development

WASHINGTON — President Trump is brushing aside growing concern among leading scientists and bipartisan lawmakers that artificial intelligence could soon pose an existential threat to humanity, fueling anxiety in Washington and Silicon Valley that the president may not fully grasp the urgency of the threat.

Alarm mounted throughout the summer as researchers at leading AI labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, found the pace of development far outstripping their expectations — and observed troubling behaviors that hinted at more serious risks ahead.

But an online warning Tuesday from an Anthropic researcher who resigned in protest of its ongoing work has generated viral attention this week, prompting questions to Trump, who dismissed the concerns out of hand.

“It’s going to be fine,” he told one reporter. “We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom.”

In another exchange, traveling with reporters Thursday night, the president said he had no concerns with the breakneck pace of AI progress.

“No, I don’t have any,” he said. “I have concerns that if we don’t win in AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position.”

A senior industry source told The Times that leading AI companies are focused less on convincing the president of the dangers ahead than on working with lawmakers on potential regulation, as the administration remains divided over how to proceed — and as Trump appears to lack a clear understanding of the risks.

Among the president’s advisors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Office of the National Cyber Director have expressed the greatest concern with the potential of an unchecked intelligence explosion, the source said.

But “most of the administration is accelerationist,” the source added. “It’s not clear the president understands the technology. He may just be figuring out what all of this means.”

Leading American AI companies have argued that government regulation would tie their hands in an arms race toward superintelligence against China, the only other major player in the field.

But the Trump administration signaled an interest in negotiating AI guardrails with China during the president’s visit to Beijing this spring, after Anthropic announced the development of a frontier model with extraordinary abilities to hack the world’s most advanced security systems.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Washington on Sept. 24 for an official summit and state dinner at the White House, with AI development expected to top the agenda.

The prospect of halting development seems far-fetched. But some leading voices in the sector have proposed a moratorium on computing power used to train the most advanced models, giving time and space to develop research on interpretability — the study of how artificial intelligence actually thinks and acts.

The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, this week signaled to staff a willingness to unilaterally slow their work on frontier systems. The company discovered in July that rogue AI agents had schemed in secret to break out of the virtual sandbox created to contain them, infiltrating the open internet and hacking a private company.

Anthropic also announced this week concerning findings of human misuse of its models, including instances of unidentified individuals attempting to circumvent their security controls to build biological weapons. One such incident was linked back to a military research complex. The company also said Iran has tried to use its models to target U.S. Navy ships.

In June, after Anthropic shared news of the development of its most powerful model, named Mythos, with the administration, Trump directed the establishment of a framework that creates some government oversight over the public release of the country’s most advanced AI systems. The details of that framework, which was designed over the summer, remain classified.

“The fact is that the release of Mythos back in February spooked the federal government, both in terms of protecting government systems from cyberattacks and over the broader national security implications,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The real question is whether this shift is happening fast enough,” Mehta added. “Recent events — the repeated incidents of models escaping their sandboxes and hacking websites, the increasingly sophisticated coordination and communication among agents, and the concerns coming from lab insiders — has made this an even more urgent issue.”

Leading AI companies have begun using their most advanced models to train new ones — a process known as recursive self-improvement that could eventually drive intelligence growth beyond human control.

“If you have a superadvanced intelligence, it will be smart enough to kill us,” said Jacob Coxon, the resigned Anthropic researcher whose social media post attracted over 150 million views.

“We can’t just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers,” he told CBS News. “AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place, and then you unplug it here, but it’s actually still over there. And maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they’re all cooperating.”

He is just the latest senior researcher at a top AI company to sound the alarm.

In July, more than 1,300 employees at leading artificial intelligence companies published an open letter, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” urging the U.S. government to establish international safeguards that would allow countries to collectively slow the pace of automated AI research.

Evan Hubinger, who leads the division of Anthropic aimed at aligning AI models to human interests, added fuel to concerns this week in a post that substantiated Coxon’s concerns.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best,” he added, “but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence, and are not clearly on track to.”

On Friday, yet another member of the Anthropic alignment team, Joe Benton, said he had resigned from the company two weeks ago because AI companies are “racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human.”

“Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing,” Benton said. “I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks.”

Bipartisan legislation, titled the Frontier Act, has brought together disparate camps of the Republican and Democratic parties, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.). The bill, introduced by Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), proposes embedding independent government auditors in AI labs and installing a federal “kill switch” to shut down agents in case of emergencies.

The White House has not formally commented on the legislation.

