United States President Donald Trump will be present at an artificial intelligence (AI) summit on October 8, with his administration set to unveil $1 billion in industry commitments for the Genesis Mission coming from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and others, Axios reported on Wednesday, citing an announcement.
The White House wants to push industry leaders to be more active amid science research and development funding cuts. The Trump administration is also set to reveal a compute hub made up of over 14 institutions spanning 10 Southeast states, as well as a $1 billion investment in Georgia.
It was further detailed that the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department will inject over $100 million in AI-driven science tools, with distinguished experts to be present at the summit.
The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop options for strikes against Iran that could be carried out before the November 3 midterm elections, The Atlantic reported Wednesday, citing two administration officials.
The size and targets of any potential strikes remain under discussion and no final decision has been made, according to the report. US Central Command is developing the options.
The planning comes as President Donald Trump weighs how to demonstrate progress in the eight-month war while seeking to bring down energy prices ahead of the elections, administration officials told The Atlantic.
Supporters of limited strikes acknowledge they would not by themselves bring Iran to the negotiating table, restore safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz or lower gasoline prices before Election Day, the report said.
The Pentagon has also presented Trump with options for military action after the elections, ranging from limited strikes to large-scale attacks that could include further strikes on Iran's energy industry.
The deliberations come as Washington and Tehran continue indirect contacts through mediators while remaining divided over the terms and sequencing of a ceasefire, the US blockade and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump has repeatedly raised the possibility of renewed military action. Last week, he said he expected the United States to win the war “right after the election,” before adding, “Maybe before the election.”
A tanker was struck by multiple projectiles about 51 nautical miles north of Qatar’s Madinat ash Shamal, with casualties reported, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said Wednesday in a post on X.
Iran says it has agreed with Oman on the geographical coordinates of safe transit routes through the Strait of Hormuz, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said Wednesday.
“Iran and Oman have reached an agreement on the geographical coordinates of safe transit routes in the Strait of Hormuz and on how they will be communicated to the relevant international body,” Baghaei said, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
The Saudi-led coalition said Wednesday it destroyed 82 military targets belonging to the Iran-backed Houthis across four Yemeni provinces after the group attacked civilian sites in Saudi Arabia.
Coalition spokesperson Major-General Turki al-Maliki said in a post on X that the targets in Saada, Hodeidah, al-Jawf and Marib included 11 mountain-based ballistic missile storage sites in Saada, as well as command centers, communications systems, missile and weapons depots and gathering sites.
Maliki said the operation followed Houthi attacks targeting King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh and Abha International Airport, adding that attacks on civilian sites “will not go unpunished.”
Federal prosecutors have charged a Bellingham man with helping another person commit murder in a foreign country - alleging he coached an 18-year-old who killed eight people in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, in February and agreed to livestream the attack.
At the federal courthouse in Seattle, law enforcement officials on Oct. 6, 2026, announce the arrest of a Bellingham resident accused of aiding in a deadly school shooting in British Columbia. Officials include assistant commissioner Elija Rain of the BC RCMP, left, FBI special agent in charge Mike Herrington, and acting U.S. attorney Neil Floyd. (KUOW Photo/Amy Radil). KUOW's caption spells the RCMP officer's name Elijah.
James Cody Bryant, 30, was arrested Tuesday, officials said at the federal courthouse in Seattle. The charge carries a possible life sentence, KUOW reported. Bryant is accused, not convicted. A preliminary hearing is set for Oct. 20.
On February 10, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed his mother and 11-year-old stepbrother at home, then five students and a school staff member at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, before dying by suicide. Canadian officials said police had been to the home several times over mental health concerns. RCMP assistant commissioner Elija Rain said Canadian authorities contacted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security soon after, based on information from a platform the attacker had used.
Bryant and Van Rootselaar communicated on Discord, officials said, and Discord contacted law enforcement after the shooting. FBI Seattle special agent in charge Mike Herrington said the two discussed the attack in detail. Bryant allegedly sent money through PayPal so Van Rootselaar could buy shoes to wear that day and a lighter to ignite an explosive device.
