Kyiv's military administration warned residents of the Ukrainian capital to take shelter on Saturday night due to the takeoff of a Russian MiG-31K, the carrier of the Russian Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, in a post on Telegram. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that its team heard explosions and saw smoke coming from an "auxiliary facility" located 1,200 metres from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The Russian-installed administration of the plant said that a civilian was killed by Ukrainian shelling. A fire that broke out near the plant was brought under control, the administrators added in a post on Telegram. An elderly man was killed inside a house that caught fire due to falling Ukrainian drone debris in Russia's Samara region, Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev posted on Telegram.

Counter-terrorism authorities have, for years, characterized keeping up with terrorist organizations and their use of digital tools and social media apps as a game of Whac-a-Mole. Jihadist terrorist groups such as Islamic State and its predecessor al-Qaida, or even the neo-Nazi group the Base, have leveraged digital tools to recruit, covertly finance via crypto, download weapons for 3D printing and spread tradecraft to its followers, all while leaving law enforcement and intelligence agencies playing catch up. Over time, thwarting attacks and maintaining the technological advantage over these types of terror groups has evolved, as more and more open source resources become available. Now, with artificial intelligence – both on the horizon as a rapidly developing technology and in the here and now as free, accessible apps – agencies are scrambling. Sources familiar with the US government's counterterrorism efforts told the Guardian that multiple security agencies are very concerned about how AI is making hostile groups more efficient in their planning and operations.

With demonstrations ramping up against the Trump administration, this week was all about protests. With President Donald Trump taking the historic step to deploy US Marines and the National Guard to Los Angeles, we dove into the "long-term dangers" of sending troops to LA, as well as what those troops are permitted to do while they're there. Of course, it's not just the military getting involved in the LA protests against the heavy crackdowns by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There's also Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which further escalated federal involvement by flying Predator drones over LA. And there are local and state authorities, who've used "nonlethal" weapons and chemical agents like tear gas against protesters.

The White House issued its first national security memorandum outlining the use of artificial intelligence for the military and intelligence agencies. The White House also shared a shortened copy of the memo with the public. The memo sets a series of deadlines for agencies to study the applications and regulations of AI tools, most of which will lapse following President Biden's term. The memo also aims to limit "the most dystopian possibilities, including the development of autonomous weapons," according to the New York Times. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced the new directive today at the National Defense University as part of a talk on AI's presence in government operations.

The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center--the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.

North Korean state-backed hackers have mounted a campaign to obtain secrets related to nuclear materials, military drones, submarines and shipbuilding in the UK and US, as intelligence agencies warned of a "global cyber-espionage campaign" targeting sensitive industries. A joint notice from the US, UK and South Korea warned that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was using state-backed attackers to further the regime's military and nuclear ambitions. It added that Japan and India had also been targeted. Hackers have targeted sensitive military information and intellectual property in four main areas: nuclear, defence, aerospace and engineering. The assailants, working for a group called Andariel, have also sought to obtain secrets from the medical and energy industries.

Researchers say LLMs still have a ways to go before they can be used reliably for high-stakes purposes. Shannon Gallagher, a Carnegie Mellon researcher speaking at the conference, said her team was asked last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to explore how LLMs can be used by intelligence agencies. Gallagher said that in her team's study, they devised a "balloon test," in which they prompted LLMs to describe what happened in the high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon incident last year, as a proxy for the kinds of geopolitical events an intelligence agency might be interested in. The responses ran the gamut, with some of them biased and unhelpful.

Ukraine has said it used sea drones to attack and destroy a Russian warship in the Black Sea near the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula. The military intelligence agency, known by its Ukrainian acronym GUR, published a video on Thursday that it said depicted a naval drone attack on the missile-armed corvette Ivanovets the night before. The grainy footage, running about 2 and a half minutes and accompanied by a dramatic soundtrack, showed a number of explosions, and the ship eventually listing to one side. It ended with the vessel sinking stern-first into the sea. "As a result of a number of direct hits to the hull, the Russian ship suffered damage incompatible with further movement," the intelligence agency said in a statement accompanying the video, apparently made up of live feeds from the drones.

An overreliance on technology by Israel's intelligence agencies and military has continued to shape the current conflict in Gaza, analysts say, while also being partially responsible for the failure to detect the Hamas attack on October 7. Hamas's surprise attack on army outposts and surrounding villages in southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 Israeli and foreign nationals, mostly civilians, took the Israeli intelligence agencies by surprise. Hamas fighters also took about 240 people captive. Israel, in its brutal military response, has killed more than 17,000 Palestinians in Gaza since then. Within both Israel and the wider Arab region, many have asked how Shin Bet, one of the world's most respected and feared intelligence agencies, which is responsible for Israel's domestic security, could have been outmatched by Hamas using bulldozers and paragliders. The world's disbelief has sparked a bounty of conspiracy theories in some quarters.

Deadly bioweapons, automated cybersecurity attacks, powerful AI models escaping human control. Those are just some of the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence, according to a new UK government report. It was released to help set the agenda for an international summit on AI safety to be hosted by the UK next week. The report was compiled with input from leading AI companies such as Google's DeepMind unit and multiple UK government departments, including intelligence agencies. Joe White, the UK's technology envoy to the US, says the summit provides an opportunity to bring countries and leading AI companies together to better understand the risks posed by the technology.