Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

President Donald Trump said he has offered Iran nothing to end the war, rejecting media ⁠reports that cited US officials saying ⁠he was willing to ​ease sanctions and release frozen funds for “concrete” steps regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

“This is untrue. I offered them NOTHING,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday.

Axios and CNN both reported, citing unidentified US officials, that Trump was willing to ⁠give Iran sanctions relief and free Iranian funds as part of a final deal on the condition that Iran showed “concrete progress” on the nuclear issue.

It comes as Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Trump was ⁠a “big liar”, citing the ⁠president’s statements ​on ‌nuclear ‌weapons and other ‌issues.

“The ​enemy (US) knows that Iran ‌is not after ‌nuclear weapons,” spokesperson Hossein Mohebbi said. “Their issue with Iran is ‌not its nuclear programme but rather its vastness, which they want to destroy.“

Trump has cited preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear bomb as a key goal of the war, ⁠along with ending its ability to attack its neighbours and creating conditions for Iranians to topple their leadership. Iran does not have nuclear weapons and denies it wants ​to develop them, but argues it has the right to a domestic ‌nuclear energy capacity.

Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, in an ‌interview with the CBS show Face the Nation, said Tehran was ready for talks on its nuclear program and other issues, but would not accept “bullying or ‌coercion”.

“Iran is not seeking war, but will defend itself against pressure, threats and attacks,” Pezeshkian said, adding that it had already agreed that “we’re not supposed to develop nuclear weapons”.

US and Iranian officials spoke separately with mediators on Monday as part of a renewed effort to end the seven-month war, according to officials of both countries.

In other developments:

  • Anthropic will caution investors that artificial intelligence could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” in its IPO prospectus. As Anthropic prepares for an IPO listing, which could value the AI company at a monumental $2tn, it dedicated almost a third of its prospectus to discussing concerns around AI safety. The news comes as OpenAI has halted the release of its next AI model over safety concerns, the Wall Street Journal reports.

  • Trump will be on the campaign trail this week – hosting rallies in Durant, Oklahoma, on Thursday, Mobile, Alabama, on Friday and Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. The first two states are GOP strongholds, and Trump has pushed voters to turn out to the polls and pretend the president was at the top of the ballot this midterm cycle.

  • Pete Hegseth ordered the defense department to “protect and uphold the reliability of America’s voting mechanisms against external manipulation and disruption from foreign actors” in a 22 September memo. Hegseth’s order comes as concerns about artificial intelligence are on the rise, but also as the Trump administration has spread misinformation about voter fraud. In July, Trump accused China of interfering in the 2020 election, which he lost.

  • Andrew Bailey said he is stepping down as one of the FBI’s two deputy directors after just over a year in the role – a short tenure that unfolded as he helped oversee several of Trump’s election‑related investigations. Bailey was appointed in August 2025 to serve alongside Dan Bongino at a moment of sharp tension between the FBI and justice department leadership over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

  • Pope Leo addressed concerns about artificial intelligence and the war in Ukraine during a press conference onboard the papal plane today. Saying that concerns about AI are not “fake news”, the first US pope appeared to criticize Trump, who called concerns about AI a “hoax” during a UN address last week.