The American Times News | Economy, Geopolitics, Calculators

Nearly 80,000 people followed a network of Instagram, Facebook and X accounts posing as ordinary Americans in cities such as Washington, D.C., San Diego and Atlanta. The accounts did not belong to the people they claimed to represent. Behind the network was a coordinated influence operation that, according to reporting and researchers, relied heavily on AI agents rather than conventional human-run account management. A New York Times investigation published on September 18, 2026, linked the operation to Iran. The same investigation described a separate China-linked campaign that used a comparable AI-driven approach, although fewer operational details were publicly available about the Chinese case. Together, the cases point to a possible shift in how state-linked influence operations are organized: from humans producing and managing individual pieces of content to software systems capable of handling multiple connected tasks with limited human supervision. An AI Agent Is More Than a Con...

The debate over how fast artificial intelligence should develop has moved well beyond a disagreement among technology executives. It now involves AI safety, autonomous agents, government oversight, enormous infrastructure spending, investor expectations and the future business models of some of the world's most valuable technology companies. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for a slower pace of frontier AI development, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk have publicly supported the idea of pacing development more carefully. Reuters reported that Amodei's proposal focused on independent safety evaluators, coordination among leading AI companies and international cooperation. Why Are Musk, Altman and Amodei Talking About Slowing AI? The argument is not that artificial intelligence should stop. The concern is that the capabilities of frontier models may be advancing faster than the systems designed to test, monitor and control them. Amodei's September propos...

 The global risk picture is becoming increasingly interconnected. A new defense framework linking Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan is moving from announcement to implementation just as the Middle East remains unsettled, the West Bank faces worsening violence and displacement, and financial regulators warn that advanced artificial intelligence could create new vulnerabilities across the global economy. These developments are not parts of a single crisis, and there is no evidence that one directly caused another. Their significance lies instead in what they reveal about a changing international environment: governments are strengthening security partnerships, regional conflicts are putting pressure on established diplomatic arrangements, and rapidly advancing technology is creating economic and financial risks that traditional institutions are still trying to understand. For governments and businesses, the challenge is no longer simply responding to one geopolitical shock at a time...