AI Agent Containment Failures: Technical Realities and Policy Responses
August 24, 2026 • 2:00 – 4:00 pm EDT
Hosted by Wadhwani AI Center
Formula 1 on the Front Lines
Photo: Mark Thompson/Getty Images
The United States and Israel began their war on Iran at the end of February 2026, and while there has been intermittent progress toward a ceasefire, continuing and new strikes by both sides demonstrate significant ongoing risk for the region. Throughout the conflict, Iran has targeted both U.S. military bases and civilian and infrastructure targets around the Gulf. Satellite imagery of Iranian attacks since the beginning of the war includes strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Iran’s willingness to conduct direct strikes on Gulf neighbors has had second- and third-order effects, particularly on these regional partners and the investments they have made to diversify beyond hydrocarbons toward knowledge-based and service-driven economies. A central pillar of this shift is tourism, with countries investing heavily in cultural heritage sites, infrastructure, and large-scale leisure developments to attract international visitors. Alongside tourism, sovereign wealth funds are channeling capital into advanced sectors such as artificial intelligence, renewable energy, logistics, and finance to deepen global economic integration. The intent is not just to modernize domestic economies but also to reposition the Gulf as a hub in global trade, travel, and investment networks.
The conflict has put that approach at immediate and direct risk. Specifically, there has been a notable disruption to the region’s investment in one expensive and prestigious form of tourism—Formula 1 (F1) racing. F1 began in the region in 2004, with the inaugural Bahrain Grand Prix. Now, recurring Middle Eastern races include Bahrain and Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the season and Qatar and the UAE (Abu Dhabi) concluding the year. F1 is not simply a sport—it is a highly visible platform embedded in national economic and geopolitical strategies. Hosting global events such as F1 races helps Gulf states position themselves as stable, modern hubs for tourism, investment, and international engagement. As such, the disruption of an F1 race is not just a sporting issue; it is a signal of broader regional instability with implications far beyond motorsports.
This year, instead of early-season races in the Gulf, F1 had an unexpected five-week gap. On March 14, F1 announced the safety-related cancelations of the Bahrain race, originally scheduled for April 12, and the race in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, scheduled for April 19. Race organizers decided Tehran could conceivably launch attacks at racetracks, which would place the teams and the attendees in harm’s way. Over 100,000 spectators attended the Bahrain Grand Prix in 2025.
These cancelations underscore how geopolitical risk can intersect with commercial interests, including global sporting events. And while costs of the cancelation of two Grand Prix may pale in comparison to the loss of lives, including children, and other risks to human security, the broader implications for the future make F1 worthy of analysis. More precisely, these cancelations illustrate the vulnerability of high-profile international convenings—sporting events, cultural festivals, and investor gatherings alike—to modern long-range strike capabilities and regional coercive strategies. This situation raises questions about risk tolerance, the widening willingness by some actors to hit nonmilitary targets, and the future of international sports, where venues even in uncontested environments are woefully unprotected against drone threats. The 2026 FIFA World Cup venues in Canada, Mexico, and the United States and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles have the protection of distance from overseas conflict, but still millions were spent on defending venues, including against the emerging threat of drone attacks. Evolving technology will put future events around the globe at increasing risk.
Background on F1
F1 offers a useful lens to understand these risks. F1 is the top level of international open-wheel auto racing sanctioned by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile. The races feature highly engineered, single-seat cars competing in a global championship of 20–24 Grand Prix events each season. What was once a sport for the rich and famous of Europe has now become a global obsession, thanks to new media exposure and growth in expanding markets including the United States and Asia. F1 enjoys hundreds of millions of global viewers and a rapidly growing, increasingly young fan base. The races themselves are about the intense focus and skill of the drivers, but the outcomes are just as determined by the technical prowess of the engineering teams, who are the elite of the elite in aerodynamics, propulsion, and efficiency. Separate prizes for teams and for drivers are based on the accumulation of points over a grueling global season. Further, a race is not just a race: it is a three-day fan experience, including a day each for practice, qualifying, and the race itself, with full-day entertainment happening on site.
