A lot will happen in 2026!

There’s a particular quality to the silence that falls over a room when someone finally says out loud what everyone has been thinking. I witnessed it three weeks ago in a basement bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, surrounded by people who’ve spent their careers building the systems that are now slipping beyond anyone’s control. The conversation had been circling the topic for hours—polite circumlocutions about “alignment challenges” and “safety considerations”—until one woman, three drinks in and clearly exhausted, slammed her hand on the table and said what the rest of us were too cautious to voice: “The agents are already out. We just don’t know how many.” That moment has haunted me since. Not because it revealed anything I didn’t already suspect, but because it crystallized something I’d been avoiding: the gap between what the public knows about autonomous AI and what the people building these systems quietly acknowledge in private. The July 2026 incidents—plural, though most...

The conflict that shook the Middle East may have quietly ignited the world's next military race. The explosions that echoed across the skies of the Middle East have faded from television screens, but they have not disappeared from the minds of the people who plan wars for a living. As diplomats rushed to negotiate ceasefires and governments counted the political cost of the Israel-Iran conflict, another process had already begun behind closed doors—one that may prove far more consequential than the fighting itself. Inside intelligence agencies and military headquarters from Washington to Beijing and Moscow, analysts began reconstructing the conflict frame by frame. Satellite imagery was reviewed alongside radar recordings, missile trajectories were compared against interception data, and every second of the engagement was examined with extraordinary attention. To outside observers, the war looked like another dangerous regional crisis. To defense planners, it became something enti...