It’s no secret that foreign hacking groups are increasingly using artificial intelligence to power their operations. But a new report from OpenAI shines a light on just how big a role AI is playing in phishing scams, covert influence operations and other nefarious actions.

Times reporter Vaughn Cockayne dove into the report and summarized its key takeaways. OpenAI said that over just the past 18 months, it has tracked and disrupted more than 40 networks that violated the company’s policies. They include a network with Russian origins that used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate prompts that were then fed into another platform to make videos used in a covert influence operation.

And several Chinese-language accounts were banned for their connection to an ongoing phishing campaign. Other accounts linked to China were recorded using OpenAI’s tools to generate ideas for systems that could be used to monitor social media conversations.

Allegations of data theft and spying by China or China-linked actors are hardly new. But in this case, the alleged targets were children under 13.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has the details on this story. The Justice Department fined China-based toymaker Apitor Technology Co. Ltd. and accused the company of violating the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act through its programmable toy robots.

A civil complaint filed last month in federal court in San Francisco stated that Apitor uses an app to operate toys that move and through the Android app secretly collected geolocation data on children under age 13. Under the terms of its agreement with the Justice Department, Apitor neither admitted nor denied the allegations in the complaint. But the company was ordered to stop collecting data on children without first notifying parents and obtaining consent.

Many analysts say Russia has been testing NATO in recent weeks with its repeated air incursions into alliance airspace. But now top allies to Russian President Vladimir Putin are directly threatening military action against a NATO member if the U.S. follows through on a plan to send long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine.

If that happens, Russian lawmaker Alexey Zhuravlyov said, Poland’s Rzeszow air base would become a legitimate target. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, said any decision by the Trump administration to send Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv would amount to a serious escalation by Washington.

The Bank of England warned there could soon be a sharp market correction in the AI sector, which has seen a rapid rise in global stock prices amid the expectation that AI is on the verge of transforming the economy.

But financial conditions could “turn abruptly,” according to International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. She warned in a speech this week that the unbridled optimism about the potential of AI has been a driving force behind rising stock prices.

Analysts point to several serious warning signs, including that tech stocks now comprise about 40% of the S&P 500, market valuations that appear “stretched” beyond their worth and a major uncertainty about what AI technology will actually look like as it evolves. 

Many of the kinds of systems that the U.S. needs to counter the major threats posed by drones have already been produced and battle tested — in Israel.

In a new piece for The Times, retired National Guard Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, a former deputy commander of U.S. Northern Command, and Yoni Tobin, a senior policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, lay out many of the battlefield innovations seen in Israel that have proven effective at combating small attack drones. 

They include Israel’s Iron Beam laser defense platform, along with major strides in quantum sensing and AI that enable Israeli defensive forces to distinguish the signatures of drones from those of birds.

“The U.S. must take advantage of Israel’s drone defense adaptations and capabilities, forged under fire by near-daily attacks,” they write. “Securing the homeland, overseas bases and global supply chains from drone threats will require learning how partners such as Israel have adapted to such threats and converting those lessons into action.”

• Oct. 9 — Countering the Axis of Aggressors with Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Retired Gen. Laura Richardson, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Oct. 10 — HTK: War and the Modern Battlefield, Center for Strategic and International Studies 

• Oct. 13-15 — AUSA 2025 Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA)

• Oct. 15 — Vanguard of Manufacturing: Fortifying U.S. National Security, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 21-22 — Missile Defense Agency Small Business Conference, Tennessee Valley Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA)

• Oct. 22 — Europe’s Energy Transition: From Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine to Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Agenda, Brookings Institution