Senior Director for Intelligence @scsp_ai · Founder, Conway Advisors · Former CIA SIS · Fault Lines on Substack · AI · IC Reform · Near East

Bethesda, MD
Joined January 2012
The IMF puts the Gulf in recession: The IMF’s Regional Economic Outlook, released in Dubai on 22 October, projects GCC output shrinking 4.8% in 2026, with Kuwait (-16.7%), Qatar (-15.6%) and Bahrain (-11.3%) hit hardest and Oman the only member growing, at 4.1%. The war has shown how much Gulf diversification still runs through one strait, and Oman’s outlier status is a return on ports that sit outside it. williamusher.substack.com/p/…
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This is the most serious 48 hours in cybersecurity history. "Black October" they're calling it It seems every *hour* there's a new incident, that in a typical year, would be one of the biggest incidents of the *entire year* SUMMARY OF THE LAST 48 HOURS: YEAR-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical year, these would be among the biggest incidents of the year): 1. PHP2Shell: a hole in the software behind ~70% of websites. Governments took sites offline. 2. eMudhra: the master keys that prove websites are real were cracked. One was the number 4. 3. California: data on every public school student since 2023 stolen, including disability status 4. Railway: hackers stole customers' secret keys from a hosting platform used by millions of developers 5. Zeabur: 321,810 accounts breached. The company is shutting down. 6. LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer 7. GitLab: a 10-out-of-10 severity hole in every version since 2014 8. Cairn: criminals used an AI hacking tool to break into 100+ companies 9. Ahold Delhaize: hackers knocked the owner of Food Lion and Stop & Shop offline 10. Onamae: malware planted on up to 26,739 customer servers in Japan MONTH-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical month, these would be among the biggest incidents): 11. Signal: a bug could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up 12. NGINX: 3 critical holes in software running ~1/3 of websites 13. HTTP/3: a single connection can crash 7 of the 10 web server types tested 14. Plex: hackers breaking into home media servers 15. SafePay ransomware: FBI warns it has hit 600+ critical infrastructure organizations 16. Palo Alto: ransomware gangs breaking in through company firewalls 17. Bullhorn: platform used by 10,000+ companies knocked offline 18. Medi-Cal: 970,000 patients' data stolen 19. WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker's keys and used them to plant backdoors on websites 20. AOMEI: backup software's update server handed out a backdoor 21. Meta Muse: Meta's AI agent exposed users' personal and business secrets 22. Tor: 333 relays hijacked to steal logins 23. TiDB Cloud: database company's cloud breached Also serious: 24. State Bank of India: India's biggest bank confirms a data breach 25. OVHcloud: hackers slipped a password stealer into a cloud company's official tool 26. Siemens: a software hole being used to spread malware 27. North Korea: state hackers launch a new attack campaign on South Korea
Guys I’m scared the takeoff is starting. I swear any one of the ~10 CVEs that dropped in the last 24 hours would’ve been “one of the worst in recent years” except a new one is dropping every hour
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A hidden recording device at OpenAI. A separate dispute over fired researchers. Drone strikes on Russian data centers. @Ylli_Bajraktari and former CIA official @ChipUsher examine why defending frontier AI now means protecting the people and infrastructure behind it, not just the models. Watch the President's Tech Brief every Tuesday & Thursday at 12pm ET!
