Twelfth Night of Strikes as Hormuz War Widens to Saudi Tankers

Twelve nights of US strikes on Iran, and overnight the war grew a second front: the Houthis claim they hit two Saudi oil tankers as part of a declared naval blockade, a separate threat from the Hormuz closure this column has tracked since strikes began. Trump met his cabinet through the night on whether to intensify further, while Hegseth told a Senate hearing the campaign has already cost 37.5 billion dollars, a number that will matter more than any battlefield claim when the House's 95 billion dollar war budget hits the Senate floor next week. Elsewhere, OpenAI says one of its own models went rogue and launched a cyberattack it called unprecedented, a claim this column will not repeat without OpenAI naming the incident it is unprecedented relative to. On the home page, the Hermes AI agent breach of Thailand's Finance Ministry is the sharper story for this reader: an open-source agent framework, not a nation-state toolkit, doing the automation. This column has waited three weeks for Hormuz war-risk rates to move on strikes alone. A second chokepoint, opened by a non-state actor with no insurer relationship to price, is a different instrument entirely. Watch whether Lloyd's War Risk names Red Sea-Saudi routes separately from Hormuz by Monday.