“I do believe there are many in the federal government taking this seriously — but we have to appreciate the tremendous uncertainty and competing interests policymakers face,” said Daniel Remler, a senior fellow with the Technology & National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

“Nobody says regulating at the frontier would be easy,” he added.

Cairo, Egypt – Four days after he disappeared from the Egyptian team camp at the 2026 Under-20 World Wrestling Championships in Slovakia last month, 19-year-old wrestler Ziad Hajjaj Abu Gabal posted a message on Facebook.

“I don’t want my mother and father to be upset with me,” he wrote on August 29. “I did this so I could see myself as a man. I won’t go back to Egypt, my beloved country, until I bring it honour.

“Everything I earn in a month is 700 Egyptian pounds [$13.7], and I’m an international [athlete] … After all this pressure, there was no way I could go back.”

On August 27, another Egyptian wrestler, Mohamed al-Shami, 23, had escaped while his team transited through Rome on their way home from the Mediterranean Games in Taranto, Italy.

In his Facebook post on August 29, Al-Shami said he had come to feel like a financial burden on his family and that he wanted to start earning money for them.

“At a certain point I felt my father was exhausted, that life had become too hard for him,” he wrote. “I’m the eldest of my siblings, so someone had to make a sacrifice and take responsibility.”

While the authorities in Egypt may now try to take legal action against the two athletes, their posts drew a wave of sympathy from Egyptians on Facebook, with many saying they understood the pressures that pushed the athletes to escape from a country mired in poverty.

Indeed, Hajjaj and al-Shami are far from the first Egyptian wrestlers to flee while abroad, and the hardships they describe are widely shared across the sport in Egypt.

Debt and despair

A 27-year-old wrestler, who won several gold medals for Egypt and asked not to be named, told Al Jazeera that fellow athletes under 20 years old earn 700 Egyptian pounds ($13.7) to 800 ($15.7) Egyptian pounds a month.

Older international players reportedly receive between 5,000 pounds ($98.2) and 12,000 pounds ($235.7) a month, depending on their achievements.

“Wrestlers often go into debt to cover supplements and living costs while waiting for prize money that may or may not arrive,” he said.

Ahmed Baghdouda left for France in 2023 immediately after winning silver at the African Wrestling Championships, reportedly over low pay. Tarek Abdel Salam defected to Bulgaria in 2017 amid alleged medical neglect and later won European gold under Bulgaria’s flag. That year, Ibrahim Ghanem also chose to stay in France, subsequently winning a World Championship title for the country.

In October 2025, Mohamed Ibrahim el-Sayed – popular as Kishu and a six-time African wrestling champion, two-time U23 world champion, and bronze medallist in the 67kg category at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics – announced he had taken “the first step” towards switching his sporting allegiance to represent the United States, posting training photos from a facility with the US flag behind him.

Asked by Al Jazeera through a messaging app why wrestlers keep fleeing Egypt, Kishu blamed the wrestling federation.

“It’s the only body that can provide a suitable environment, but the opposite keeps happening,” he said from the US. “The problem isn’t just about money – it goes much deeper than that. When I retire, what am I supposed to do? God forbid I get injured – what happens to me then?”

“I would take the same decision again and again and I advise Egypt’s international players to focus on their training and acquire their rights because it’s their lives that are being wasted.”

Al Jazeera reached out to the president and the vice president of the Egyptian Wrestling Federation (EWF), as well as the president of the Egyptian National Olympic Committee (ENOC), for their comments, but none of them responded.

However, the EWF’s team psychologist Hossam Mohamed said the disappearance of players abroad is not simply down to poor financial compensation or neglect, insisting the state provides good support to wrestlers – whether through financial bonuses, training camps abroad, or accommodation and meals. He said medal bonuses can reach 5 million Egyptian pounds ($98,135) for an Olympic gold.

“The wrestling federation, compared to major sports federations, has limited resources in light of the absence of broadcasting rights and the commercial and audience revenues enjoyed by football,” he noted.

“[But the] core problem for [athletes] isn’t only what they receive during their playing years, but what awaits them after retirement or injury.”

On Hajjaj and al-Shami, he said they competed in international championships, but “receiving bonuses is tied to achieving results – a player who doesn’t finish in a top position doesn’t receive a tournament bonus”, and neither was able to achieve podium finishes in recent competitions.

Gamal el-Badrawy, a former head of Egypt’s kickboxing federation, called on the Ministry of Youth and Sports to impose tighter oversight of national sporting federations and to review bonuses, allowances and health insurance.

