A NATO fighter jet wasscrambledover Lithuania after a reported drone sighting, but authorities later determined the suspected aerial threat was a large flock of birds, the country's National Crisis Management Center said on Sunday.
The incident prompted a temporary closure of Vilnius International Airport as authorities investigated the unidentified object. The fighter was deployed from Siauliai in northern Lithuania.
Officials lifted the alert and reopened the airport within hours after confirming there was no security threat.
US President Donald Trump pressured his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to stop drone strikes on Russian diesel infrastructure, specifically citing the impact on global fuel markets.
"Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing: He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel because he is causing a shortage of diesel fuel. This isn't done by the Middle East. This is done by what's happening in Russia and Ukraine," he told reporters in an impromptu press briefing at the Irish Open on Sunday.
Trump also reiterated that Iran is "desperate" to reach a deal with the US and said Washington would eventually "extricate" itself from the conflict. On Northern Ireland, Trump repeated his view that reunification with Ireland is "a natural thing to do." He also said he had spoken with UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham about the "windmill issue."
Western media outlets reported early Sunday that a Russian attack drone struck a civilian locomotive on the Kiev-to-Warsaw route just two kilometers from Poland's border. Whether a false-flag operation or an actual Russian strike, the incident suggests mounting spillover risks near NATO territory ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha responded to the incident on X, saying:
Russia's barbaric strikes at the Ukraine-Poland border in Yahodyn are not just a continuation of its attacks on our state borders. This is Putin's terror "knocking" directly on the doors of the EU and NATO. Russian barbarians are at your gate, dear partners. Act now: throw the full weight of your sanctions at Putin's aggressive regime. Make Moscow feel the consequences of its terror. Not just half-decisions, but uncompromising, powerful steps. Full trade embargo. Full entry bans. Full sanctions on the military-industrial complex. Putin needs to understand that his barbarism will be met with decisive action that increases the cost of war for him to an unacceptable level. This is the only way to stop him.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said there was no border violation but described the strike as a Russian escalation. Polish authorities identified the weapons involved as Geran-5 jet-powered drones.
Polish railways said the train carried 208 people. Ukraine's railway operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, said an advance warning allowed the crew to respond and that no one was injured. The service was delayed for six hours.
Separately, Lithuania temporarily closed Vilnius airport Sunday as NATO scrambled fighter jets following a possible drone sighting.
The Wall Street Journal pointed out, "Almost every week this summer brought new reports of drone incursions over NATO's eastern frontier, the airspace over which is now a front line."
Last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that attacks on Europe's borders had intensified, as some intelligence agencies warned of a buildup toward a direct attack by Russia on a NATO member country. She warned that NATO faces "an escalating campaign of threats" and "hybrid warfare."
Update (1055ET): David Sacks, former White House AI czar and co-chair of Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), slammed Amodei and Altman over their calls to 'pace the frontier.'
In a nutshell; they don't need to establish some convoluted framework to pause the development of dangerous models, just 'agree not to build it.' Demanding a regulatory framework as the price of that, 'will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.'
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric - market share, revenue growth, model capability - the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture - or an election-season psyop.
***SPECIAL BULLETIN***
Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public - the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China's open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity - jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere.
For two years the United States frontier laboratories - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI - have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token - at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.
Then the East opened the crate.
And here's what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu - open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers. Qwen had shoved Meta's Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot's Kimi K3 - two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door - sat within shouting distance of Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents - one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic's Opus - and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.
The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the "AI will eat the S&P" thesis - HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription.
TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!
This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another's sentences.
On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And - it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).
Speaking of those three 'defectors' - two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs.
According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines - recursive self-improvement, happening "across the industry, including at Anthropic." He pointed at July's OpenAI - Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models - one of them Mythos 5 - that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies' live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei's warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it "could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," he wrote - "hundreds of billions of dollars in damage," and rising from there.
His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists "does not mean halting model training or technical progress."
Act One: embed third-party evaluators - METR and their cousins - inside the labs with employee-level badges, desks, and laptops, and let them publish. Anthropic would do this unilaterally, he said, today.
