Axios

House Republicans are taking their growing frustration with President Trump's trade policies straight to the White House — and they aren't afraid of a food fight.

Why it matters: In public and in private, Republicans are increasingly frustrated with Trump's trade policies, including allowing more tariff-free beef imports and his trade war with Canada.

House Republicans are seizing on the Supreme Court's decision that freed national party committees to coordinate directly with candidates, reserving nearly $9 million in TV ads across more than 20 races this month, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Call it the National Republican Coordinating Committee.

Vice President JD Vance said that there is "some really, really weird spiritual dark energy" around some artificial intelligence practices in a recent podcast interview.

The big picture: Vance's hesitancy about the personification of AI and certain use cases strikes a different tone than the Trump administration's advocacy for deregulation and the data centers needed to power the technology boom.

The U.S. Army has inked contracts worth a total $192 million with Palantir Technologies and Anduril Industries for the production of eight Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Nodes.

Why it matters: State-of-the-art TITAN trucks are cornerstones of the service's deep-sensing and long-range precision fires goals — in other words, the ability to find, track, shoot and kill more accurately from farther away.

• They are also key contributors to the Joint All-Domain Command and Control networking nirvana the Pentagon has for years sought to achieve.

There is a $100 billion question hanging over the Trump administration's deal to effectively gain control of more than a dozen large oilfields in Venezuela.

Why it matters: This could become a big opportunity for private equity and private credit, albeit one fraught with pallets of political risk.

Israel will build Greece a missile-and-drone defense network similar to its own.

Why it matters: The arrangement, dubbed Achilles Shield, is valued at around €3 billion, or almost $3.5 billion. It's billed as the largest defense export in the history of Israel-Greece relations.

August came and went, and still no contract for the U.S. Navy's futuristic fighter, F/A-XX, was announced.

Why it matters: The date keeps slipping — inspiring memes, leaving defense industry giants in public limbo, pressuring the service's existing fleet and reminding military watchers of the Trump administration's warplane priority.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who'll preside over a parade of tech tycoons at today's G20 innovation summit, tells me he's confident the U.S. will stay ahead of China in the AI race by continuing to define the frontier.

• "It's teacher-student," Lutnick said Tuesday in a sunny conference room between meetings with Chinese and Turkish officials.
• China's open-weight models, he said, "study off of the large language models of America. ... The teacher is the smartest person in the world, and relentlessly pushing to the frontier. The student ... can't be in the lead, because they're learning from the teacher."

AI is already helping detect and monitor wildfires. Now, researchers are exploring how it could help fire officials decide where to deploy crews across multiple fires.

Why it matters: Studies show climate change is contributing to longer, more intense wildfire seasons, forcing officials to make high-stakes decisions about how to prioritize limited resources. AI could help them process information to make those decisions faster.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Trump administration officials came to this week's G20 innovation summit to project a united front on U.S. AI leadership. But tensions between the Commerce Department and the White House's tech policy shop are playing out behind the scenes.

Why it matters: The Trump administration wants the world to follow its lead on AI policy, even as it grapples with divisions at home.