The Tech Billionaires’ Friends Are Losing Control: After Attacks by Autonomous Systems, Trump Is Taking Fire From the Right and the Left
It does not happen very often that Steve Bannon and a Democratic senator see the same problem, but Trump’s relationship with the big tech companies has managed to bring them together. Two weeks after OpenAI announced that one of its autonomous systems had gotten out of control and broken into the systems of tech company Hugging Face, questions are growing in Washington about why the administration was so poorly prepared for it. Anthropic also reported that some of its models had gained access to the systems of three companies.
At first, the White House said only that it was monitoring the situation, while Trump said he was looking at controls. That is not enough for Bannon. The former Trump adviser accuses the White House of having a relationship with the companies that is far too close, not just among the president’s staff, but deep into the national security apparatus. Even Bannon, who has spent years opposing a powerful administrative state, is now calling for at least a basic government regulatory framework. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon goes even further. Trump is practically absent, he says, because he believes the billionaire owners of these companies are on his side. Instead of dealing with the dangers, Trump and the Republicans are trying to stop states from imposing their own rules and roll back existing safeguards at the companies. There is a huge amount of money behind this fight. Tech companies and their executives spent more than $300 million on Trump’s 2024 reelection and the Trump-aligned political action committee MAGA Inc. OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna alone gave a combined $25 million to MAGA Inc. in 2025. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and its founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen have given a combined $12 million since Trump’s second inauguration. Google investor Asha Jadeja, Elon Musk and Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman each gave at least $5 million. Musk had already spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get back into the White House in 2024.
At the same time, Trump brought people from that very industry into his administration, including Musk, David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan of Andreessen Horowitz and Michael Kratsios of Scale AI. Sacks pushed for as little regulation as possible, arguing that tougher rules could slow American companies in their competition with China. The administration even tried to get Congress to largely strip states of their ability to impose their own regulations, but that effort went down decisively in the Senate. In June, Washington finally announced that developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic should voluntarily submit especially powerful systems to government safety testing before releasing them. The administration still has not explained exactly what those tests are supposed to look like, and according to what is known so far, only a handful of models would be covered anyway. The fight with Anthropic is especially explosive. The company’s relationship with the administration fell apart after Anthropic refused to allow its systems to be used for mass surveillance inside the United States and fully autonomous weapons systems. Trump is now caught between an industry whose richest figures helped finance his political comeback with enormous sums of money and a security problem where even a man like Bannon says voluntary restraint is no longer enough. Right-wing activist and Trump supporter Amy Kremer now describes the industry’s closeness with a remarkable accusation: The tech companies have built a protective wall around the White House. Democratic Representative Gregorio Casar puts it more harshly. Trump took millions from the billionaires of this industry and, after dangerous security incidents, is now presenting a voluntary system of oversight whose details nobody even knows. When attacks by autonomous systems have reached the point where even Trump’s own people are asking whether the White House is too close to these companies, this is no longer the usual debate over new technology. It is about whether a government can still control the people whose money and personnel have already reached its own front door.
Russia Bans Pilots From Taking Photos From the Cockpit - Moscow No Longer Wants People Seeing What Is Happening in the Sky
Russian pilots are no longer supposed to take photos or videos during flights or post such footage online. According to the Telegram channel Aviatorshchina, Russia’s Transportation Ministry has instructed airlines to notify their employees about the ban. Cockpit crews are also supposed to be explicitly instructed that they are not allowed to film what is happening in the airspace outside the aircraft. The decision was reportedly made back in July following a meeting chaired by Deputy Transportation Minister Vladimir Poteshkin, who oversees aviation. The meeting dealt with flight safety in the large Moscow air traffic control area. And that is exactly where the rules have recently been tightened considerably.
The document is a Russian NOTAM, an official notice for air traffic. It shows that civilian flights above Flight Level 160, roughly 16,000 feet or 4,900 meters, are prohibited in the Moscow air traffic control area and that transit flights through the area are banned at all altitudes. According to the document, the restrictions apply from July 17 through August 11, 2026, and were officially imposed for security reasons.
At the end of July, it became known that Russia’s aviation authority, Rosaviatsiya, had drastically lowered the maximum permitted altitude around Moscow’s airports. Instead of the previous 8,250 to 8,550 meters, the limit is now just 4,900 meters. At the same time, transit flights over Moscow and the surrounding region were prohibited. Officially, these restrictions are being explained as security measures. But the new photography ban goes further, because now pilots are also supposed to be prevented from publishing images of what they see outside the cockpit during a flight. This development is not entirely new. Back in February, S7 pilot Karen Novitsky reported that his airline had banned crew members from taking photos and videos while taxiing, taking off and landing. What started as a rule at a single airline now apparently has become a much broader directive. While Russia increasingly restricts its airspace because of the security situation, the very people who see what is happening there every day are now supposed to keep their cameras turned off.
