Latest / The President's Daily Brief / PDB Afternoon Bulletin | September 9th, 2026: U.S. Takes Out Eight Iranian Tankers & China Accused of AI Copying

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PDB Afternoon Bulletin | September 9th, 2026: U.S. Takes Out Eight Iranian Tankers & China Accused of AI Copying · The President's Daily Brief

0:12
It's Wednesday,
0:12
the 9th of September.
0:14
Welcome to the PDB
0:15
afternoon bulletin.
0:16
OK,
0:16
maybe the late afternoon bulletin today.
0:19
I'm Mike Baker,
0:20
your eyes and ears on the world stage.
0:22
Alright,
0:23
let's get briefed.
0:24
First up,
0:25
the US and Iran are escalating their attacks at sea,
0:28
with 8 Iranian tankers now destroyed or disabled since Saturday,
0:33
and civilian shipping increasingly getting caught in the middle.
0:36
Oil rose over $100 per barrel in response.
0:41
Later in the show,
0:42
US intelligence agencies accuse some of China's biggest AI companies
0:46
of systematically copying American models,
0:49
raising new concerns
0:51
about Beijing's race to close the technology gap.
0:54
But first,
0:55
today's afternoon spotlight.
0:57
The tanker war between the US and Iran exploded overnight.
1:00
That's,
1:00
that's wordplay right there.
1:02
The latest round began after Central Command said Iran twice
1:06
attempted to strike a US Navy warship with ballistic missiles
1:09
over the past two days.
1:11
The attacks failed,
1:12
according to the military,
1:13
and no American personnel were injured.
1:15
Washington responded by striking 5 Iranian oil tankers,
1:19
including 1 operating near Karg Island,
1:21
the center of Iran's oil export infrastructure.
1:25
The crews were ordered off the vessels before the strikes,
1:28
and Central Command says all 5 were rendered inoperable.
1:32
That brings the total number of Iranian tankers destroyed
1:35
or disabled by the US since Saturday to 8.
1:39
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that every
1:41
time Iran attempts to strike an American naval vessel,
1:44
the regime should expect to lose more tankers.
1:48
That formula has played out twice in less than a week.
1:50
Iran targets American warships,
1:53
and the US responds by destroying Iranian oil shipping assets.
1:57
But Tehran's retaliation overnight suggests that it has no intention of giving in.
2:03
The Revolutionary Guard Corps,
2:04
the IRGC,
2:05
says it attacked 10 vessels around the Strait of Hormuz,
2:09
including 2 American ships and 8 tankers.
2:12
The US military
2:13
disputes Iran's claim that American warships were actually hit.
2:17
But commercial vessels were caught in the attacks.
2:20
One of them was the Nuandros,
2:22
the Panama-flagged tanker carrying roughly 2 million barrels of Iraqi fuel oil.
2:27
The ship was struck by a drone in Iraqi territorial waters and caught fire,
2:32
though all 22 crew members survived,
2:34
and Iraqi officials say there was no major cargo leak.
2:38
Another tanker,
2:39
the Hercules Star,
2:40
was hit while anchored off Dubai.
2:42
Its charterer says one crew member was killed and another remains missing.
2:47
British maritime authorities also reported several merchant vessels
2:50
coming under disabling fire in the northern Gulf.
2:53
And the Gulf of Oman
2:55
that marks an important escalation in this tanker fight.
2:58
For months Washington and Tehran have
3:00
largely concentrated their attacks on vessels they
3:03
directly associated with the other side.
3:06
Now civilian crews and cargo belonging to third countries
3:10
are increasingly getting caught in the crossfire.
3:13
And Iran's retaliation was not limited to the waterway.
3:16
The Revolutionary Guard Corps also launched 20 ballistic missiles toward
3:20
Al-Azraq Air Base in eastern Jordan,
3:22
which is used by American forces.
3:25
Jordan says its air defenses intercepted 18 of them
3:28
while the remaining 2 fell in unpopulated areas,
3:31
and no casualties were reported.
3:34
Iran claims that attack caused significant damage.
3:36
US officials say it did not.
3:38
But Tehran is already warning that the next round could be larger,
3:42
with Iranian officials saying that
3:44
if the US attacks 2 or 3 Iranian targets,
3:46
Iran could respond by striking 20 US targets.
3:50
So Washington is openly trying to impose a steep
3:53
and predictable cost for attacks on American forces.
3:56
Iran meanwhile is threatening to increase the scale of its retaliation,
4:01
and while that cycle continues,
4:03
commercial traffic to the Strait of Hormuz remains badly constrained.
4:07
Shipping data shows just 6 commodity vessels crossed the Strait on Tuesday.
4:12
5 were headed into the Gulf.
4:14
Only 1 was leaving
4:16
before the war.
4:17
Roughly 125 commercial vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz every day.