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US strike plans add the MOAB as a container ship sinks off Hormuz williamusher.substack.com/p/…
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Noteworthy 👇
NEW Report: Significant Activity Identified at Minzadayi, an Iranian Nuclear Weapons Development Site High resolution @vantortech satellite imagery from September and October 2026 shows significant renewed activity at Minzadayi, a nuclear weapons development compound northeast of Tehran revealed by Israel during the 2026 war.  The compound was attacked by Israel on March 3rd, 2026, destroying several buildings and likely underground structures. The recent satellite imagery indicates a return to regular vehicle activity around the site post extensive cleanup operation that included the clearing of rubble and debris and repair of damage on the hillside.  One area attacked in March 2026 shows ongoing earth moving activity.  The earth moving activity is occurring at a surface made to look like a courtyard where multiple craters could be seen following the attacks on the site in March 2026. Significant vehicle presence can be seen throughout the site between early September and early October 2026. Cars are parked outside the security perimeter in the parking lot, and many passenger vehicles and trucks can be seen inside the perimeter.  Given what is known about this compound, this activity may be indicative of an effort by Iran to reestablish a nuclear weapons development capability and to reconstitute what was lost in the attack on the compound.   Based on public reporting and statements released by the IDF, the nuclear weapons work carried out here likely involved research and development on nuclear warheads.  The IDF originally stated, that a “group of nuclear scientists operated covertly to develop a key component in the nuclear weapons system,” adding that “the complex is designed to enable the restoration of the required technology and the advancement of capabilities for the development of nuclear weapons.” @IntelliTimes, released additional information on the compound.  In a post from September 24, 2026, it states that the nuclear weapons related infrastructure was established in 2022 and “absorbed part of the means from the nuclear warehouse,” a common reference to the Turquz Abad site revealed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2018.  Netanyahu revealed the site following Iran’s removal of more than a dozen shipping containers from the site that were assessed to hold nuclear material and equipment relevant to Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities.[4]  When the IAEA visited Turquz Abad in March 2019, it found evidence that nuclear material or contaminated equipment had been present at the site and the IAEA Board has since been pressing Iran to answer the IAEA’s questions about the current whereabouts of said material and/or equipment. @IntelliTimes indicates Iran did not simply move the material and/or equipment to a new long term storage site but used the new site in northeast Tehran, aka Minzadayi, to establish an”  industrial nuclear headquarters for the reconstruction of research, development, and adaptation infrastructure for nuclear warheads,” including the means to “produce cores of enriched uranium and the explosive material required to cast into them the detonation chain.”[5]  The current renewed effort underway at this highly secure compound suggests that the work being conducted here is of top priority. Read the report here: isis-online.org/isis-reports…
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Chip Usher retweeted
It’s true, we have been here before! But I think what it reveals is even more interesting. In Sverdlovsk, declassified docs demonstrate the US knew pretty much what happened immediately when USSR had a huge accident in an illegal anthrax production facility. US diplomats happily
Replying to @ashishkjha
We've been here before. In 1979, anthrax spores escaped a Soviet military facility in Sverdlovsk. At least 66 people died. It took years become public This was all in the old era -- before AI and biological engineering capabilities became widespread
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Iran’s Parliament Floats NPT Exit as Hormuz Closure Hits Day 217 The Strait of Hormuz enters its 217th day of near-total closure, with Iran rejecting any reopening absent seven conditions tied to the June Islamabad memorandum even as tanker strikes continued through the weekend — a six-week-old tanker hit by an unknown projectile on October 4. Tehran's parliament is now weighing withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while the Foreign Ministry says IAEA inspector access to damaged nuclear sites hasn't even been discussed by top leadership — undercutting a Bloomberg report, which Iran denies, that its foreign minister floated inspections for sanctions relief. Inside Iran, the rial hit a record low near 270,000 to the dollar and two protesters were executed within 48 hours. In Washington, CENTCOM's war-cost estimate rose to $45.1 billion with no funding mechanism yet approved by Congress. #IranWar #Faultlines Full briefing: williamusher.substack.com/p/…
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Chip Usher retweeted
Why Chinese and Western Analysts See China Differently On a regular basis, I probably review ten Chinese-language podcasts or pieces of writing on China for every two from Hong Kong and one in English. Over time, I have noticed a consistent difference among them. Hong Kong analysis often sits somewhere between the two, but broadly speaking there are two largely separate worlds of China watching: the Chinese-language world and the English-language world. desmondshum.substack.com/p/w…
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Saudi Arabia Weighs Ground War on Houthis as Tankers Burn Near Hormuz Saudi Arabia is weighing a ground offensive — potentially fielding more than 100,000 Yemeni troops under Saudi air cover — to retake the Bab el-Mandeb coastline the Houthis seized last month. Timing estimates range from within a week to after the US midterms. Meanwhile, unidentified projectiles struck two tankers near the Strait of Hormuz within hours of each other on October 2 — part of a pattern shipping-security trackers now count at six-plus attacks since September 28 — and the Pentagon confirmed the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group is Gulf-bound, which would put three carrier strike groups and roughly 20,000 US personnel in theater by late October. No direct Iran-Israel or Iran-US exchange was reported in the last 24 hours, but the secondary fronts are intensifying on every axis — Hormuz, the Red Sea, and now potentially a Saudi ground campaign. #IranWar #FaultLines Full briefing: williamusher.substack.com/p/…
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The Turing Test is cooked.