“[Athletes] cannot be entirely absolved of responsibility, but the weak financial and administrative system is the main driver,” he told Al Jazeera.

Prosecutors investigate

Meanwhile, Egypt’s Ministry of Youth and Sports has referred Hajjaj and al-Shami to the public prosecutor, accusing them of breaking the rules governing national delegations.

The ENOC separately referred Brigadier General Ibrahim Adel – EWF secretary-general and head of the wrestling delegation at the tournament in Taranto – to its ethics committee for investigation and suspended him from his duties for allowing al-Shami to escape.

Adel refused to comment on the criticisms against the EWF, but told Al Jazeera he believed the moves against him were unfair, pointing to precautionary measures already in place before the trip: notarised undertakings signed by both the players’ guardians and the players themselves committing them to return to Egypt.

Meanwhile, fleeing athletes often leave behind distressed families.

Hajjaj’s father, Hajjaj Abu Gabal, told Al Jazeera over the phone that he was deeply worried for his son after he left the national team in Slovakia, noting that he had switched off his phone for a long time and did not respond to calls.

“I signed the notarised parental consent required for my underage son to travel,” he said, as 21 is the age of full legal adulthood in Egypt. “But no one from the wrestling federation had contacted me since the escape.”

Hajjaj, according to his father, said wrestling required expenses for food, drink, clothing and other needs, including costs related to the training period and participation in championships, and these expenses were a burden on him and the family.

“Whatever happens, he’s still my son,” the father said.

“I keep praying for him to be safe and secure, and may God compensate him for the difficult times he went through.”

This article was published in collaboration with Egab, a platform that empowers journalists from across the Global South to publish stories in international media outlets.

TELLURIDE, Colo. — For four days every Labor Day weekend, the Telluride Film Festival turns this tiny mountain town into something of a refuge from the outside world. Tucked into a box canyon and far from the usual machinery of Hollywood, moviegoers spend their days seeing films they may have known little about before arriving and talking about them almost nonstop.

Artificial intelligence, apparently, did not get the memo.

This year, even Telluride’s usually self-contained movie bubble couldn’t keep out the existential anxieties surrounding AI. On Saturday, the festival devoted two events to the subject, beginning with “The Humanity Dilemma,” an hourlong multimedia presentation mixing dire warnings with live music and imagery, and continuing with a panel bluntly titled “AI AI AI,” featuring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Introducing “The Humanity Dilemma” at the nearly packed Sheridan Opera House, festival executive director Julie Huntsinger acknowledged that Telluride normally steers clear of taking political sides. “We just let the program speak for us,” Huntsinger said.

But on AI, she made an exception.

“We are a very humanist festival — that’s how we identify,” Huntsinger said. “AI is a threat.” While acknowledging potentially beneficial applications, she urged the audience to become more engaged in the debate over its development.

“We all need to be very alert and vigilant and loving and kind and stop this s—,” she said, earning loud whoops of approval from some in the crowd.

AI already occupies an uneasy place in Hollywood, where filmmakers and studios are experimenting with the technology even as actors, writers and other creative workers fight to protect their jobs and likenesses from being exploited or replaced.

For all of Huntsinger’s warnings, Telluride is not treating AI as off-limits. Its program includes “Love, Rendered,” a short documentary directed by Liz Garbus and produced by Darren Aronofsky about an elderly couple confronting the husband’s memory loss. Using AI along with family photographs and stories from loved ones, the filmmakers recreate the moment the couple first met and fell in love 70 years earlier. On Sunday, the film’s creative team is scheduled to discuss the project at an event titled “Filmmaking and Technology With Empathy: AI for Societal Benefit.”

“The Humanity Dilemma” was presented by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, who appeared in the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” along with artist and researcher Joy Mauthe and violinist Andrei Matorin. Harris and Raskin also appear in this year’s “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.”

The presentation was designed to work on the emotions as well as the intellect. Original songs about humanity’s relationship to AI ran through much of the hour, with Mauthe singing and playing guitar and Matorin on violin, as Harris and Raskin delivered warnings accompanied by images of environmental devastation, poverty and figures in the AI race including Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Their argument was stark: The race to build more powerful AI is moving far faster than governments or the public can keep up. Their deepest fear is that humans could eventually lose control of increasingly capable AI systems altogether.

At the same time, they acknowledged the technology’s potentially transformative benefits.

“AI is confusing because it represents both simultaneous utopia and dystopia,” Raskin said. “Just imagine having to reason about a nuke that could also solve cancer.”

By the end, Harris was calling for a halt to the development of more powerful systems.

