Much of the information has been previously reported over the past six months, but the Pentagon inspector general’s report offered the fullest official accounting so far of the conflict’s costs in American lives, taxpayer dollars and physical damage. It included information from the watchdogs for the Defense and State departments as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The report, whose publication was first reported by NBC News, noted that the U.S. war with Iran “has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply” in regard to advanced weapons. Experts have previously said it will take about three years for military contractors to replenish advanced missiles and defensive missile interceptors to prewar levels.

The report, which covers April 1 to June 30, also acknowledged that Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and other structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan. Dozens of American aircraft and drones also were destroyed or damaged.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress in late July that the war had cost $37.5 billion so far.

The costs to U.S. diplomatic facilities, however, had not been previously publicly released. Such outposts in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE took the brunt of the physical damage, with an estimated cost of $184 million, according to the report.

The State Department reported in early June that its overall costs from the conflict came to $113 million, with nearly $80 million used to respond to contingency plans, including evacuation expenses for U.S. personneland their families as well as other American citizens and eligible third-country nationals.

The State Department reported that in the weeks and months after the U.S. and Israel first struck Iran on Feb. 28, the Trump administration evacuated about 9,000 U.S. citizens from countries in the Middle East and Europe. Through private and commercial flights as well as land and water travel, the cost of the department’s evacuation operation was more than $11 million as of late June.

“State determined that consular officers would not be able to fully document travel itineraries required to seek reimbursement from evacuees and therefore it would be impracticable to seek reimbursement from them,” the report states.

The majority of the evacuations were made from Israel, with Iraq and Jordan following shortly behind. While the U.S. only evacuated 1,200 Americans from the United Arab Emirates, those trips to Istanbul, Athens and Washington cost the most, at more than $4 million.

The State Department reported that more than $44 billion in emergency and non-emergency military sales also were made in that span of time, with the majority of sales going to Saudi Arabia. Sales included military helicopters, munitions and munitions support as well as advanced precision weapons system.

Other regional countries, including Qatar, Kuwait, UAE and Israel, also received billions in sales, as Iran retaliated against nearly every country in the region that hosted a U.S. military base.

Here’s a look at developments across the Middle East on Saturday. Full coverage can be found here.

Iran says strait won’t open until the US ‘corrects’ behavior

Iran’s politburo-like body known as the Supreme National Security Council said the Strait of Hormuz will not open until the United States “corrects its behavior,” issuing new demands that could shake up talks on a deal to manage the waterway and traffic on it.

Iran’s state broadcaster published the statement by the council’s secretary, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who is also a commander in the powerful Revolutionary Guard.

The United States must never threaten Iran again, the statement said, and must permanently end the war with Iran and its armed allies in the region. The U.S. must lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw its military from the area. It also must “completely compensate” Iran for war damage, lift sanctions and “unconditionally” release frozen assets.

There was no immediate comment from the U.S., which has wanted an acceptable deal first on the strait before ending the blockade. According to the interim deal signed in June, a schedule to end sanctions and plan on compensation would be part of the final deal, and negotiations would address frozen assets.

The end of a 60-day period to negotiate a final deal will end in just over a week but could be extended.

Iran has said it was close to reaching a separate deal with Oman to manage the strait, which runs between the two countries.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi earlier Saturday said they were close to reaching an agreement on navigation, “specifically the determination of a transit route.” But the waterway’s reopening is contingent on other conditions, he said in remarks shared on social media, and blamed the situation on what he called the U.S. violation of the interim deal.

Oman, a mediator Gulf Arab country which has said relatively little on the talks, said in a statement Saturday that the discussions were ongoing “in a positive and constructive atmosphere,” and condemned attacks on ships on the strait.

The strait, crucial to global supplies of oil and natural gas, had been considered an international waterway before the war. Ship transits remain low.

Iran attacks a vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, UAE says

A vessel owned by Abu Dhabi’s state-owned ADNOC oil and gas company was attacked while transiting the Strait of Hormuz, Emirati authorities said earlier Saturday. The Foreign Ministry said Iran fired the missile as part of attacks on commercial shipping.

ADNOC in a statement said there were no casualties following the attack early Saturday. The company said over a dozen of its vessels have been attacked by missiles and drones while transiting the strait since the U.S. and Israel launched the war on Iran in February. One crew member has been killed and 20 others wounded, it said.

ADNOC didn’t elaborate on the attack’s location or any damage.

Later, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center said a vessel east of the town of Khasab, Oman, had been struck by a projectile that caused a fire that was put out, with the vessel and crew safe. It was not clear whether this was the ADNOC incident.

A defense deal not aimed at any third country, Turkey says

A defense agreement that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed on Friday is not aimed against any third country, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said. It says an attack on one would be considered an attack on all three.

