It’s complicated, but when it comes to global terrorism, the enemy of your enemy could be your friend. National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang takes a deep dive into how the growing threat posed by the Islamic State-Khorasan Province — the Afghanistan-based terror group better known as ISIS-K — has linked the U.S. in common cause with some of its most bitter enemies, including Russia, Iran and even the Taliban.

Each has been targeted by either direct, deadly attacks from ISIS-K or, in Moscow’s case, seems to have narrowly avoided disaster on multiple occasions. Even Turkey, a traditional U.S. ally that has repeatedly been a thorn in the side of America and NATO in recent years, has experienced bloodshed on its soil as a result of ISIS-K attacks, the threat of which is expanding, according to Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command.

The situation finds Washington carefully weighing how much intelligence about ISIS-K to share with adversaries such as Iran or Russia, which could seize on such information to advance their own interests in Europe or the Middle East. Nathan Sales, the State Department’s former counterterrorism coordinator, tells Threat Status that “this is one of those situations where the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is divided on whether President Biden’s 2023 executive order on artificial intelligence is a needed regulatory measure or an illegal abuse of power threatening to crush American innovation. National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace reports that some lawmakers harbor concerns that the president’s reliance on the Defense Production Act — a Korean War-era law intended to influence private-sector production for national defense — goes too far.

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, who chairs the House committee’s cyber panel, fears Mr. Biden‘s use of the act’s emergency powers will force AI developers to hand over sensitive proprietary data to the government. She expressed particular concern at a hearing Thursday about giving such data to the Commerce Department, citing a devastating hack that compromised the emails of department personnel last year.

It’s notable, however, that the Biden administration’s approach appears to have buy-in from some of the biggest private sector AI players in the national security community. The Colorado-based data tech giant Palantir, which won a $250 million Pentagon contract last year to help the U.S. Army with AI research, has described the administration’s policy moves on AI as an “unfolding process.”

The outgoing commander of the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command warned Congress this week that China’s “massive” military buildup shows no signs of slowing and the U.S. military needs more money to better deter a war with Beijing.

Adm. John C. Aquilino said his plan for deterring conflict with China will require $11 billion more than the Biden administration’s request in its latest budget. “We must recognize that the most dangerous national security challenges are evolving faster than our current government processes allow us to address them,” the four-star admiral told the House Armed Services Committee.

Gen. Kurilla followed that warning by testifying to the committee on Thursday that fallout from the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent offensive into the Gaza Strip have turned a once promising strategic landscape of the Middle East back into one of the world’s most dangerous places for the U.S. and its allies. “Just a year ago, the region was on the verge of improbable, unprecedented and transformative progress,” Gen. Kurilla said. “Today, the region faces its most volatile security situation in the past half-century.”

The $1.2 trillion spending bill that’s coming up for a vote in the House and Senate adopts a Trump-style approach to immigration by boosting funding for border enforcement and detention, but it drops some of the big policy changes that Republicans say are needed to solve the migrant crisis.

The bill comes amid an ongoing fight over Texas’ push to implement its own strict new state anti-illegal immigration law, which the Biden administration has said is unconstitutional. Mexico notably filed a brief in a U.S. court on Thursday asking judges to block Texas from enforcing the law, saying it’s unfairly frightening Mexicans who live in the state.

One of the more ominous consequences of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the most destructive land war in Europe since World War II, has been the tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape it has caused, according to regular Threat Status columnist and former CIA Clandestine Service Officer Daniel N. Hoffman. “Increasingly dependent economically and militarily on Iran, North Korea and China, the Kremlin has become the centerpiece of this century’s new axis of tyranny,” he writes.

Mr. Hoffman cites the U.S. intelligence community’s recently declassified threat assessment that underscored a range of dangers stemming from Moscow’s new relationships with Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran. The threats are “multifarious, especially in the unregulated fifth domain of cyberspace, which operates as a force multiplier for freedom of expression and commerce,” he writes. “The U.S. private sector is squarely in the crosshairs of not only cyber criminals but also cyber spies recruited by the North Korean, Chinese, Russian and Iranian regimes.”