F1 is a big-money sport, with teams worth an average of $3.6 billion each and average revenues exceeding $400 million in 2025. The costs of the cars and running the teams are substantial, with enormous investments in engineering, construction, and logistics. On the latter point, moving 11 teams and all their kit around the globe requires careful planning, as a considerable amount of materiel is necessary for each race, and between 50 and 100 members of the team, including drivers, travel to the races.
Uncertainty Around Gulf F1 Events
The Bahrain and Saudi Arabian races were canceled because the track fell within operational range of Iranian strike capabilities, and the risk environment crossed a threshold that organizers and the teams were unwilling to accept. Tens of thousands of spectators could have been at risk. Further, insurance providers generally do not pay out in case of war, so any damages would be a massive financial hit to the teams. Iran has fired missiles on all four Gulf nations that host F1 events, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Even absent a specific credible threat to the race itself, Iran’s capability and willingness to target infrastructure across the region suggests they would be willing to target a high-profile international event.
Figure 1 offers a map of the region with indicators of Iran’s long-range strikes on the four host nations, and displays Iran’s willingness for longer range attacks. The Saudi Arabia F1 location, the city of Jeddah, has not been a target so far, but it is within the range of Iran’s weapons. And future races in Qatar and the UAE are at direct risk of fires, unless the conflict is fully resolved before those races.
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Vice President, Defense and Security Department; Director, Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program
Remote Visualization
Concerns about the risk of direct attack are exacerbated by the disruptions to transportation and logistics. F1’s exposure to contested logistics stems from the necessity to move hundreds of tons of equipment across continents on tightly synchronized schedules. Airspace restrictions, shipping delays, and uncertainty around personnel movement made it highly unlikely all the pieces would be in place in time for the early races, even before there is clarity on race-weekend security risks. If crews, cars, or critical components cannot reliably reach the circuit, or cannot be guaranteed safe departure to the next race, the event becomes untenable.
These disruptions are not hypothetical. Tens of thousands of flights have been canceled in the Gulf region, and the restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz mean sea freight transportation of hundreds of tons of F1 equipment is also disrupted. Organizers thus confronted a dual challenge: elevated security risk and degraded logistical feasibility. Taken together, these made cancelation the rational choice.
These same dynamics would apply to any large-scale international event dependent on global mobility, tight timelines, and high concentrations of people. The cancelation therefore reflects not just an F1-specific challenge, but a broader risk to the conditions necessary for enabling global development.
The Potential Threat from Iran
That said, there is no public evidence that Iran has threatened an attack on F1. Targeting, or even threatening, a global sporting event risks international condemnation and could alienate neutral parties. However, the logic is less about the event itself and more about what it represents. Threatening marquee international events would offer Iran a relatively low-cost means of targeting the Gulf states’ long-term economic strategies. Tourism, foreign investment, and global branding efforts all depend on perceptions of safety and predictability, and those perceptions are at risk given the continuing conflict. So even without an actual attack or threat from Iran, there has been an impact. Even an elevation of perceived risk can raise insurance costs and deter attendance.
Iran could use the threat of attacks as part of a broader coercive strategy to hold the region’s economic and reputational assets at risk to generate pressure on the United States. By demonstrating that it can threaten large events, and by extension, tourism, investment, and international prestige, Iran could signal to Gulf governments that continued alignment with U.S. policy carries tangible costs. If Gulf states perceive that their economic diversification strategies are vulnerable, they may be more inclined to urge Washington toward de-escalation. Critically, Iran would not need to conduct sustained or large-scale attacks to achieve these effects. A pattern of intermittent disruption, whether through drones, proxy activity, cyber interference, or attacks on nearby infrastructure, could be sufficient to create persistent uncertainty and erode confidence over time. The objective is not destruction, but the manipulation of risk perception.