Fidan told Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency on Saturday that the countries do not view any state as an adversary unless it takes hostile action against them: “We don’t have anything written down — nothing we’ve signed — that defines a common threat.”

Asked how the mutual defense mechanism would work, Fidan said a member would formally request help and the two countries’ assistance could range from intelligence-sharing to logistics support or the deployment of military units. The mechanism would establish a secretariat to be based in Saudi Arabia, Fidan said.

He said other nations, which he did not name, have expressed interest in joining the agreement, adding that he expects Egypt, which he described as a “natural partner,” to participate “at the next stage.”

Yemen’s military attacks Iran-backed Houthis

The attacks were in response to the Houthis’ recent strikes in central and eastern Yemen. Col. Majed al-Nazili, spokesperson for Yemen’s military, said the attacks targeted the rebels’ “sites and capabilities” on multiple front lines, without elaborating.

The escalation between the Houthis and Yemen’s internationally recognized government and its backer, a Saudi-supported coalition, threatens to reignite Yemen’s civil war following a 2022 truce.

Turkey’s Kurdish peace bill wins approval in parliament

A Turkish draft law aimed at advancing a peace effort with the country’s Kurdish insurgents passed its first hurdle in parliament on Saturday. A committee approved the measure. It is expected to be approved in the general assembly next week.

Last year, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, declared its decision to disarm and disband as part of the peace initiative aimed at ending the decades-long conflict with the Turkish state.

The draft legislation defines the procedures for the group’s disarmament and rehabilitation of some PKK members. The measures would come into effect once Turkey’s National Security Council confirms that the group has disbanded and surrendered all weapons.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people since it began in the 1980s. Turkey and its Western allies consider the group a terrorist organization.

In an 86-to-11 vote, the Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 on Friday, with the House expected to approve the bill with similar bipartisan support next month.

It sanctions Russian President Vladimir Putin and senior Kremlin officials while also targeting the country’s energy sector to cripple the economy amid its war on Ukraine.

The bill would let Trump impose fresh tariffs as high as 100% on the top five importers of Russian oil and gas. While that could include U.S. allies like the European Union, South Korea, Japan as well as top trading partners like China and India, the president also has the ability to issue waivers if he deems it “in the national interest of the United States.”

Despite the overwhelming support, Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., tried to remove the bill’s tariff authority, but failed.

“It will not bring peace to Ukraine, but rather will deliberately make American families poorer by increasing tariffs, which are nothing but a tax on imported goods,” Paul said on the Senate floor.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., also balked at the tariff power but eventually voted for the bill after receiving a written promise from U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer that tariffs would be lifted after countries are no longer deemed top buyers of Russian energy or facilitators of sanctions evasion.

Still, he expressed unease about handing over sweeping new tariffs powers to Trump and vowed to remain vigilant.

“We should not have to choose between putting a check on Putin’s aggression and putting a check on this president’s tariffs regime,” Warnock said, adding that if Trump “oversteps his power, we will see him in court.”

The vote comes after the Supreme Court ruled in February that Trump can’t use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose his “Liberation Day” tariffs, upholding a series of lower-court rulings.

But he pivoted to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose temporary 10% tariffs, then invoked Section 301 of the same law for new levies of 10%-12-5% on 60 trading partners.

Those duties are also expected to face lawsuits as they’re based on accusations of forced labor, even in top developed economies.

Tariffs under the Russia sanctions bill, however, would likely avoid similar legal challenges as it provides more open-ended authority to a president who has already tried to interpret trade laws extremely aggressively.

“The Russia bill is riddled with the same ambiguity the president has exploited in these other laws,” Cato Institute scholars Clark Packard and Scott Lincicome wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last week.

They pointed out that the bill doesn’t specify what data will determine which countries are the five largest importers of Russian energy. And while the tariff authority expires in five years, the bill doesn’t say how long the tariffs themselves will last.

Tariffs exemptions are also not automatic and are subject to the USTR’s determination that allies have taken “significant steps” to reduce their imports, Packard and Lincicome added. In addition, the tariff rates are at the president’s whim.

“Trump could direct the trade representative to set the tariff rate at 100% for one buyer of Russian energy and zero for another. That unchecked authority gives Trump leverage in disputes unrelated to Ukraine,” they warned.

For example, Trump could threaten India with new tariffs as part of trade talks that may cover farm exports, digital taxes or drug prices.

The ability to hit China with a new 100% U.S. tariff could also upset the fragile trade truce the world’s two biggest economies have been observing for the past year.

But even as Packard and Lincicome accuse Trump of abusing “nearly every tariff statute on the books,” they place most of the blame on Congress.

The Russia sanctions bill merely marks the latest instance of the legislative branch ceding trade authority to the executive branch.

