The FLRA said more than half the citations in HHS’s brief were fictitious, erroneous or irrelevant as it upheld an award restoring telework for employees.

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“We now have all the work roles inside of a cyber protection team mapped out at this point, and learning their trade,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Eubank said.

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Shield AI has released new details on how its Hivemind autonomy software steered two Taiwanese uncrewed boats through a joint patrol off southern Taiwan, fusing radar and ship-tracking data into a single picture and switching the pair from patrol to escort duty without an operator directing each move. The U.S. company described the July demonstration […]

"The cloud journey started very similarly, where almost all assumed initially that migrating will lead to saved costs," said Gayatri Shenai.

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Beijing says artificial intelligence will give the state a visible hand to allocate capital. Here’s the rub: Washington’s economic authority sits in five places, and none of them is in command.

This column begins a four-week series ahead of The Cipher Brief Threat Conference on economic-warfare. The author is hosting a live session on this topic with former Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, General Bryan Fenton (Ret.). Apply now to attend.

On September 26, the President answered the week's largest security question in just four words: "I'm rejecting their deal." Iran's offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days, in exchange for lifting the blockade and waiving oil sanctions, had been on the table since September 24. It received its answer in public, from the one official authorized to give it, inside forty-eight hours.

The week's economic questions received no answer of that kind. The trade truce with China, and the pause on Beijing's rare-earth licensing regime tied to it, moved from November 10 to January 10 on the strength of a Treasury Secretary's statement; Beijing has yet to publish a matching notice.

The Russia sanctions act the President signed on September 18 requires determinations on the largest buyers of Russian energy by October 18, a deadline set by Congress rather than the executive, with waivers broad enough to let it pass unenforced. In February, the Supreme Court ruled six to three in Learning Resources v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize tariffs, removing the instrument the executive had used for its broadest tariffs.

This is important because Washington can decide a war in a sentence. But on the economic front, authority rests with Treasury, Commerce, the U.S. Trade Representative, Congress, and the courts. Each is competent. None is in command. The arrangement is by design and has served the country well for most of the last eighty years. But not anymore.

Beijing is now claiming a different design. In a recent lecture on Xi Jinping's economic strategy, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has tracked Chinese ideology for fifty years, described a shift in the Communist Party's theoretical literature. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other "new quality productive forces" are portrayed not only as sources of productivity but also as "a superior macro-allocation mechanism for resources," driven by algorithms. Rudd says the literature now uses the term "the visible hand of the state," offered for the first time as a rival to the market's invisible one. He is careful about its status: the idea sits in the ideological literature, "not yet in the policy literature," and not yet in the behavior of firms. But in his reading, ideology in China is where policy begins.

The hand is already visible without the algorithm. The rare-earth regime now paused until January, the Ministry of Commerce's Announcement No. 61, applies to any product anywhere that carries more than 0.1 percent Chinese-origin rare-earth content by value. One ministry notice imposed it; one more can reimpose it. The capital moves the same way. Chinese households, burned by property and wary of equities, hold record savings in low-yield bank deposits, and the state draws on those deposits through local, provincial, and national loan instruments to fund its technology bet. Rhodium Group puts China's AI capital spending at 932 billion renminbi this year, double last year's, financed by state banks and equity placements rather than bond markets.

America's AI buildout is financed the other way. Its five largest builders raised a net $163 billion in debt in the first half of this year, compared with $90 billion in all of 2025, in a bond market where the ten-year Treasury has reached 5.18 percent, its highest since 2007. No ministry allocated that capital. The market did, and the market will reprice it.

Neither design is simply superior, and the distinction matters more than the verdict. A single allocator is fast and brittle. It can direct capital, licenses, and supply to a strategic target within a week, and it can misallocate at the same speed. The household savings now financing the AI bet were poured into a property boom that left many of those households with assets worth only a fraction of what they paid. A distributed system is slow and resilient. Its errors stay local, its capital carries a price, and no single notice can switch it off. In peacetime competition, resilience compounds. In economic warfare, tempo is the contested variable, and the side that can decide within the other's cycle sets the terms. Beijing has already shown what that looks like. It imposed its rare-earth regime by notice on October 9 of last year and suspended it by another on November 7, having collected in between Washington's agreement to delay its own rule extending export controls to the affiliates of blacklisted firms. Two notices, one month, one American concession.

This column has traced the same gap from the drone fleet to the power grid: the capacity exists, and the decision does not. The economic front shows it at national scale. Washington holds the reserve currency, the deepest capital markets, and the reach of the dollar system. What it lacks is a place to settle competing claims on those instruments and to make them binding on the timeline decided by an adversary.

October 18 is the first live test. The sanctions act's determinations are due that day, just sixteen days before the midterm elections. They will be imposed, waived, or deferred, and whichever it is will say more about the American economic hand than any strategy document published this year. Beijing will be watching the same date, holding a notice it can publish on any morning it chooses.

