An anonymous reader shares a CTech article with the caption: "A brilliantly executed operation." From the report: Years before the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israeli intelligence had been quietly mapping the daily rhythms of Tehran. According to reporting by the Financial Times (paywalled), nearly all of the Iranian capital's traffic cameras had been hacked years earlier, their footage encrypted and transmitted to Israeli servers. One camera angle near Pasteur Street, close to Khamenei's compound, allowed analysts to observe the routines of bodyguards and drivers: where they parked, when they arrived and whom they escorted. That data was fed into complex algorithms that built what intelligence officials call a "pattern of life," detailed profiles including addresses, work schedules and, crucially, which senior officials were being protected and transported. The surveillance stream was one of hundreds feeding Israel's intelligence system, which combines signals interception from Unit 8200, human assets recruited by the Mossad and large-scale data analysis by military intelligence.

When US and Israeli intelligence determined that Khamenei would attend a Saturday morning meeting at his compound, the opportunity was judged unusually favorable. Two people familiar with the operation told the FT that US intelligence provided confirmation from a human source that the meeting was proceeding as planned, a level of certainty required for a target of such magnitude. Israeli aircraft, reportedly airborne for hours, fired as many as 30 precision munitions. The strike was carried out in daylight, which the Israeli military said created tactical surprise despite heightened Iranian alertness. The Financial Times reports that the assassination was a political decision as much as a technological feat. Even during last year's 12-day war, when Israeli strikes killed more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and senior military officials and disabled air defences through cyber operations and drones, Israel did not attempt to kill Khamenei.

The capability to do so, however, had been built over decades. Former Mossad official Sima Shine told the FT that Israel's strategic focus on Iran dates back to a 2001 directive from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon instructing intelligence chief Meir Dagan to make the Islamic Republic the priority target. What distinguishes the latest operation, according to the FT, is the scale of automation. Target tracking that once required painstaking visual confirmation has increasingly been handled by algorithm-driven systems parsing billions of data points. One person familiar with the process described it as an "assembly line with a single product: targets." Further reading: America Used Anthropic's AI for Its Attack On Iran, One Day After Banning It

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After OpenAI announced a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. uninstalls of ChatGPT surged 295% in a single day. Meanwhile, rival Anthropic "gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store's Top Free Apps leaderboard," reports Engadget. TechCrunch reports: This data, which comes from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower, represents a sizable increase compared with ChatGPT's typical day-over-day uninstall rate of 9%, as measured over the past 30 days. [...] In addition, ChatGPT's download growth was impacted by the news of its DoD partnership, with its U.S. downloads dropping by 13% day-over-day on Saturday, shortly after the news of its deal went public. Those downloads continued to fall on Sunday, when they were down by 5% day-over-day. (Before the partnership was announced, the app's downloads had grown 14% day-over-day on Friday.)

[...] Consumers are also sharing their opinions about OpenAI's deal in the app's ratings, where 1-star reviews for ChatGPT surged 775% on Saturday, then grew 100% day-over-day on Sunday, Sensor Tower said. Five-star reviews declined during the same period, dropping by 50%. Other third-party data providers back up Sensor Tower's findings.

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The Supreme Court of the United States declined to review a case challenging the U.S. Copyright Office's stance that AI-generated works lack the required human authorship for copyright protection, leaving lower court rulings intact. The Verge reports: The Monday decision comes after Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri, appealed a court's decision to uphold a ruling that found AI-generated art can't be copyrighted. In 2019, the U.S. Copyright Office rejected Thaler's request to copyright an image, called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed the decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn't include "human authorship," disqualifying it from copyright protection.

After Thaler appealed the decision, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled in 2023 that "human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright." That ruling was later upheld in 2025 by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. As reported by Reuters, Thaler asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling in October 2025, arguing it "created a chilling effect on anyone else considering using AI creatively." The U.S. federal circuit court also determined that AI systems can't patent inventions because they aren't human, which the U.S. Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024 with new guidance. The UK Supreme Court made a similar determination.

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