'New and disturbing' tech may soon pose devastating threat for Trump: analysis

President Donald Trump's poker-table approach to Iran — using oil blockades to force negotiation — fundamentally misunderstands how modern asymmetric warfare has transformed geopolitics, according to a new analysis.

The 79-year-old president insists Iran has "no cards," but two months of conflict demonstrate otherwise, wrote New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, as smaller powers now leverage information-age and emerging intelligence-age tools to create devastating disruption against militarily superior opponents.

"Iran is betting that by choking off the Strait of Hormuz — and driving up gasoline and food prices for Americans and all their allies — Trump will eventually act in accord with his TACO label: Trump Always Chickens Out," Friedman wrote.

The columnist compared the ongoing stalemate to a competition to see who can hold their breath the longest, but he said the fact that Iran hasn't gasped yet was extremely telling.

"How in the world has Iran’s regime lasted this long — two months — against the combined military might of Israel and America?" Friedman wrote. "The answer: Trump does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics in just the last few years."

Trump isn't alone, however, Friedman said. Ukraine has held up against Russia using the same tactics, and Hamas and Hezbollah have done the same against Israel, and he warned that China could pose similar risks to the rest of the world.

Ukraine destroyed approximately 20 Russian strategic bombers worth tens of millions of dollars using 117 cheap drones smuggled in trucks. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps deployed $35,000 Shahed-136 drones to destroy Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE, disrupting banking across the Persian Gulf. Hamas fashioned rockets from salvaged materials and unexploded ordnance, forcing Israel to deploy $4 million Patriot missiles for interception.

"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," Friedman wrote.

"Here’s what’s truly new and disturbing," he added. "We are rapidly moving from the age of asymmetric warfare based on 'information-age tools' that can wreak mass disruption to ... an age of asymmetric warfare based on 'intelligence-age tools' that can cheaply wreak disruption at a much larger scale anywhere on demand."

Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber can identify system vulnerabilities that "represent a gold mine for hackers." Despite restrictions, unauthorized users already accessed Mythos.

When democratized AI reaches hostile actors, super-empowerment becomes inevitable. A Stanford biosecurity expert's encounter with an AI chatbot explaining pathogen modification and bioweapon dispersal demonstrates the nightmare scenario. Iran gaining access to advanced AI cybersecurity models would exponentially amplify its destructive capacity beyond current drone capabilities.

The geopolitical imperative is clear: US and Chinese AI superpowers must cooperate to neutralize these asymmetric intelligence-age threats — mirroring Cold War nuclear proliferation controls. Otherwise, neither power nor anyone else remains safe.