Iran has filed a formal complaint with the United Nations against Elon Musk’s Starlink, saying the satellite internet provider has been operating illegally in its territory over the last month. The complaint, submitted to the U.N. International Telecommunication Union, accuses Starlink of operating in Iran without a license in June.

Starlink was activated in Iran shortly after Israel launched preemptive attacks on the Islamic republic. Mr. Musk, Starlink’s CEO, announced the activation on X on June 14. He and other opponents of the regime in Tehran hoped increased internet access could foster a popular uprising in Iran by giving the Iranian masses access to information otherwise blocked by the regime’s tight control on media.

While Starlink is illegal in Iran, more than 100,000 residents there use the service, according to the Iranian E-Commerce Scientific Association. Iranian users could face harsh punishment in the coming months. Following the war with Israel, Tehran has instituted an espionage crackdown, part of which involves a new law that could slap Starlink users with a 10-year prison sentence.

Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI were awarded contracts this week from the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, each with a $200 million ceiling. Pentagon officials say the contracts will shrink the gap in knowledge between the U.S. military and the private sector in the development of artificial intelligence.

The contracts are part of the Defense Department’s “commercial first” strategy, which will integrate the best U.S.-based AI talent, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said in statement. The integration means that several agencies will have access to the latest generative AI models.

The development is seen as a win for Mr. Musk’s-led xAI, which develops Grok AI and has quickly become one of the most valuable AI companies on the planet. The company this week announced a slew of new features created for government employees, termed “Grok for Government.”

The Trump administration will allow California-based AI microchip maker Nvidia to sell advanced chips to China, undoing curbs that sought to prevent U.S. technology from helping China’s military buildup. Nvidia announced on its website this week that it has been given assurances that new requests for exports to China of its H20 AI chips will be approved.

The announcement followed a meeting at the White House between Mr. Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the lifting of the advanced chip restrictions was a concession made in exchange for China’s announced resumption of sales of rare earth minerals needed by U.S. manufacturers.

In April, the administration announced a crackdown on exports of AI chips produced by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) over concerns the chips would be used for China’s rapid military buildup, which includes integrating AI into its weapons systems. Nvidia is a world leader in AI chips and is the first company to be valued at more than $4 trillion. Its chips are key elements of cutting-edge data centers that train AI models and operate AI applications.

South Korea’s new government plans to take over wartime operational control of South Korean troops from the U.S. within five years, a shift that would almost certainly collapse the joint warfighting command on the peninsula and probably trigger a downsizing of U.S. Forces Korea. Defense Minister nominee Ahn Gyu-back revealed the Lee Jae-myung administration’s intention this week in a National Assembly hearing. The Lee administration was inaugurated in June.

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that wartime OPCON Transfer is not a novel concept. It was the brainchild of the liberal Roh Moo-hyun administration (2003-2008) after major anti-American protests. Initially set for 2012, it has been consistently delayed, particularly by conservative Seoul administrations.

As North Korea massively upgraded its weapons of mass destruction capabilities, Seoul and Washington have agreed to transition from a time-based to a conditions-based transfer of operational control. The conditions that Seoul’s forces agreed to meet have never been fully public, but major upgrade requirements are known to be in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets.

A panel at the Aspen Security Forum this week focused on how China and Russia have been militarizing space with anti-satellite weaponry for more than a decade and the steps the U.S. should take to more quickly develop advanced defensive and offensive capabilities in the futuristic domain. Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin Space, told the forum that a “fundamental shift” came in 2015, when China “declared space a war-fighting domain.”

Retired Space Force Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno said the network of current U.S. satellites are “vulnerable” because when they were designed and built, there was “no threat” in space. “Russia and China have built weapons and deployed them in space all the way back to 2007, when China launched an anti-satellite missile [that] destroyed one of their own defunct weather satellites,” she said.

Mr. Lightfoot, meanwhile, stressed that China is advancing dramatically in the space domain. “[They] have increased the number of satellites they have for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance by 500%,” he said, underscoring the current challenge of quickly developing an advanced engineering U.S. workforce that can compete with Beijing in the domain.

• July 17 — GenAI Summit, GenAI Week

• July 17-18 — Aspen Security Forum, Aspen Institute

• July 21 — Mesh Sensing for Air and Missile Defense, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• July 22 — Breaking China’s Chokehold: Securing America’s Advanced Battery Supply Chains, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• July 23 — The State of Republican Foreign Policy with Rep. Jake Ellzey, Hudson Institute 

• July 29 — ICE Pact: The Icebreaker Collaboration Effort and Arctic Security Conversation, The Heritage Foundation