that geography, activated by cheap tech, can completely bypass a superpower’s military superiority to strike directly at its domestic and economic vulnerabilities. We see proof that this shift is a universal law, not an American exception, in the stagnation of the Russian war machine in Ukraine. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, conventional military wisdom predicted a rapid collapse of the Ukrainian state within days. Instead, the world witnessed the brutal stagnation of a traditional military giant. Ukraine countered massive armored columns and superior air power by leveraging the same formula: boundless national will paired with asymmetric technology. Armed with relatively inexpensive, mass-produced anti-tank missiles, first-person-view kamikaze drones, and decentralized digital command networks, Ukraine transformed the battlefield into a meat grinder for conventional assets. Ukraine’s ability to completely neutralize Russia’s Black Sea Fleet—not with a rival navy, but with low-cost, domestically manufactured explosive sea drones—perfectly mirrors how the vulnerability of multi-billion-dollar warships has been exposed globally.


This new reality explains the profound caution we see in East Asia regarding the Taiwan Strait. Objectively, China possesses the overwhelming conventional means—the world’s largest navy, advanced missile arsenals, and proximity—to launch an invasion of Taiwan. Yet Beijing hesitates. This caution stems from a clear-eyed analysis of these new rules of engagement. The Chinese leadership understands that invading Taiwan would mean wading directly into an asymmetric trap. Taiwan has spent decades preparing a “porcupine strategy” centered on cost-imbalance warfare. Crossing a hundred miles of open sea leaves Chinese transport ships highly vulnerable to swarms of low-cost, domestically produced anti-ship missiles and autonomous sea drones. Even if Chinese forces landed successfully, controlling a highly urbanized island of twenty-three million people against a deeply nationalist insurgency would mirror our catastrophic occupation failures in Iraq, multiplied tenfold, while inflicting an estimated two-and-a-half-trillion-dollar hit on the global economy. China’s hesitation proves the thesis: they recognize that while they have the hard power to cause immense death and destruction, they cannot guarantee surrender or control.

When a superpower faces a determined populace armed with universally manufacturable denial weapons and backed by strategic geography, it hits a wall. Because economic sanctions and localized strikes fail to break a deeply nationalist population, a superpower is left with only one military option to force an unconditional win: total destruction. Forcing a sovereign nation to abandon its existential interest today would require sustained, uninhibited bombardment or the use of nuclear weapons. However, as any strategist knows, this is a dead end. If the resisting nation or its allies possess even primitive nuclear or chemical deterrents, any escalation toward total destruction guarantees mutually assured destruction(MAD). Furthermore, neither the domestic population of a democracy nor the international community will tolerate the absolute annihilation of a country. Because total destruction is morally, politically, and strategically impossible, unconditional surrender is a relic of the past. Hard power has reached its absolute limit. If the accumulation of military might can no longer buy security or compliance, the global architecture must undergo a pragmatic revolution. This is not an appeal to utopian idealism; it is hardheaded realism from someone who has spent a lifetime reflecting on the cost of war. When conflict becomes too expensive for the strong and resistance too cheap for the weak, coexistence is the only affordable strategy left on the table.

Conclusion

True national security must be built on a balanced matrix of defensive sustainability and soft power. Superpowers must pivot away from a doctrine of regime change, containment, and forced compliance and toward policies of tolerance, compromise, and mutual respect. If a powerful nation needs resources, stable trade routes, or geopolitical cooperation, it can no longer acquire them bythe barrel of a gun or the threat of a carrier strike group. It must acquire them through diplomatic reciprocity. By recognizing the sovereignty and existential interests of smaller nations, superpowers can foster partnerships built on mutual benefit rather than perpetual, exhausting hostility. The lessons of my lifetime are clear. The world will never know peace, and superpowers will never achieve stability, until they accept that hard power is a blunt instrument capable only of wreckage. True strength lies in the capacity to compromise, to tolerate difference, and to engage the world through the sustainable lens of mutual respect.

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Batmanghelidj, Esfandyar. “Drones Like Bicycles: The Real Economics of the Shahed Fleet.” Phenomenal World, March 11, 2026. Phenomenal World.

Boyle, Michael J., and Anthony H. Cordesman. Regime Change Revisited: The Intersecting Failures of Post-Conflict Governance and Hard Power. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2016.

Brown, Seyom. The Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003.

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CSIS Analysis

Cordesman, Anthony H. The Lessons of Ukraine and the Changing Nature of Asymmetric Attrition.Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2024.

Fard, Erfan. “Iran Didn’t Need to Win the War. It Needed to Outlast It: AI Targeting and Strategic Geography in the 2026 Conflict.” Small Wars Journal, July 8, 2026. Small Wars Journal.

Malahila, Letsema. “The Contradictory Logics of International Intervention in Africa: Structural Fragility from Mobutu to Françafrique.” GIGA Focus Africa, no. 4 (2022): 1–9. GIGA Hamburg.

O’Hanlon, Michael E. The Porcupine Strategy: Asymmetric Sea Denial and Taiwan’s Defense Dilemma.Brookings Institution Policy Brief, 2025.

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About Dawit W. Giorgis
Dawit W. Giorgis is originally from Ethiopia, US citizen, permanent resident of Namibia; served as P.S of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Governor of Eritrea (prior to independence) and Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner during one of the most publicised famine relief operations. He later served as UN consultant in 11 African conflict and post conflict countries; was a visiting fellow at Princeton University, University of Cape Town and Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Wash, D.C. at different times.
View all posts by Dawit W. Giorgis →

INTERVIEW

'Absolutely nothing' justifies arrest of Niger journalist, rights expert tells RFI

Journalist Moussa Kaka has been missing since 31 August, when he left the offices of radio and television station Saraounia in the capital, Niamey, to return home. His family has not seen him since and the Nigerien authorities have offered no explanation. Alioune Tine, a Senegalese human rights activist, believes they are implicated in his disappearance.


Issued on: 01/10/2026 - RFI

Nigerien journalist Moussa Kaka has been missing since 31 August.

 AFP - BOUREIMA HAMA

Kaka, a prominent figure in Nigerien journalism and a former RFI correspondent, has spent more than three decades reporting from the country.