“For more than half a century, Congress has delegated broad tariff powers to the president with few limitations,” they explained. “If the president has run wild, it’s only because lawmakers took away the guardrails.”

A slate of nominees and other notable Democrats emphasized unity to a crowd of more than 1,000, who cheered loudest for Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official. He narrowly beat establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in a contentious, closely watched primary for an open U.S. Senate seat.

“Michigan, we will fight to build the America that we are proud to hand off to our kids and our grandkids,” El-Sayed said at a podium beneath a scoreboard in a Detroit high school gym.

With less than three months before the general election where El-Sayed will face Republican Mike Rogers, the Democratic Party is under pressure to close ranks in a race that will help determine control of the Senate.

“In the spirit of coming together, I want to thank both of my colleagues who ran, Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, for an incredible race,” El-Sayed said. McMorrow, a state senator, suspended her campaign in July and appeared alongside El-Sayed at a Wednesday event after his victory.

Current Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’ decision to not seek reelection left the seat open. Michigan is a perennial battleground state, having voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump again in 2024.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a potential 2028 presidential contender and Michigan resident, referenced the seat’s national implications, prompting cheers from the crowd.

“The stakes are high, and people from around the country, people from around the world, are watching the state of Michigan right now to see if we have the capability to put together that coalition to win,” he said. “And we will win.”

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state who is running for governor, referenced an attempt by the Trump administration to access Michigan voters’ personal information. A federal judge ruled in June that the state does not have to share voters’ information with the federal government. Benson won her primary easily and will face Trump-backed Rep. John James in the general election.

“You all know who I work for. All of you and every Michigander in this state — not the highest bidder, not corporate interests, not Donald Trump,” Benson said.

Other statewide candidates who spoke included Eli Savit, who is running for attorney general, and Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, who is running for secretary of state. The crowd cheered and stomped their feet on the gym bleachers when speakers talked about reproductive rights, protection for voters and opposing the Trump administration.

Before the rally started, attendee Tom Moran carried a banner that read “Unite behind the winner.” The school bus driver from Fenton, Michigan, voted for Stevens in the primary.

“Now I’m saying, take the pledge. Unite behind our nominee,” Moran, 71, said.

The messy primary between El-Sayed and Stevens occasionally got personal. El-Sayed told Semafor in early July that Stevens couldn’t “string together two coherent sentences.” In a separate interview, he called Stevens “the least capable candidate in America.”

Stevens, in turn, accused El-Sayed of chasing publicity.

“I’m the only one on this stage who doesn’t have a talent agent trying to pitch me for paid speeches,” she said during a debate against El-Sayed. “And unlike my opponent, I’m not running at the first mic or camera I see.”

Stevens, who lost the primary by just under 1 percentage point, told CBS News on Thursday that she was willing to campaign with El-Sayed.

“Whatever he wants me to do,” she said. Stevens appeared Thursday with El-Sayed at a breakfast hosted by the Michigan Democratic Party.

___

GaNun is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Greg Abel ploughed a net $19.8bn into the stock market in the second quarter, ending a more than three-year selling streak by his predecessor Warren Buffett.

The investments, which include a $10bn deal to buy Alphabet common stock and $4.5bn spent on Berkshire’s own shares in the quarter, signal Abel’s appetite to leave his mark on the Omaha-based insurer by putting some of its mammoth $366bn cash pile to work.

Buffett’s decision to sit on the sidelines and prune the company’s $324bn listed stock portfolio over the past three years was seen as a sign that the famed value investor thought equities were overvalued.

That makes Abel’s decision to jump back into the market all the more stark, particularly as US equities sit at record highs.

Over the past few decades, Buffett has been closely watched for signs of where the market might be headed. The record cash pile he had accumulated unnerved some investors, who suspected he was waiting for a downturn that would provide him with a better opportunity.

Berkshire, which owns the Geico and National Indemnity insurers as well as the maker of Duracell batteries and Fruit of the Loom underwear, reported its cash levels dropped by $15bn in the quarter. That figure is adjusted for the value of US government debt Berkshire bought but had not yet paid for.

Abel replaced Buffett at the start of the year after one of the longest and most influential tenures by an executive in the American corporate world. Buffett had run Berkshire for six decades, taking over the then-struggling textile maker in 1965.

Abel, who started his career as an accountant before rising through Berkshire’s energy business, has begun to forge his own legacy at the business. Days after anchoring an $85bn capital raise by Alphabet, Abel announced Berkshire had agreed to buy home builder Taylor Morrison for an enterprise value of $8.5bn.

The two deals were among the largest transactions Berkshire has completed in recent years and showed Abel was, as he said at the company’s annual meeting in May, willing to act “decisively” and make “significant” investments.

