Watch Lockheed Taps OpenAI to Solve F-35 Challenges - Bloomberg.com

US President Donald Trump on Sunday announced a White House task force to coordinate the administration's response to artificial intelligence (AI). The group will be led by director of national intelligence Jay Clayton, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael and director of the Office of Personnel Management Scott Kupor.

The provincial government has announced $2 million in new funding for a Moncton-based company that has attracted protest for supplying American military giant Lockheed Martin, which builds fighter jets for customers that include the Israeli Air Force. Opportunities NB, the economic development agency, announced the new “performance-based support” for Apex Industries last week during DEFSEC Atlantic, an annual exhibition in Halifax billed as “a major networking opportunity for the Aerospace, Defence and Security industries.”

Here’s your NYT Strands hint for today, plus the spangram and all of today’s Strands answers for puzzle No. 959 on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026. Today’s Strands theme was tricky. It helps to be a runner. Read on for all the answers.

A supply-chain attack involving ConnectWise’s cloud services has exposed Microsoft 365 customers to unauthorized application access, with researchers reporting successful sign-ins across 173 partner and customer tenants. The incident centres on credentials associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly SkyKick, and raises concerns about attackers exploiting permissions already entrusted to business software. ConnectWise has confirmed unauthorized access to application identities within its Cloud Backup environment. In an October 17 update on its service-status page, the company said it was shutting off application access, interrupting customer backups while investigation and remediation continued.