He was previously imprisoned in Niamey from September 2007 to October 2008, accused of complicity in threatening state security or authority after interviewing leaders of the Tuareg-led Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ).

Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is calling for an investigation into his disappearance, saying it has strong reason to believe the country's military authorities are involved.

It has now referred the case to the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances, having previously referred it to the African Union's special rapporteur on freedom of expression and access to information.

Tine, founder of the Afrikajom think tank, which focuses on democracy and security in Africa, spoke to RFI about the case. He believes it is part of a wider deterioration of the civic space in Niger since the military, led by General Abdourahamane Tiani, took power in a coup in July 2023.

RFI: It’s now been a month since we last heard from Moussa Kaka. What does that make you think?

Alioune Tine: It is extremely worrying and difficult to understand, particularly in a country where the military is in power. We should be able to protect people's lives and fundamental freedoms. We are very concerned. We strongly want to see clear, concrete signs that Moussa Kaka is alive.

We knew him as a professional journalist who did fantastic work. I knew him personally. I intervened in 2007 and 2008, when he was in prison. I mediated between RFI and president Mamadou Tandja and he was released.

But we knew where to find Kaka. We could speak to the authorities about Moussa Kaka and his freedom. Once there was a connection and people were talking, Moussa was freed.

We're asking the current authorities, and particularly General Tiani, to give us the opportunity to speak with him, to express our concerns and desire to have news of Moussa Kaka, to see him free and continuing to do his work as usual.

RFI: So, for you, is this an enforced disappearance?

It is an enforced disappearance because responsibility lies first and foremost with the Nigerien general, whom we solemnly call on to tell us where Moussa Kaka is, whether he is still alive and, if he is alive, to release him. His family is extremely anxious.

Alioune Tine © RFI

RFI: Reporters Without Borders believes the Nigerien authorities are involved in his disappearance. The G25, which brings together several Nigerien civil society organisations, says that according to its investigation, Kaka is being held by an intelligence service called the DGDSE. Do you find this information credible?

Completely credible, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult in Niger to be an independent civil society activist who acts independently and says what they think.

There has been an enormous deterioration in civic space, with human rights violations. All of this means that the people and organisations who believe he is being held hostage by the Nigerien intelligence services have information that is credible today, and that must be taken seriously. We have to ask those responsible – that means the Nigerien authorities – to release Moussa Kaka.

There is absolutely nothing to justify the arrest and enforced disappearance of Moussa Kaka.

RFI: A year ago, several journalists in Niger were arrested. Most of them were subsequently released. Do you see the Nigerien authorities taking a harder line towards the press?

There is a hardening, because it is obvious that serious events have happened recently – the attempted coup [in July 2024]. And when journalists report truths that people do not like, the government takes measures and tries to govern through fear, to terrorise people so that they remain silent.

And that is what’s happening. People no longer dare to speak in Niger. It’s also happening in [other] African countries where we have military dictatorships.

The African and international communities can't continue to remain completely indifferent to these things – they're dark stains.

RFI: Do you think the African Union and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) in Banjul could do more?

The ACHPR, which is due to meet in October here in Dakar, is on the front line. The African Union too, ECOWAS and even the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). We have to call on all of them.

African citizens are being arrested. And I think no African, no African institution, should remain indifferent to these phenomena.

What we need today is a real mobilisation of African public opinion in defence of people's fundamental freedoms.

RFI: In the three countries of the central Sahel [Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger], the military regimes in power often accuse journalists of not being patriotic enough. Isn't Kaka proof that you can be both an independent journalist and a patriotic citizen who loves his country?

Of course. Most professional journalists are patriotic journalists. That's why they can't be manipulated.

I've been to Mali and worked with independent experts. Journalists are really responsible people, for the most part. They are patriots, for the most part.

So, honestly, I think there's no need to be afraid of the true words of people who present the facts. On the contrary, there needs to be dialogue with journalists to protect the nation and tackle the same challenges – insecurity and attacks by armed terrorist groups.

When it comes to insecurity, there needs to be unity among Nigeriens. Nobody likes to see their country attacked.

In that context, we need to put an end to this never-ending transition. That means the constitutional order must be restored. People must wake up.

RFI: When you were a UN human rights expert, from 2018 to 2024, you met with several West African heads of state. Do you think contact with the Nigerien authorities is possible today?

It's very difficult. I used to find it easy to meet the Nigerien authorities, during [former president Mamadou] Tandja's time. And after Tandja, with [former president Mahamadou] Issoufou and even [former president Mohamed] Bazoum. I see myself as one of the most Nigerien of Senegalese people because I have been with them. When I'm in Niger, I feel at home.

RFI: Do you feel a sense of helplessness in this regard now?

That's it, helplessness. Because there is too much resistance, we’re facing such a level of radicalism. It really strips us down.

But we’re not despairing. If we have the opportunity to go there, meet the authorities and advocate, we’ll do it. We mustn’t retreat in the face of the military’s resistance.

We see journalists disappearing, we see civil society organisations and leaders disappearing. But that isn’t a good image for our continent, for our region.

And it calls on all democrats, all African citizens, all African public opinion, to mobilise to put an end to it. If we mobilise, we can put an end to it.

This interview was adapted from the original version in French by Christophe Boisbouvier.

 

Atomic Eagle expects renewed financing interest in Niger after uranium deal

Reuters | September 25, 2026 | 

A drill rig at Atomic Eagle’s Madaouela project in Niger. Credit: Atomic Eagle

An agreement reached this week between the government of Niger and uranium developer Atomic Eagle (ASX: AEU) is expected to help improve access to financing for uranium projects in the West African nation, the company’s chief executive told Reuters.

Niger doubled its stake in the Madaouela uranium project to 40%, bringing an end to a dispute with Australia’s Atomic Eagle, the mining ministry said on Wednesday.

The country is one of Africa’s largest uranium producers, holding about 336,000 metric tons of identified uranium resources in 2023, according to the World Nuclear Association in August.

The Madaouela agreement came just days after the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) backed rival Global Atomic’s (TSX: GLO) Dasa uranium project, and at a time when spot uranium prices are almost a fifth higher than a year earlier, at around $89.68 per pound in August, according to industry data.