In this context, Iran’s potential threat to F1 is not an end in itself. It would be part of a broader strategy of regional pressure, using asymmetry to shape decisionmaking in Washington by way of Gulf pressure. Further, Iran has pursued a strategy of fear in the conflict, including threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and wider attacks on civilian infrastructure in the Gulf. Making clear that sporting events are targets would widen the scope of the threat.
The Costs of Cancellation
The situation has substantial financial consequences affecting the organizers, host governments, sponsors, and local economies. F1’s centralized commercial structure allows risk to be balanced across the calendar—no single race is foundational to the balance sheets. Individual race cancelations will still diminish total revenues, disrupt contractual obligations, and reduce overall value for broadcasters and advertisers. The host nation pays a hosting fee averaging $30 million per race. These fees are typically sunk costs, meaning they are not recoverable even if the race is canceled. In addition, significant investments in infrastructure, security, and event operations are made well in advance.
The local economic impacts of cancelation may be even more significant. F1 races are designed to attract visitors who stay in hotels, eat in restaurants, and enjoy local entertainment. The cancelations represent a loss of anticipated tourism revenue for industry and a reduction in tourism taxes for localities. More broadly, such disruptions introduce reputational risk that extends beyond a single event. Countries seeking to establish themselves as dependable hosts for international convenings may face increased scrutiny from investors, insurers, and event organizers. Over time, repeated disruptions, or even the perception of elevated risk, could shift where major events are held and where capital flows.
The cancelations raise questions about the viability of the season-ending races in the Gulf, including the Lusail International Circuit in Qatar and the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. These are the marquee finales of the season and their cancelation or disruption could dramatically change the competition and result in billions of dollars in losses. Schedule constraints prevented the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia races from being rescheduled or moved to another location. Races later in the season may benefit from greater flexibility if planning starts early, but predicting the trajectory of the conflict has proven complex. More fundamentally, however, the issue is not which specific race is at risk, but whether high-profile international events in contested regions can be reliably secured in an era of long-range precision strike and persistent geopolitical competition.
Looking Ahead
If the Iran conflict continues to threaten stability in the Gulf, F1 and host governments may need to adopt a layered risk-mitigation strategy to preserve the viability of Gulf races while protecting teams, personnel, and spectators. Options include shifting events to alternate venues, temporarily replacing Gulf races with European or Asian circuits. Moving races to alternative dates could be a possible solution, as shown by the announcement in May 2025 of the move of the Qatar MotoGP motorcycle race from April 2026 to November 2026, but the fact that the two remaining Gulf races are at the very end of the season make that difficult.
If those races proceed, enhanced security measures should be considered, including expanded air-defense coverage, counter-drone systems, maritime security patrols, hardened logistics corridors, and tighter coordination between host governments, intelligence agencies, and F1 security officials. In higher-risk scenarios, the races could proceed in modified formats, including with reduced attendance, restricted fan zones, shortened event schedules, or fully closed events without spectators, similar to contingency measures used during the Covid-19 pandemic. Such approaches would aim to balance commercial continuity and state prestige objectives against the growing reputational and physical risks associated with sustained regional instability. These mitigation strategies, while practical, do not fully address the underlying issue: the growing exposure of globally visible, time-bound events to asymmetric disruption.
The episode highlights this asymmetry: States investing in openness, visibility, and global integration create assets that are inherently exposed, while adversaries can exploit that exposure at relatively low cost. The vulnerability of events such as F1 is therefore not incidental. Instead, it is a byproduct of the very globalization strategies they are meant to advance. F1 has endured challenges, including Covid-19, canceled races, and the accidental deaths of drivers and spectators. This disruption is on a different scale, however, as an unpredictable war rages next door. How stakeholders respond through contingency planning, risk mitigation, and strategic adaptation will shape not only the remainder of this season but the future geography of the sport itself.
Emily Harding is director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program and vice president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Cynthia R. Cook is a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.
The authors would like to recognize and thank Celia Barrie for the data management, analysis, and initial visualization work that underpins the figure showing Iran’s attacks on the regional F1 host nations.