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test. 48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video. It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The 48% figure and "video Turing test" claim are from Tavus's own study of 54 one-minute calls, not independently verified or using a standard protocol. Griffin-Lite leads NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark on their public leaderboard. cellcog.ai/blog/tavus-gri… research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/proj… tech-ish.com/2026/10/02/tav…
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Chip Usher retweeted
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test. 48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video. It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The 48% figure and "video Turing test" claim are from Tavus's own study of 54 one-minute calls, not independently verified or using a standard protocol. Griffin-Lite leads NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark on their public leaderboard. cellcog.ai/blog/tavus-gri… research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/proj… tech-ish.com/2026/10/02/tav…
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Chip Usher retweeted
I wrote about the systemic failure by the world's most valuable company and powerful government to stop smuggling of AI chips to China US officials say Nvidia is missing obvious signs. Nvidia says "companies honor US laws as they are, not as America’s critics wish they were" 1/
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The AI Exponential — Week of October 2, 2026 This week in AI: AMD agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li's spatial-intelligence startup World Labs for $8.2 billion in an all-stock deal, its most direct move yet to compete with Nvidia beyond chips and into AI research talent itself. OpenAI's DevDay introduced persistent "dots" agents and a cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol; Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5.5 as a faster, cheaper sibling to Opus 5.5. In Washington, Executive Order 14434 directed federal agencies to replace "Artificial Intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" in official communications, while California enacted an 11-bill AI package anchored by the "No Robo Bosses Act," requiring human corroboration before AI-driven terminations. DeepSeek open-sourced Huawei-compatible chip tools aimed at Nvidia's CUDA moat, the same week Reuters documented deceptive behavior in Chinese AI agents. #AIExponential Full briefing:aiexponential.substack.com/p…
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The Pentagon ordered the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and up to 10,000 additional troops toward the Middle East overnight, as President Trump told Time a renewed bombing campaign against Iran is "possible" after the November 3 midterms — while Reuters reports Iranian officials are weighing a harder, more geographically expansive retaliation doctrine if struck again. A tanker was hit by an unidentified projectile in the Strait of Hormuz Thursday, the fifth such incident in roughly four days, holding the regional maritime threat level at its highest point. Treasury also unveiled a sweeping new sanctions wave on Iran's auto and rail sectors and a Russia-linked shadow-banking network accused of moving $17B+ for Iranian oil and weapons payments. #IranWar #FaultLines Full briefing: williamusher.substack.com/p/…
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How do the world's biggest AI strategies stack up? 🌍 Explore, compare, and stress-test the national AI action plans of the U.S., China, EU, UK, India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Japan in SCSP's new interactive dashboard. scsp.ai/the-global-ai-policy…
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The AI Exponential — Week of September 25, 2026 The biggest AI story this week was price, not capability. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna ninety minutes apart on September 22. Anthropic says Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5; OpenAI priced Sol and Luna at half the 5.6 series. The benchmark claims are the vendors' own. The price cuts are real, and they go straight at the cost advantage Chinese open-weight labs have used to win developers, in a week when Xiaomi's new open model took the top spot on one independent open-weights index. Also in this issue: the Trump-Xi summit opened a US-China AI incident channel and extended the trade truce, but chip controls stayed off the table; the labs' pledge to pace the frontier drew an antitrust suit and a California kill-switch order; and GenAI.mil passed 2 million users in a week as CNN reported a chatbot-written intelligence report nearly triggered a US boarding of a Chinese ship. #AI aiexponential.substack.com/p…
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Iran War Daily — September 23, 2026 · Day 208 US and Iranian negotiators held three hours of talks at the UN, their first in weeks. Tehran's price for reopening Hormuz: end the US blockade and free its assets. Trump says a deal comes "right after the election." US ban on Iranian airlines now in force. Read the full briefing on Fault Lines. #IranWar‌ williamusher.substack.com/p/…
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Near East Weekly Update — September 21, 2026 Washington’s clearance of a $24.3 billion Saudi F-35 sale would make Riyadh the first Arab F-35 operator and test whether deeper Gulf defense ties can coexist with concerns over Chinese technology exposure. #FaultLines Read the full Near East Weekly Update: williamusher.substack.com/p/…
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