United States President Donald Trump has said the US will be hitting Iran “very hard tonight”, adding the military will be “taking Kharg Island” and other Iranian “oil infrastructure points in the not too distant future”.

The threats, made in a Truth Social post on Thursday, come after the US and Iran traded two days of strikes, threatening to derail ongoing negotiations for a lasting ceasefire.

While the statements indicate US willingness to return to a full-scale war, Trump has repeatedly alternated between bellicose threats and diplomatic overtures in recent weeks.

For example, he pledged that “a whole civilisation will die” just hours before a pause in fighting was agreed to, beginning on April 8.

“The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT,” Trump wrote on Thursday.

“At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets,” Trump wrote, before referencing the US military action against Venezuela.

That included the abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. Maduro’s replacement, Delcy Rodriguez, has overseen an opening of the country’s state-controlled oil industry to foreign investors, under heavy US pressure.

Kharg Island, known as the “Forbidden Island” due to its strict military control, processes 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports.

In a subsequent interview with Fox News, Trump said taking Kharg Island has always been his “preference”.

“I don’t know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest,” he added, saying he was still averse to deploying boots on the ground in Iran.

Trump’s statements came shortly after Iran’s foreign ministry said the latest round of US strikes rendered the ongoing pause in fighting “practically meaningless”.

Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, described the latest US attacks on Iran as “a widespread and utter nullification of the ceasefire”.

Recent US strikes have targeted the port city of Bandar Abbas, Qeshm Island, and the southern towns of Sirik, Minab and Karaj west of Tehran, according to Iranian media.

Iran, meanwhile, has attacked US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. Trump has also accused Iran of downing a US helicopter in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday.

Following the latest round of US strikes, Iran announced the full closure of the strait, the arterial waterway that has emerged as Tehran’s key point of leverage in the conflict.

US officials have for weeks been signalling that a deal is close, but have offered few specifics on impasses over the future of Iran’s nuclear programme, future control of the Strait of Hormuz, or the release of frozen Iranian funds.

Analysts have said the Trump administration is constrained by the political imperative of reaching a deal with better terms than the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which saw Tehran curtail its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and has, since taking office last year, twice struck Iran amid ongoing talks on its nuclear programme.

On Thursday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent vowed that any damage Iran “inflicts on our allies in the Gulf will be paid for with funds extracted” from Iran’s frozen assets, which are estimated to total about $100bn globally.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett said Trump appears to be using military pressure and inflammatory language to try to push Iran towards a deal.

“So what’s clear is that the US president is continuing with this Truth Social post to mix public threats with what he believes is still possible, and that is diplomacy at the barrel of a gun,” Halkett said.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Abas Aslani, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Middle East Strategic Studies, said the Trump administration “wants to escalate in order to create leverage at the negotiating table to pressure Tehran to make concessions that they did not in the past”.

Tehran, meanwhile, is concerned with “restoring deterrence against additional attacks on the country”.

“And for Iran, this is also important because the previous response to the US attack was not enough to ensure that they will not attack Iran again,” Aslani said. “That is why they might be escalating to de-escalate [the situation].”

On Thursday, US CENTCOM also announced that the military had disabled three oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman amid its ongoing blockade of Iranian ports.

India has called on the US to cease attacks on Thursday, saying three Indian crew members were killed in one US strike on a vessel.

Anthropic on Wednesday joined growing calls for the artificial intelligence industry to find ways to cushion people from the technology’s disruptions, announcing an initial $200 million investment to research AI’s impact on jobs and the economy.

Alongside new policy proposals from the maker of the Claude chatbot, Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei published an essay on his personal website that expanded on his position that the government should promise economic support for those financially impacted by AI. The technology could produce much larger disruptions to the labor market than previous technological advancements, Amodei wrote, and those disruptions could last longer.

“The key challenge in such a world won’t be incentivizing growth, but finding a way for everyone to share in the benefits,” Amodei wrote.

The announcement comes on the heels of Anthropic rival OpenAI on Monday outlining goals that included ensuring gains from the technology are “widely shared.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently met with Sen. Bernie Sanders to discuss a plan for the public to take an ownership stake in artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI, using their stock to create a public wealth fund that would spread the fortune generated by AI behemoths.

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Donald Trump told reporters that he will soon meet with executives from several leading AI companies to discuss “giving back” to the public.

“We’re talking about giving back something to the public, and if we do that, the ⁠public will become very rich,” Trump said. “I think they’ll do that, and I think it’ll make it very popular.”

In his essay, Amodei said he has warned of job displacement not because he is “trying to be a ‘prophet of doom’” but because he wants “both policymakers and the private sector to have the best chance to adapt and respond.” He proposed better data collection to track AI job displacement, pro-employment policy incentives to slow or reduce displacement and “mechanisms such as universal basic income” if job displacement more permanently drives down labor demand.

That universal basic income could be financed through taxes on “relevant companies” or by raising the capital gains tax, Amodei wrote.

Scant details were available Wednesday about the $200 million commitment from Anthropic, but the company said it will go to what it calls an Economic Futures Research Fund that will back research trials and “program evaluation” on public policies it deems promising. The company is also establishing a $150 million national fellowship program it says will help early-career professionals “extend the benefits of AI to communities across America.”