The question for Washington is who, when economic warfare requires a decision, is empowered to make it, and whether that decision can arrive before the adversary's action. Coordination assigns. Integration arbitrates.

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Andy Burnham was a few weeks into the job as the new Prime Minister of the UK when he found himself exchanging messages with someone claiming to be Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff. The exchange, first reported by Politico last week, was brief and apparently trivial. Burnham grew suspicious, stopped replying and told the right people; the British embassy in Washington quietly informed the White House, which confirmed that Wiles’s own devices hadn’t been touched. No harm done, officially.

Embarrassments like this are becoming more common. The FBI warned last year about impostors using AI to mimic senior officials, after someone posing as Wiles contacted senior Republicans and business figures. The State Department later chased a fake Marco Rubio who reached three foreign ministers. And every one of these approaches lands on a habit “Signalgate” already exposed: when one wrong contact card could add a journalist to a strike-planning thread, the name on the screen was the only authentication in the room. If you want to see what this security weakness looks like run as a nation-state campaign look at a case that closed quietly in Taipei last month.

In July, prosecutors in Taipei’s Shilin district wrapped up proceedings against two local businessmen, Li Hualun and Chen Mengsen, who had spent months registering accounts on LINE (the messaging app nearly everyone in Taiwan uses), each tied to a real Taiwanese phone number. They leased the accounts to Xiamen Empress Information Technology, a mainland firm Taiwanese investigators say works under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party’s cyber forces. The going rate was about 1,100 RMB per account, call it $160.

A working exploit for a major platform costs millions on the gray market. A trusted local identity cost less than a decent dinner, and it did something no technical exploit can do.

The operators used the fake accounts to become journalists. In the approach that eventually unraveled the scheme, one of them even dressed up a leased account in the name and photo of Chen Yishan, editor-in-chief of CommonWealth Magazine, and began courting an aide in a legislator’s office. Interview requests, invitations to contribute articles, the ordinary traffic of political journalism followed.

There was no malicious link in the first message, or the tenth. Investigators found the operators worked on targets for months, sometimes close to a year. Any counterintelligence officer would recognize the rhythm. It was the patient cultivation and recruitment of an agent run through a chat app.

The eventual ask was small and reasonable-sounding. Journalists use encrypted tools to protect their sources, so would the contact mind installing a secure communication app to keep talking? The app was in fact malware. The MO turns a decade of good security advice inside out. The more someone knew about how careful reporters actually operate, the more normal the request looked.

Researchers at Citizen Lab and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose reporting the Taiwanese prosecution now corroborates, counted more than a hundred malicious domains behind the wider campaign, and found errors in the phishing messages suggesting the attackers were using AI to draft them and to pick targets. The people on the receiving end were lawmakers and their staffs, defense think tanks, semiconductor companies, dissidents at home and abroad. Taiwanese media reported that even the island’s overseas missions were probed.

Through all of it, nothing technical failed. The networks held and the patches were current. The attackers went around the security stack entirely, and the thing they spent, their actual operational currency, was the credibility of a free press. Every fake interview request makes the real ones a little harder. This cost never shows up in an incident report.

The two men who supplied the accounts got deferred prosecutions and payments totaling a bit under $6,000. That is the current legal price, in a frontline democracy, for renting identity infrastructure to a foreign intelligence service. It isn’t a deterrent. It’s barely a business expense.

Which brings us back to Downing Street. A prime minister with the full apparatus of British intelligence behind him replied to a stranger because the name on the screen looked right. Nothing in either story depends on LINE, or Taiwan, or Westminster.

Swap in WhatsApp or LinkedIn; swap the fake editor for a fake recruiter or a fake chief of staff. Aged, locally registered accounts are already a commodity in criminal markets. All the model requires is a person who handles something worth stealing and a persona they have no fast way to check.

That last part is fixable, though not by the security team alone. Organizations that handle sensitive work should treat identity verification as a counterintelligence habit. Platforms need to treat the account-rental trade Taiwan uncovered as the national security problem it has become rather than a terms-of-service nuisance. And legislatures need to punish collaboration with foreign intelligence services at something above a traffic ticket.

Mostly, though, the people likeliest to be approached — the legislative staffer, the fab engineer, the think-tank fellow, the human rights activist, apparently the occasional head of government — need to become more educated on how foreign intelligence cultivation and targeting actually works: slowly, warmly, and with no suspicious link in sight until the very end. The adversary in this case looked at hardened networks and vigilant software and made a rational choice. Building a fake trusted persona was cheaper — $160 a head – than spending millions on a sophisticated cyber exploit. We need to start defending the credibility of verified, trusted identifies the way we defend our networks: as the attack surface it already is.The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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