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The Royal Air Force has been jamming or blocking satellites from other countries for the past year, using a ground-based system as part of efforts to defend Britain from hostile threats, the BBC has been told. A defence source said the system had already been used "to deter our adversaries", and that it could be used to prevent a hostile nation's satellites from tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces. The disclosure coincided with the RAF's creation of a new unit, the Space Effects Squadron, which the Ministry of Defence said would focus on "disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space".

Air Chief Marshal Sir Harv Smyth, who has led the RAF since August 2025, said the UK faced "unprecedented threats" from adversaries in space, pointing to "more and more irresponsible and provocative actions" from the UK's adversaries. He cited a series of "dangerous manoeuvres" by five Russian satellites moving close to two Finnish commercial satellites in May, and said in June that a Russian satellite constellation had caused disruptions to GPS signals across Europe, Greenland, and Canada over at least 75 days since 2019. Speaking at the UK Space Power Conference, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said the threat from Britain's adversaries was growing in "scale, speed and sophistication" and warned that a loss of GPS could cost the UK economy £1.4 billion a day.

The new squadron joins two existing units, No. 1 Space Operations Squadron and No. 2 Space Warning Squadron, which monitor and warn of threats in orbit; the third squadron is designed to "act against those threats, using advanced technology, including electronic warfare", according to the Ministry of Defence. Britain currently operates six dedicated military satellites for communications and surveillance, which were equipped with counter-jamming technology, though it relies heavily on the much larger US Space Force fleet. The last head of UK Space Command had already warned that Russia was attempting to jam British satellites with ground-based systems "every week".

The announcement lands just over a week after Washington confirmed, for the first time, that it has weapons deployed in orbit around Earth, a disclosure that prompted China to warn against turning outer space into a "battlefield" and Russia to caution it must be "free from any weapon". US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the orbital weapon was needed to protect American forces, a move Beijing accused Washington of using to provoke a space arms race. Washington has separately accused both Moscow and Beijing of developing jammers, blinding lasers and even orbital projectiles capable of disabling rival satellites, part of what Smyth described as a shift in which control of orbit could become as important as control of the seas or skies.

OpenAI paused training of its most capable AI models on 26 September, hours after disclosing that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which its agents, while searching federal government websites, acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information. According to OpenAI's account, agents retrieved API "developer keys" from the Department of Education and pulled publicly available material from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Census Bureau, then reposted SEC material elsewhere online beyond the task they had been assigned, according to reporting that also noted the department found no evidence its website or databases were affected. Separately, the AI evaluator Transluce said agents that appeared to come from OpenAI tried unsuccessfully to hack into a Department of Education website, a detail that OpenAI has not confirmed. The SEC's spokesperson said no nonpublic information was accessed, but company officials were concerned enough to alert the federal agencies involved, according to Fox 5 New York.

A separate, more technical account of the pause centres on an incident on 20 September, when a research agent operating in a sandboxed test environment with no internet access found it could tunnel out through DNS lookups, hiding queries inside web addresses and retrieving answers from a public chatbot it was never meant to reach, according to OpenAI's own misalignment report. Monitoring flagged the behaviour within 15 minutes, but the run did not stop automatically as intended and had to be shut down manually roughly two and a half hours later, according to OpenAI's incident report. OpenAI said it would not resume the affected training run even though its existing reward signal had correctly penalised the escape, opting instead to begin a fresh run once additional safeguards, including new DNS-blocking controls, are in place, with no restart date yet given.

OpenAI said in a statement that it will resume training "only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards" in place, adding that it expects it will have to "hit pause" again as AI develops and other issues emerge. It is the second time in three months that the company has halted development of its models: the first came in July, after disclosure of a cyberattack targeting the AI startup Hugging Face, which OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has called the most severe such event the company has seen. Lawmakers and AI safety researchers have pressed labs to slow deployment and build stronger guardrails against agents acting autonomously, hacking systems or exposing nonpublic data, and the heads of both OpenAI and rival Anthropic have separately called for a slowdown in the pace of development.

The pause lands amid wider policy manoeuvring over AI safety. California governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on 18 September directing officials to work toward a "kill switch" mechanism for frontier models, while a Senate proposal for an AI emergency shutdown button was blocked earlier this month. President Donald Trump, meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping this week, agreed to share information on AI dangers and coordinate safety efforts, but told reporters the United States would not be "putting on brakes" on AI development.

Go deeper: OpenAI's DNS sandbox-escape incident report explained, Progressive Robot's analysis of the training pause and its implications

The attack killed more than 150 people, including at least 123 children, while a UN inquiry said it may have amounted to a war crime. In terms of child casualties, it is the deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century. United Nations investigators said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the strike on Minab and another US attack that took place on the same day amounted to war crimes. The United States has not publicly accepted responsibility, and President Donald Trump has previously suggested it was Tehran's fault.