Anthropic and OpenAI each recently announced they were moving toward initial public offerings of shares, following Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, which is pitching itself as an AI-focused space company as it prepares to go public.

The economic policy framework Anthropic proposed Wednesday set recommendations for how the U.S. government could respond to three levels of economic disruption caused by AI: one in which the national unemployment rate reaches 5%, 10% and an unspecified, “unprecedented” level. The latest unemployment rate, reported last week, was 4.3%.

In the “unprecedented” scenario, the company wrote that more permanent support will be necessary, and it listed several ways to generate and share revenue broadly, including basic income, sovereign wealth models and equity-sharing mechanisms. This would be “novel economic territory,” the company wrote.

The company’s proposals also outlined several suggestions for mitigating safety and security risks. Anthropic is known for its emphasis on safety and building reliable, “steerable” AI systems, with Amodei and its co-founders splitting off from OpenAI to form the new company in 2021.

The proposals add that the government should be able to “block or deter” the rollout of AI models that “pose a significant risk of catastrophic harms.”

Amodei wrote that AI regulations should match the rigor of Federal Aviation Administration regulations in that AI models would be required to go through technical testing and auditing like airplanes. They wouldn’t be released if they didn’t meet high safety standards.

Last week, Trump signed an executive order on AI oversight that established a framework for the government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.

Amodei added existing regulations for aircraft, automobiles and drugs should serve as models for regulating AI. They are all “powerful technologies essential to the modern economy,” he wrote, “but capable of killing large numbers of people if designed or operated poorly.”

U.K. surveillance laws drew scrutiny from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio June 5 amid warnings they could expose communications of officials and American citizens, according to reports.

The concern centered on the U.K.’s use of secret Technical Capability Notices under the Investigatory Powers Act, which critics say could make U.S. companies weaken encryption or create “backdoors” weaken encryption or create “backdoors” while preventing firms from disclosing requests without U.K. government approval.

Critics have argued this could undermine privacy, create vulnerabilities and limit congressional oversight with one former intelligence official warning of a “standing invitation to Beijing.”

“We have already seen how this ends,” former Department of Defense official Andrew Badger told Fox News Digital.

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“There are legitimate privacy concerns here, and those have been well aired. The less examined issue is national security,” Badger said.

“A backdoor compelled by one ally becomes a standing invitation to Beijing, Moscow and Tehran so once one government can quietly compel access, others will demand the same, and a one-off concession hardens into a permanent vulnerability,” he warned.

According to the Telegraph, a June 5 letter sent by Jordan to U.K. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, showed the Trump ally had called for a review.

The report said Mahmood’s decision had been to deny a U.S. company permission to speak with Congress about an alleged encryption backdoor notice.

Jordan was also said to have warned that a lack of bilateral coordination raised concerns about the “trust and effective partnership between our two countries.”

“Five Eyes works because every partner trusts the others not to weaken the systems they all depend on,” Badger, co-author of “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets,” said.

“If Washington also concludes that U.K. surveillance powers could inadvertently expose Americans and American officials to espionage, it puts real strain on the relationship and makes future cooperation on intelligence and cyber harder to sustain.”

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On the encryption issue, Badger noted that mainstream encrypted platforms now function as “de facto infrastructure for sensitive communication well beyond the consumer market.”

“Any access point built into them becomes a permanent target. It is not a private key the requesting government gets to keep to itself,” he said.

U.S. and British cyber officials have also repeatedly warned that an axis of hostile states — including Russia, China and Iran — poses threats to Western security and infrastructure.

As previously reported by Fox News Digital, cyberespionage by groups such as Salt Typhoon, linked to China, has carried out operations targeting sensitive communications.

“China is actively running one of the largest state-backed cyberespionage operations ever uncovered. The Salt Typhoon campaign has targeted hundreds of organizations across roughly 80 countries and, through those intrusions, gained access to sensitive communications and networks used by senior Western officials,” Badger warned.

“Chinese state hackers didn’t defeat encryption. They walked straight through the lawful-intercept systems telecom providers had built, reaching the communications of senior officials and even information about surveillance targets.”

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Reports also surfaced that U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper used a burner phone during a recent trip to Beijing and raising further concerns about state-sponsored espionage.

Badger noted that the episode reflects a broader pattern of Chinese targeting of British democratic institutions, including the “hacking of senior Downing Street officials’ phones and an Electoral Commission breach that exposed the data of roughly 40 million voters,” he said.

“The telling thing is that no one issues burner phones for a trip to Sweden or Germany,” he said.

“The precaution is itself an admission of the threat environment. The working assumption — correctly — is that anything digital taken into China should be treated as potentially compromised.”

The systemic vulnerability also highlights a fundamental contradiction in Western diplomatic strategy, according to Badger.

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“This case perfectly underscores the contradiction at the heart of the U.K. Labour government’s China policy: chasing positive economic relations and expanded trade with Beijing on one hand, while being forced to take elaborate precautions against a state whose core interests remain fundamentally at odds with its own on the other,” Badger said.

“You can’t simultaneously treat China as a trusted economic partner and a hostile intelligence threat. It’s a fundamental contradiction. The need to use burner phones symbolically underscore this.”