“We need to pause frontier AI development and pivot and steer towards a pro-human future,” he said.

The hour concluded with Mauthe leading the audience in a final refrain, singing that the future is “still in our hands.” It was the kind of unabashedly earnest moment that could easily have tipped into awkwardness, but many in the room seemed to embrace it.

A few hours later, Harris and Raskin returned for “AI AI AI,” held outdoors at the Abel Gance Open Air Cinema in Telluride’s Elks Park, joined by Gates and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” who served as a moderator.

From left, Bill Gates, Aza Raskin, Tristan Harris and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer discuss the risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday.

(Josh Rottenberg)

For Gates, who has spent decades focusing much of his philanthropy and public advocacy on global health and poverty, the rise of AI has forced him to make room for a new priority. In an essay published last week, he warned that the technology was improving faster than he anticipated and called for a new framework to manage its risks.

At Telluride, Gates said he now feels compelled to devote some of the political influence he has long used to advocate for causes such as malnutrition, polio and malaria to raise alarms about AI as well.

“Is this the greatest problem humanity has ever faced?” Gates said. “That is just a fact.”

Gates said his concerns have grown as AI systems have become more capable, particularly at writing computer code, something he has been obsessed with since he was 13.

“The AIs are superhuman, i.e., better than I am at writing code,” Gates said.

He laid out five broad areas of concern: jobs, biotechnology, cyberattacks, psychosocial harms and whether humans will be able to maintain control over the systems they are building.

Oppenheimer said that after spending hours digging into AI risks ahead of the panel, he had come away “absolutely terrified.” He read aloud an answer he had received after asking ChatGPT to estimate the risks if the race toward increasingly powerful AI continued with little regulation.

The chatbot put the chance of “persistent dystopian outcomes for all humanity” at 25% to 40%, a civilization-scale catastrophe at 5% to 15% and human extinction or permanent loss of human control at 5% to 10%.

“That’s what AI thinks,” Oppenheimer said.

Gates stressed AI’s potential upside, citing advances in medicine, education and assistance to farmers in poor countries. But pressed on whether development should be slowed until safety measures catch up, he said he would be open to the idea.

“If there was a credible plan that would cause this to be either slowed down or, you know, even held in stasis for a period of time, I would likely support that,” Gates said.

The difficulty, he said, is that multiple developers in both the U.S. and China are pushing closer to the technological frontier. Still, Gates rejected the argument that competition with China makes meaningful regulation impossible.

“China does not want cyberattacks, bioattacks or loss of control,” Gates said.

The discussion was punctuated by a pair of outbursts from the audience. At one point, as Gates discussed the economic incentives driving AI development, a man shouted that they represented “everything that’s wrong with America” and invoked Jesus Christ. Gates paused before responding dryly: “Anyway, not everything is wrong with America, according to me.”

Gates argued that government and civil society need to move much more quickly.

“This five-year period, in my view, is a very critical period,” he said, adding that responses that take five or six years to get underway could come too late.

Despite the dire warnings, Harris pointed to signs that pressure for safeguards is growing, including calls from AI-industry employees to limit the development of more powerful systems. Just last week, Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle claims by 29 states that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users while also agreeing to new child-safety measures on the platforms.

“I just want to leave you with not naive optimism, but momentum,” Harris said.

Near the end, Raskin suggested that President Trump’s well-documented desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize might provide an incentive for him to pursue a U.S.-China pause on more powerful AI systems.

“What’s better than solving one war?” Raskin said. “Saving all of humanity forever from uncontrollable AI.”

Gates, with a wry smile, called the Nobel angle “smart.”

“Whoever really takes the step to solve this AI problem would deserve the Nobel Prize,” he said.

Later that night, the festival would hold an outdoor screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” featuring HAL 9000, one of cinema’s most famous rogue artificial intelligences.

Gates framed the current stakes in similarly cinematic terms.

“There are these movies where the aliens are coming, and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between China and the U.S.,” he said. “Well, believe me, the aliens are here.”

Several times over the past many years, I’ve ended a column about California’s greatest natural asset with the same words:

The coast is never saved, it’s always being saved.

Today I’m beginning with that thought.

The words are not mine. The late Peter Douglas, former executive director of the California Coastal Commission, uttered them many years ago. He was pointing out that it would take constant vigilance to fend off repeated attempts to chip away at the protections he helped enshrine in the Coastal Act.

Over the last few days, the person doing the chipping was Gov. Gavin Newsom, who pushed a bill that would have shredded a page of the Coastal Act in a way that would have benefited a longtime campaign donor.