The recent support secured by Global Atomic is a “fantastic indication that international finance is willing to finance Niger uranium projects again”, Atomic Eagle CEO Phil Hoskins said on Thursday.

Niger tightens control over uranium sector

Military leaders who seized power in a 2023 coup have tightened state control over Niger’s uranium sector, revoking permits held by Orano and GoviEx, now Atomic Eagle, triggering arbitration proceedings and raising investor concerns over resource nationalism.

Atomic Eagle now plans to update feasibility studies, secure environmental approvals and arrange financing over the next two years, aiming to bring the Madaouela project back to construction-ready status, Hoskins said.

Under the agreement, Niger will hold a 15% stake at no cost and a further 25% stake that it must help fund to maintain. Atomic Eagle agreed to cover up to $40 million of Niger’s future funding commitments under the project, the CEO said.

“I don’t believe (the deal) has any negative implications on the ability to develop the mine or the economics,” Hoskins said, adding that the company would consider funding from a range of investors, including China, as it advances the project.

(Reporting by Maxwell Akalaare Adombila, Additionall reporting by Niamey newsroom; Editing by Robbie Corey-Boulet; Kirsten Donovan)

Niger increases stake in Madaouela uranium project to 40%, statement says

Reuters | September 24, 2026 | 

Credit: RHJ/AdobeStock

Niger increased its stake in the Madaouela uranium project to 40% from 20%, bringing an end to its dispute with Australian explorer Atomic Eagle (ASX: AEU), the West African country’s mining ministry said on Wednesday.

Niger is a major uranium producer. In 2016, it awarded a permit to exploit uranium at the Madaouela project located in the Agadez region to Atomic Eagle, formerly named GoviEx.

In 2024, Niger revoked the miner’s permit for the Madaouela uranium project and returned the asset to the state, prompting the company to file for international arbitration.

The parties agreed in February 2025 to suspend the proceedings while pursuing a negotiated settlement and, in September 2025, extended the pause by a further six months to allow talks to continue, Atomic Eagle said.

Atomic Eagle claws back Niger uranium project

According to the new agreement that was signed with the mines ministry, Atomic Eagle, which is responsible for operational oversight, will now hold 60% of the project, down from 80%.

Atomic Eagle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Niger has prioritized dialogue and negotiation to usher in a new phase based on partnership and development,” a statement from the mines ministry said, without detailing the terms.

Military-led governments across the Sahel region are trying to assert more control over their resources in a bid to generate more revenue.

(Reporting by Niger Newsroom; Writing by Anait Miridzhanian; Editing by Maxwell Adombila and Thomas Derpinghaus)

Nigeria faces world’s highest heat death toll as El Nino bears down on Sahel

Extreme heat generated by this year's El Nino is projected to cause up to 67,000 additional deaths across the Sahel over the next six months, with Nigeria facing the highest death toll of any country in the world.


Issued on: 24/09/2026 - RFI
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A boy carries drinking water for sale at a street market in Abuja, Nigeria. Scientists estimate Nigeria could face the world's highest heat-related death toll from the current El Nino. AP - Ben Curtis

The Climate Impact Lab, a research group based at the University of Chicago, predicts there will be 66,800 extra deaths across the Sahel, the dry belt along the southern edge of the Sahara, between September and February compared with a normal year.

Nigeria alone accounts for 31,400 of these, followed by Sudan with 17,500, Niger with 10,000 and Chad with 8,000.

Worldwide, around 239,000 more heat-related deaths are likely to be seen over the same six months. Counting from June, when the current El Nino began, the estimated global toll rises to 451,000 by the end of February.

“This is such a large number that it can be numbing, but it is made up of parents and children, grandparents and neighbours, people going to work, caring for families and living their lives,” said Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago economist and co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab.


Emergency measures

The El Nino phenomenon is marked by unusually warm waters in the tropical Pacific and can disrupt weather around the world. This year's could become the strongest on record.

The projections cover deaths caused by extreme heat alone, but they come in addition to the death toll from droughts, wildfires and flooding linked to higher temperatures and shifting rainfall, said the report, which was published on Wednesday.

Some of the heaviest losses will come later in the six-month period. Nigeria could record 15,400 additional heat deaths between December and February – leaving more time to act.

Heat warnings, cooling centres, hydration stations and protection for outdoor workers are among measures that could help reduce the toll, the researchers found.

“This report allows decision-makers to see exactly where emergency actions can be taken now to save tens of thousands of lives in the coming months,” Greenstone said.

Some of these measures are already under way to protect communities.

“Increasing emergency response and better targeting our efforts can save many lives this year,” said Tamma Carleton, the lab's faculty head of research and an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“But 20 years from now, once today's extreme temperatures become the new normal, we don't want to be in a constant state of emergency.”

The projections will be updated as El Nino develops, the lab added.

A call to action

The analysis has not yet been independently peer reviewed, although the methods behind it have.

Scientists calculated the projections using research into the relationship between temperature and deaths in more than 24,000 regions worldwide, combined with seasonal temperature forecasts.

The findings should be treated as a call to action rather than simply another warning about extreme heat, Abhiyant Tiwari, a heat expert at the Natural Resources Defence Council India who was not involved in the research, told the Associated Press.

“The real measure of our preparedness is not how many heat warnings we issue, but how effectively we protect people and reduce preventable deaths,” he said.

El Nino is forecast to last until the northern hemisphere spring of 2027, while heat-related deaths could remain high into June or July, researchers said.

OpenAI makes U-turn and calls for binding national AI safety rules

Copyright AP Photo/Matt Rourke

By Roselyne Min with AFP

Published on 11/09/2026 - EURONEWS

The intervention comes a week after OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, “its most capable model to date,” after delaying its rollout over cybersecurity concerns.

OpenAI is calling for binding safety requirements on the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the United States, marking a pivot for a company that has previously resisted tighter regulation.

OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a statement on Wednesday that mandatory national rules should be based on what advanced AI models are capable of doing.

“We’ve reached a new chapter in AI capabilities, and that demands a new chapter for AI policy. No company, industry, or government can meet this challenge alone. We need to meet this moment with a bias toward meaningful action over policy perfection,” Lehane said in a statement published on OpenAI's website.