4:22
Now those are the publicly observed crossings,
4:25
and there may be additional ships moving without
4:28
appearing in available tracking data,
4:30
but even accounting for clandestine traffic,
4:33
no one disputes that commerce through the strait
4:36
remains dramatically lower than normal.
4:39
And the market is reacting.
4:41
Brent crude oil climbed above $100 a barrel today
4:45
for the first time since July,
4:47
moving even higher during trading as investors weighed
4:50
the growing danger to Gulf energy supplies.
4:54
Now there isn't just one threat driving that concern anymore.
4:57
American and Iranian forces are deliberately attacking tankers.
5:01
Commercial ships are now being struck,
5:02
and traffic through Hormuz remains severely disrupted
5:06
on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula.
5:08
Iran-backed Houthis have attacked
5:10
Saudi energy infrastructure while
5:12
threatening shipping near the Red Sea.
5:15
Those risks are increasingly being felt far beyond the region.
5:18
Average gasoline prices in the US have climbed above $4 a gallon,
5:22
while diesel is approaching $6 a gallon.
5:25
Higher diesel prices also raise costs for trucking,
5:28
agriculture,
5:29
shipping,
5:29
and manufacturing,
5:31
giving the conflict another pathway to impact the broader economy.
5:35
So far Iran's attempts to target US warships have failed,
5:38
but the current cycle
5:40
does leave very little room for error.
5:42
The next missile could hit an American warship.
5:44
The next tanker attack could produce a much larger loss of life,
5:48
or another strike against Gulf energy infrastructure
5:51
could send oil prices considerably higher.
5:54
The logic of the US administration has been that
5:57
severe economic pressure on the regime through sanctions,
6:00
the blockade of Iranian ports,
6:02
and third party sanctions on countries and businesses still trading with Iran
6:06
can force the Iranian leadership to capitulate,
6:09
to sit down at the table in a meaningful way,
6:11
or possibly create the conditions
6:13
for a significant popular uprising against the repressive regime.
6:18
But that is Western logic,
6:20
not the logic or thought process of the Islamic Republic's leadership.
6:24
And certainly not the logic of the hardline Islamists that
6:27
appear to be running the country at this stage.
6:30
Their response to the increased pressure appears to be,
6:32
at least so far,
6:34
more aggression,
6:35
more belligerence,
6:36
and more antagonistic behavior towards the US and Gulf states.
6:40
The regime leadership's logic is that they've
6:42
withstood the attacks and pressures so far and
6:45
still maintain their grip on power and their grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
6:50
They look at $100 a barrel or more for oil
6:53
and see their position from their point of view
6:55
strengthening.
6:57
In a sense,
6:58
the Iranian regime views this struggle as
7:00
their long-term existential battle for survival.
7:03
At the same time,
7:04
the regime believes the US administration views this struggle
7:08
as a short-term battle to open the strait
7:10
and drive down gas prices ahead of the US midterm elections.
7:14
They do not believe,
7:15
it appears,
7:16
that the White House has the patience to continue this conflict.
7:20
Alright.
7:21
Coming up next,
7:22
US agencies say China's leading AI companies have been
7:25
copying American models at scale,
7:27
potentially accelerating Beijing's military and
7:30
cyber capabilities.
7:32
I'll be right back.
7:34
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Welcome back to the PDB
9:41
afternoon bulletin.
9:42
We've talked often here on the PDB about
9:44
the technology race between the US and China.
9:47
Now,
9:47
according to a new US government warning,
9:49
Some Chinese AI companies
9:51
found a much cheaper way to run that race
9:54
by copying America's most advanced AI models
9:57
to help build their own.
9:59
The latest alert comes from the FBI,
10:01
NSA,
10:02
and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,
10:05
and you ask,
10:06
does that have an acronym?
10:07
Of course it does.
10:08
It's CISA,
10:09
CISA.
10:10
They
10:11
6 major Chinese AI developers
10:13
pulled billions of tokens from millions of
10:16
interactions with systems including OpenAI's Chachi BT,
10:20
Anthropic's Cloud,
10:21
Google's Gemini,
10:22
and
10:22
XAI's Grok.
10:24
The agencies say the copying became so extensive
10:28
that it became a critical part of how
10:29
these companies built their competing AI models.
10:32
So how exactly were they allegedly doing it?
10:36
Well,
10:36
it starts with something called
10:37
AI distillation,
10:39
a fairly straightforward concept.
10:41
Instead of building every capability from scratch,
10:44
a developer can repeatedly send questions and prompts to a more powerful model,
10:49
collect the answers,
10:50
and use what they've learned
10:51
to train their own system to reproduce some of the same capabilities.
10:55
Now distillation itself isn't necessarily a bad thing.
10:59
It's widely used across the AI industry
11:01
to create smaller and more efficient models.
11:04
But the agencies say these Chinese
11:06
companies were mining American technology repeatedly,
11:09
deliberately,
11:10
and on an enormous scale.
