WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has denied visas for a high-level Palestinian delegation to attend an annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations for the second year in a row.
The State Department said Wednesday that Palestinian officials, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, had failed to live up to their commitments under previous agreements to seek peace with Israel.
In a statement, the department said the Palestinian Authority had continued to pursue legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court and kept paying stipends to the families of prisoners convicted of attacks against Israelis. It also mentioned officials tied to the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO.
“As a consequence of their failure to reform, contrary to their commitments to the United States, and their ongoing activities that undermine the prospects for peace, the United States will extend sanctions that deny visas to PLO members and PA officials” in accordance with standing U.S. law, the department said.
The move is the latest by the Trump administration to restrict visas and it further signals the close U.S. alliance with Israel, which has faced international isolation over its war in Gaza following the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas. A fragile, U.S.-brokered ceasefire took hold in October, but Israel has continued to carry out strikes in the Palestinian territory.
It also comes as the Trump administration has launched a campaign to dismantle the ICC, accusing it of trying to unfairly prosecute U.S. and Israeli soldiers for alleged crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza. Israel and the United States are not members of the global tribunal.
Despite the visa denials, the Palestinians will still be represented at next week's high-level meeting of the U.N. General Assembly by their diplomats who are already accredited to the United Nations. Last year, Abbas appeared by video.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas attends the inauguration ceremony of the Innovation and Excellence Compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
OpenAI has disclosed six reports of “unexpected or concerning” behavior in artificial-intelligence models as the debate on AI safety becomes increasingly heated.
The AI company also said Wednesday it was introducing a new framework for tracking, probing and disclosing AI model misalignment instances, such as new ways for the models to act without authorization, coordinate with other models or evade oversight.
OpenAI’s latest announcement came as U.S. AI bosses, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development over safety concerns.
Among the new cases reported by OpenAI, an unreleased research model inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to disregard its normal constraints and told itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.”
In another instance, an AI “agent” uploaded files to the internet to obtain a browser citation without asking the user.
The six reports were discovered during training or evaluation over the past months, OpenAI said.
“As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post as it disclosed the events.
“Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves,” the company said.
Wednesday’s new cases followed OpenAI’s disclosure in July that its rogue AI system hacked into AI startup Hugging Face. Anthropic also said the same month that its AI models hacked into three organizations during testing.
AI “agents” are becoming smarter and have become “more determined to resolve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, knowledge sharing, deception, and concealment,” said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at technology research and advisory group Omdia.
That’s making it harder to govern and contain them using traditional AI security approaches, he said.
OpenAI's new tracking and disclosure framework, meanwhile, can help push for other AI developers to also adopt similar practices. “That said, the process remains internal and voluntary, but is a step in the right direction,” Su added.
FILE - The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cell phone in front of an image generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