The company said it wants a federal framework built around common testing standards, independent assessments of the most advanced AI models, tougher cybersecurity requirements and mandatory reporting of serious safety incidents.

The intervention comes a week after OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which it described as its most capable model to date.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the release marked the beginning of the era of artificial general intelligence (AGI), referring to the long-sought goal of developing AI that can match human abilities across a wide range of tasks.

Growing concerns over powerful AI

Major AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have already encountered safety concerns with increasingly capable models.

OpenAI delayed parts of Astra’s rollout while adding safeguards after testing found advanced cybersecurity capabilities, weeks after a system built from its own models slipped free during an internal security test and broke into the AI platform Hugging Face.

Relate

Anthropic has reported similar cases involving its Claude models during safety testing.

Concerns grew further after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said this week he was leaving the industry, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop increasingly powerful AI.

“The prospect of AI-accelerated AI development demands more than voluntary commitments,” Lehane wrote.

A shift in OpenAI’s approach

The ChatGPT maker urged US lawmakers to act before Congress adjourns in December.

The push comes as lawmakers consider new AI rules, although passing major technology regulation remains difficult in a politically divided Congress and amid heavy industry lobbying.

OpenAI acknowledged that some of the measures it now supports are ones it previously declined to endorse.

The company had also opposed individual US states setting their own AI rules, arguing instead for federal legislation. It has now backed four AI bills in California while continuing to call for a national framework.

OpenAI said any federal safety requirements should apply only to the small number of companies developing the most powerful models, rather than “startups, small developers, or researchers operating nowhere near the frontier.”

Anthropic says it stopped AI misuse for cyberattacks, propaganda and bioweapons

Copyright AP Photo

By Una Hajdari

Published on 11/09/2026 - EURONEWS

The AI company revealed new cases of its models being used for cyberattacks, propaganda campaigns and dangerous biological research, days after a researcher resigned over safety concerns.

Anthropic said on Thursday it had blocked attempts by malicious actors to misuse its artificial intelligence models for cyberattacks, surveillance and biological research that could have contributed to weapons development.

As AI models grow more powerful, sophisticated cyberattacks increasingly require little technical skill, meaning even lone individuals can now create threats that would have been impossible just a year ago, the company said.

Anthropic added that it has strengthened safeguards in its newest models to restrict biological research with potential weapons applications.

"The cases we share here aren't typical misuse, but rather examples of the most notable and novel threat activity we've identified to date," Anthropic said in its third report on AI misuse since March 2025.

The report includes excerpts of malicious code and AI prompts the company said it had identified, and it urged governments and rival AI firms to watch for similar abuse.

"We're publishing this work because we believe we have a responsibility to disclose malicious misuse of our services," the company said.

"As models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase, unless AI developers and society's defenders act to make them safer."

Anthropic, which is preparing an initial public offering this autumn, published the report two days after one of its researchers announced his resignation over concerns that the company and its competitors are not developing AI responsibly.

He echoed warnings raised elsewhere in the industry about the technology's potential to escape human control.

Relat

Claude asked to help make a virus more dangerous

Between December 2025 and August 2026, Anthropic's researchers identified misuse by actors ranging from spyware vendors and politically motivated individuals to state-sponsored groups spreading propaganda.

Among the cases outlined in the report, unnamed actors attempted to use Anthropic's models for research that could have led to biological weapons.

In one instance, the company said its systems blocked a request for its Claude chatbot to help draft a grant application for scientific funding.

"The work discussed in the application involved gain-of-function research — that is, research that genetically alters an organism to create a new or enhanced biological property — on the chikungunya virus," the report said.

The research targeted the virus's transmissibility and its ability to evade the immune system.

Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne virus that causes severe pain and fever. The grant proposal sought to enhance mutations that would make the virus progressively more dangerous.

Anthropic said such research could "certainly" support the development of vaccines and treatments, but added that "it could also be used to make the pathogen more dangerous".

'We cannot guarantee no harm'

None of the cases in the report involved Anthropic's newer, more powerful Claude Fable or Mythos-class models, with one exception: an "industrial-scale, covert campaign to extract a model's capabilities and replicate them in another model without authorisation".

Anthropic said its older models, including Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 from 2025, "were well below the threshold where they could meaningfully assist a sophisticated user in carrying out dangerous biological research".

"As a result, safeguards on these models were less stringent, directed mostly at preventing access to content that might uplift novices in recreating known bioweapons," the report said.

"But for today's models — which are capable of assisting in a range of complex scientific research tasks — the evidence is no longer certain, and we cannot make that same assurance."

Because of this, Anthropic has introduced tighter safeguards restricting access to a wide range of dual-use biological research queries in its more recent models, such as Claude Fable 5, according to the report.

As AI companies release increasingly powerful models, experts have called on governments to regulate the technology rather than relying on the industry to police itself.

John Thickstun, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, said it puts companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI in an uncomfortable position, since they are effectively required to make "value judgements at societal scale without any kind of democratic or deliberative oversight".

Report follows a researcher's warning

Anthropic also identified groups that had created hundreds of fake social media accounts designed to look like ordinary users, which then posted material amplifying the same political message over the course of a week.

The company outlined nine such cases, originating in Russia, Iran, Turkey and across the Gulf, South Asia, Africa and Europe.

While social media platforms can detect influence operations once posts are already circulating, Anthropic said it "may see it on Claude while the operation is still being built".

The report follows the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said he was leaving over fears that the company and its main rival, OpenAI, "are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives".

Coxon warned that some of his former colleagues believe AI could threaten human life before the end of the decade.

Anthropic said it had blocked each of the malicious activities identified in the report, used the findings to strengthen its safeguards, and shared information with government authorities and industry partners.

"We hope that the findings in this report will help other developers recognise similar patterns on their own platforms, give governments and civil society a clearer view of how emerging threats take shape, and strengthen collective defences," the company said.

Anthropic Report Says Company Blocked

Possible Use of AI Model to Build Biological

Weapons

“Right now, we’re counting on AI corporations to voluntarily block weapons of mass destruction,” said Rep. Greg Casar, who is pushing for a ban on “superintelligent” AI.


