News

• British XV Excalibur robotic submarine has now launched an American Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo
• Project Broadsword completed its first weapon integration test in seven months
• Engineers mounted the 3,700-pound Mk 48 torpedo externally beneath XV Excalibur’s hull

The US Navy and Royal Navy have launched an American Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo from the British XV Excalibur uncrewed submarine during testing in Scotland.

Held on September 13 2026, the launch took place at the British Underwater Test & Evaluation Centre under Project Broadsword, approved only seven months earlier.

It examined whether an American weapon could be integrated with a British autonomous underwater vessel through compatible mechanical, electrical and software systems.

AUKUS is a security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States covering cooperation on advanced military capabilities.

Its second pillar, known as AUKUS Pillar II, focuses on developing and sharing advanced capabilities including artificial intelligence, autonomy, quantum technologies and advanced undersea systems.

Project Broadsword is part of this technology-focused cooperation, with the latest trial applying allied interoperability to an American weapon and British uncrewed underwater vessel.

Approved in February 2026, Project Broadsword brought together the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office (DONRCO), OPNAV N97, Royal Navy, Defense Innovation Unit, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Keyport and industry partners.

The project connected the Mk 48 with XV Excalibur, an extra-large uncrewed underwater vessel designed for autonomous or remotely controlled operations.

Unlike a conventional attack submarine, Excalibur does not have traditional internal torpedo tubes, so engineers mounted the approximately 3,700-pound weapon externally beneath its hull.

That configuration allowed the teams to conduct the launch while testing the interfaces required between the American torpedo and British underwater platform.

Excalibur had already been used by the Royal Navy as a mobile underwater laboratory for testing technologies and future payloads.

In 2025, the vessel was remotely controlled in British waters from a command centre in Australia, approximately 10,000 miles away.

Those tests gave the Royal Navy experience operating an uncrewed underwater platform without placing personnel aboard the vessel during its missions.

“This successful test marks a historic first for allied undersea warfare…validates our shared vision for true interchangeability,” said Adm. Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations.

“By integrating weapons, payloads, and mission architectures across allied platforms, we are increasing the flexibility, scale, and combat power of our combined forces and ensuring they are ready to meet the strategic demands of tomorrow.”

The test showed that a U.S. weapon could be integrated with a British uncrewed platform rather than requiring both systems to develop exclusively around individual systems.

Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher, Director of Submarine Programs, described the launch as an important early step toward developing greater interoperability for autonomous undersea systems.

The US Navy plans to continue the work through Project CUTLASS, using Anduril's Dive-XL platform for the next stage of development.

The follow-on effort will examine payload integration, command and control systems, and operational scenarios involving uncrewed underwater platforms.

The Navy said this work will further develop the use of autonomous underwater vessels with different payloads and mission systems.

The September launch completed the Broadsword proof-of-concept, while CUTLASS now moves the effort toward additional integration and operational testing.

Further trials will determine whether the approach can support other weapons, platforms and mission configurations beyond the system used during Broadsword.

• Register.si logged 46,066 new .si domains in September 2026 compared with 3,515 in August after Trump said the US would call AI "superintelligence"
• Registrations have continued to accelerate to over 12,600+ a day at the time of writing, as an increasing number of registrants lock in key domain names with the registrar
• The rename was telegraphed by Truth Social polls from September 19, and Netcraft found speculative .si buying happening before the speech aired

Slovenia's national domain registry has spent the past two weeks absorbing a wave of demand thanks to an unexpected boon.

US President Donald Trump recently told the UN General Assembly that the United States would now call artificial intelligence "super intelligence," or SI, because the word artificial "makes it sound fake."

This has prompted buyers around the world to pile into .si, the country code of the small European nation where First Lady Melania Trump was born.

The First Lady was born in Novo Mesto in 1970, when Slovenia was still a Yugoslav republic, and Netcraft notes that she and Barron Trump both hold Slovenian citizenship. The coincidence ironically exists only because Slovenia was assigned SI when SL had already gone to Sierra Leone.

Register.si, in a screengrab of the site, registered only 3,515 domains in August 2026, while one day saw the website register as many as 12,491 across 92 domain registrars, even as the site shows 46,066 registrations at the time of writing, indicating an impressive 13.1x increase monthly or pro-rated, a 106x increase when compared with an average day in August.

