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Senior U.S. defense officials have held talks about producing weapons and other military supplies with top executives ​of companies including General Motors (GM.N), opens new tab and Ford Motor (F.N), opens new tab, the ‌Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions. The preliminary and wide-ranging talks, which started before the war in Iran, come as the Trump ​administration wants automakers and other American manufacturers to play a ​larger role in weapons production, the Journal said. Defense officials told ⁠the newspaper that American manufacturers might be needed to backstop ​traditional defense contractors and asked whether the...

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture. “The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission,...

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday denied Anthropic’s request to temporarily block the Department of Defense’s blacklisting of the artificial intelligence company as a lawsuit challenging that sanction plays out. The ruling comes after a judge in San Francisco federal court late last month, in a separate but related case, granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction that bars the Trump administration from enforcing a ban on the use of its Claude model. “In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government,” the appeals court said in its decision. “On one side is a relatively...

Israel announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Majid Khademi was killed in a precision strike, with an Israeli official noting that Quds Force’s special operations commander Asghar Bagheri was eliminated at the same time. In a statement posted on X, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed Khademi's killing, accusing him of helping advance terrorist attacks abroad and overseeing surveillance of Iranian civilians as part of the regime’s crackdown on domestic protests. "Khademi wasn’t just any figure, he was effectively No. 2 within the IRGC, one of the few senior commanders who managed to survive multiple...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s top aide Ricky Buria told colleagues last year that he and his boss donned disguises and went out drinking together — a juicy bit of gossip that’s widely believed to be a lie and recklessly planted to sniff out leakers, The Post has learned. Two sources said that Buria, 44, told them separately in early 2025 that he and Hegseth, 45, slipped past the secretary’s security detail while he was staying at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pentagon City. There’s no proof that the great escape actually happened, but the tale has reverberated within...

The following is a mostly complete set of Associated Press articles, news alerts, bulletins and flashes that ran on the morning of September 11, 2001 - BC-APNewsAlert,0018 NEW YORK -- Plane crashes into World Trade Center, according to television reports. (Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) (New York-AP) -- There's word of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York. (Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) AP-Plane Crash-World Trade Center URGENT, take 2 C-N-N quotes a witness as saying that it was a twin-engine plane that flew right into the trade...

The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, U.S. officials said, as thousands of American soldiers and Marines arrive in the Middle East for what could become a dangerous new phase of the war should President Donald Trump choose to escalate. Any potential ground operation would fall short of a full-scale invasion and could instead involve raids by a mixture of Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops, said the officials. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive military plans that have been in development for weeks. Discussions within the administration over the...

🇺🇸 A judge ordered the Pentagon to restore press credentials and stop screening journalists. The Pentagon's response: comply with the ruling, close the entire correspondents' corridor, and relocate media to an external annex that's still under construction. The court said you can't control who covers the military. The military said fine, but you're covering it from across the parking lot now. This is happening during the biggest U.S. military operation in two decades, when press access to the Pentagon matters more than at any point since Iraq. Source: @SeanParnellASW @BreannaMorello

“A federal judge has struck down some of the Defense Department's strict controls on how journalists with access to the Pentagon are allowed to report — ending a policy that caused many news outlets to leave the Pentagon. U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman sided with the New York Times and a reporter at the newspaper, Julian E. Barnes, who sued in December, arguing the new Pentagon policy violated the First Amendment, Fifth Amendment and due process provision of the Constitution.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s push to revive expired enhanced Obamacare tax credits by contrasting their cost with Pentagon spending is colliding with fresh scrutiny of the Affordable Care Act, as policy experts warn the program is riddled with improper enrollments, fraud vulnerabilities and rising taxpayer costs. "We need to reform the ACA, not throw more taxpayer money at it," Brian Blase, president of the health policy research group Paragon Health Institute, said. He added that "government subsidies don’t make the coverage more affordable. They make it more expensive overall because you have to consider the taxpayer amount." Blase spoke...