The Claude app icon is displayed on a smartphone screen with a finger about to tap it, in Creteil, France, on June 10, 2026.
(Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Sep 10, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


As industry insiders issue louder warnings about the catastrophic danger of unchecked artificial intelligence, Anthropic has revealed in a report out Thursday that it had to “disrupt” several attempts by scientists to use its AI models for research that could contribute to the creation of biological weapons.

In the report, titled “Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI,” Anthropic said that over the past eight months, it banned several accounts that had used its chatbot Claude for research into highly contagious diseases.

As NBC News reported:
In each of the five cases Anthropic cited, the company suspected that the researchers behind them were affiliated in some way with a government or military in a country it had banned or took deliberate steps to hide their location and identity, or both. The company declined to say where any of the researchers were based, but its terms of service allow all use from all but a few regions, including China, Iran, and Russia.

In one example, Anthropic said researchers used a third-party platform that attempted to use Claude to complete a grant application for work that would look into how to repeatedly mutate chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus that causes severe pain and fever in humans. Anthropic said it blocked all attempts by the researchers. The research, which would be conducted at a military institute, would seek to repeatedly mutate the virus in live animals to become increasingly more infectious, Anthropic said.

Another had used Anthropic’s Claude to assist in research into how to make bird flu, which historically has a global fatality rate of around 50% in confirmed human cases, more virulent and damaging to mammals. Anthropic said the researcher only received assistance from Claude’s weakest class of models, which provided clerical help.

Anthropic clarified that it did not find any concrete instance of a scientist attempting to use its technology for nefarious purposes, and that these use cases may well have been part of beneficial scientific inquiry, like research into vaccines or other cures for disease. Nevertheless, it said it erred on the side of caution and shut down the accounts.

“Biological misuse is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models,” the report explains. “It has long been a concern that AI models might one day reach the level of capability where they can help to make existing pathogens more dangerous—or create entirely new ones. Without the correct safeguards, such capabilities could have catastrophic consequences.”

The report acknowledges that even as safeguards are implemented, those with the intent to do harm are getting more savvy about how to evade them and using the appearance of legitimate science to do it.

“Sophisticated threat actors are aware that we (and other AI providers) are attempting to detect dangerous uses of our models, and they use the dual-use nature of biology to maintain a kind of ‘plausible deniability’ about their research,” the report says. “More sophisticated actors can hide their intent, extracting assistance from an AI model in interactions that look plausibly beneficial, but when put in context and analyzed holistically, can provide clear warning signs of misuse.”

The report details other ways in which actors have used its technology for malicious purposes. It found that governments like China, Iran, and Mali had used Claude to collect information about journalists and dissidents. Others used it to conduct hacking campaigns, automate identity theft operations, and create malware.

Anthropic said it hoped that by publishing the report, it would “help other developers recognize similar patterns on their own platforms, give governments and civil society a clearer view of how emerging threats take shape, and strengthen collective defenses.”

The report comes amid a torrent of scrutiny directed at Anthropic and its competitor OpenAI following reports in recent months of severe security breaches involving their technology, which has been documented acting autonomously to hack into other websites and evade human detection.

Earlier this week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, resigned from his post and sounded the alarm about fears within the industry that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade” and that the companies are prioritizing the race toward superintelligence without regard for the potential risks.

In the wake of Coxon’s resignation, several other researchers from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have shared similar warnings that the technology could result in an extinction-level disaster or otherwise cause severe harm to human society.



A poll published on Wednesday by Data for Progress showed that 68% of likely voters in the US support a proposal announced last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) for legislation that would permanently ban the development of “superintelligent” AI that can surpass human cognition and would put a pause on “advanced” AI development until a federal body is put in place to regulate the industry.

Casar said the fact that Anthropic was being relied upon to stop its own users from using its tech to potentially create bioweapons illustrated the urgent need for regulation.

“Right now, we’re counting on AI corporations to voluntarily block weapons of mass destruction. Voluntarily,” Casar emphasized in a post to social media on Thursday. “Congress must do the obvious thing: BAN catastrophic AI uses like creating biological or nuclear weapons.”

Warning AI ‘Could Mean the Demise of Humanity,’ El-Sayed Backs Development Pause

“Enough is enough. We need to make sure that the pace of development isn’t outpacing the pace of risk.”


Democratic US Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed speaks at a campaign event in Detroit, Michigan on August 23, 2026.
(Photo by Abdul El-Sayed/X)

Brett Wilkins
Sep 10, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan on Wednesday called for a pause in advanced artificial intelligence development, warning that the technology is progressing faster than governments and researchers can establish meaningful safeguards against potentially catastrophic consequences.

“You might have woken up like me to this tweet from a guy you probably never heard of until today. His name is Jacob Coxon,” El-Sayed said in a video posted to social media. “Up until yesterday, he worked for an AI lab called Anthropic, one of the leading-edge AI research organizations in the world. He quit yesterday. He quit because he’s worried that the technology that he was building could end humanity.”

“That’s something we should be paying attention to,” the 41-year-old epidemiologist stressed.




Coxon said on social media that neither OpenAI—whose rogue machine agents recently hacked outside systems on multiple reported occasions—nor Anthropic “is acting responsibly” as they race against competitors at home and abroad to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human.

“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he emphasized. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”

El-Sayed said that the AI Under Democracy plan his campaign released in July—which called for a new federal regulatory agency akin to the Food and Drug Administration to oversee development of artificial intelligence technology—doesn’t go far enough. Instead, he is now backing a pause in AI development, as urged by US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last month.

Earlier this month, Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, with the Vermont senator arguing that “the future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs.”

Many of those oligarchs and other AI pioneers also believe their products could one day wipe out humanity, but are rushing to build them anyway so that their competitors don’t reap the rewards of being the first to achieve AGI.

Sanders is also reportedly preparing to convene a bipartisan Senate hearing next week on the dangers of AI, with special guests set to include Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google in 2023 so he could sound the alarm on what he estimates is a 10–20% chance that AI could cause human extinction within three decades.

“Enough is enough,” El-Sayed said Wednesday. “We need to make sure that the pace of development isn’t outpacing the pace of risk. We cannot, in a race against China or a race for these corporations to be the dominant AI manufacturer, inadvertently create products that slip human control, that could fall into the wrong hands, that could mean the demise of humanity.”