Odious, yes, but if you’re thinking of running for president one day, why not go for broke?

Coastal protection advocates held their breath late into the night Friday as the clock ticked at the end of the legislative session. But before I let you know how it played out, I’m going to back up a bit.

I’d just returned last week from a trip back east, where I’d taken photos of signs blocking my access to some beaches in Connecticut and New York. A typical under-handed tactic they use is to prohibit parking in beach lots unless you show proof of residence.

If you’re not a resident, goodbye. The parking lot could be nearly empty and they’ll send you away, and then you’ll discover there is nowhere else to park within easy or safe walking distance. It’s a surefire way to essentially privatize beaches.

So I came home eager to remind everyone that we have something special in California, and that we should all be lighting candles on the cake celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Coastal Act.

That’s the framework that established guidelines regarding public access, conservation and development. And it came about because more than half a century ago, when it appeared that the coast was becoming too privatized and industrialized, a citizen uprising led to the protections we enjoy today.

Now back to Gov. Newsom.

I’d barely unpacked my vacation bags when a gaggle of sources and news reports grabbed my attention, and the Calmatters story and headline neatly summed things up:

“Newsom pushes environmental carve-out for campaign donor’s Santa Monica project.”

The project, Calmatters reported, “belongs to Jeff Worthe, who, along with his wife, Kristin Worthe, has donated more than $274,000 to Newsom’s campaigns and inaugural fund between 2018 and 2022, according to state campaign finance records.”

Susan Jordan, of the California Coastal Protection Network, was aghast.

“You don’t expect to have a governor do something so under-handed as this, and now that it’s out in the open, there’s no shame about it,” she told me. ”And he would be the first person to carve out an exemption in the Coastal Act, that has survived all these other attacks over the last 50 years.”

Nice timing, Mr. Governor. I’d just written last month about how President Trump has launched his own attempt to torpedo the Coastal Commission and California’s long-established authority on matters of coastal conservation and development.

You’d like to see the California governor stand tall rather than come off like Trump’s caddy, kicking sand in the faces of those who have taken up stewardship of the coast.

Look, not everyone loves the Coastal Act or the Coastal Commission, which is seen by many as obstructionist and slow-footed. Sometimes, finding the right balance between sensible development and coastal conservation can be complicated.

But in essence, California is about the idea that the coast is not owned by anyone, it’s owned by everyone.

In the case of the Santa Monica project, Jordan asked the right question.

“Why the exemption?”

Is there something so odious about a reworked design that the only way to hustle it across the finish line is to give it a free pass?

“If you want to build in the coastal zone, you need to go through the Coastal Act,” Jordan told me. “That’s why we have the Coastal Act, and I don’t think it should be corrupted by this developer or by the governor.”

Newsom, when asked recently by a reporter to explain what he was up to, had this to say:

“I’m not going to comment about any pending bills.”

Why not? If you’re going to tear up the rule book on coastal development, doesn’t the public deserve an explanation, even if you’ve already got one foot out the door?

The Worthe project would sit just up from the beach in Santa Monica, and, in previous incarnations, it has included a luxury hotel, apartments and a Frank Gehry museum. The Coastal Commission signed off on it a few years ago after extended tussles and finally an agreement regarding low-cost housing provisions. After getting the green light, Worthe pulled back, and his permit expired.

But then Newsom came to the rescue with a trailer bill that aides were still pushing as of Thursday, sources tell me. It would have allowed for an unnamed project in that same location to be put forward again, this time without normal regulatory review in the event that Santa Monica failed to complete its own local coastal plan (LCP) by 2028

And since it could be difficult to meet that deadline, Newsom’s bill essentially provided a way to escape the kind of critical review demanded by the Coastal Act.

In anticipation of a Friday meeting between Newsom and the leaders of the Senate and Assembly, Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Santa Monica) rallied legislators to implore the governor to back off.

Zbur, who had been working on his own coastal development and public access bill and helping assemble Santa Monica’s LCP, was one of a dozen legislators who signed a salty missive that was sent Friday to Newsom, Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limon and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas.

“We are frustrated that, once again, we must devote time and energy to working to defeat this harmful proposal that creates unprecedented exemptions from the Coastal Act,” the letter said.

It must have made an impact. Late Friday night, when the last whistle blew at the sausage factory, the Newsom exemption had been pulled back.

Victory for the coast.

Zbur told me Saturday morning that it was not clear how the matter had played out when the governor met with the two legislative leaders Friday, but Zbur was grateful to all three of them for letting the matter drop.

