The Manhattan Project developed the first atomic bombs and birthed Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the hills of East Tennessee more than 80 years ago. Today the U.S. government lab is running an artificial intelligence security research center.

Edmon Begoli, the center’s founding director, tells Threat Status that Oak Ridge is investigating the possibility of major risks to humanity from AI. The danger he envisions is not a consciously malicious tech tool seeking to harm people, along the lines of Skynet from the Hollywood blockbuster “The Terminator,” but an AI system connected everywhere that expands the “attack surface” for hackers and cannot be easily shut off. 

“It’s just so omnipresent that you cannot go back and delete it from everything,” Mr. Begoli said separately at a Defense Writers Group event on Tuesday. “It’s not like some big mind trying to kill humans, it’s just a thing that is so good at doing what it does, it can hurt us because it’s misaligned.”

It’s notable that OpenAI, maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, assembled its own team last year to examine concerns about AI going rogue and enabling the extinction of humanity. In July, OpenAI warned of danger from a potential superintelligent AI system that would be misaligned and too smart for humans to rein in.

Longtime U.S. diplomat Johnnie Carson at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) recently told Threat Status that China’s infrastructure projects in Africa have “largely been negotiated in opaque fashion.” 

A new USIP report now warns about “corruption and human rights abuses, including child labor exploitation,” by Chinese companies extracting critical minerals from African countries. A summary of the report released Tuesday also says the Russian-led paramilitary Wagner Group is engaged in “predatory mining activities” in Mali and Sudan.

The United States is “near-100 percent reliant on ‘foreign entities of concern’ — mainly the People’s Republic of China — for key critical minerals,” according to the document. U.S. efforts to diversify its critical mineral supply chains through investment in partnerships with African countries could remedy the situation, while also helping to drive economic development and strengthen security on the African continent.

“The United States, its allies and the private sector can play a positive role — including by offering a better alternative to an approach to extracting Africa’s critical minerals common to Chinese companies,” the report states. “U.S. mining and related companies could be much more engaged, however, as they remain largely absent from the continent.”

The U.S. risks losing a new space race with China unless American and allied space industries are strengthened and bureaucratic logjams reduced, according to a newly released report by Pentagon space experts, who contend that the world could see off-earth human communities by 2060.

China is rapidly expanding its capabilities for both exploration and warfighting in space, the report by experts from the Space Force, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Defense Innovation Unit states. National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has a deep dive on the report, which notes in part: Beijing “remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades and the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so.”

The study more pointedly warns that “China appears to be on track to surpass the U.S. as the dominant space power by 2045, or potentially earlier, unless proactive measures are taken now to sustain our nation’s leadership.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified to Congress on Tuesday that the U.S. has seen no evidence Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since launching a war against Hamas following the Oct. 7 terror attack by the Iran-backed militant group that killed more than 1,200 people. Palestinian estimates say more than 30,000 fighters and civilians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory campaign over the past six months.

His comments came during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Mr. Biden‘s $850 billion defense budget request. While Mr. Biden has been an outspoken supporter of Israel’s war against Hamas, the president on Tuesday described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the ongoing campaign in Gaza as a mistake and called on Israel to flood the beleaguered territory with aid.

The administration continues to ramp up pressure on Israel to reach a cease-fire with Hamas amid growing U.S.-Israel tension. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza marked a muted start to the Eid al-Fitr holiday on Tuesday.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and analyst Miles Yu argue in an op-ed that while the Taiwan Relations Act, enacted 45 years ago today, has served as a bulwark against precipitous shifts in U.S.-Taiwan relations, it has now become imperative to reevaluate the act in the face of contemporary geopolitics that include the rise of China as a global power.

With regard to Taiwan, China has “outmaneuvered the United States in the great strategic game, and the Communist Party’s leaders have proved far more adroit and effective practitioners of playing the America card,” write Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Yu, both of whom are fellows at the Hudson Institute.

“The Taiwan Relations Act, though foundational, may no longer be sufficient to address the complexities of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations,” they write. “The U.S. must reassess its strategy toward Taiwan and China” to ensure that Washington has a “a clear-eyed understanding of the current strategic environment” and upholds “America’s upright moral obligations to recognize Taiwan diplomatically as a free and independent nation.”