“That is a risk none of us ought to be able to bear, and it certainly shouldn’t sit with the richest, most powerful corporations in the world on incentives that are driven by their greed rather than our well-being,” he added. “So the time for action is now.”

68% of US Voters Back Sanders/Casar Bill

for AI Pause, Ban on Superintelligence: Poll

The new survey results come as whistleblowers from leading AI firms speak out about the potential catastrophic dangers if their technology is allowed to develop unchecked.

A protester holds an anti-AI placard outside OpenAI offices in King’s Cross during a march against unregulated Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data centers.
(Photo by Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Sep 10, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As whistleblowers in the artificial intelligence industry speak out about the extraordinary risk posed by their technology if it remains unchecked, a new poll out Wednesday reveals that more than two-thirds of US voters agree with a new proposal in Congress to pause artificial intelligence development until guardrails are set up and ban AI superintelligence completely.

The proposed legislation, announced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) last week, and soon to be introduced in Congress, would ban developers from creating “superintelligent” AI programs capable of surpassing human cognition and resisting human attempts to shut them down. It would also halt “advanced” AI development until a new federal regulatory body was established to set clear rules and processes for AI safety.

The polling firm Data for Progress asked more than 1,300 likely voters about the bill. According to survey results released on Wednesday, 68% of them said they would support the proposal to temporarily pause advanced AI development and permanently prohibit the development of superintelligent programs, while just 25% said they’d oppose it.

Though the bill was proposed by a pair of progressive lawmakers, its appeal spans the political spectrum: 72% of Democrats and 70% of independent and third-party voters said they supported it. But so did 63% of Republican voters.



The poll results come just one day after AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, saying that the company and one of its top competitors, OpenAI, where he previously worked, were more concerned with winning the AI race than with protecting the public against out-of-control “superhuman systems” that many of his industry colleagues privately fear could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon said. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

With reports piling up of AI agents escaping human control, hacking into external computer systems, and deceiving users, several other researchers at leading AI firms have cosigned Coxon’s warning, saying that AI could have catastrophic results if it surpasses human capabilities.

Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, said that while “the risk from present models is low,” he and other researchers “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans” if it continues to develop and put the likelihood of it happening within the next decade at above 10%.

Alex Turner, who left his job as a research scientist at Google’s DeepMind in June, concurred that Coxon was “right” and that “many researchers believe they are building something that could kill everyone on the planet. It was literally my day job to think about how to stop that.”



Even if AI doesn’t lead to the extinction of humanity, other researchers have said they are gravely worried about its impacts on society.

“I think there are a number of ways AI could go poorly for humanity, and at the current, frankly terrifying pace, humanity will be quite lucky if we manage to find and stay on the narrow path between all the bad outcomes,” wrote Jason Wolfe, a researcher at OpenAI. “Regardless of what you think of OpenAI, this is not a problem that can be solved by any one company (or country) in isolation.”

Jonathan Richard Schwarz, former Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, noted that he left the company after seven years and rejected offers from other AI companies “due to severe concerns about the concentration of power these labs represent.”

“What is currently happening in this field is deeply unhealthy for society,” Schwarz said.

In a Wednesday social media post, Sanders pointed to these and other warnings from industry experts as evidence that federal intervention is urgently needed.

“The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity,” the senator wrote.

He added on Thursday that “Unless we reverse course, there is a very real possibility that once advanced AI surpasses human intelligence, it could escape our control with catastrophic consequences.”



Wednesday’s poll results are consistent with other recent surveys showing that solid majorities of voters across all parties object to the construction of AI data centers near them, an issue that has come to dominate the 2026 election season.

William Lawrence, a cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, became the Democratic nominee for the US House in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District last month, in part by tapping into constituents’ fears about data centers. He said recent whistleblower warnings were evidence that AI companies were “gambling with our lives” and needed to be reined in.

“I can’t see the future,” Lawrence said in a video posted online Thursday. “But if there is even a 5% chance of a bioweapon being set loose, authoritarians using AI to entrench their own power, or a rogue AI hacker taking down the economy, that risk is too great.”

“We need a pause on the development of AI models and data center construction,” he said. “I do believe that AI is very powerful and could potentially be of tremendous benefit to humanity. But if we stay trapped in this arms race, if OpenAI and Anthropic have to keep competing for market share, we know that they will not slow down.”

“The only entity that has the power to intervene here,” Lawrence said, “is the federal government.”

‘This Is an Emergency’: Congressional Inaction in Spotlight After Existential Warnings From AI Insiders

“The very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity,” said US Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the few lawmakers sounding the alarm.


A man is using his mobile phone to view GPT-6 Astra logo and using his computer to view OpenAI logo in Suqian, Jiangsu, China on September 4, 2026.
(Photo by CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Sep 09, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Critics slammed US lawmakers on Wednesday for being completely out to lunch on artificial intelligence regulation even after multiple industry insiders warned that the technology could wipe out humanity within years.

The controversy began on Tuesday after AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he had resigned from his position at AI lab Anthropic because he no longer felt it was possible to safely develop the technology.

Coxon further said that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” while accusing them of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon’s warning was seconded by Anthropic colleague Evan Hubinger, who wrote that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” and personally put the chances of it happening at greater than 10% “within the next decade.”

Samuel Marks, another Anthropic employee, said that AI developers “believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes),” but are continuing to work on it due to “a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of the few members of Congress to consistently sound the alarm about the impact of AI on society, seized on Coxon’s statement, noting that “the very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity.”

“That is why I will soon be introducing legislation to ban superintelligence,” Sanders added, “and pause AI development.”

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who last week teamed up with Sanders to introduce legislation to ban AI models capable of surpassing human cognition, said the AI researchers’ warnings should be a major wakeup call for US lawmakers.

“This is an emergency,” wrote Casar. “Congress must convene hearings and pass my and Bernie’s superintelligence ban.”

JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, pointed out that lawmakers have now received warnings from multiple AI insiders about the danger of the technology, but have still failed to act.