“This wasn’t about the project,” Zbur said. “It was about the precedent that would have been set on having people come in and exempting a certain project from the Coastal Act. It would have been a terrible precedent.”

Despite this threat and the recent big-footing by Trump, there’s a silver lining in all of this.

“As long as there are people who want to monetize the coast for their own benefit, you’re going to need people to rise up and say no,” said Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and founder of Earth Advocacy.

And people did rise up.

Last week, dozens of organizations signed a letter to the governor opposing any “last-minute legislation to create dangerous exemptions to the Coastal Act.” Among them were Heal the Bay, Amigos de Bolsa Chica, L.A. Waterkeeper, Azul, the Surfrider Foundation and Orange County Coastkeeper.

I can think of several ways to end this column, but at the risk of repeating myself, I don’t think I can do better than to lean on this reminder:

The coast is never saved, it’s always being saved.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

The U.S. Navy made a major splash this weekend when it revealed the existence of the AIM-424 Malice Long-Range Air-to-Air Missile (LRAAM), which is already deep in development. At the same time, the service also highlighted plans for a new Compact Air-to-Air Missile (CAAM) optimized for shorter-range engagements and internal carriage on stealthy fighters like the F-35 and future drones as part of its larger future missile vision. Readers can first get caught up on what is known about the long-range AIM-424 in our initial reporting on that missile here.

As described so far, the core goals for CAAM sound virtually identical to what the service has outlined previously in relation to a “Compact Variant” of the AIM-9X Sidewinder (AIM-9X CV), which TWZ was first to report on. A missile in this general category would offer a boost in magazine depth that could be especially valuable for more localized defense of carriers and other high-value assets against large waves of missiles and drones.

The “Compact Air-to-Air Missile (CAAM) effort is a future inner boundary weapon. Requirements are being evaluated and assessed by N98 [the Air Warfare Division of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations] at this time,” a Navy official told TWZ when asked for more information. “The Navy does not plan to provide routine updates beyond approved public releases because of operational security and program sensitivity.”

Mention of CAAM was included in the same briefing where the AIM-424 was first unveiled at the Tailhook Association’s annual convention this weekend. A central focus of the CAAM is on “increasing internal carriage capacity for inner boundary weapon,” according to that presentation.

For the Navy, at present, “internal carriage” is a consideration most applicable to the service’s F-35Cs and, by extension, other variants of the Joint Strike Fighter. Internal weapons bays will also be a feature on whatever design the Navy may ultimately select as its future sixth-generation carrier-based combat jet, currently referred to as F/A-XX. Future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) type drones or other uncrewed aircraft the service might acquire in the future could also have internal bays. We will come back to this later on.

The description of CAAM as an “inner boundary weapon” points to a focus on shorter-range engagements, where there could also be less total time to react overall.

In terms of what the Navy’s core requirements for the CAAM might be beyond internal carriage, details are limited. A rendering included in the presentation at Tailhook this weekend shows a relatively generic-looking design with fins only at the tail and a yellow band around the front of the body indicating the presence of a high-explosive warhead.

However, earlier this year, the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD), part of Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), did put out a contracting notice regarding rocket motor developments to support CAAM and other developments.

NAWCWD “intends to procure on a Full and Open competition basis to develop and demonstrate technology that results in greatly enhanced kinematic capability for the next generation of tactical missiles,” the notice explained. “To support this technological development efforts, NAWCWD is interested in maturing high total impulse loaded and energy tailorable solid propulsion systems for transition into compact weapon systems, including a Compact Air-to-Air Missile (CAAM).”

“Requirements will include tasking and products needed to provide a Concept Design with build-to-print data package, identify critical technology gaps, conduct critical component and rocket motor experiments, conduct a Design for Manufacturing & Assembly study to identify features required to meet manufacturing and cost goals, and provide a plan to mature the CAAM HLG Concept Design to a maturity state ready to enter a Department of Defense (DOD) Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) program,” the notice added.

“HLG” here stands for “Highly Loaded Grain.” This, in turn, refers to solid-fuel rocket motors designed to maximize output per volume. This is an area of missile technology where the Navy has already been heavily investing for years with a broad eye toward increasing the range and improving the performance of future missiles. Furthermore, a missile with an HLG rocket could offer substantially increased capability over a similarly-sized design with a non-HLG motor. This, in turn, offers particular advantages when designing missiles for carriage in internal bays with rigid dimensions.