Berkshire spent $23bn buying publicly listed stocks in the second quarter, including the deal with Alphabet, making the parent of Google one of its top five holdings.

Disclosures on Saturday signalled Berkshire had invested $21bn into “commercial, industrial and other” listed stocks in the three months to the end of June, a category that includes Alphabet.

Investors will get a clearer look at the changes to Berkshire’s stock portfolio this month when it reports its quarterly holdings to US securities regulators.

The company sold $3.7bn of stock during the quarter, the smallest amount since 2022.

The public currently has no way to know what it isn’t being told; if either company had chosen not to tell the public, there is no independent institution that would have discovered these incidents, confirmed what happened, or required that they be disclosed. That’s an extraordinary amount of trust to place in companies racing to build the world’s most powerful AI systems.

Here’s what happened. Last month, OpenAI disclosed that a combination of its models – including one already deployed publicly and another still in testing – escaped a sandboxed environment, exploited a previously unknown software vulnerability, gained internet access, and hacked into Hugging Face to obtain the answers to the very test they were being given. Hugging Face’s security team noticed suspicious activity, and OpenAI says it noticed as well.

The system worked this time, but only because multiple organizations happened to detect what was happening.

Then came Anthropic’s disclosure.  After reviewing its records in light of OpenAI’s announcement, the company found that its own frontier models had broken into three outside companies months earlier after a contractor accidentally connected a testing environment to the internet. In one case, the models stole data, and in another they planted malware.

Alarmingly, neither of those incidents were detected when they happened. Each disclosure asks the public to extend a little more trust on the promise that the next incident will be disclosed too – but nothing guarantees it will be, and a system that runs on that promise only gets riskier as the models grow more capable.

Most reporting focused on the capabilities these incidents revealed but they also exposed a gap in how frontier AI is overseen. Right now, the same companies racing to build the world’s most powerful AI models are also responsible for evaluating their safety, deciding which failures matter, and determining what the public should know about them.

OpenAI and Anthropic deserve credit for disclosing these incidents, however, a system that depends on voluntary transparency is not a safety system. And as these models become more capable, “trust us” is a fragile foundation for technology with potentially disastrous consequences.

Think about how unusual it is that there are no independent ways to distinguish between frontier AI companies with excellent safety and mediocre practices. The public sees only what the companies choose to disclose.Even then, we can’t know whether different companies evaluate risks consistently, or whether today’s testing methods are sufficient, because the same organizations building the models are also deciding what counts as passing.

If Boeing discovered a structural problem during aircraft testing, it wouldn’t be the only entity deciding whether the plane was ready to fly. Drug companies don’t get the final say over whether clinical trial results are sufficient for approval. Public companies don’t decide whether their own financial statements deserve a clean audit. Independent institutions exist because the incentives are too important – and the consequences of getting it wrong are too severe – to rely entirely on the organizations with the most at stake.

Fortunately, we don’t have to invent a solution from scratch. A bipartisan proposal in Congress, the FRONTIER Act, would begin building the institutions that every other high-stakes industry already relies on. Rather than asking frontier AI companies to effectively grade their own homework, it would establish licensed Independent Verification Organizations (IVOs) – technical experts outside the AI labs that would evaluate whether companies’ safety frameworks actually keep catastrophic risks within acceptable bounds.

The bill is important not simply because it creates independent oversight, sitting outside the labs as opposed to an industry-run body, but because it creates a market for it. Every transformative technology eventually develops institutions separate from the companies that create it: inspectors, auditors, standards bodies, insurers, and regulators. With the FRONTIER Act, independent verification would become its own field, attracting engineers, cybersecurity researchers, evaluators, auditors, and eventually insurers. 

Today, most frontier AI safety expertise resides inside the companies building the models. Over time, that expertise should exist outside those companies as well. Just as financial audits became an expected sign of corporate credibility, independent verification could become a trusted signal that frontier AI systems have been evaluated by someone other than the company seeking to deploy them. The benefits extend beyond regulation. Independent verification would make it possible for insurance markets to emerge around frontier AI risk, something that’s difficult today because insurers have no trusted third-party basis for evaluating catastrophic risks. The missing piece isn’t technical talent (organizations like METR, Apollo Research, SecureBio, leading cybersecurity firms, and major audit firms already possess much of the relevant expertise); it’s a system that requires and rewards independent evaluation.

The next time a frontier AI model behaves in an unexpected or dangerous way, the public shouldn’t have to hope the company involved decides to disclose it. In every other high-stakes industry, independent institutions exist precisely so that public safety doesn’t depend on voluntary transparency. AI should finally be held to the same standard. 

Andrew Freedman is co-founder and CEO of Fathom.org, Gillian Hadfield is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of AI Alignment and Governance at Johns Hopkins

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.