"In addition to providing money, technical advice, and particular items to be used in the shooting, Bryant agreed to record a livestream feed of the attack and broadcast it in a way that would maximize notoriety for the shooter," Herrington said. Other messages suggest Bryant advised Van Rootselaar when the car would not start on the way to the school, after the killings at home, he added. Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd said the planned broadcast was on Twitch. Officials said the feed shut down after about 20 seconds.
Charging documents show an exchange in which Van Rootselaar said, "I really hope you wouldn't ever snitch." Bryant replied, "I don't want to honestly. I know I can like, save lives I guess but idk." The government's press release also said there were conversations in which Bryant "tried to talk Van Rootselaar out of doing the attack." Officials said Bryant never contacted law enforcement, and agreed to handle the livestream just minutes before the attack.
Officials said the two met about three years ago on Omegle, a now-defunct video chat service that randomly matched strangers, and that there is no indication they ever met in person or had ties to any other group. Both were born male and identified as female, officials said. The criminal complaint uses female pronouns for Van Rootselaar and no gendered pronouns for Bryant.
Herrington said distance does not shield a defendant. "If you think you are safe from prosecution because you did not pull the trigger or were not physically present at the scene of the crime, think again," he said. The Canadian investigation remains active, but Floyd said the case is being brought in the United States for now. "All the activity involved in this was committed here in the state of Washington," Floyd said.
Separately, victims' families and British Columbia, which sued in September, have taken OpenAI to court over Van Rootselaar's use of ChatGPT. The province's suit says the company flagged the chats but did not report them to police. Mother Jones reports ChatGPT helped the attacker get around its safeguards by framing questions as fictional or hypothetical.
A cutting-edge new artificial intelligence (AI) tool can reconstruct images from a person's vision simply by analyzing brain scans.
There's our little test subject!
The technology recreates a person's visual field with startling accuracy and can also predict brain activity by analyzing what a person is looking at in real time.
Professor Michal Irani of the Weizmann Institute of Science developed the "mind-reading" AI model Brain-IT, which interprets functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of participants' brain activity as they view a series of images.
Irani and her team - which includes Roman Beliy, Amit Zalcher, Jonathan Kogman, and Navve Wasserman from Weizmann's Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department - released their research on Sept. 14.
While the current study used fixed images, Irani's lab plans to test these so-called mind-reading methods on participants' hearing and, eventually, on video.
"What remains especially challenging is decoding video - for example, during dreaming," Irani said in a statement.
"Dozens of images change every second, while an fMRI scan takes about two seconds. If we overcome all these obstacles, it's possible that in the future we may even be able to read dreams."
The study reviewed fMRI scans of eight participants who had viewed thousands of images across 30 to 40 scanning sessions. Participants viewed around 40 images over roughly 10-minute sessions as researchers scanned their brains six times. This created roughly 73,000 image-fMRI pairs for the AI model to analyze.
Irani said other models can translate brain activity into images with "impressive reconstructions," but that they often make basic composition and color errors.
"The new model we developed outperforms them in reconstructing both the content of the image and its details," she said.
"What's more, while every other model requires dozens of hours of brain scans to learn to 'read' a new person, our model needs only one hour," she said.
Scientists have been working on similar technology for years. A paper published in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences in 2017 discussed the possibility of reaching "brain-based mind reading" with neuroimaging techniques.
The paper described how these techniques could be used for lie detection to assess defendants, prisoners, and prospective jurors in court cases to improve the legal system. However, it also notes that brain-based mind reading could have potentially unethical coercive uses.
Improvements in the signal data produced by fMRI machines and in how humans analyze that data in recent years have made this technology possible, according to Kenneth Norman, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Princeton University.
In a discussion with the American Psychological Association in 2022, Norman said the technology could help people with depression or anxiety.
Therapists could use neurofeedback to make participants aware that their thinking has drifted toward negative thought loops and then give them direction to try to control those mental patterns, he said.
Some neuroscientists have heralded the capabilities of Brain-IT's AI model, highlighting how it could therapeutically help people suffering from neurological conditions. But others have raised concerns about how the technology could be abused to coercively extract information from a person's mind.