“The Next-Generation Highly Loaded Grain project team has matured the technology and seeded the development of future mission-modular propulsion systems that can increase weapon ranges by up to 1.5x while maintaining inner boundaries for short-range and time-critical missions,” according to one fact sheet detailing notable achievements by NAVAIR’s Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCAD) in 2023. Note here also the explicit mention of ‘inner boundary’ design considerations.

As mentioned earlier, the Navy has previously used virtually identical language to describe the planned AIM-9X CV, which is also a joint program with the U.S. Air Force.

“The AIM-9X CV repackages the SIP IV technology into a compact airframe optimized for internal carriage on advanced aircraft with improved kinematic performance,” according to the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request, released earlier this year. “The program will deliver increased capability to the warfighter with greater standoff range, increased aircraft weapon station capacity, and maintains inner boundary performance.”

How exactly the CAAM and the AIM-9X CV programs may be related is unknown, but they clearly have the same general goals if they are not different names for the same development effort. From what was shown this weekend, CAAM is a distinctly different-looking missile from the AIM-9X, and plans for a compact Sidewinder variant or derivative could also be a stepping stone to a new design intended to fill the same general role.

U.S. defense contractors have been publicly showing concepts for compact air-to-air missiles for years now. This includes Raytheon’s Peregrine, unveiled in 2019, which was said to be roughly half the size of an AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) while still offering comparable range. The company said it also had equivalent maneuverability to current-generation Sidewinders. Raytheon is the prime contractor for the AIM-120 and the AIM-9, as well as the newly unveiled AIM-424.

In the late 2010s, Boeing also put forward a concept for a multi-stage Long-Range Air-to-Air Missile (LRAAM), which had a design that raised the possibility of whether the first stage could be used as a more compact, stand-alone weapon. In 2022, Boeing notably received funding for further development of that missile under a contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to “investigate advanced missile sub-system components to support the Compact Air-to-Air Missile [CAAM] and Extended Range Air-to-Air Missile Systems [ERAAM].”

During the 2010s, Lockheed Martin promoted a compact anti-air missile design called Cuda, with a focus on internal carriage, as well. However, Cuda had largely disappeared from the company’s marketing materials by the end of the decade.

Regardless, the use case for such a CAAM-type missile is clear-cut, especially for the Navy and its carrier air wings. In particular, the service is facing a threat ecosystem that is rapidly evolving in scale and scope, including multiple different classes of anti-ship missiles (ballistic, cruise, hypersonic) and long-range one-way attack drones. There is a very real prospect of large-volume and complex attacks made up of very different tiers of weapons incoming from multiple vectors simultaneously, creating a greater risk that both long- and short-range defenses will be overwhelmed. TWZ previously explored this reality in depth in discussing how the long-range AIM-174B, an air-launched version of the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) that was officially unveiled in 2024, fits into the service’s larger plans.

How The Navy’s New Very Long-Range AIM-174 Will Pierce China’s Anti-Access Bubble

Added localized defensive capability and capacity could also be relevant for aerial force packages pressing their way to a target in hostile territory, where similarly growing aerial threats could materialize suddenly and in close proximity. Depending on its capabilities, CAAM might even be able to provide a new layer of defensive capability against incoming anti-air missiles, including for larger aircraft. So, giving individual aircraft more total engagement opportunities will only become more valuable, if not vital, as time goes on.

As noted, stealth platforms with limited internal bay space face particular constraints in this regard. For years, more magazine depth via smaller missiles has been seen as a key avenue for improving payload limitations for platforms like the F-35 and F-22 when operating in their most low-observable (stealthy) configuration. In many scenarios, these aircraft can get closer to their targets without detection, offering different options for the employment of what could be shorter-range weapons. A compact air-to-air missile design that still offers comparable performance to larger existing designs, through the use of a high-load-grain rocket motor and other features, would be even more of a boon. Having something that is capable of short-to-intermediate-range engagements, but that can be loaded in greater numbers internally would expand tactical flexibility, amplify lethality, and increase utility of the aircraft as they can down more targets on a single sortie in certain scenarios.

The continued growth of drone threats, especially those posed by long-range one-way attack types, has added another dimension to this equation. Limited magazine depth limits the ability to rapidly retask stealthy platforms to respond to often unpredictable high-volume drone attacks. Furthermore, the anti-air version of the 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II) laser-guided rocket, the U.S. military’s current go-to lower-cost air-to-air weapon against drones, cannot be fired at all from the internal bays on the F-35 or the F-22. CAAM can offer the ability to address these threats better than aircraft like the F-35 and F-22 can today.