WASHINGTON, March 18 (Reuters) - The ​Pentagon has ‌asked the White House ​to ​approve a more ⁠than $200 ​billion request ​to the U.S. Congress to ​fund ​the war in ‌Iran, ⁠the Washington Post reported ​on ​Wednesday, ⁠citing a senior ​administration ​official.

Palantir is still using Anthropic’s Claude as the artificial intelligence startup’s clash with the Pentagon plays out, CEO Alex Karp told CNBC Thursday. “The Department of War is planning to phase out Anthropic; currently, it’s not phased out,” Karp told CNBC’s Seema Mody at Palantir’s AIPcon 9 in Maryland. “Our products are integrated with Anthropic, and in the future, it will probably be integrated with other large language models.” The Department of Defense officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk last week, but is still using Claude models to support the war in Iran, as CNBC previously reported. Anthropic sued the...

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The Pentagon has ordered a Marine expeditionary unit with about 2,200 Marines and three Navy amphibious warships from Japan toward the Middle East, a significant new U.S. force movement amid tensions tied to the war with Iran. U.S. officials told ABC News that the deployment centers on the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, a forward-deployed force based in Japan that normally operates in the Indo-Pacific. At the center of the movement is the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group, led by USS Tripoli, an America-class amphibious assault ship. USNI News reported that the Tripoli had been operating in the Philippine Sea earlier this...

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave a two-word retort after Anthropic leader Dario Amodei claimed in an interview that he isn’t sure if his company’s AI models have gained consciousness. "Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety," read a post on X by cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket, to which Musk replied, "He’s projecting." The comment from Musk, who is also the founder of xAI, comes as Anthropic is at odds with the Pentagon over its use in a separate matter. In an interview with The New...

Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker said Tuesday that lawmakers are considering whether the Pentagon may need additional funding as questions grow over U.S. munitions supplies and the strain of ongoing U.S. strikes on Iran. The cost of the operations are likely to surface at the Trump administration’s briefing later in the day for both chambers of Congress. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine are expected to brief lawmakers amid widespread Democratic opposition. “Well, we’re talking about that, and that will undoubtedly be discussed at...

A Democrat running for office in California has reportedly called to defund the Pentagon, but her husband works for a company that built missiles the United States is believed to have used during the recent strikes on the Islamic regime in Iran. Fatima Iqbal-Zubair is a candidate for the state’s 65th Assembly District and her husband, Fazlul Zubair, is an engineer manager for Raytheon, the New York Post reported Monday. The United States and Israel launched a joint military operation targeting Iran on Saturday in part to ensure the regime will never have the capability to threaten the world with...

Washington — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday that the Pentagon would be canceling troops' attendance at graduate programs at some of the nation's top universities, calling them "woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination." "Today, just like we did with Harvard, I am ordering the complete and immediate cancellation of all Department of War attendance at institutions like Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale and many others, starting next academic year, 2026-2027," Hegseth said in a video statement. "We cannot and will not continue to send our most capable officers, senior officers, into graduate programs that undermine the very values they...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon on Tuesday morning for what senior Defense officials made clear was anything but a courtesy call. The meeting represents a breaking point between the U.S. military and the AI company behind Claude — the only artificial intelligence model currently operating inside the military’s classified systems — over whether a private technology company gets to set the rules for how its tools are used in war. The core dispute is over what conditions Anthropic will place on military use of Claude. The company has sought formal assurances that its...

YORBA LINDA, California — Fifty yards from Richard Nixon’s grave, which sits not quite in the shadow of the modest home where he was born, a series of exhibits at his presidential library describe him as a psychologically unbalanced fool. The Nixon White House, museum display panels announce, was consumed by “a climate of deep suspicion.” The infamous Plumbers took action against “perceived political opponents within the Federal Government.” A video display allows visitors to choose clips on the theme of Nixon’s “Conspiracy Thinking.” Paranoid, the president mindlessly lashed out at enemies that he hallucinated. This is still the official...