“Right now, the only protections the US has in place are completely voluntary,” Branch said. “There is no comprehensive federal AI regulation, no safety standards imposed on AI companies, and no agency capable of investigating serious AI incidents... The people building the most powerful AI systems in the world are warning us about what could go wrong. Why isn’t Congress listening?”

Journalist David Sirota expressed disgust at US Congress for its inaction, describing the current crop of elected officials as “Instagram influencers” who will “likely will do nothing about” the threat of AI.

Journalist Jim VandeHei similarly argued that “at the very least, Congress should clear everything else to understand what they’re seeing” coming from the AI industry, before pessimistically adding, “but they won’t.”

Eric Michael Garcia, Washington bureau chief at The Independent, blasted Congress for completely shrugging off its duties and letting the AI industry continue without any regulations or guardrails.

“I am aghast there have been almost zero hearings in Congress about how AI threatens national security, privacy, employment,” Garcia wrote. “Republicans even tried to preempt states from regulating AI last year.”

Paul Williams, executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, observed that Congress seems to be more focused on regulating transgender athletes than a potential AI extinction threat.

“The Senate committee responsible for commerce and technology policy has zero hearings on AI scheduled for the next four months,” Williams wrote. “The committee’s top priority is, instead, the Protect College Sports Act.”

Anthropic says AI could bring both 15% growth and mass unemployment by 2030

Copyright AP Photo/Cliff Owen

By Quirino Mealha

Published on 11/09/2026 - EURONEWS

Anthropic has published an economic model projecting how AI might reshape the US economy by 2030, and its three scenarios range from barely perceptible to a boom with no historical precedent, including one in which GDP grows 15% a year while nearly a fifth of office workers are out of a job.

The company behind Claude has put numbers on its own disruption.

Anthropic's economics team released a technical paper and an interactive tool on Wednesday, modelling the economy as bundles of tasks that AI can leave alone, assist with, automate outright or create anew, then tracing what different rates of capability and adoption would mean for growth, wages and jobs in the US.

The authors are explicit that these are not forecasts as the paper reads "the scenarios are not predictions and we attach no probabilities to them."

In the modest scenario, AI turns out to be a minor technology.

GDP in 2030 sits 1.6% above where it would be without AI, growth reaches 2.4% a year, and cognitive employment, meaning management, professional, sales and office work, falls half a percent. Unemployment barely moves.

The substantial scenario doubles the economy's normal growth rate to 5.4% as AI becomes capable of half of all knowledge work, though most tasks are still done without its assistance.

GDP lands 8.3% higher, cognitive employment falls 3.9% and unemployment among office workers rises to 4.5%. Wages diverge as cognitive pay dips slightly while everyone else gains nearly 6%.

The extreme scenario has no precedent.

Annual growth hits 15.4%, GDP finishes 32.4% above the no-AI path and the economy would double roughly every four and a half years.

However, cognitive employment collapses by 21.5%, unemployment among those workers reaches 17.9% and joblessness across the whole workforce hits 11.9%, worse than a typical recession. Office wages fall 11.5% while other wages jump 33.6%.

The starkest number is who collects the proceeds.

Labour's share of national income drops from 60% to 45.2%, with capital income rising more than 80%.

The machines would make the economy vastly richer while shifting the gains decisively from workers to asset owners.

What the public thinks and what the boss said

Anthropic paired the model with a Morning Consult survey of US adults fielded in August.

According to the paper, the median respondent's expectations map onto the substantial scenario, implying GDP roughly 8% higher by 2030 and cognitive employment down about 4%.

That leaves the company's own CEO as an outlier given that Dario Amodei warned in May 2025 that up to half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within five years, with unemployment reaching 10% to 20%, figures that sit squarely in the extreme scenario rather than the middle one.

Relate

Adoption, not capability, may prove decisive.

"If AI can do amazing things but nobody uses it, then it's not going to have an economic impact," said Anton Korinek, who leads Anthropic's transformative AI economic studies.

Co-founder Jack Clark expects rapid technical progress but slower uptake, telling NPR that "diffusion of the technology will likely be more challenging than people think."

The scenario that is not there

What the economic model does not include has drawn attention of its own.

Every path assumes an economy that still functions, with no scenario for AI going badly wrong in the ways the industry itself keeps warning about.

That gap looked pointed this week as Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned on Tuesday and published a thread explaining why.

"Neither company is acting responsibly," Coxon wrote, adding that "they are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence."

He also claimed colleagues privately believe the technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade" while executives soften their language publicly, and described the industry's approach as "a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack."

Anthropic has itself disclosed that Claude models gained unauthorised access to the real systems of three organisations this year. Whether that belongs in an economic model is a fair question.

When asked, Claude's own answer is that it does not.

China, Iran among countries using AI to spy on dissidents and minorities, Anthropic says

Anthropic said Thursday it had disrupted several state-sponsored surveillance operations using its artificial intelligence models, warning of the growing AI use to target dissidents and minorities. The campaigns, detected between January and July, originated in China, Iran and West Africa and targeted diaspora communities, including Hong Kong pro-democracy activists.


Issued on: 11/09/2026 
By: FRANCE 24

Anthropic says it has shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models © SEBASTIEN BOZON, AFP

Anthropic said Thursday it shut down multiple cases of state-sponsored surveillance operations that used its artificial intelligence (AI) models, and warned that governments and state-aligned actors are increasingly using AI to spy on ethnic minorities and dissidents.

The incidents were found and disrupted between January and July, and they originated in China, Iran and west Africa, Anthropic said in a report about misuse of its models.

These surveillance campaigns "targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted. These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad," the report said.

In one case, Iranian actors developed a way to identify people through their social media accounts; in another, a contractor working for Malian national security authorities used Claude "to design the underlying software that enabled the intelligence gathering."


"AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce," the report said.

Anthropic also disrupted efforts by users to design weapons, conduct questionable biological research, and create dating scams.

The San Francisco-based AI lab also accused Chinese developers of deceptively using Claude to produce responses to user queries while simultaneously "distilling" that data to improve their own models.

Distilling is an industry term that refers to a process where one AI model is used to train another one.

