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- Weight-Loss Drug Zepbound Is Being Tested as a Treatment for Long Covid

- All MAGA Wanted Was the Epstein Files. Now They're Ignoring Them

- Why You Should Cook Your Turkey Outside for Thanksgiving

- Can a Hydroelectric Dam Really Make the Days Longer?

- How Windows Recall Works—and Whether You Should Switch It On

- You Won’t Be Able to Offload Your Holiday Shopping to AI Agents Anytime Soon

- Airports and Airlines Are Crawling Out of the Shutdown

- Jeffrey Epstein Claimed Intimate Knowledge of Donald Trump’s Views in Texts With Bill Gates Adviser

- Stewart Rhodes Relaunched the Oath Keepers. Even Old Oath Keepers Don’t Care

- British Churches Are Putting Their Faith in Heat Pumps

- AI Relationships Are on the Rise. A Divorce Boom Could Be Next

- OpenAI’s Open-Weight Models Are Coming to the US Military

- DHS Kept Chicago Police Records for Months in Violation of Domestic Espionage Rules

- A Proposed Federal THC Ban Would ‘Wipe Out’ Hemp Products That Get People High

- Anthropic’s Claude Takes Control of a Robot Dog

SCIENCE | EMILY MULLIN | NOV 14, 2025 AT 11:10 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Weight-Loss Drug Zepbound Is Being Tested as a Treatment for Long Covid

Obesity wonder drugs Wegovy and Zepbound are already showing that they can reduce the risk of cardiovascular and chronic kidney disease in addition to helping people lose weight. Now, a US-wide trial will test whether tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Zepbound, may be an effective treatment for people with long Covid.

Part of a class of drugs known as GLP-1s, tirzepatide acts on receptors in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite. As a result, people shed pounds by eating less. But decreased body weight doesn’t fully explain the positive effects on the heart and kidney. Mounting evidence suggests that the drugs have a broad anti-inflammatory effect on the body—a mechanism that’s of interest for treating long Covid.

As many as 20 million people in the US have experienced long Covid, a chronic condition that lasts for at least three months after an initial infection. While more than 200 symptoms of long Covid have been documented, some of the most common include coughing, shortness of breath, brain fog, fatigue, mood changes, trouble sleeping, and body aches.

Scientists still don’t fully understand how and why long Covid occurs, but they’ve found persistent inflammation in many patients. This chronic inflammation may be caused by lingering traces of virus in the body or by misdirected antibodies, known as autoantibodies, that attack a person’s own cells and tissues. The hope is that tirzepatide could tamp down this inflammation to improve patients’ symptoms.

“The rationale for a GLP-1 drug is its powerful body-wide and brain anti-inflammatory properties,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the director of the La Jolla, California-based Scripps Research Translational Institute, which is sponsoring the trial.

Scripps researchers are recruiting 1,000 people across the country who are 18 years of age or older and have medical documentation of long Covid. Unlike most medical studies, which typically require multiple in-person visits, the Scripps trial is fully remote. Participants will be randomized to receive either tirzepatide or a placebo by mail and will take it for a year. They’ll receive a fitness tracker so that researchers can measure their step count, an important indicator of fatigue. Participants will also get a smart scale and will weigh in regularly. Since GLP-1s are used for weight management, study investigators want to make sure participants don’t lose too much weight during the trial.

Julia Moore Vogel, coprincipal investigator of the trial who herself has long Covid, says the remote design of the trial was intentional. “For the long Covid population, it’s so crucial, because if you’re requiring people to come into a clinic, you’re systematically excluding the most severely affected folks who are housebound or bedbound. It was really important to us to make sure that those people are included.”

In-person drug trials for long Covid have struggled to recruit patients because the debilitating nature of the condition makes it difficult for patients to travel for studies.

A lack of investment from the pharmaceutical industry has also stalled research. And despite a hefty $1.8 billion investment into long Covid research under the Biden administration, progress on finding effective treatments has been slow. Getting vaccinated remains the best way to prevent long Covid, and studies have found that taking the antiviral Paxlovid during an infection can also reduce the risk of developing it.

“There is an urgent need for investment in long Covid clinical trials, and in decentralized clinical trials like this one in particular,” says Hannah Davis, cofounder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a long Covid research and advocacy group. “Tirzepatide has shown to have anti-inflammatory, metabolic, and cardiovascular effects that could be promising to long Covid patients.”

One published study found that in 47 people with mast cell activation syndrome, or MCAS, a condition in which white blood cells release inflammatory chemicals, 89 percent benefited from a GLP-1, especially at low doses. The findings are relevant for long Covid, which shares many symptoms with MCAS.

David Kaufman, a private practice physician who specializes in MCAS, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune diseases, and chronic infections, has been treating long Covid patients with small doses of tirzepatide at his clinic, the Center for Complex Diseases, in Seattle and Mountain View, California.

He started prescribing GLP-1s off-label after some of his patients started taking the drugs for weight loss but were also reporting less fatigue. “I want to be cautious. This doesn’t cure everything. What it does is it seems to move the needle so patients can become more functional, but they may still need some fine tuning with the other medication,” he tells WIRED.

To avoid unwanted weight loss and the gastrointestinal side effects that come with GLP-1s, Kaufman typically starts patients out on one-tenth of the standard starting dose of 2.5 milligrams. He currently has 40 to 50 long Covid patients who are taking microdoses of tirzepatide. At a long Covid workshop in September, Kaufman presented his and other providers’ experience treating more than 350 patients with microdosing. They have found a 60 to 90 percent decrease in fatigue, brain fog, pain, and MCAS symptoms.

The Scripps trial, meanwhile, is using the standard 2.5 milligrams of tirzepatide as the starting dose. An NIH-sponsored trial also plans to test a GLP-1 drug for long Covid.

Although GLP-1s are showing knock-on benefits for a variety of symptoms and conditions, there’s reason for caution. Given the spectrum of symptoms associated with long Covid, there’s unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all treatment.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/weight-loss-drug-zepbound-is-being-tested-as-a-treatment-for-long-covid/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

POLITICS | DAVID GILBERT | NOV 14, 2025 AT 10:19 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

All MAGA Wanted Was the Epstein Files. Now They're Ignoring Them

MAGA could care less about the latest document dump on disgraced financier and convicted sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 documents from Epstein’s estate, a number of which directly reference president Donald Trump. The cache of documents contain messages from Epstein, where the sex offender says he knows “how dirty Donald is,” and that the president had spent hours in Epstein’s own home with one of his victims. In one message from Epstein to author Michael Wolff, Epstein writes: “Of course he knew about the girls.”

The White House has dismissed the revelations as nothing but a partisan attempt to smear Trump, a narrative MAGA world has been more than happy to get behind, even though the same people spent years calling for further investigations into Epstein’s associates. In February, the White House gave a dozen right-wing influencers including conservative commentator Liz Wheeler and Chaya Raichik, the woman who runs the notorious LibsofTikTok account, access to a number of Epstein-related documents. They walked out of the White House waving white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “The Most Transparent Administration in History,” though the administration later admitted many of the documents were already in the public domain.

But this week, following the drop of new documentation, the influencers have been silent.

