Excerpts:
President Trump often falls back on poker metaphors. He told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that he had “no cards” when it came to standing up to Russia. Trump told Iran’s leaders that they had “no cards” when it came to standing up to him.
Would somebody please tell me when it’s poker night at the Trump White House? Because I’d really like a seat at that table.
Trump is betting that by blockading Iran to prevent it from exporting its oil, he can force Tehran to negotiate on his terms. But some experts think Iran has enough income and can store enough oil to hold out for at least several months.
Meanwhile, Iran is betting that by choking off the Strait of Hormuz — and driving up gasoline and food prices for Americans and all their allies — it can force Trump to eventually act in accord with his TACO label: Trump always chickens out.
This is painful to watch. Trump and Tehran are each saying: “I will hold my breath until you turn blue.” We’ll see who gasps first.
The real question is: How in the world has Iran’s regime lasted this long — two months — against the combined military might of Israel and America? The answer: Trump does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics in just the last few years.
But I don’t want to be too hard on our president. He is not alone. Iran is to Trump what Ukraine is to Vladimir Putin, what Hamas and Hezbollah have been to Benjamin Netanyahu and — wait for it — what the next generation of cyberhackers will be to China and America and every other nation-state.
In other words, we’re already in a new era in which small powers and small groups can leverage information-age tools — guided by GPS and digitally controlled — to gain asymmetric advantages.
Trump recklessly started this war without allies, without any scenario planning and, obviously, without any real understanding of Iran’s assets in asymmetric warfare. Nevertheless, it would be a disaster for the region and the world if Iran’s malign regime emerges from this war intact and unreformed, because an even more powerful asymmetric tool kit for bad guys is just arriving.
Here’s what’s truly new and disturbing: We are rapidly moving from the age of asymmetric warfare based on information-age tools that can wreak mass disruption to what my technology tutor, Craig Mundie, a former head of research and strategy at Microsoft, calls an age of asymmetric warfare based on “intelligence-age tools” that can cheaply wreak disruption at a much larger scale anywhere on demand.
To put it differently, information-age tools vastly amplified trained operators within organizations, including terrorist organizations. Intelligence-age tools replace trained operators with vastly more intelligent, autonomous and skilled A.I. agents with more destructive reach at little cost.
My translation: You’ve read a lot about how Iran has used cheap $35,000 drones to close the Strait of Hormuz. Wait until you see how it can leverage large language models and their A.I. agents at a very low cost.
How will Iran gain access? Just recall the story that broke a few weeks ago: The A.I. giant Anthropic announced that its newest artificial intelligence model, Mythos, was simply too good at finding vulnerabilities in the operating systems and other software programs that so many companies and utilities run on. Days later, OpenAI made a similar announcement about its own cybersecurity-focused model, GPT-5.4-Cyber.
As Bloomberg reported, the flaws Mythos has discovered are the kind that “often represent a gold mine for hackers because they offer a window of free rein inside vulnerable systems.”
Anthropic and OpenAI both elected to restrict the release of these A.I. systems to only the most critical and responsible software generators so they could find and patch their vulnerabilities before these tools might one day be released more widely. But guess what happened?
Unauthorized users got hold of Mythos anyway.
It is hard to exaggerate how destabilizing these rapid advances in A.I. sophistication could become, and it is why Mundie and I have been arguing for a while now that the United States and China, the two A.I. superpowers, need to figure out how they can (and surely will) continue to compete strategically while cooperating to neutralize these new asymmetric intelligence-age threats — not unlike what the United States and the U.S.S.R. did to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Cold War.
Otherwise, neither of them will be safe. Nor will anyone else be.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/opinion/trump-iran-artificial-intelligence-china.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share