The monthly numbers might be even more impressive if one considers the statement of the Register.si spokeswoman, Klara Herman, to the BBC, where she stated that "44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix had been registered in September, compared to less than 2,000 in August - an increase of more than 2,100%".

One could, however, argue this isn't a complete surprise: on September 19, Trump posted a poll on Truth Social offering Superior, Extreme, or Supreme Intelligence as replacements for AI, two of which abbreviate to SI.

On September 21, he promised in a post that he would "only encourage AI or SI (SUPER INTELLIGENCE)!", and a second poll pitting super against superior intelligence drew more than 50,000 votes. This also sparked a betting spree: a Polymarket contract on whether Trump would rename AI by September 30 opened on September 20 and drew $151,000 in bets by September 23.

The obvious beneficiary for now seems to be the state of Slovenia, though at a limited scale; Register.si still charges every registrar the same €10 per domain, and the registry has said media speculation about millions in earnings for Slovenia has "no real basis".

Domain Name Wire estimated roughly €300,000 in additional September revenue for the state, though that number may be dated, given the current total stands at 46,066 domains or €460,660 and may be even higher. Anguilla, by contrast, earned around $32 million from .ai in 2023, more than 20% of government revenue, according to IMF figures cited by Foreign Policy,

The less obvious, but considerably more lucrative, play is speculative buying of potentially high-value domain names should the trend catch on, to flip for a high multiple (100x, 1000x, or even higher in certain cases) on transfer.

The more interesting question is what SI could eventually mean, and whether it is one used by the rest of the world. The White House fact sheet says the order directs agencies to use Super Intelligence and SI in official communications and "to no longer acknowledge" the old terms, but it applies only to executive branch documents outside statute. It has no say in whether the nomenclature actually catches up with or replaces AI in an industry that has far more pressing concerns to address than its own name.

• Those buying an RTX 5090 at Micro Center now have to fill out a declaration form
• This includes having a government-issued photo ID scanned by the retailer
• Some approve of the policy as it's an anti-scalping measure, but others view it as an annoyance or a pointless move

If you're buying an Nvidia RTX 5090, or a PC with the graphics card inside, over in the US, you may have to fill out an official form to declare that you don't intend to export and resell the GPU – or at least you will at Micro Center.

PC Gamer spotted the 'advanced computing product purchaser declaration' which a Redditor was forced to complete and sign – including a scan of their driving license for ID – when buying a PowerSpec AI90 workstation PC with an RTX 5090.

The Micro Center store was in Tustin, California, but someone else posting on the Reddit thread claims that the same form has been introduced at the Columbus, Ohio store.

Apparently this is a new policy that only started this week at Micro Center (but seemingly other retailers already follow this practice in the US, including Central Computers).

In case you hadn't guessed, this move is about trying to prevent scalpers from buying up the RTX 5090, or PCs containing it – which can be around the same price as the standalone GPU these days, and are sometimes the only way of getting this graphics card at all – in order to sell it on to China and turn a profit.

As some of the commenters on Reddit are quick to point out, this form isn't legally binding, and there are question marks over how any of this might be enforced. Somebody breaking the terms of the agreement is likely to just shrug their shoulders about the consequences, perhaps.

However, as PC Gamer notes, the use of the ID check is certainly a deterrent of sorts for GPU exporters. And what this is doing is preventing people who are making a short trip to the US buying an RTX 5090 and selling it on when they get back home for a hefty mark-up. Those people won't be able to provide a US address and government photo ID that can be verified as belonging to them, of course.

The fact remains that it's a bit of a pain for Micro Center's customers to have to go through this form filling and ID check, although that said, some of the folks on the above Reddit thread don't have a problem with the process given that it's an anti-scalping measure. Others are concerned about having to give a retail store personal information for an unnecessary reason as they see it, or they're just annoyed and think it's a waste of time. As one Redditor put it: "This is ridiculous."

Going by the Reddit thread, another measure Micro Center enforces is that there's only one purchase of an RTX 5090 GPU per customer full-stop, forever. Once you've bought one, you can never buy another, we're told.