Chinese developers have previously been accused of using that technique without permission, essentially stealing resources from American labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Now Anthropic alleges that China's Moonshot and Deepseek have also secretly used Claude to generate answers given to its users.

"In one instance, over a ten-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic" through a "network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan," the report said.

Some of that data contained sensitive user information, potentially in violation of privacy agreements.

"We do not know if Moonshot notified their customers that their requests were being rerouted to Anthropic and exposed to a third party," the report said.

Deepseek used similar techniques.

When it comes to the research Anthropic detected and blocked that was related to biological weapons, the intent of the actors was less clear-cut and the AI lab did not identify them.

"The individuals implicated in these case studies are working scientists. We do not assert that they intended harm, and identifying them or their labs could expose them to harm," the report said.

The scientific research in those cases involved work around the mosquito-born chikungunya virus, a "highly-pathogenic" strain of the bird flu, a family of viruses that include smallpox and mpox, venoms and other toxins.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

AI deepfakes and fake fighters reshape Mali's information war

Mali's warring sides are increasingly using artificial intelligence to fight an information war alongside their battle on the ground, a study published Wednesday has found. Jihadists are experimenting with relatively basic AI propaganda, separatist networks are creating fake online characters and Russia's Africa Corps is using the technology on a far more sophisticated scale.


Issued on: 10/09/2026 - RFI

Tuareg rebels from the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) coalition ride in the back of a pick-up truck in Kidal, Mali, on 26 April 2026. © AFP

The study, Algorithms at War, by the Dakar-based Timbuktu Institute examines how generative AI is being used across Mali's conflict – including by JNIM jihadists linked to al-Qaeda, their allies in the FLA, the Front de libération de l'Azawad, a Tuareg independence movement, Mali's transitional authorities and Russia's Africa Corps.

“Generative artificial intelligence is becoming a new front in this information war in Mali,” Bakary Sambe, director of the Timbuktu Institute and a researcher and lecturer at Senegal's Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis, told RFI.

“Everyone is adopting the tool in their own way, depending on their resources, their level of technical sophistication and their objectives. With artificial intelligence on the Malian front, we are moving from fairly rudimentary use by jihadist groups, for example, to a genuine professional machine on the Russian side.”

Personalised recruitment

JNIM sits at the rudimentary end of that spectrum.

The Timbuktu Institute identified AI-generated propaganda posters distributed through its media channels, including one promoting real videos filmed during attacks on 25 April that killed Mali's defence minister Sadio Camara and drove Malian forces and their Russian Africa Corps partners out of the town of Kidal in northern Mali.

AI does not create new divisions in Mali but amplifies those that already exist, Sambe said.

JNIM remains in a phase of limited experimentation, although researchers believe AI could help the group translate propaganda and greatly increase the amount of material it produces.

“The real danger is large-scale personalisation of the profiles targeted for jihadist recruitment,” Sambe added.

Automatic translation could allow a group such as JNIM to produce recruitment messages in around 15 Sahel languages, including Fulani, Bambara, Wolof and Tamasheq, with different messages aimed at different audiences.

“A message about pastoral pride for young Fulani people, a message about social dignity for marginalised urban youth”, Sambe said.

“And with voice dubbing, you can even reach people who cannot read or write, who until now were beyond the reach of written propaganda.”

Fake fighters

FLA independence supporters are using AI differently. Unofficial social media accounts run by members or supporters have created entirely artificial characters to spread their messages.

One example identified by researchers is “Azzghim”, a supposed Tuareg fighter whose fierce criticism of Russia's Africa Corps has been widely shared online. He is in fact an extremely realistic AI creation, although imperfections in the image reveal that he is artificial.

Such characters can “humanise” a movement, tailor messages to particular audiences, make them easier to spread and help recruitment, the study's authors said. They also reduce the risks a real fighter would face by appearing publicly.

Russia's Africa Corps and Mali's transitional authorities, meanwhile, show a “state-level, professionalised and systematic adoption of generative AI”, the Timbuktu Institute said.

Africa Corps, which succeeded the Russian mercenary group Wagner, has incorporated AI into an already extensive disinformation operation.

Its methods include fake videos, anti-Western deepfakes and generated social media comments, with large-scale operations documented by researchers and European state agencies.

Propaganda at industrial scale

“The Africa Corps case is undoubtedly the best-documented case in the entire study,” Sambe said.

Researchers have counted 19 Russian disinformation campaigns across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger since 2018, he said.

“With AI, Russian disinformation is moving to a completely different scale. We are going from cottage industry to industrial production, with plausible deniability thrown in,” Sambe said.

Some content identified by the Timbuktu Institute has attracted nearly five million views.

It depicts victories by Malian forces over JNIM and FLA fighters and amplifies messages from Mali's transitional authorities and the three countries in the Alliance of Sahel States – Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – against France, regional bloc Ecowas and human rights organisations.

Deepfakes and coordinated campaigns were also used after the fighting in Kidal on 25 April to present Africa Corps in a favourable light and avoid the appearance of defeat, Sambe said.

Russian paramilitaries have also used AI to push claims that France and Ukraine supported and equipped JNIM and FLA attackers during the battle, he said. The claims form part of a narrative portraying foreign powers as plotting against Mali while reinforcing official government messaging, Sambe said.

Such content is used for political control and to manipulate information and opinion, diverting people's attention and misleading them about the real security situation, the institute said.

Its impact is greater because Alliance of Sahel States governments have tightened control over domestic media and cut off international outlets they consider too troublesome, the report added.

From propaganda to battlefield

AI could increasingly move beyond information warfare into military operations, including drone strikes, researchers warned.

AI can help paramilitary forces identify targets and increase their capabilities. Its use has also led to mistakes and harm affecting communities, including civilians and other non-combatants, Sambe said.

Advanced military uses remained largely prospective in the institute's written study, but their potential was described as “a serious threat because of its potential use as a force multiplier” – something that could allow armed groups to achieve more with the resources they already have.

The same effect could transform recruitment by allowing jihadist groups to target people individually with highly tailored messages, Sambe said.

“Tomorrow's jihadism will no longer recruit en masse. It will recruit person by person and tailor its approach to each individual,” he said.

This story was based on reporting and interviews in French by David Baché and Christophe Boisbouvier