MAGA influencers are either ignoring the new information or reframing it not as an indictment of Trump, but as part of a Democratic Party effort the president himself called “a hoax.” In many cases, MAGA influencers online focused instead on references to other people in the document dump, including a former New York Times journalist, a lawyer who worked as a White House counsel during the Obama administration, and Wolff, an author who has written several books about Trump.

“Why was anti-Trump author Michael Wolff advising convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein?,” Rogan O’Handley, a right-wing commentator known online as DC Draino, wrote on X.

O’Handley, an influencer who was also given the Epstein binders in February, echoed the White House’s claim that the document release was an attempt to “smear” Trump. O’Handley called for the release of all the Epstein files, though he failed to mention that it was Trump’s own administration who has prevented that from happening.

Posobiec, another member of the February influencer group, also flagged Wolff’s prominence in the release. “Michael Wolff was seemingly helping Epstein work to lie about Trump,” Posobiec wrote on X. “Never once asked him about the truth.”

Many right-wing figures on social media dismissed the entire document release as a hoax because of a single email from Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is Trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him,” Epstein wrote, before adding that Trump “has never once been mentioned” including by a “police chief.”

Maxwell responded: “I have been thinking about that.”

The victim's name was redacted in the email initially released by the Democrats on the committee on Wednesday morning, but was unredacted in the wider release by Republicans later on Wednesday. That document shows the name "Virginia" which the White House says refers to Virginia Guiffre, who accused Epstein of abusing her for years before dying by suicide earlier this year.

MAGA figures claimed that because Guiffre herself has said she was not aware of any wrongdoing on Trump’s part, this redaction was evidence of the Democrats trying to falsify smears against the president.

“Today’s Epstein emails showed members of regime media colluding with Jeffrey Epstein to create hoaxes about Trump,” right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich wrote on X, with Posobiec adding: “This release blew up in Dems' faces.”

Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury, a member of the House Oversight committee, told CNN that the document came to them from the Epstein estate already redacted.

Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor, did talk about the Epstein case on her show on Wednesday. But rather than addressing the Trump allegations, she tried to claim Epstein, according to someone she said was close to the case, was not a pedophile.

“Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile,” Kelly said. “He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realized this is disgusting. I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I'm just giving you facts, that he wasn't into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”

Trump whisperer Laura Loomer also largely ignored the Epstein story on Wednesday, though she did use it as a way of once again posting deeply islamophobic content:

“You can’t be outraged by the Epstein saga and simultaneously not be outraged by the fact that we have Muslims serving in Congress,” Loomer wrote on X. “Their ‘prophet’ was an infamous pedophile! Nobody wants to talk about that.”

While the vast majority of right-wing figures have dismissed the documents as irrelevant, there are a small number who are calling out the revelations. In a clip shared on X, conservative podcaster Candace Owens said “the Trump administration seems to have been hiding these emails. They’re not good, OK, they are completely indefensible.”

Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic far-right podcaster who recently ignited a civil war within the Republican Party after appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show, said Trump campaigned on a promise of transparency in relation to the Epstein files, before working with his administration to try to prevent their publication.

“This is a crisis of Trump’s own making, you have no one to blame but yourself,” Fuentes said on his own show Thursday night. “You can’t blame your own base for asking you to do what you promised to do. You can’t say your base doesn’t see the bigger picture or they’re conspiracy theorists if you played into that for years, which you did. The chickens have come home to roost now.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/maga-wanted-epstein-files-now-theyre-ignoring-them/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

GEAR | MATTHEW KORFHAGE | NOV 14, 2025 AT 7:02 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Why You Should Cook Your Turkey Outside (But Not Like That)

The holiday turkey has monopolized oven space for far too long. Thanksgiving should be a grill holiday to rival July 4.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The turkey is a tyrant. It is the centerpiece of American Thanksgiving, but it is also the great and unforgiving monopolizer of the oven. For a feast where the sides—stuffing! yams! baked mac! veggies with maple syrup on them!—are arguably the true and most beloved main event, the turkey often gets in the way.

I have made multiple Thanksgiving feasts already this year while testing Thanksgiving delivery meal kits—meals complete with multitudes of sides and dessert. One problem remained constant: oven space. With a turkey in your oven for hours at a time, plotting the logistics of cooking five sides started to feel like a spreadsheet endeavor to rival corporate forensic accounting.

By the time I planned out my second big turkey feast—a complicated filing system of recipe cards, all devoted to avoiding the multi-hour stay of the turkey in the oven—I realized that I should have paid better attention to my father over the years.

If I had, I'd have known that the best place for a holiday meat is always outside, on a grill or a smoker.

Courtesy of Weber

My father's stalwart belief—never stated out loud but clear to all observers—was that the best place to be when you have 23 people in your house is on the back patio. So while I was growing up, that's often where he was: outside, cooking meat. It's a perfectly useful activity that provides perfect deniability—a reason to leave the house that can't be questioned.

After all, our family is big. Farm-family Catholic and Lutheran big. Big is busy. And big is loud, especially by the time the third bottle of wine is uncorked. If you needed him, Dad was on the deck cooking a pork roast, a pork loin, whatever it took. One by one, the uncles would follow. They'd go out for a cigarette, then stay to “help” the same way old guys help at a construction site, by watching, and jawing a little.

But the one thing we never cooked on the grill was turkey. This was my mother's province, and it stayed inside. But after prepping a couple of feasts myself this year—always organized around the Problem of the Turkey—I'm now convinced.

The only real way to do turkey at Thanksgiving is outside. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Turkey Day should join the Fourth of July as one of America’s great grill holidays. Rain notwithstanding, crisp fall temperatures are better for grilling than summer. New smart grill technology and wireless meat thermometers make it all a whole lot easier.

And so this month, I smoked up a little 10-pound turkey alongside WIRED writer Brad Bourque. Meanwhile Reviews team director Martin Cizmar grill-roasted a whole turkey according to a recipe from our sister publication Bon Appetit, and the results are clear. Turkey is simply better on a grill or a smoker.

Here’s why, and also how to get it done. And maybe also why there's no good reason to use a deep fryer.

Smart Grills and Wireless Thermometers Make Outdoor Turkey Easy

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

I know, I know, a roasted turkey is tradition—though probably not quite as old a tradition as you think. Most turkey recipes call for slow-roasting the bird for hours in an oven, at a low heat that's not overly amenable to cooking other dishes alongside it.

Plenty of vast exurban kitchens sport a double oven these days, but plenty more kitchens do not. Smoking or grill-roasting the bird outside solves a lot of logistical problems. So that's the motive for why you'd want to be outside with your bird, and out of the way.

But the main reason it’s easy to move the turkey outdoors these days is technological. Grill-roasting a turkey used to be a guessing game, hidden underneath the black box of your grill lid. But these days, smart grilling technology and a whole lot of excellent wireless meat thermometers have made it easy to grill turkey to temp without much trouble.

With three probes constantly on the case, you’re able to monitor the cooking temp to reach the target temp of 175 degrees Fahrenheit for dark meat, and 165 degrees for white meat. No more black box! You can follow along on your dang phone.