Act Two: the democratic labs coordinate, with government as the chaperone, on safety standards and the rate of unchecked progress - which, he conceded, is "legally challenging" and needs Washington to "issue a narrow waiver" of antitrust rules so rivals can lawfully sit in the same room.
Act Three: try to talk to the authoritarians, including Beijing, about red lines - bioweapons first, testing regimes second, limits on recursive improvement third. Full pause? He all but called it a fantasy. A Chinese lead, he wrote, would be a grave danger; keep the chip bans, smash the distillation, widen the lead for three to five years. Then, perhaps, a bargain.
Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic "evil" before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:
Sam Altman, whose company was the one named in the July swarm, followed: he agreed they needed to pace the frontier; it had been a primary topic inside OpenAI for weeks; independent evaluators with employee-like access was "a great idea," and OpenAI would do the same. More to share soon.
Days earlier the fuse was a twenty-seven-year-old Brit named Jacob Coxon. Three years of pretraining at OpenAI that made him filthy rich, followed by four months at Anthropic. Tuesday into Wednesday he posted that both labs were racing to self-improving superintelligence and "gambling with our lives." The people building this, he said, earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Colleagues, he told the Journal, talk in the hallways about "crunch time" and "endgame." The thread did more than a hundred million views. Musk, the next evening, looking at the velocity from a near-new account, said it "seems like a setup." Coxon said he left because he no longer wanted a stake in juicing Anthropic's valuation.
Anthropic's own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed - writing "Jacob is correct." Researchers there really do believe AI could kill all humans. His personal odds: above ten percent this decade. The lab, he added, does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one. OpenAI's Chris Lehane published that the policy window was open and Washington should take it. Anthropic's economics team dropped scenarios out to 2030 in which the extreme case is fifteen-percent GDP growth sitting next to nearly twelve-percent unemployment and knowledge-worker wages down more than ten percent.
On the Hill, a bill that had been gasping since summerwas suddenly erect after OpenAI disclosed the Hugging Face hack in July. House members Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran dropped an AI Kill Switch Act.
Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte float the FRONTIER Act - audits, incident reporting, Commerce power over models judged an imminent catastrophic risk. Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Majority Leader John Thune then stall. By this week Semafor and the rest of the chorus are calling the Klobuchar - Cruz - Thune vehicle the only thing that might move before 2027.
And guess what, Saturday's 'pact' still isn't enough for these people!
And Ted Lieu goes to bat for China...
i.e. "Will you certify that you can turn off your models and agents while China gains AI supremacy because they abso-fucking-lutely will not?"
The President is not in the choir. Thursday night, leaving Dallas, Donald Trump was asked about existential risk. "No, I don't have any." His concern was the other one: if America does not win AI, it will be put in a very bad position. America is leading China "by a pretty good period," he said. Xi, in his accounting, is China's guardrail. The administration's posture remains race-first. The laboratories' posture, as of this morning, is pace-first. Those two sentences do not live in the same house.
About Those Chinese Models...
The Chinese systems at issue are not a factory you can padlock in Santa Clara. They are weights. They propagate. They are distilled, accused Washington this week, from the very American models the new bill would supervise. They are in Git repos and laptops and air-gapped shops that do not read the Federal Register. A Commerce Department letter does not delete a torrent. A kill switch on GPT or Claude does not switch off Qwen. Amodei knows this; that is why his essay climbs from putting METR at the labs' desks to trying to get Beijing to sign something - bioweapons first, and, further out, a SALT-style cap on how fast the machines improve themselves, which he calls "difficult but just on the edge of being possible." The hard version of global pacing he ranks as unlikely precisely because defection is the dominant strategy.
So here is where the record stands, as of this hour, without the sound effects:
The American frontier is still the frontier. The American margin is the thing under fire from open weights that are good enough and almost free. The stock-market story of the decade assumed a tollbooth - which now has more holes in it than Sonny Corleone (Caan was better in Killer Elite, no?).
Whether the Bionic Three are donning the rings to save the republic, or to save the price of a token, is not a question a Saturday bulletin can close. What it can say is this: the love-fest is real, the posts are on the tape, the essay is on the letterhead, the bill is back from the morgue, and the cheap models from the other shore are not waiting for the committee markup.