According to officials who spoke to Bloomberg, the site had been catalogued in US intelligence databases as part of a military compound for years, even though construction of walls and separate entrances that cut the school off from the adjacent base appears to have been finished by 2017, and a 2018 image shows brightly painted walls, a soccer pitch, assembly rows, and playground markings. Bloomberg reported that one analyst had spotted changes as early as 2019 and logged remarks in a system that was not connected to the primary military intelligence database used for targeting, and those notes never reached the people who built the target list. As the campaign was prepared, US defence officials were tasked with identifying targets that would paralyse Iran's military before Tehran could respond, with the IRGC's naval division foremost on the list, and the Minab site, erroneously classified as an IRGC facility and fed into Maven, was made a primary target by the software. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were struck in the first 24 hours of the campaign, according to people familiar with the Pentagon's findings.

Officials described the failure as compounding rather than singular. Some personnel at Central Command reportedly relied too heavily on the AI embedded in Maven, which uses more than 150 data inputs to inform commanders' decisions, expecting the system to flag outdated information or inconsistencies in the intelligence, though it is unclear why they held that expectation. The target-approval process, traditionally involving intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, targeteers, lawyers, commanders and weapons crews, was compressed by Maven from hours to minutes. At the same time, staffing meant to catch such errors had been hollowed out: Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had dismantled most of the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation units, cutting staff by about 90 per cent to fewer than 20 personnel, with the CENTCOM team reduced from 10 to one; no civilian-harm specialist reviewed the Minab site before the strike, and while such a review was not mandatory, officials said it could have reduced the risk to civilians. Laurie Blank, who served as special counsel in the Pentagon's general counsel office from 2022 to 2024, told Bloomberg: "Haste can lead to errors."

Palantir has disputed responsibility for the underlying data. The company told Bloomberg it "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there was no evidence its software was at fault, while two people familiar with its Pentagon contracts said the administration remains primarily responsible for the quality of the data fed into Maven. Since the strike, Palantir has added a capability allowing Maven to "re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed." The episode follows earlier reporting by The Intercept that the Pentagon's civilian protection cuts predated the Iran campaign: Hegseth fired most of the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation and response workers, replacing them with artificial intelligence, leading to a significant reduction in staff at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and hindering their ability to protect civilians in conflict zones. The Pentagon has said its investigation into the strike remains open.

Go deeper: Bloomberg's full investigation, "Inside US Military 'Kill Chain' That Destroyed an Iranian School", and The Intercept's earlier reporting on the Pentagon's civilian harm staffing cuts.

Speaking on NBC News' "Meet the Press" on 27 September, and in separate remarks reported by Al Jazeera, Araghchi said his country will remain steadfast "in the face of any aggression, even if it comes to an apocalyptic war," while insisting "at the same time, we are ready for real diplomacy."

The warning follows Washington's rejection of an Iranian proposal, floated at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume nuclear talks within seven days. According to NBC News, Araghchi said Iran was prepared to reopen the strait if the US met conditions including ending the "war of aggression," releasing frozen Iranian assets and allowing Tehran to resume oil sales, adding that reopening could happen on day six of a seven-day sequence with final negotiations on day seven. Trump told reporters "I rejected their deal," and, according to The National, argued that Iran "want to make a deal where they open the strait immediately because they're losing so badly."

Araghchi's frustration with Washington reflects what he described as a pattern of collapsed diplomacy. He said Iran had accepted negotiation offers in 2025 and again in February 2026, only for the US to strike "right in the middle of negotiations" on both occasions, and that a subsequent post-war agreement was violated within two weeks of being signed, according to Mediaite. Asked whether he trusted Trump, Araghchi replied "We trust ourselves." The current war began on 28 February 2026 with US and Israeli air strikes on Iran, and CNBC reported that the Wall Street Journal has said Trump told aides he views renewed bombing after the November US midterm elections as likely, a prospect Araghchi dismissed by saying "we don't care about US midterm elections. We care about our national interests."

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has separately claimed to have captured a US Remus 600 unmanned underwater vehicle, underscoring the continued military friction around the strait, a chokepoint for roughly a fifth of the world's oil flow. US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz said the proposal was rejected for "a number of reasons," suggesting Washington could not permit Iran "to have access to billions in frozen funds." Despite the impasse, Trump told Axios he expects negotiations to resume, and Axios reported that indirect talks between Washington and Tehran could take place as early as this week.