Lately, I’ve been having a good experience with the new four-probe WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled Chef IQ Sense ($160), which registers accurate temps even with evaporation taken into account. My colleague Martin Cizmar prefers the Traeger Meater Pro ($349 on Amazon for a four-probe model). Each lets you track your ambient and meat temp on your phone, without lifting your grill.

Cizmar grill-roasted a turkey on his Big Green Egg this year, an experience he described as “extremely pleasant.” He cooked with charcoal, no wood, to get roasty character. He wasn't trying to smoke it. But he still ended up with a very light smoky tinge from the turkey drippings falling down into the charcoal, a blessed form of meat-on-meat feedback you don't get from an oven.

This is the way.

“This is definitely how I would cook it on Thanksgiving Day if I were making a Thanksgiving dinner,” he writes, “which I'm not because I will be working to bring our readers the best Black Friday deals.”

Smoked Turkey Tastes a Lot Better

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But as for me, I'm team smoke. Holiday or no holiday, turkey has a bad rap as the most boring of meats. Possibly, we’ve all just developed low standards for it. It’s a big, irregular bird—and we’ve become accustomed to cooking it slowly and unevenly, without a lot of seasoning, and tasting it dry.

But go to East Texas, and you’ll find that turkey isn’t boring at all. It’s full of hickory smoke, and dry-brined with spice rub. It is delicious. WIRED grill reviewer Scott Gilbertson maintains that the only good turkey is a smoked turkey leg. I also like a whole smoked whole turkey; and frankly you can get great character and even cook out of a brined, rubbed breast.

With the help of WIRED contributing reviewer Brad Bourque, I ran a test run smoking a small 10-pound turkey on the new Recteq Flagship 1600 pellet smoker and grill ($1,480) that Bourque is busy testing. I dry-brined it up for a day beforehand, mixing an herb-garlic and lemon-pepper rub with extra thyme and a bit of brown sugar to crisp the skin during the cook.

In early testing, the Recteq is showing very even heat across the width of the grill when cooking with hickory-cherry blend pellets, better even than the top-line Traeger Woodridge Pro pellet grill, so Bourque laid out the turkey in the middle of the grill at 225 to start—but notched it up to 275 for the back end of the cook to aim for crispy skin. Next time around, this may go above 300 for better crispiness.

In retrospect, we would have also used the Chef IQ probes over Recteqs for better readings on each part of the turkey. The Recteq probes provide excellent data but are a little big to use for poultry. And we might have tried a spatchcock for a more even cook.

But these small shortcomings didn't matter much. The smoke flavor was excellent, deep, and rich. The difference between roasted and smoked turkey is a bit like the difference between stereo and mono sound: Turkey loves to take on other flavors if you let it, and the smoke also harmonizes with turkey’s ever-so-slight gaminess.

I know a smoked turkey isn’t traditional for a holiday forged mostly in New England. But what I will say is that among three turkeys I’ve cooked this season before Thanksgiving, the one cooked on the smoker had by far the best flavor of any turkey I expect to make this year.

Deep Frying Turkey Is Still Kinda Dumb

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The one thing we didn't do outside with the turkey was deep-fry it. Every time I bring up grilling a turkey outside, this is what people suggest. And I can see the fascination. Fire! Hot oil! Feelings of excess! Promises of crispness, and maybe a little frisson of danger. After all, Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without a news story about somebody burning down their $4 million house by trying to deep-fry a turkey in the garage. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission, as well as fire departments all over the country, seems to delight in posting videos of turkeys causing explosions when dipped in hot oil.

It's true that deep frying a turkey is unlikely to start a fire if you do it right. If you know how to measure the volume in advance by filling the oil with the turkey submerged, if you stay at least 10 feet away from your home, and pay good attention so the oil doesn’t overheat. And of course, if you fully thaw the turkey so the water trapped in still-frozen meat doesn’t superheat and explode.

But the fact that I used the word “explode” when describing a possible holiday meal is pretty much the point—as is the fact that FEMA feels the need to put out flyers about the dangers of deep-fried turkey. Multiple WIRED staffers remember watching in fear or horror as their partner or father deep-fried a turkey. WIRED reviewer Louryn Strampe said her mother used to tightly grip a fire extinguisher as the bird lowered into the oil. Each attests that the purported extra crispiness and flavor enhancement never quite materialized.

In the experience of WIRED reviewers, the results from deep frying a turkey don’t really bear out the risk or the hassle. But as for delicious smoked turkey? Grill-roasted turkey? Turkey in front of an open sky? Consider it the only real way to honor the wildness, independence, stubbornness, and intelligence that once made this native bird a would-be symbol of America—before, of course, we bred the poor thing into fat stupidity. Besides, backyard meats are the true American pastime. And grilled turkey should pretty much take over Thanksgiving.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/grill-turkey-outside-thanksgiving/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

SCIENCE | RHETT ALLAIN | NOV 14, 2025 AT 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Can a Hydroelectric Dam Really Make the Days Longer?

How many times have you said, “I wish the days were longer”? Well, NASA scientists say the construction of China’s Three Gorges Dam actually did make the days longer, by slowing the rotation of the Earth. Hallelujah! Extra time you can use to learn a new language, catch up at work, or even better, sleep in.

This raises a lot of questions. First of all, is it true? Did the dam actually make our days longer? And if so, why? And just how much extra time are we talking about here? I mean, you need to plan your schedule, right? Should we build more giant dams to get even more time?

Angular Velocity

To answer these questions, we need three basic physics ideas: (1) angular velocity, (2) angular momentum, and (3) the moment of inertia. I’ll explain each of these.

First, here’s a little experiment that you can do yourself. If you have a rotating desk chair, get it spinning with your feet off the ground and your arms tucked in. Now, before you throw up, extend your arms. It slows you down, right? Here's a version with a human on a rotating platform:

Video: Rhett Allain

The speed of rotation is what we call angular velocity, represented by the Greek letter omega (ω). Why “angular”? Here’s a two-dimensional example below. Think of this circle as centered on an xy coordinate plane. I’ve drawn a radius (R) to a point on the circle where it cuts the horizontal axis:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Now imagine this point moving counterclockwise around the circle. As it does, the radius line sweeps around like the second hand on a (backward) clock—and at any point in time, it forms an angle (θ) with the x axis. The faster the point moves around the circle, the faster that angle changes. Hence, “angular velocity.”

To be specific, ω is defined by how much the angle changes (Δθ) in a certain increment of time (Δt). So if the spinning girl above completes one rotation in one second, we say she has an angular velocity of 360 degrees per second—or using radians, 2π radians per second.

Actually, you know this concept from your car. Engine speed is measured in revolutions per minute. What it’s counting is how many times the crankshaft rotates in a minute, usually anywhere from 600 to 3,000 rpm’s for responsible citizens.

The Moment of Inertia

Inertia is basically the same thing as mass. What does mass do in physics? Well, it's a property of an object that makes it more difficult to change its motion. It’s much harder to roll a heavy bowling ball than a light baseball. On the other end, it would be harder to stop the bowling ball too. More mass means more resistance to change—more inertia.

