The Pentagon has revealed that it is allocating about $500 million this year to its Replicator artificial intelligence overhaul that aims to field multiple thousands of all-domain drone systems by August 2025.

Defense Innovation Unit Director Doug Beck says he’s working to get the department to rethink its appetite for risk as it pushes to meet the deadline and build reliable processes for delivering the drones at the scale desired. Mr. Beck told AI companies gathered at a major technology conference in Washington on Tuesday that the biggest obstacle to moving more quickly is the government’s own culture.

“It’s not about the tech and it’s not about the money, it’s all about culture,” Mr. Beck said. “We need to get much, much, much, much faster. We got to get better at taking process risk, financial risk, reputational risk … so that we avoid transferring that into very real risk to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardians, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, who have to fight a future war if we have to fight.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Serbia on Tuesday came on a symbolic date for Beijing: The 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by U.S. jets during NATO’s air war over Kosovo, an incident in which three Chinese citizens were killed.

Serbia is seen by many critics to be providing a foothold for Chinese and Russian influence in Europe. Beijing has invested billions in Serbian mining and infrastructure projects since the two countries inked a strategic partnership in 2016.

Mr. Xi met with Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic on Wednesday. The Chinese president described their relationship as “ironclad.” Mr. Xi moved on to Hungary later Wednesday. He visited France earlier in the week as part of his first tour of Europe in five years.

The social media giant TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government Tuesday that claims a looming ban on the social media company is unconstitutional.

The case raises questions about the dangers of social media, national security concerns over the Chinese government’s exploitation of the platform, First Amendment rights and the extent of congressional power. TikTok and ByteDance argue in the 70-page complaint that Congress and the Biden administration have given them an impossible choice: Either sell the company or close shop within a year.

TikTok’s critics, including U.S. defense and intelligence community officials, say the platform is part of a Chinese push to interfere in U.S. politics, that it is a method to collect troves of information on its 170 million-plus American users and that the app lets Chinese operatives install nefarious software on users’ devices.

The mystery surrounding sidelined Biden administration Iran envoy Robert Malley is deepening, amid revelations by two top GOP lawmakers that Mr. Malley may have downloaded “classified documents” onto his cellphone, which was then apparently hacked by Iranian cyber operatives.

Mr. Malley, a longtime Democratic diplomat who was a key architect of the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, has had his status in limbo since the State Department stripped his security clearance, suspended his pay and put him on administrative leave nearly a year ago, pending a review of allegations he mishandled classified information.

Republicans on Capitol Hill say the Biden administration has kept them in the dark about the case, but they’ve done their own digging. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and Sen. James E. Risch, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking Republican, sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week asking him to confirm that Mr. Malley’s security clearance was suspended “because he improperly transferred classified U.S. government information to a personal email account and/or device that is not authorized to store such information.”

The letter, first obtained and reported on by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, asks the State Department to confirm the lawmakers’ belief that “a hostile cyber actor was able to gain access to [Mr. Malley’s] email and/or phone and obtain the downloaded information,” and questions whether the alleged cyber actor is affiliated with the “Iranian military or intelligence services.”

The proliferation of nuclear weapons and Iran‘s recent attack on Israel are just two reasons the United States should upgrade its missile defense capabilities and ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, writes Threat Status opinion contributor Joseph R. DeTrani, a former member of the Senior Intelligence Service of the CIA and former director of the National Counterproliferation Center.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has announced his regime will make more nuclear weapons designed to fit on a variety of delivery systems, Iranian leader Ali Khamenei has ensured that Iran remains a threshold nuclear weapons state, and China is reportedly planning to increase its nuclear arsenal from about 200 warheads to 1,000 warheads by 2030, Mr. DeTrani writes.

“In addition to a robust nuclear deterrent,” he argues, “we need to invest more in our missile defense capabilities to protect the homeland and our allies and partners if diplomacy and deterrence fail.”

America’s goal should be to prevent China’s president from establishing an illiberal new world order — what he calls “A Community of Common Destiny for Mankind” — with rules made by the Chinese Communist Party, writes Threat Status opinion contributor Clifford D. May.

To achieve this — and keep what many see as a new Cold War between China and the United States from turning hot — Mr. Xi and other adversaries “must perceive that America’s military and economic power is vastly superior to theirs and that Americans have the will to utilize their power when necessary,” writes Mr. May.

The problem, he argues, is that Mr. Biden has “conveyed weakness and fecklessness” by capitulating to Afghanistan’s Taliban, attempting to appease Iran and delivering only a slow drip of support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism.

• May 8 — AI Expo for National Competitiveness 2024, Special Competitive Studies Project.

• May 8 —True North: The Future of U.S.-Canada Relations, American Enterprise Institute.

• May 8 — The Future of the Atlantic Alliance, with U.K. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Sen. Jim Risch, Hudson Institute.

• May 9 — The Erosion of Hong Kong’s Autonomy Since 2020: Implications for the United States, Center for Strategic and International Studies.

• May 10 — U.S. Leadership in Multilaterals: A Fireside Chat with Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Trade and Development Alexia Latortue, Center for Strategic and International Studies.