Reuters World News - US-Saudi joint strikes, OpenAI's rogue agent and Japan quake

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

 Saudi Arabia has waded into the Iran conflict, carrying out strikes alongside the U.S. against Iran-backed militia in Iraq. OpenAI's rogue agent compromised a customer at a second tech firm on its hacking spree. The Trump administration bans new humanoid robots from China. And emergency services rush to find survivors from Japan's 7.1 magnitude earthquake. Watch the latest episode of On Assignment ⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠. Listen to the Morning Bid podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Visit the ⁠⁠⁠⁠Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement⁠⁠⁠⁠ for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Elena Kassas in London. It's Wednesday, July 29th. Today, a new escalation in the war as the US and Saudi Arabia launched strikes on Iran-backed groups in Iraq. Japan's emergency services race against time to find earthquake survivors. And we reveal the open AI agent that went rogue compromised more companies. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. seven days a week. Saudi Arabia has waded into the Iran conflict, carrying out strikes alongside the US against Iran-backed militias in Iraq. It's the first time Iran-backed groups in Iraq have been targeted. Saudi says its strikes were in response to drone attacks on its oil facilities. To understand what that all means, here's Reuters' foreign policy correspondent D.Underfee in Washington, D.C. Well, Iran has really expanded this conflict, and it still has militia around the region that

are aligned with it. Most not will be the Houthis, but also some militia in Iraq. The Houthis, of course, have been striking Saudi oil facilities, but there have also been strikes from the Iranian-aligned militia in Iraq, and they've been sending drones over, and they've been hitting Saudi oil facilities as well. So Saudi had previously been striking back against the Houthis, and now they're striking the Iraqis. And it's notable that the U.S. didn't participate in the strikes against the Houthis, but they are joining these retaliatory strikes against the Iraqi militia. It's not entirely clear why that is, but it is worth remembering that during the Gaza conflict, Trump had secured, you know, essentially a separate peace with the Houthis, got them to agree

not to attack U.S. forces. So it's not out of the question that perhaps the U.S. are still hoping to maintain that sort of arm's-length relationship with the Houthis, but are more willing to strike the Iranians, which is, of course, a show of good faith for the Saudis who are a close U.S. ally. Don says the escalation underlines a dilemma for Washington. Well, clearly the Trump administration would like to find an exit from this conflict as soon as they possibly can. And the question is, do you basically just stop fighting and go home? Or do you try to escalate in such a way that you can have a decisive blow against Iran and kind of force them back to the table? And it seems like the administration hasn't fully made up its mind what it's going to do.

The escalation comes as a Reuters exclusive can reveal that within weeks, Iran is expected to receive a first shipment of hundreds of Chinese-made, shoulder-fired air defence missile launches. That purchase is one of Tehran's largest known efforts to strengthen its short-range air defences since the outbreak of the war. Well, the Iran War was at the top of the agenda over in Washington as Trump sat down with Israel's Prime Minister biniman Netanyahu, in town for the funeral of Senator Lindsay Graham, who died suddenly earlier this month.

In life, he was a prominent supporter of both Israel and Ukraine. But there wasn't a warm welcome for Netanyahu from everyone in D.C. Protesters gathered outside for the visit. This is Rabbi Yisrael David Weiss. There's an imposter coming to the White House. There is somebody who is using the Holy Star of David. Our State Department reporter Simon Lewis says that Trump was wasn't waiting with open arms either.

So ahead of the meeting today, Trump seemed to be pretty irritated by Netanyahu. He was asked about some reporting that had come out on Netanyahu's kind of planned talking points in the meeting and Trump kind of dismissing this and seemingly annoyed that this had come out in the press rather than Bibi just telling him in the meeting. Trump seems to feel that Netanyahu has been trying to pull him more into the Iran War initially, it seems Netanyahu was the one who was at least involved in convincing him to launch the war in Iran. And the relationship has been particularly fraught since then, as

you know, it doesn't seem like the war has gone as Trump wanted it to, and perhaps he in part blames Netanyahu for that. Ukraine's president, Rodomir Zelensky, was also in the capital for the Graham's service and his own sit down with Trump at a time when $400 million in Pentagon. funding for Ukraine has stalled, despite bipartisan support. Here's Simon again on Zelensky's wish list. He wants Washington to do more sanctions or something that Lindsay Graham had been pushing for with a bill and also support Ukraine more with this idea of joint production of interceptors for Patriot missiles. There's a drone cooperation agreement that they're trying to work on.

And really, ultimately, he wants more help from the White House on getting Russia. to end its war in Ukraine. We have heard from sources after the meeting that Trump's envoys, Steve Wickoff and Jared Kushner, have agreed to visit Ukraine in the meeting to try to kickstart mediation efforts with Russia. Now to Japan, where rescuers are frantically searching for survivors of a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

In Kumamoto Prefecture, the Ian Shopping Mall had just reopened last month, celebrating its recovery from a 2016 earthquake, when Tuesday's quake ripped the building open again, despite seismically reinforced ceilings and safety improvements. A powerful explosion was reported at the mall, as well as witnesses reporting the smell of gas in the area. Authorities have warned residents to be on alert for further strong quakes,

as well as for the risk of landslides. Now, remember that rogue agent that escaped from Open AI and went on a days-long hacking spree at the AI platform Hugging Face? Well, we can reveal that wasn't the only company it broke into. Sources have told Reuters that the agent also compromised a customer at New York-based modal labs. Here's reporter Raphael Satter with more. So this was all part of the same hack. What this means effectively is that it broke out of its contained environment within open AI

and effectively like found a nest online where somebody had left an open door. So think of the agent like a fugitive that's escaping justice. It needs to find a base of operations, and so it found one at, basically, at a sandbox that had been left inadvertently exposed online. OpenAI says that its rogue agent broke into four accounts at four separate services. The unreleased model that was being tested and where that test went wrong has been frozen. Internal access to it has been restricted, and OpenAI is now studying, what its next steps are going to be. I think the concern is less about individual AI users.

So your average user of chat GPT or Google Gemini, for example, is not going to encounter some of these problems. But it is a concern to the public at large because what it shows is that these frontier labs are developing very powerful hacking tools that they may not be able to fully control. While staying in the tech world, the Trump administration is banning imports of new Chinese robots and power inverters, citing national security. The restrictions target humanoid and quadruped robots, plus inverters used to connect renewable energy and batteries to data centers.

Officials say they want to avoid Chinese disruption, data theft and cyber attacks while pushing manufacturing back to the U.S. Our White House reporter Alexander Alper explains the worries. One of the concerns among China Hawks in Washington is basically that China could get a really strong foothold in this industry as it takes off. And then we could find ourselves increasing really reliant on Chinese robots. There's fears that, you know, a foreign power could spy by stealing data from these robots. There's fear that they could control the devices remotely, potentially disrupt their function or your access to. them. And then the third case is that you could sort of install malware by sending updates that could create, you know, a botnet that could launch a cyber attack. Firefighters are racing to

contain massive wildfires across France and Spain as Western Europe races for yet another heat wave. In France, the wildfire raging near Bordeaux continues to worsen, with hundreds of thousands of people forced to flee. World Meteorological Organization spokesperson Claire Nullis says the fire in France has generated its own weather system. What we've seen in France, I've just seen the most incredible image of a cumulinimbus cloud, which is, you know, it's like the big storm cloud, it's the king of clouds. And this was created by, you know, by the fire. It's where the fire literally creates its own weather.

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