The “moment of inertia” is the same thing, but for rotational motion. Let’s say you have a car up on blocks. If you grab a tire and apply some torque to spin it, you increase its angular velocity. Now do the same thing with a bicycle wheel. Way easier, right? And it’ll be going faster than the heavy car wheel. This is because the bike wheel has a lower moment of inertia.

We know the inertia of an object depends on its mass, but the moment of inertia (I) also depends on where that mass is located, relative to the axis of rotation. Say you have two wheels of equal radius and mass, but one has all the mass on the outer part of the wheel and the other is just a solid disk. The disk has more of its mass closer to the axis of rotation, so it will have a smaller moment of inertia. See where this is going?

Angular Momentum

There’s one more thing to think about: angular momentum (L). This is just the product of the angular velocity (ω) and the moment of inertia (I):

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Now, if you have a system with no external interactions—like a person spinning in a chair, with no one pushing—the angular momentum (L) is constant. We say angular momentum is conserved. But look at the right side of the equation: For a given value of L, if you increase the moment of inertia (I), the angular velocity (ω) must decrease.

Dams and Days

So back to our original questions! The Earth is an isolated rotating system with a constant angular momentum. This means that if you alter the distribution of mass on Earth, the moment of inertia will change, and that will change the angular velocity.

This is exactly what a dam does. The water wants to move downhill to the sea, but a dam prevents that, so it holds the water’s mass farther away from Earth’s axis of rotation—just like spreading your arms in a spinning chair. So yes, a big dam really can change the speed of Earth’s rotation!

Now for the fun part. Let’s estimate how much longer an Earth day is because of the Three Gorges Dam. First, here’s an extremely exaggerated diagram:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

The dam makes a big block of water (which we call a lake). Notice that the latitude (θ) of the dam site determines how far it is from the planet’s axis of rotation. As you move from the north pole toward the equator, that distance increases. So if you want to make the day as long as possible, in addition to stacking up water at a high altitude, you should build your dam near the equator.

OK, let’s calculate the change in the moment of inertia, ΔI. We can find this with the following equation. Don’t worry about the math! I just want you to see how it depends on the latitude (θ), the mass (m) and depth (h) of the water, and the radius of the Earth (R):

Illustration: Rhett Allain

We need to fill in these variables with actual numbers. Luckily, we have Wikipedia. So, given an initial value of Earth’s moment of inertia (I_1), I can use ΔI from above to find the change in the angular velocity (Δω) caused by the dam:

(If you want to see my numbers and calculations, they’re all in this Python code.)

After crunching the numbers, I get an Earth day that is 5.3 x 10–6 seconds longer. Yes, that’s 5.3 extra microseconds! Due to our simplifying assumptions that’s likely an overestimate, but the increase is real. I grant you, there’s not a whole lot you can accomplish in 5 millionths of a second, but it shows that human activity really can alter a planet’s rotation.

It also means there’s a whole bunch of other things we could do to get still more time in the day. We could build skyscrapers all across the Great Plains. Or heck, we could just have everyone on earth stand up at the same time. That would also increase the moment of inertia and slow the Earth’s roll. I’m getting up from my desk right now—care to join me?

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/can-a-hydroelectric-dam-really-make-the-days-longer/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

GEAR | DAVID NIELD | NOV 14, 2025 AT 6:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

How Windows Recall Works—and Whether You Should Switch It On

If you're a Windows 11 user, and specifically an owner of a Microsoft Copilot+ PC that has the necessary AI processing power, you can now take advantage of Windows Recall. It works like a memory for your computer, using screenshots to keep track of everything you're doing on Windows, and then letting you search back through it.

The idea is to give you something like your web browsing history, but for the whole computer. If you remember an app, document, web page, or file you need to get to several hours or days later, Windows Recall can help. Thanks to Microsoft's Copilot AI, it can not only grab screenshots, but understand what's in them.

Windows Recall isn't the first tool to do this, but it has been met with a lot of criticism from a lot of users, who would rather their every computing move wasn't being recorded. Security researchers have also shown how it can be easily hacked.

So just how serious are those security and privacy concerns? And if you have Windows Recall on your PC, should you turn it on? Here's what you need to know.

How Windows Recall Works

You can filter out specific apps and websites from Recall.Courtesy of David Nield

It's fair to say the initial reaction to Windows Recall wasn't hugely positive: The problem with a memory for your PC is that other people might gain access to it, including staff at Microsoft—which potentially means those people are able to see your browsing history, your sensitive documents, your private messages, and potentially anything you looked at on your computer screen. The backlash was so strong that Microsoft pulled Recall for a while.

Now it's back, with changes. First, Recall is going to be off by default. It will not suddenly start tracking you without your knowledge. You need to deliberately turn it on if you want to use it. Second, all of the screenshots and other information Recall captures are stored locally on your PC. Nothing that Windows Recall does is sent to Microsoft's servers or anywhere else on the web. Files are also encrypted, making them much harder for bad actors to access.

Third, Windows Hello authentication is required to get at Windows Recall. If someone gains access to your PC, they can't open Recall without going through a face or fingerprint scan process, or entering your PIN, so it's a level of protection similar to what’s on your phone. Fourth, you have the option to not save screenshots when sensitive information (such as passwords or credit card numbers) are on screen. You're also able to delete screenshots at any time.

It's quite a comprehensive package of protections, and Microsoft is hoping that it'll be enough to make you trust Recall and enable it. In return, you get the convenience of being able to retrace your steps at any point, and jump back to previous files or tasks even if you're only able to half remember them. Recall has the potential to be useful, but it's understandable why concerns have been raised about it.

Ultimately, it's a question of how much you trust Microsoft and the security around your PC. Technically, someone at Google could be snooping on your Chrome history and Gmail messages if you sync that information between devices—but Google promises that won't happen, and millions of users accept that promise in return for using all of Google's apps and tools for free. Now there's a similar decision to be made with Windows Recall.

Use Windows Recall on a PC

Your screengrabs become searchable, and interactive.Courtesy of David Nield

If you want to turn on Recall to be your long-term computer memory assistant—or just for a short-term test—you can find it as one of the apps on your PC. Just search for "Recall" using the search box at the top of the Start menu. You'll be taken through the setup process, which includes verifying your user account identity.

While Windows Recall is running, you'll see an icon for it in the notification area on the right-hand side of the taskbar. Click its icon, and you can open the main interface, temporarily pause recording, and choose More Recall settings, which takes you to a list of options for the feature.

There's a lot you can do from this options screen, including disabling Recall. You can set how much storage space the feature is allowed to take up on disk (once you reach that limit, the oldest snapshots will be deleted first), you can delete some or all of the snapshots from the archive, and you can specify particular apps and websites that can't be screenshotted (so you can leave your bank website out of Recall, for instance).

When it comes to the main Recall interface, you'll be shown the most recent snapshot first. It'll probably be something you were just doing on your PC. Use the timeline at the top of the screen to go forwards or backwards in time, and hover over anything in a screenshot to interact with it. Available actions include copying text and images, running web searches, summarizing text, and editing pictures.

