PDB Afternoon Bulletin | September 9th, 2026: U.S. Takes Out Eight Iranian Tankers & China Accused of AI Copying

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