Iran War Day 13: IRGC Strikes US Gulf Bases; Trump Weighs “Massive Attack”#

The United States completed its 13th consecutive overnight round of airstrikes against Iranian targets, while Iran escalated retaliatory operations against US military positions across the Gulf. Kuwait’s armed forces said air defenses intercepted Iranian drones targeting Ali al-Salem airbase; the IRGC nonetheless claimed in a statement Friday morning that its forces had destroyed a Patriot missile battery and a hangar full of American MQ-9 drones at the base. Bahrain’s military separately confirmed intercepting “Iranian aerial attacks” overnight.

The most striking Iranian claim of the day was “Operation Nasr-2”: Iranian state media said the IRGC launched cruise missiles at the remaining structure of an Amazon Web Services data center in Bahrain, which the IRGC alleged provided intelligence support to the US military. Neither Amazon nor Bahraini authorities immediately confirmed or denied damage, and the claim has not been independently verified — but the targeting of civilian cloud infrastructure, if substantiated, would mark a significant escalation in what Iran is willing to hit.

President Trump, when asked about the pace of strikes, said the US “needs more of the same” and signaled a ceasefire is not imminent. ABC News reported that he is now actively considering a “massive attack” on Iran but has not yet made a final decision. There was also conflicting ceasefire reporting: the New York Times said Iran rejected a proposal Trump sent via Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi; a US official told CNN the report was “not accurate.” Separately, Brent crude finished at $101.10 a barrel — its highest point since May, and up roughly 40% over the past month — as the combination of US-Iran combat, the Hormuz constraint, and Houthi tanker strikes in the Red Sea compress global supply from multiple directions.

Sources: CNN — Iran War Live Blog, July 24 · ABC News — Iran Live Updates: Kuwait Attacked, Bahrain Sounds Sirens · CBS News — Iran War Live Updates · IranWire — IRGC Claims Second Strike on Amazon Data Center in Bahrain · Tom’s Hardware — Amazon data center in Bahrain struck by Iranian cruise missiles, state media claims · The National — Oil hits $100 for the first time since May · Bloomberg — Houthis’ Red Sea attacks worsen oil shock

Ukraine: Rubio-Lavrov Manila Talks End in Deadlock#

The post-meeting assessment from Thursday’s Rubio-Lavrov exchange in Manila has come in, and it’s bleak. The 35-minute meeting on the ASEAN sidelines yielded no new movement toward ending Russia’s war on Ukraine. Rubio told reporters that the proposals developed during earlier rounds of US-Russia dialogue are “no longer viable” and that any path forward would require fresh concepts — a frank acknowledgment that months of diplomatic scaffolding have collapsed. Lavrov, for his part, reiterated Russia’s “readiness for a political and diplomatic resolution” while pushing the same maximalist territorial demands that have blocked progress since the war began.

Neither delegation made joint statements or announced a follow-up meeting. The talks occurred with US diplomatic bandwidth stretched thin by the simultaneous Iran war and Trump’s stated preference for military pressure over negotiation in that theater. Ukraine was not represented at the table.

Sources: Eurasia Review — No Breakthroughs, Little Optimism As Rubio, Lavrov Meet On Ukraine War · RFE/RL — Rubio, Lavrov Meet On Ukraine War · The Moscow Times — Rubio Says US Remains Committed to Ukraine Peace Talks · US State Department — Secretary Rubio’s Meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov

AI: Claude Gets Model Choice in Voice Mode; Kimi K3 Open Weights Land Sunday#

Anthropic on July 23 pushed an update to Claude’s voice mode that lets users choose which model powers their conversation — Opus, Sonnet, or Haiku — a meaningful shift from the previous single-model configuration. The update also extends voice mode’s connected-tool access (Gmail, Slack, and other integrations now work in voice), and adds support for substantially more languages. Running Opus in voice is the most compute-intensive configuration Anthropic has offered in that channel; the practical effect is that complex real-time voice tasks that previously stalled or degraded will now have a stronger model available on demand.

On the open-weights front, Moonshot AI has confirmed that the full weights for Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter multimodal model with a one-million-token context window — will be publicly released on July 27 under a Modified MIT license. The model launched commercially on July 16, and independent benchmarks have placed it near the strongest proprietary systems rather than just at the top of the open-weight tier. Combined with DeepSeek’s ongoing release activity, the final week of July is the densest concentration of frontier-class open-weight releases the industry has produced. The weights release will also let researchers independently compare Kimi K3’s behavior against Anthropic’s Fable model — relevant context given the White House’s distillation accusations against Moonshot from yesterday.

Sources: TechCrunch — Anthropic updates Claude voice mode with more capable models · Kimi — Kimi K3 Tech Blog · Windows Forum — Kimi K3 Weights Arrive July 27 · Interconnects — Kimi K3: The open-weights escalation