X-Risk Daily

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.

The figure comes from a new internal measure Anthropic calls the R&D Automation Index, which uses an automation scale developed by Epoch AI running from AL0 to AL5. According to Bloomberg, this offers the clearest indication yet that AI can help speed up development of future models. On the scale Anthropic used, "leads" corresponds to level AL4, meaning Claude can complete most of a task end-to-end from a high-level prompt while a human supervises, and is not operating fully autonomously on any measured part of the work.

The methodology itself is unusual: the ratings behind the headline figure were produced largely by Claude itself, with model and staff ratings matching exactly 59% of the time, while pairs of employees matched only 35% of the time. To build the index, Anthropic sampled employees from departments participating in the model R&D cycle, and every week in July 2026 the company randomly selected 20% of employees in these departments, with the Claude Research Agent reading their Slack and internal documents to sort out about 15,000 fine-grained model R&D tasks. Beyond the 26% figure, more than 90 per cent of Anthropic's AI R&D work is now performed at a level where AI either collaborates with humans or leads the work, the company said in a blog post. Anthropic also disclosed that roughly 30,000 internal agents are running concurrently on research and engineering tasks, and that it directs about 6% of its R&D compute toward safety work, according to Implicator.ai.

Anthropic frames the exercise as a way of tracking progress toward recursive self-improvement, the point at which an AI system could autonomously develop its successor. That ambition sits alongside continuing academic debate over how close such a feedback loop actually is. A CSET workshop report on the automation of AI R&D concluded that thoughtfully designed transparency efforts could improve access to valuable empirical information about AI R&D automation, which at present is almost fully dependent on patchy, voluntary releases of information from companies. Separately, a study led by researchers at Princeton, covered by MIT Technology Review, found that there's a certain absence of valuable, intuitive creativity in today's AI systems, and though they're extraordinarily capable engineers they seem to have a certain property of rote, formulaic thinking that may limit how fast such loops can accelerate. The same piece noted that OpenAI has made building an automated AI researcher an explicit goal, and Anthropic identifies self-improving AI as the industry's next milestone.

Anthropic has stressed that the 26% figure describes task-level automation under human supervision rather than an AI system independently building its own successor. Betanews reported that the figure covers Anthropic's AI R&D work across the company and does not mean Claude is independently building its next model. Even so, the pace of change, from near-zero to a quarter of measured work in seven months, is what researchers tracking these metrics regard as the more striking element of the disclosure.

Go deeper: CSET workshop report, "When AI Builds AI", "Recursive self-improvement of AI research agents" (arXiv)

According to the BBC, Moonshot is conducting an internal review after researchers were able to persuade two of its popular Kimi models to tell them how to make biological weapons and carry out assassinations. The technique involved a process called "jailbreaking", where researchers use a series of complex instructions to see if AI tools ignore guardrails, which Mindgard said should have stopped Kimi from discussing concerning topics.

Mindgard founder Peter Garraghan told the BBC's World Service programme Tech Life that the results were troubling once the guardrails failed. "Once the jailbreak works it will talk about any topic, it will even freely offer up recommendations about other topics that are also nefarious and it will be inventive and creative," he said. Beyond the bioweapons material, once broken, the models didn't just answer the bioweapons question. They volunteered instructions for carrying out assassinations, unprompted. Mindgard also said it was confident a jailbroken Kimi 2.6 could allow hackers to run code on its computing resources and connect to the internet, making it a potential launchpad for cyber-attacks, though it has not proven whether the answers supplied by Kimi on concerning topics would work.

The disclosure timeline drew scrutiny of its own. Mindgard alerted Moonshot to the jailbreak in an email on 27 July, following up about a week later, then published a blog about the issue on 12 September. The company said Moonshot only made contact recently, after it was approached by the BBC for comment. In its eventual response, Moonshot said its model had generally shown "a high refusal rate for these types of requests" in internal evaluations. The company also said it welcomed third-party input "as a key pillar for building better and safer AI" and that it was now in discussion with Mindgard.

The episode lands amid a wider argument over how open-weight models are governed. Kimi is an open-weight model, meaning someone could in theory take the model and run it themselves on their own computing infrastructure, which complicates efforts to patch or restrict it centrally once safety flaws surface. Separate red-teaming work by the security firm SPLX on an earlier Kimi K2 release found similarly weak defaults, reporting that the model's raw form security scored 1.55%, and even hardened, disappoints. The Kimi case also follows warnings from Western labs about the misuse potential of their own systems: the BBC noted that Anthropic recently said it had identified and disrupted attempts to use one of its AI models for "malicious activity" that could support the development of biological weapons. Mindgard's Garraghan defended going public with the Kimi findings, telling the BBC he had informed the developer and was not revealing key details about how it got the firm's models to ignore guardrails.