11:12
The government report puts it this way,
11:14
quote,
11:14
The sheer scale of these campaigns and their sophistication
11:17
indicate that distillation is not a supplement
11:19
to these companies' AI model development,
11:22
but the critical core of it,
11:24
end quote.
11:25
The agencies
11:26
named DeepSeek,
11:27
Moonshot AI,
11:28
Alibaba,
11:29
Minimax,
11:30
Stepfront,
11:31
and Z.AI with the
11:32
activity allegedly dating back to at least late 2024.
11:37
The agencies say they targeted particular skills,
11:39
including specialized legal reasoning,
11:41
AI assistance capable of carrying out more complicated tasks,
11:45
and other advanced functions
11:47
that American companies had already spent enormous amounts of money developing.
11:51
According to the agency,
11:52
Chinese developers spread millions of
11:54
requests across different services and infrastructure
11:57
to make the activity harder to detect.
12:00
Some requests went directly through American AI companies.
12:03
Others were routed through outside cloud services and
12:06
third party platforms
12:08
that made it more difficult to determine who was actually behind them.
12:12
The report says Chinese developers even used a gray market of proxy services
12:16
known as quote transfer stations to get around geographic restrictions,
12:20
disguise where requests were coming from,
12:22
and continue accessing American models without easily being traced.
12:27
They also allegedly bought premium American AI subscriptions in bulk
12:32
and built systems that could automatically reroute requests
12:35
when one avenue of access was blocked.
12:38
The developers even tested the answers they received
12:40
to determine whether an American company had caught on
12:43
and started deliberately giving them less useful information.
12:46
They also weren't necessarily looking for the
12:48
same thing from every American model.
12:50
The agencies say Chinese developers tried to
12:53
identify what individual US systems did particularly well
12:57
and combine the best capabilities from different American models into their own.
13:02
And there's an obvious incentive here.
13:04
Building a frontier AI model requires massive amounts of computing power,
13:09
electricity,
13:09
and data.
13:10
Along with highly skilled researchers and years of work,
13:14
American companies have already absorbed those costs.
13:17
If a Chinese competitor can learn from the finished product,
13:20
it may be able to develop similar capabilities much faster
13:23
and for considerably less money.
13:26
The accusation also fits into a much older dispute
13:29
with the US accusing China for years
13:32
of stealing American intellectual property
13:34
and trade secrets.
13:35
Well,
13:35
that's because they have.
13:37
OpenAI previously accused China's DeepSeek
13:40
of quote
13:41
inappropriately using chat GPT to help develop its technology.
13:45
In July,
13:46
White House Science and Technology Director Michael Kretzios
13:49
also accused Moonshot AI
13:51
of using Anthropic's model to help develop its own system.
13:55
But this latest warning goes considerably further,
13:57
with 3 federal agencies describing a broader effort
14:01
involving several of China's leading AI developers.
14:04
And according to the report,
14:06
all of this happened,
14:07
quote,
14:07
likely with Chinese government awareness.
14:09
Well,
14:10
there's a diplomatic statement.
14:11
The agencies are not,
14:13
at least yet,
14:13
accusing Chinese intelligence services of running the operation,
14:17
but they believe Beijing was very likely aware of it.
14:20
It should come as no surprise that China is,
14:23
look at that,
14:23
rejecting the accusation.
14:26
Ah,
14:26
I wonder if they called it groundless accusations.
14:29
A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the country's AI advances are
14:32
the result of quote high-level scientific and technological self-reliance,
14:37
while accusing Washington of making,
14:38
quote,
14:38
oh,
14:38
there you go,
14:39
groundless accusations.
14:41
So,
14:41
a logical question to ask here is what can American AI companies do about this?
14:47
Well,
14:47
the government wants them to better identify who's accessing their systems.
14:51
If a company believes someone is systematically mining its model,
14:55
the report says that the company could also
14:57
alter the answers that the suspect account receives
15:00
in order to make the information less useful.
15:03
From Washington's perspective,
15:04
Chinese companies are using American technology
15:07
and know-how to accelerate.
15:09
China's own progress without absorbing the enormous costs
15:12
that gave US companies their lead.
15:15
To be fair,
15:15
that has been the signature move of the Chinese Communist Party,
15:19
the Chinese intel apparatus,
15:20
and Chinese companies supported by the government for decades
15:24
skip the heavy costs of research
15:26
and development
15:27
through persistent and aggressive economic espionage.
15:31
And that my friends,
15:32
is the PDB
15:33
afternoon bulletin for Wednesday,
15:34
the 9th of September.
15:36
If you have any questions or comments,
15:37
please reach out to me at PDB@tv.com
15:41
and to listen to the show ad-free,
15:43
just become a premium member of the President's Daily Brief
15:46
by visiting PDBpremium.com.
15:48
It really is that simple.
15:50
I'm Mike Baker and I'll be back tomorrow.
15:51
Until then,
15:53
stay informed,
15:54
stay safe,
15:55
stay cool.
16:10
Hey,
16:10
Mike Baker here.
16:11
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