The search box up at the top of the Recall interface lets you look for apps, text, images, and more. You could type out a headline from a web page you remember, or type "notepad" to see all the times you've opened that app. Click through, and you're able to jump right back to whatever website or file you were looking at. And of course, the longer you use the feature, the more useful this digital memory becomes.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/how-windows-recall-works-and-whether-you-should-switch-it-on/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | PARESH DAVE | NOV 14, 2025 AT 5:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

You Won’t Be Able to Offload Your Holiday Shopping to AI Agents Anytime Soon

Ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT about a product on Etsy, and chances are you can enter your payment details and buy it without ever leaving the app. Instant Checkout was one of the first features to emerge from a recent wave of partnerships between leading AI and ecommerce companies. The aim is to encourage people to hand off parts of the browsing and ordering experience to AI tools and usher in an era of agentic shopping. But while these so-called agents have started to become more commonplace, they are far from taking over as full-time virtual buyers.

OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and other AI chatbot developers are still negotiating with major retail partners on the best way to limit costly mistakes by agents and the amount of product data and chat history that have to be exchanged to make these agents successful, according to executives at seven tech and ecommerce companies who spoke with WIRED. As a result, the features currently on the market require significant input from users and operate slowly or only for a limited number of items. With discussions and testing ongoing, consumers hoping to offload shopping chores to automation this holiday season may be disappointed.

“I haven’t yet felt a super magical agentic experience in commerce,” says Talia Goldberg, a partner at the venture capital firm Bessemer, who has invested in AI companies including the search and browser startup Perplexity and the coding platform Cursor. “There are big questions that have to be solved around a true functional experience.”

In the past few months, surveys of US consumers found that 60 percent plan to use AI to assist with shopping, 20 percent say they would let an AI agent fully handle everyday purchases, and just 25 percent say they would prefer to shop without the help of AI. Long-term projections are rosy. McKinsey estimates that up to $1 trillion in sales will be generated through agentic shopping by 2030 in the US alone.

To help set this future in motion, OpenAI partnered with Walmart to soon allow ChatGPT users to buy Walmart products right within the chat window. Both OpenAI and Perplexity have announced deals with PayPal and Shopify, which hosts online stores for brands. And last week, Google introduced AI agents that can fill out online checkout forms and call stores to inquire about pricing.

Some prototypes show promise. Expedia’s app for ChatGPT provides real-time flight and hotel pricing data in response to user queries. Users must still manually make bookings—no AI agents are involved yet. But the feature is leading to greater sales than Expedia anticipated. “That means there's something in these tools that works,” says Clayton Nelson, a vice president who oversees Expedia’s strategic alliances with AI giants.

Social commerce—or shopping through platforms like TikTok and Instagram—hasn’t been a smash hit in the US, in part due to ongoing distrust of tech giants among consumers and big retailers. To help ensure AI initiatives don’t encounter similar resistance, major payment processors such as Visa and software startups like New Generation, which helps stores develop or partner with chatbots, are trying to broker technical compromises with retail partners. “We do think that a service provider like us will be faster to earn the trust of retailers, which is pretty important,” says New Generation CEO Adam Behrens.

Retailers want in because chatbots have become a crucial tool for consumers researching and validating purchases. Partnerships between AI and ecommerce companies could ensure that chatbots not only present accurate product information, but also consume fewer computing resources when executing online orders. All of that could boost profits for both sides—if they can come to terms.

In one of the frankest comments on agentic shopping made by a top tech boss, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently criticized how agentic shopping currently works on other platforms. “I would say the customer experience is not good,” Jassy said on an earnings call last month. “There’s no personalization. There’s no shopping history. The delivery estimates are frequently wrong. The prices are often wrong. We have got to find a way to make the customer experience better and have the right exchange of value. ”

A task as simple as adding eggs to an Amazon cart took the Opera browser’s AI agent 45 seconds in a WIRED test this month; manually doing so on Amazon’s shopping app took a third of the time.

Opera has been inviting potential partners to workshops to weigh in on security and design choices. “If our agent doesn’t work with the biggest websites people go to, it will be a suboptimal experience,” says Per Wetterdal, an executive vice president who leads Opera’s commercial partnerships. “No one benefits if [a purchase] is ending up at the wrong place or in the wrong quantity.”

Deal Talks

As is often the case in the tech industry, money and data are central to the negotiations. With agentic shopping, the financial exchange could be straightforward. AI companies including Opera want a cut of sales for facilitating purchases. “If we do something that adds incrementality, it’s very fair to be compensated for that,” Wetterdal says. OpenAI is showing a path forward by collecting what it describes as “a small fee” from partners such as Etsy for Instant Checkout purchases.

But data sharing may be more complicated. Retailers guard pricing and availability data, as well as customer information, to maintain an edge over competitors. AI companies want to protect conversation histories to preserve the feeling of intimacy that chatbots can deliver. But chatbots require real-time information to fulfill user requests, and retail brands prefer greater context to develop relationships with shoppers.

OpenAI’s apps feature provides partners such as Expedia the user’s IP address and their relevant chat queries, according to a permission screen on ChatGPT. Nelson, the Expedia executive, says he’s pleased with the initial trade but wants to get more eventually—provided that ChatGPT users consent to it. “I want to know the full conversation,” he says. “I know they're looking for a hotel room in Las Vegas right now for two guests, but I want to know, are the guests friends? Have they traveled before? Do they have other things that they like?”

Some discussions have soured. This month, Amazon sued Perplexity for using AI agents to make purchases on users’ behalf in ways that allegedly interfered with the ecommerce giant’s businesses, including sales of advertising and Prime subscriptions. Perplexity said it will fight back.

At the same time, Amazon is pursuing its own shopping agent. It has been testing a feature called Buy for Me that uses agentic AI to complete purchases on other retailers’ websites when Amazon doesn’t have a particular item in stock. The tool automatically adds items to a cart, and users check out with their Amazon payment details. The third-party stores don’t receive shoppers’ real email addresses and can contact Amazon to keep its agents away.

So far, AI companies aren’t sharing how well their agents are working. An executive in charge of online initiatives for a large clothing retailer in California says they're eager to make deals because chatbots are driving significant traffic. But the opportunities on the table feel undeveloped. “Up to today, no one has a solid solution,” says the executive, who wasn’t authorized by their employer to speak to the media. “Everyone is just making marketing announcements.”

Some smaller AI companies are forgoing agent shopping deals for the time being. Archit Karandikar, CEO of CoInvent AI, which develops the travel planning chatbot Airial, says getting AI to generate useful recommendations is a significant challenge on its own. Pursuing agentic purchases would be too much to add, given the current state of the technology. “You can’t be spending someone’s money without being sure you’re making the right transactions,” Kandikar says. So Airial links to booking websites and receives a commission when someone buys.

Expedia’s Nelson is blunt. “My goodness, no one wants to mess up their vacation for their entire family because a bot went left instead of right, or didn't follow the specific prompt that was given,” he says. “It's up to us and our partner to make sure that we never leave travelers astray. And so that's the big thing that's holding us back on fully agentic booking experiences.”