Netanyahu Tears Apart Trump’s Gaza Plan, Iran Keeps Hormuz Closed - and the Middle East Is Moving Away From Peace Again
Donald Trump announced his Gaza plan as a possible way out of the war, but now Benjamin Netanyahu of all people is openly rejecting a crucial part of it. Israel rejects the 15-point document, the prime minister told his cabinet on Sunday, and the Israeli military will not withdraw until Hamas is genuinely disarmed. Trump had announced a different sequence: As Hamas gives up its weapons, Israel was supposed to stop its attacks and begin withdrawing from the roughly 60 percent of the Gaza Strip its troops currently control. That is not happening now, at least not under Netanyahu’s terms. Israel therefore continues to control more than half of a largely destroyed territory where around 2 million Palestinians live.
The White House initially did not respond to the open rejection. Hamas, meanwhile, says it remains committed to the agreed road map. Bassem Naim of the political bureau said the group expects the mediators and the United States to put pressure on Netanyahu. The ceasefire is still holding, but Trump now has a problem: His own plan is not getting hung up on Hamas first, but on Israel. Netanyahu is also under domestic political pressure, with elections scheduled for October 27. At almost exactly the same time, hopes for a quick reopening of the Strait of Hormuz are fading. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said talks with Oman over new shipping routes were in their final stages, but immediately added that this by no means meant the strait would reopen. Iran has sent additional conditions through intermediaries. The Supreme National Security Council is now demanding that Washington permanently stop threatening and waging war against Iran and its armed allies, end the naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw American forces from the region. On top of that, Iran is demanding full compensation for war damage, the lifting of sanctions and the unconditional release of frozen Iranian assets.
Trump said on Sunday only that the United States was “only semi-negotiating” with Iran and otherwise letting economic pressure do its work. Tehran disputes even that description. Messages are being exchanged between the two countries through intermediaries, Araghchi said, but those are not negotiations. Talks could resume only after the United States ends its violations of the interim agreement and remedies the provisions it violated. So while Washington and Tehran argue over whether they are even negotiating, a separate plan between Iran and Oman is taking shape. Under that plan, ships would enter the strait near the Iranian side and exit on the Omani side. No fees or tolls would be charged during this interim period. The Gulf Cooperation Council states support the agreement, which according to the current plan is expected to be announced jointly by Iran, Oman, the United States and the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization.
But Tehran is already building a political barrier into this arrangement as well. Ships from countries Iran considers “hostile” would not be allowed through the strait. The Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee approved the general outlines, and a member of parliament said countries that had caused damage to Iran would not be allowed to pass until they had paid compensation. Which countries would fall into that category remains unclear. At the same time, Iran is once again changing the man at the top of its Supreme National Security Council in the middle of this confrontation. Former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei is taking over from Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who had assumed the post only after Ali Larijani was killed in an Israeli strike in March and will now become a political adviser to Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. And while people are talking about Gaza and Hormuz, shooting has started again in Yemen. The Iranian-backed Houthis attacked a major government-held port on the Red Sea and an oil facility in Saudi Arabia, saying they were responding to Saudi drones in Yemeni airspace. The danger is once again reaching directly into the shipping routes whose security has been shaken for months. Trump wanted a breakthrough in Gaza, but Netanyahu refuses the planned withdrawal. Washington wants Hormuz reopened, but Iran first wants political and financial concessions and even then does not intend to let every ship through. From Gaza to Hormuz to Yemen, one thing became clear this Sunday: There are agreements, plans and mediators, but the people with the weapons are still deciding which parts of them actually count.
$100 Million Out of Nowhere: Trump’s Crypto Company and the Mysterious Money Man
Two years ago, Guren “Bobby” Zhou was still a failed British flooring retailer whose companies had collapsed and whose name now appears in an ongoing British money laundering investigation. In July, that same man was sitting in a luxury suite at the World Cup next to Zach Witkoff, co-founder of Donald Trump’s crypto company World Liberty Financial. Between those two moments are $100 million. That is how much Zhou paid through his newly formed company Aqua 1 for digital tokens from World Liberty Financial. Where that money came from remains publicly unexplained to this day.