An official affiliated with Saudi-backed militias in Yemen told CNN that the Houthis "committed everything they had – waves upon waves of fighters... along with their available ballistic missiles and weapons."
"But the air support never came," the source said in reference to the fact that the Saudi-backed side rapidly folded and retreated in just days last week. "And Mocha has now fallen." The blame game has begun after a mere 36 hours has seen the Saudi coalition fracture on the ground, and the finger-pointing is likely to go on in the halls of government, now as Saudi territory continues coming under direct missile and drone threat.
Another regional source told CNN on Thursday that "The failure this time is not with the Yemenis" but that "it's a disaster made in DC and Riyadh."
According to some further key lines and expletives:
The regional source told CNN that it was "a complete failure of political leadership" amid fierce squabbling and delayed decision-making in Riyadh.
"There was not one air strike throughout the day yesterday (by Saudi support forces), although there were minute-by-minute updates," the regional source added. "It’s a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions."
There are at the same time widespread reports that the Iran-backed Houthis have seized US made M-ATVs and MRAP armored vehicles.
Dudes in sandals breaking the coalition with lighting speed...
Amr Al-Bidh, the top official of Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council (STC), has also been quoted in the CNN report, explaining that the Houthis "don’t need to use advanced weapons to close Bab al-Mandeb. They can just use a cannon on a car."
He added "It’s a leverage that they have without using advanced weapons. And they will keep it."
All of this has further emboldened the Houthis to take the fight directly to Saudi territory, amid the ongoing "siege for siege" policy. Riyadh has long sought to impose a brutal blockade on Houthi-controlled ports. The group has so far indicated it intends to allow most international vessels to traverse the Red Sea, but will attack Saudi or Israeli-linked shipping.
There are fresh Sunday reports of another ballistic missile attack on a Saudi base:
Yemen's Houthi group on Sunday claimed that it had launched a ballistic missile and drone attack on a Saudi military base, as fighting between the group and Riyadh-backed Yemeni government forces intensified.
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the attack targeted the Sharurah base in southern Saudi Arabia, including “weapons depots and command and control centers that are managing the aggression against our nation and people”.
Saree declared that the strikes had hit their targets and threatened further bigger strikes deeper inside the kingdom if the Saudis keep up their military operations in Yemen.
Saudi coalition aerial assets have been belatedly at work: "On Sunday, the Yemeni military said its air force had conducted three strikes against Houthi positions and barracks in the Taiz region," MEE reports.
Al Jazeera writes: Analysts are calling the Iran-backed Houthi group’s victories the most significant regional development since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran. The offensives could be particularly damaging for Saudi Arabia and its oil exports.
The Yemeni military announced on X, "Air force of the armed forces targeted positions and barracks of the terrorist Houthi group with three air strikes" in the Taiz region.
Meanwhile, President Trump has said the Houthis are in contact with him and have pledged to let ships through the Bab Al-Mandab Strait. He said to reporters Saturday while meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin,"The Houthis called us, and they don't want to fight with us. They don’t want us to go after them." He further explained that "they would much prefer not having us involved:" and so "they are letting most ships go through." The president did acknowledged they do have a ban on Saudi vessels, however. But the Houthi threat of closing the energy transit chokepoint lingers heavily.
Saudi Arabia risks losing up to 4% of global oil supply unless it restarts its major east-west pipeline to the Red Sea within days, threatening a key export route that has helped the kingdom bypass the wartime shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reported on Sunday.
Drone attacks forced Riyadh to shut the pipeline on Friday, cutting a route that had been carrying around 4 million barrels per day to the Red Sea port of Yanbu.
Yanbu has enough oil stocks to maintain exports for only five to seven days, three industry sources told Reuters, while smaller volumes are also stored at Egyptian ports.
Estimates for repairs varied, with one source saying the damage could take five to six weeks to fix, while another said partial pumping could resume sooner.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis on Saudi Arabia and its oil infrastructure during a phone call with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry said.