This holiday season, users may turn to chatbots to help select gifts, add them to their carts, and even instantly checkout. But humans will still be in control. Maybe next year they can blame the bots if a loved one doesn’t like their gift.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-dealmaking-to-make-agentic-shopping-a-reality/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

GEAR | AARIAN MARSHALL | NOV 14, 2025 AT 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Airports and Airlines Are Crawling Out of the Shutdown

On Wednesday evening, the longest government shutdown in US history ended. Fliers hoped it would also end the looming specter of airport cancellations and delays. Thanksgiving is coming, and with it the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year.

Travelers should expect scattered delays and cancellations, aviation experts say, as airlines get their crews and aircraft back into place after weeks of acute staffing shortages. Last week, the US Federal Aviation Administration began requiring airlines to cancel flights, up to 6 percent of them earlier this week in 40 airports, some of the country’s busiest. The agency said the measure was necessary to keep airspace safe as controllers and security professionals missed their second straight paychecks. The effects of that decision were compounded by an inadequate number of controllers on duty, which led to delays and cancellations across the country.

For the next few days, though, it’ll be difficult to sort shutdown-related delays from the standard chaos of the holiday season. “It’ll be hard to get everything up and running quickly, “ says Tim Kiefer, a former air traffic controller who is now a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “But you would have experienced some delays because of weather, equipment issues, or staffing, whether there was a government shutdown or not.”

“Airlines cannot flip a switch and resume normal operations immediately after a vote—there will be residual effects for days,” Chris Sununu, the president and CEO of the airline trade group Airlines for America, said in a written statement.

Some residual effects could last longer, as workers in the aviation system grapple with yet another interruption to their work and pay schedule. Federal employees have gone through four shutdowns in the past two decades. Controllers especially have worked long hours amid worker shortages for nearly 15 years, as years of underhiring, mandatory retirements at age 56, and Covid-era interruptions in training have made it hard to get new controllers certified and into facilities. It can take around two years—and as long as five—to train new workers to be air traffic controllers.

Unlike in past shutdowns, the FAA kept open its academy in Oklahoma City, so workers didn’t have to halt their training (though they and their instructors went without pay). Still, the process of hiring new controllers stopped during the shutdown. The FAA did not respond to questions about how and when it might restart the hiring process.

“Does this deter from recruitment?” says Kiefer. “There is that potential of [prospective controllers] saying, ‘I don’t want to be subject to the appropriations process every 16 months and not get paid.’”

And speaking of pay: It might take weeks for federal workers to be made whole. In 2019, Kiefer said, he didn’t get his complete paycheck until about five weeks after Congress reopened the government.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/airports-and-airlines-are-crawling-out-of-the-shutdown/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

POLITICS | TIM MARCHMAN | NOV 13, 2025 AT 3:19 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Jeffrey Epstein Claimed Intimate Knowledge of Donald Trump’s Views in Texts With Bill Gates Adviser

In text messages sent in 2017, disgraced financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appears to position himself as a middleman between President Donald Trump’s administration and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, even seemingly representing himself as passing on information directly from Trump to Gates through an intermediary.

The messages, which the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released on Wednesday, originated with the Epstein estate. They begin on January 27, 2017, years after Epstein had already pleaded guilty to state prostitution solicitation charges. In them, Epstein purports to show intimate awareness of Trump’s plans for domestic and global public health policy, and to be directly familiar with the president’s thinking.

Trump has continued to claim, as recently as this summer, that he stopped speaking with Epstein around 2004.

The messages are among those in dozens of files that show Epstein texting with prominent figures. According to metadata in the files, the texts were sent using iMessage and then backed up to an Apple computer.

Throughout the exchange in question, Epstein is apparently talking to a longtime associate, physician Melanie Walker, who, according to an online biography at one time, worked for what was then known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She subsequently worked as an adviser to Gates at bgC3, the entity that would become Gates Ventures. The Gates Foundation and Gates Ventures did not respond to requests for comment.

(The metadata does not name Melanie Walker as the sender of the messages. At one point in a continuous conversation carried on over a period of months, though, the person Epstein is texting with identifies herself as “Melanie” and gives him a new phone number, which is associated with Melanie Walker in public databases. Additionally, the person he’s texting with at one point situates herself at Harborview, a Seattle hospital to which Walker has ties. Melanie Walker did not respond to emails, a phone call, or a text message seeking comment.)

In the first text in the files, Melanie asks Epstein for advice.

“I'm seeing BG tmr. He will be in DC for the Alfalfa dinner but he's got mtgs most of the day including w Jared Kushner. Should I ask him to discuss surgeon general or mention it or wait? Not sure kushner cares about that stuff.” (The Alfalfa Club hosts an annual banquet in DC where political elites and high-powered businesspeople dine and network that Gates did attend in 2017. As they are throughout this article, the text messages here are presented as they appear in the Oversight Committee release.)

Epstein tells her that Kushner wouldn’t care. “ask him if he will see tom barrack,” he writes. “thats the most important.” Epstein appears to be referring to the chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee in 2016 and current US ambassador to Turkey; at several points in the conversation he refers to Barrack as one of the people Gates should talk to if he wants to make things happen. The State Department did not reply to a request seeking comment from Barrack.

Melanie should, he instructs her, tell Gates he’s free to call any time for “inside baseball.”

“He wants to talk to you but his wife won’t let him,” Melanie replied. “He loves you.” Fifteen seconds later, she added, “he says hi.” Bill and Melinda French Gates finalized their divorce years later in 2021; Melinda went on to say that their split was due in part to Bill’s involvement with Epstein. A representative for her did not reply to a request for comment.

Epstein and Melanie would subsequently discuss different plans to get Melinda Gates to soften her views of the registered sexual offender, including arranging a meeting between her and Kathryn Ruemmler, the former White House counsel in the Obama administration whose friendly messages with Epstein have appeared throughout the recent document dump. (“She would love to sit with Melinda and give her the other side of jeffrey,” Epstein writes on January 27 about Ruemmler, who did not reply to a request for comment.)

The next morning, on January 28, discussion between the two turned to Trump. Throughout his messages, Epstein appears to imply specific and detailed knowledge of Trump’s personal interests and plans.

“New medical group to be announced to study va,” Epstein writes to Melanie. “Mayo Cleveland involved.”

“Trumps health guy is Moscowitz z palm beach,” he continues, in an apparent reference to Bruce Moskowitz, a Mar-a-Lago member who took a special interest in the Department of Veterans Affairs during Trump’s first term. “Not my interest at all it's Donald's,” Epstein writes. “He thinks vets should get at least as much as everyone else . Some hospitals do not have computers.“

The two discuss the potential power a surgeon general could wield before Epstein abruptly asks Melanie, “Did you fuck,” before clarifying that he meant to ask whether she had slept with “Bill.”

“No,” Melanie replies. “Members of his henchman team hovered outside the door for the full few hours Instead We went crazy on the whiteboard and a lot to talk about.”

“Every half hour they would bring him coffee or a croissant or a. Newspaper or message etc,” she continued. “Very closely watched.”

“He was Complaining about being too old,” she wrote, “and I said he was still a little too young for me.”

On February 18, the conversation resumed.

“GENIUS IDEA Now to convince bill,” she writes; the context for this is not clear from the messages published by the Oversight Committee. “Do you think there is a way to do this really well and also get something for BG? Like if we say do this and the admin will keep PEPFAR or something like that.”

