“Invisibility cloaks” and “digital twins” are among artificial intelligence technologies that could soon give America’s adversaries powerful new weapons beyond people’s wildest imaginations, say national security officials gathered Tuesday at the Black Hat USA 2024 hacker conference.

Mr. Lovelace is reporting from the conference in Las Vegas, where Ms. Fisher of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) displayed the “invisibility cloak” on a presentation slide describing how the Pentagon is working to disrupt state-of-the-art adversarial AI.

DARPA’s program defending against the dark arts of AI is called GARD, or “Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception.” The program investigated adversarial AI to learn how to stop AI-generated crime and chaos. Ms. Fisher, who leads DARPA’s information innovation office, said the GARD program discovered that hackers could pay just $60 to put data on the internet to override AI developers’ “large language” models. Large language models undergird many popular generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

A Chinese proposal submitted to the United Nations last month calling on all nations to adopt Beijing’s “no first use” nuclear weapons policy is a nonstarter for the United States.

A State Department official told Mr. Gertz for his Inside the Ring column that the no-first-use policy would be unacceptable given China’s massive nuclear weapons buildup and its refusal to join U.S. arms talks.

China’s “rapid and opaque buildup of a more flexible nuclear arsenal calls into question the objectives behind its no-first-use proposal,” the official told Mr. Gertz on background. “[China’s] refusal to engage in meaningful bilateral or multilateral discussions on arms control and risk reduction, including on questions about the PRC’s stated no-first-use policy, reinforces these concerns.”

Mystery surrounds the spectacular Israeli intelligence operation to assassinate Hamas political leader Haniyeh in the heavily guarded heart of Iran’s capital.

A New York Times report quoting Iranian officials said Haniyeh was killed last week by an explosive device smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse months before it blew up in the room where he was staying. Another account, by The Jewish Chronicle, a British newspaper, reported Haniyeh was killed by a bomb placed under his bed by two Iranians recruited by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

Iran’s government has said the killing was the result of an unspecified “severe explosion” outside the guesthouse. Other reports said the attack was the result of an air-launched missile strike from an Israeli F-35.

None of the four versions of the operation have been confirmed, and Israel has not even confirmed it was behind the hit. Mr. Gertz digs into the situation, citing intelligence analysts who say those who conduct such high-risk operations likely put out multiple deceptive or misleading cover stories as a way to protect the sources and methods that could be used again in the future.

Missile and drone attacks from Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthi rebels have cut commercial maritime shipping in half in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, and the top U.S. naval commander in the region says he sees little appetite among shippers right now to return in significant numbers to the vital waterway, despite a U.S.-led military operation formed late last year to blunt the Houthi attacks.

“We used to see about 2,000 ships go through the [Bab al-Mandab] a month. Now, we see roughly 1,000 ships go through,” Admiral George Wikoff, commander of the Middle East-based U.S. 5th Fleet, said Wednesday in a virtual discussion hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Houthi attacks have prompted shipping companies to rout vessels around Africa, adding some 11,000 nautical miles and $1 million in fuel costs. The Houthi attacks have continued despite multiple strikes against positions on Yemen’s coastline by both the U.S. and Israel in recent months. Pentagon correspondent Mike Glenn takes a deeper look, examining how shipping companies have absorbed the costs and taken into account the extra transit time necessary to go around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa.

Andrew P. Napolitano writes that “the hours and weeks and months and years of repeated torture — all of it criminal — will undermine the case against [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed.”

“This is what happens when our legal system is interfered with for authoritarian reasons,” argues Mr. Napolitano, who dishes up a play-by-play history of the George W. Bush administration’s handling of Mohammed and other al Qaeda suspects in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“The tragedy of 9/11 happened on Mr. Bush’s watch. What did the CIA know before 9/11? Mr. Bush compounded his ignorance and failures with boasts of bravado and torture — all of which have come back to haunt his current successor in the White House,” writes Mr. Napolitano. “Defense and Justice Department lawyers have recognized that they cannot try [the Mohammed] case without doing material damage to the American empire, built on death, lies and torture, without revealing the names and methods of the men who did these horrible deeds and the lies of the presidents who authorized them — and without the truth coming out at last.”

Gary Marx writes that tyrants always persecute innocent people for their faith — Hitler and Stalin being prime examples.

“Hamas has employed a corrupted version of Islam to legitimize the indiscriminate murder of Jewish people, and Russia has weaponized the Christian religion to create its own Kremlin-directed jihad,” asserts Mr. Marx, president of Madison Strategies and former executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his recent address to U.S. Congress, “‘It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life,’” writes Mr. Marx. “The question for Americans and the rest of the world is simple: Do you want to be on the side of life or death?”

• Aug. 7-10 — University of California San Diego Forum on U.S.-China Relations, UC San Diego

• Aug. 8 — Over the Brink: Escalation Management in a Protracted U.S.-PRC Conflict, Center for a New American Security

• Aug. 12 — How Local Authorities Make Decisions in the Myanmar Civil War, Stimson Center

• Aug. 15 — One Year after Camp David: How Durable Are U.S.-Japan-South Korea Trilateral Ties? Hudson Institute

• Aug. 27 — U.S.-Mexico relations: Addressing challenges at the border, Brookings Institution