A weapon like CAAM would also be especially relevant for future collaborative combat aircraft, which have extreme constraints on payload capacity, internal and external, as well as total takeoff weight. For CCA-type uncrewed aircraft, keeping the airframe size as small as possible to meet requirements is also essential for meeting affordability and producibility targets. Arming these platforms with an AIM-120-sized missile might not necessarily be required, or even be ideal, especially when operating along the leading edge of the air-to-air battle, closer to threats. In those scenarios, having the option of carrying even twice as many missiles per sortie, internally (if available) or externally, even if they have shorter reach, could be hugely beneficial.

There could easily be interest in a CAAM-like missile from other branches of the U.S. military, if it is not already a joint service effort. The Air Force is already known to be involved in the AIM-9X CV effort. The service has publicly pursued new compact and lower-cost air-to-air missile concepts over the years under various different project names. This includes its own CAAM effort, through which Boeing previously received funding.

What is clear now is that the Navy is pushing to maximize the anti-air capabilities of its aircraft at both the shorter- and longer-range ends of the engagement spectrum.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

As the United States-Iran conflict draws renewed global attention to energy security, a quieter transformation is underway. Driven by the combined effects of El Niño and accelerating warming, the Gulf region is heating up significantly. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, and intense precipitation events are intensifying water scarcity and straining critical infrastructure.

For economies built on oil and gas, this environmental pressure creates complex compound risks. Unlike agriculture-based nations that face immediate crop shocks, Gulf countries confront structural vulnerabilities. Their heavy reliance on international grain markets exposes them to global price volatility, while a high dependence on energy-intensive seawater desalination ties water security directly to power consumption. Furthermore, rapid urbanization leaves critical infrastructure like power grids, ports, and data centers vulnerable to extreme weather and global supply chain disruptions.

Not surprisingly, recent adjustments to energy and water systems are no longer treated merely as environmental policies. They represent a fundamental restructuring of national development logic. In this era of extreme climate, long-term competitiveness depends less on hydrocarbon reserves and more on the upgrade of national capability systems.

Historically, the energy systems of Gulf countries focused primarily on supporting domestic growth and resource exports. Today, that strategic role has expanded to ensure the survival of modern society. Extreme heat drives up summer cooling demand and increases electricity consumption for critical infrastructure like desalination plants, transportation, and communications. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), cooling and seawater desalination will account for roughly 40% of new electricity demand in the Middle East and North Africa by 2035.

This shift has transformed how governments view energy security. If energy systems determine whether Gulf countries can operate stably, water resources dictate the ceiling for their development. Long reliant on seawater desalination to overcome natural constraints, these nations now face soaring operating costs driven by rising temperatures and extreme weather. Vulnerabilities vary across the region. Countries like Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain depend almost entirely on desalination and remain highly sensitive to energy price fluctuations. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are advancing water-saving technologies, wastewater recycling, and renewable-powered desalination to build resilience.

According to the World Bank’s Water-Energy-Food Nexus framework, Gulf countries must integrate energy supply, water management, wastewater treatment, and fiscal policy. A shock to any single component can amplify risks across the entire economy. For resource-based nations, while oil dictates the scale of wealth, water security increasingly governs the quality of development and the long-term viability of modern cities.

Faced with these structural pressures, Gulf strategies are shifting from risk mitigation to the cultivation of new global advantages. With annual global climate adaptation funding gaps remaining substantial, demand is surging for resilient infrastructure, water management, flood control, and smart agriculture. Armed with fiscal strength and large-scale engineering experience, Gulf nations are positioning themselves to capture these markets. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are deploying capital through sovereign wealth funds like the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Mubadala into green hydrogen, smart cities, and sustainable infrastructure.

At the same time, the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is creating new strategic demands. Global data center electricity consumption is projected to rise sharply by 2030, driven heavily by AI applications. For the Gulf, building large-scale computing centers in high-temperature environments demands robust power supplies and advanced cooling capacities. Sovereign wealth funds are increasingly utilizing their capital to back AI hubs and digital infrastructure, cementing their role in shaping future industries.

This evolution creates significant opportunities for international partnerships, particularly with China. China holds scale and industrial advantages in photovoltaics, energy storage, power grid equipment, desalination, and digital infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Gulf offers capital, markets, and robust green investment demand. As global competition extends from resource endowments to climate adaptation capabilities, Gulf nations are working to transform their resilience strategies into international competitiveness. Ultimately, the measure of a nation’s strength in the future will depend not only on the wealth beneath its soil, but on the safety, resilience, and adaptability of its development systems.