“Yes and more,” Epstein writes. “its a deal”

“Thats what he likes,” he continued. The “he,” subsequent texts make clear, is Donald Trump: “he said malaria and polio not an american problem. climate change and eboloa not a american problem nor is clean water or genital mutilation. he thinks bill should stop trying to scare people .ike chicken little,” Epstein wrote. (In October, Gates released a memo downplaying the impact of climate change. Critics noted Gates’ abrupt about-face, citing his previous philanthropic work and the book he published four years ago titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Al Gore, the climate activist and former vice president, has wondered if Trump was bullying Gates.)

“OK let's keep thinking BG likes deals too,” writes Melanie, musing that the PEPFAR program, which originated under George W. Bush as a government initiative to combat HIV/AIDS globally, was popular among Republicans. “If he could be convinced to keep PEPFAR as is in exchange for cyber i think we would all win.”

“bill needs to focus on american problems first and foremost,” writes Epstein. “if he wants deals. he can also portray certain worldwide iniativies as buying american drugs etc. IT MUST have an american component. donald says it is childish to count the lives at risk in africa and make believe you are doing something for america. or pakistan afhhntan, etc. he points to 8500 killed in chicago vs 2500 killed in afganistan over the past 10 years.”

Melanie says she “understands,” and notes that Gates’ team at the foundation is pushing “in other direction.”

“I sent bill a note to suggest he talk to lauder,” writes Epstein, possibly in reference to billionaire GOP donor Ron Lauder or his brother Leonard. Epstein goes on to imply that he is in close communication with Trump and in a position to pass on messages from the president to Gates. “donald also thinks bill wants not to help america first , he should use his own money, and even that is wrong as it was made here. just transmitting.”

The White House did not reply to a request for comment.

Melanie and Epstein continued to go back and forth about the best way to proceed. She suggested Trump “should enforce tax laws” as a way to police the Gates foundation’s expenditures.

“Number of lives saved per dollar amount is not in donalds mind, it must be american lives saved, and yes, good idea on tax,” replied Epstein.

Melanie went on to share details about how, she alleged, the foundation took advantage of regulatory loopholes.

“Understood I am good at that,” writes Epstein, “however bill should be careful very careful as donald could make an example of him using american dollars to help other than america which really needs it. careful”

“Understood,” writes Melanie.

The next day, she sent Epstein a link to an article in Commentary about Trump’s election and the American economy. “Good article for trump to see,” she wrote.

On March 4, Melanie messaged Epstein. “Bg meets w trump march 20/21,” in apparent reference to Gates. (Gates did indeed meet with Trump at the White House on March 20, 2017. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said the meeting was about combatting disease outbreaks around the world.)

“A waste of time,” replied Epstein. “he should meet with barrack,” in an apparent reference again to the current US ambassador to Turkey.

On March 6, Epstein and Melanie continued messaging about Trump and Gates.

“Israel - tell bill Paris week of 21,” Epstein wrote, in apparent reference to a supposed peace meeting regarding the situation in the Middle East.

“Peace mtg? W Jared and Tony Blair and all those folks? Not sure bg interested in peace process mostly technologies,” replied Melanie. “He says he speaks to Jared a lot”

“No peace boring and not happening. GROW UP,” Epstein replied.

(While there didn’t appear to be a peace meeting in Paris in March 2017, on March 10, days after these messages were sent, Trump had his first ever phone call with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and invited him to visit the White House.)

In their messages on March 6, Melanie reminded Epstein that the meeting was taking place between Gates and Trump later that month.

Epstein appeared to then claim a meeting was taking place at his house to discuss a myriad of issues related to Israel, including, he said in a message to Melanie, “Money surveillance, offense. It’s at my house so I would know.” It’s unclear if the meeting took place, or who attended if it did.

“Omg INVITE ME,” writes Melanie. “Can try to invite bg depending on guest list etc - Larry told him he couldn't have contact w you so would have to manage that carefully.” (This is an apparent reference to Larry Cohen, Gates’ longtime associate. Cohen is the CEO of Gates Ventures and did not reply to a request seeking comment.)

“Not a problem for me,” writes Epstein. “I like bill . He gets more from me than I get from him. He should grow some balls and start to love.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-intimate-knowledge-of-donald-trumps-views-in-texts-with-bill-gates-adviser/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

POLITICS | DAVID GILBERT | NOV 13, 2025 AT 12:36 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Stewart Rhodes Relaunched the Oath Keepers. Even Old Oath Keepers Don’t Care

Stewart Rhodes announced last week that he is relaunching the Oath Keepers, his anti-government militia which virtually disappeared after dozens of its members—including Rhodes—were arrested for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Rhodes, speaking to the Gateway Pundit this week, says that he sees the relaunched group as playing a role in combating what he labeled an “insurrection by the left” on the streets of US cities. “Right now, under federal statutes, president Trump can call us up as the militia if he sees it necessary, especially for three purposes: to repel invasions, to suppress insurrections, and to execute the laws of the union,” Rhodes said.

But in the days since Rhodes announced their return, experts, former members, and online chatter suggest there is little to no interest in restarting what was, at one point, one of the largest militias in America with a leaked database listing 38,000 supposed members in 2021. This hasn’t stopped Rhodes from asking potential new members and supporters to send money in support of the cause.

But even former Oath Keepers are uninterested. Janet Arroyo, who ran an Oath Keepers chapter in Chino Valley, Arizona, with her husband Jim Arroyo prior to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, says they have not heard from Rhodes in six years and had no plans to rejoin his group.

“He hasn't reached out during his incarceration, nor since being released,” says Arroyo. “No hard feelings, but we are doing what we do and don't spend a lot of time wondering what he's up to. The dumb DC stunt has scared a lot of great patriots into hiding. My guess is he won't be successful.”

Another former Oath Keeper, Jessica Watkins, an army veteran who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for her role in the Capitol attack, says she hadn’t even heard about the relaunch when WIRED contacted her this week. “I have not heard of a relaunch, but most J6ers I know are trying to rebuild their lives,” says Watkins, who added that even if she wanted to rejoin, she would be unable to do so as she had her sentence commuted rather than being pardoned. “Felons are not allowed to be in the Oath Keepers or work with them.”

Kelly Meggs, who headed up the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers and was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his part in the attack on the Capitol, says he won’t be joining the relaunched Oath Keepers, as he is concerned about being targeted again when Democrats return to power. “I am more worried about the future,” says Meggs. “I think four and five years from now, eight years from now, 12 years from now, whenever it is, anyone that is a member of these organizations stands at risk of what I went through.”

Meggs said he would be interested in taking part in any work the Oath Keepers were carrying out in response to natural disasters, but he won’t be on the streets defending cities from the perceived threat from antifa. “I am not going to be an active member,” says Meggs. “If they’re doing a big march somewhere, I won't be there.”

A review of social media platforms and right-wing message boards shows a decided lack of discussion about the new group over the last week, but Meggs says it’s happening in “one-on-one conversations.”