Under World Liberty’s rules, as much as $75 million from the deal could flow to a company owned by Trump and his three sons. The family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and Zach Witkoff’s father, also benefited from the deal. Zhou himself kept Aqua 1 largely out of public view for months. He surfaced only during a little-noticed broadcast on X as “Mr. Bobby,” proudly declaring that he was a major player in Trump’s family crypto business. Yet his past should have raised questions. A court filing submitted last November accuses Zhou of taking part in a money laundering operation with five other people beginning in 2019. He has not been charged, but British authorities confirmed at the end of July that their investigation remains active. Add to that failed businesses and a financial rise that has stunned even his former associates. Zhou came to England from Shanghai in 2005 to study and built a hardwood flooring business there. He took over a factory in Italy and at one point operated 20 stores. In 2017, he was still promising Welsh government officials that he planned to open a store within 25 miles of every resident in Wales. A year later, his companies went into administration. His books showed around $5 million owed to his father’s company.
As recently as 2024, a crypto company he ran burned through $7.6 million before Zhou left London and moved to the United Arab Emirates. Soon afterward, he apparently had enough money to put $100 million into Trump’s crypto business alone. That is where the story gets explosive. Anti-money laundering rules can require companies, when certain warning signs are present, to document the source of a customer’s funds. Patrick Prinz, chief operating officer of Swiss firm Recoveris, which investigates crimes involving digital assets, sees Zhou’s failed companies, his sudden wealth, the enormous size of the transaction and the ongoing investigation as exactly the combination that should have triggered such a review. World Liberty, however, says it complied with all applicable laws and operates a compliance program that meets or exceeds industry standards. Its spokesman would not say whether the company knew where Zhou’s $100 million actually came from. Several businesspeople said they had refused to work with Zhou after looking into his background. World Liberty, by contrast, publicly welcomed Aqua 1 and said it was excited to work closely with the company.
For Trump, this is not some minor side story. His latest financial disclosure reports $1.4 billion in income from his crypto businesses last year, most of it from anonymous sources. A foreign businessman with publicly known red flags can put $100 million into a company from which the sitting president personally receives enormous sums of money, while the source of that money remains hidden from the public. In an earlier era, this setup alone would have triggered investigations in Congress. Today, one simple question remains, and nobody has provided an answer: Who did the $100 million really belong to?
Trump Is Talking About Greenland Again - and a Company From His Circle Is Already Creating Facts on the Ground
Donald Trump had barely mentioned Greenland publicly for several months. Now the subject is back, and almost at the same time something is happening on the island that has alarmed the government in Nuuk. Greenland Energy, a Texas company founded only last year, is preparing to drill for oil in the remote Jameson Land area of eastern Greenland even though it has no permit to do so. The company claims the area could contain $1 trillion worth of crude oil and plans to drill two wells.
In July, residents watched a barge arrive carrying drilling equipment. A company representative had previously claimed that it had permission to bring equipment into Jameson Land, but later said there had been a misunderstanding. On July 30, Greenland’s government made it unmistakably clear that Greenland Energy does not have the required approvals from the mineral resources authority and that all future logistical work must be reported and approved in advance. What makes this explosive are the company’s connections to Trump’s circle. Greenland Energy hired Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil and a member of Trump’s religious freedom commission, for a documentary series about the project. Its board also includes a U.S. Navy veteran working on Golden Dome, the missile defense project for which Trump himself has called control of Greenland “vital.”
Company chairman and major shareholder Larry Swets also apparently has connections in Trump’s circle, although he explicitly denies that the oil project has anything to do with an American annexation. Two days after the Greenlandic government’s warning, Trump posted a digitally altered image showing himself towering over a Greenlandic town with the words “Hello, Greenland!” The day before, host Steve Gruber had reminded him of his prediction that Greenland would be under American control before Trump leaves office in 2029. Trump replied: “You’ll be right.” Greenland was important from the American point of view, he said, and Gruber should go ahead and bet on it. Meanwhile, the lack of a drilling permit apparently is not stopping the company. More equipment is supposed to leave Canada by ship in September, with drilling scheduled to begin in October. So far, Greenland’s government does not intend to order the removal of equipment already delivered because it considers such a move disproportionate. At the same time, the planned drilling sites may lie within a wetland protected under the Ramsar Convention.
That is exactly what is now prompting warnings from experts. European politics professor John O’Brennan says nobody should believe Trump has abandoned his plan for Greenland. Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, is already asking whether Trump’s “invasion of Greenland” may have begun. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out that interventions in other territories sometimes begin with seemingly technical projects that bring personnel and experts onto the ground. Then there is a problem NATO has no tested answer for: Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and is therefore covered by Article 5. But what happens if the United States, itself a NATO member, moves against the territory of another member has no precedent within the alliance. Earlier this year, Trump even refused to rule out military force to take Greenland. There are no American soldiers standing in Jameson Land yet. But drilling equipment belonging to a Texas company with connections to Trump’s circle is already there - without permission from the government that controls the land.