“This just feels like the latest desperate attempt by Rhodes to cling to relevance,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “There’s no real appetite for the Oath Keepers in 2025. Why would any young anti-government extremist trust a failed insurrectionist who got all of his followers arrested?”

Rhodes did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 as a reaction to a conspiracy theory that the Obama administration was seeking to trigger economic collapse and impose martial law on American citizens. The group largely operated out of the limelight until 2017 when they began to provide security at Trump events, culminating with dozens of members taking part in the attack on the Capitol. Rhodes was convicted in 2023 of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in jail, with the judge at the time saying Rhodes presented “an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to the republic and to the very fabric of this democracy.”

In January, Rhodes had his sentence commuted to “time served” by Trump, but did not receive a full pardon like hundreds of other insurrectionists, which means his conviction still stands.

Rhodes first floated the idea of restarting the Oath Keepers in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, claiming his group would have been able to prevent the TPUSA founder’s death if it had been operating.

Rhodes then announced his relaunch in an interview nearly two weeks ago with the far-right outlet The New American, which is owned by a subsidiary of the John Birch Society, a right-wing advocacy group. In the interview, Rhodes said he was waiting for Trump to issue him a full pardon before restarting the Oath Keepers, but added that recent events have forced him to act.

And despite the inspiration for the group’s founding, Rhodes now appears to be fully on board with the idea of a US president deploying troops against their own citizens.

“The National Guard is part of the militia, which is why it's completely lawful for [Trump] to use the National Guard as he has, and he should do more of that, I think, across the country,” Rhodes told the Gateway Pundit.

On November 3, Rhodes launched a new website where people can sign up to become a member of the newly reformed Oath Keepers. Yearly memberships cost $100—though previous lifetime memberships of the original group will be honored, according to the website.

Those seeking to join are asked to send checks or money orders made out to Rhodes’ legal name—Elmer Stewart Rhodes—and send them to an address in Texas, where Rhodes lives. Rhodes has also launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise a “modest goal of $75,000,” the campaign claims, to support the new group. A week after it launched, the campaign has barely broken the $1,000 mark, with just 16 donations. The majority of the money raised came from two $200 donations, one of which came from an individual who identified themself as the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft.

The website appears to still be a work in progress and features a blank “About” page. Among the “classes” listed on the site is a “Never Surrender” event in Texas scheduled to take place next week. However, according to social media posts, this event appears to be actually being run by the Young Republicans of Houston rather than the Oath Keepers. At the time of publication, the website for purchasing tickets for the event says “online sales are currently paused.”

It is unclear how many people have actually signed up for the new group, and in his interview with The New American, Rhodes said that the number of people currently involved was “classified.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/stewart-rhodes-relaunched-oath-keepers-militia/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

SCIENCE | CHRIS BARANIUK | NOV 13, 2025 AT 10:15 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

British Churches Are Putting Their Faith in Heat Pumps

They gathered together on a sunny July evening, between the churchyard’s trees and leaning tombstones, to give thanks for the heat pump. Facing the newly installed system, in its large green metal box, they sang hymns and said prayers. “To thank God, really, for being able to work His wonders in mysterious ways,” says Karen Crowhurst, who is part of a committee that helps to run St. Mary’s Church in Lawford, Essex, in the United Kingdom.

The previous month, a flatbed truck carrying a hefty new heat pump system had eased itself onto the church grounds. By late July, the device was fully installed, and soon followed an outdoor thanksgiving service.

Parts of St. Mary’s date back to the 13th century. In more recent times, the building was heated by a wood chip boiler that had become expensive to run and sometimes clogged up. So now, after more than 800 years, St. Mary’s has gone electric. “We’re all very happy,” says Crowhurst. “We want to get through winter knowing that we’re going to have a nice warm church.”

Dozens of churches in Britain—commonly heated by oil or gas boilers—are currently in the process of installing electric-powered heat pumps as part of eco-minded retrofit projects. Many churchgoers view the schemes as acts of Christian stewardship.

“It’s about caring for other people,” says Kat Jones, from a committee that plans ecofriendly initiatives at the parish church in Milton of Campsie, a village north of Glasgow in Scotland. Many of those currently suffering the worst effects of climate change live in countries that are not responsible for the vast majority of emissions, she explains. Milton of Campsie’s new-build church has triple glazing and an air source heat pump.

And yet, it can be difficult to install heat pumps in older places of worship, which tend to be large, uninsulated buildings.

This, then, is the story of why some churches have opted to take a leap of faith toward this technology—and why it matters to them.

Courtesy of VitoEnergy

“I’m not one of these people that will glue myself to the road,” says Reverend Barry Knott, rector of the Lympne and Saltwood Benefice and area dean of Elham, Kent, referring to recent climate protests in the UK. “But I’m a great believer that resources are not infinite and therefore we have to manage them responsibly.”

For years, the Church of England (C of E) faced criticism over its oil and gas-related investments, until it divested from fossil fuels in 2023. Currently, the Church says it plans to reach net zero by 2030. That involves decarbonizing church heating systems.

According to C of E data shared with The Reengineer, in a 2024 survey of 12,337 churches (68 percent of the total number of C of E churches in the UK), 94 had air source heat pumps while 27 had ground source heat pumps. While many churches are opting for infrared heating devices, around 40 churches are currently in the process of acquiring some form of heat pump instead.

One of Knott’s churches, St. Stephen’s in Lympne, was a trailblazer. It is well known in heat pump circles as one of the oldest churches in the country—and possibly the world—to be warmed by a heat pump. Parts of the building date back to the 11th century. That’s young in the context of Lympne itself, though. “It’s a village where both the Saxons and the Romans came through, the Vikings came through,” says Knott.

And, back in 2008, a ground source heat pump company came through, too. Workers buried long lengths of pipe in the churchyard, to soak up some of the naturally present warmth in the ground.

The Reverend Barry Knott.

Photograph: Barry Knott

Heat pumps harvest heat from the environment—the energy available in the air, even on a cold day, or in water or ground sources. Inside the heat pump, that warmth causes a refrigerant to evaporate. Compressing the refrigerant heats it further, and ultimately the heat gets blown into a room, or passed to a water-filled loop that connects to radiators or—in St. Stephen’s case—an underfloor heating system.

The crucial thing is that for every kilowatt hour of electricity this process consumes, heat pumps can produce multiple kilowatt hours of heat. The second number is represented by a figure called the coefficient of performance (COP). A COP higher than 3 is generally considered good. North of 5 is stunning.

Some churches are running heat pumps with COPs as high as 4. Though the number can vary across the year—weather conditions affect the devices’ performance, for example. It’s also important to remember that heat pumps tend to deliver water to radiators or emitting pipes slung below pews at lower temperatures than the fossil fuel or wood-burning boilers they replace.

“When it works, it is outstanding,” says Knott. But some of the St. Stephen’s pumps are in a damp basement, meaning they have occasionally rusted and seized up over time. “We’ve replaced one only in the last 12 months.”

Because of high electricity tariffs, St. Stephen’s is now planning to install solar panels to try to reduce running costs. Being such an old church, and Grade I listed—the highest classification of protection given to buildings of historical interest in the UK—this isn’t easy. Knott explains that he plans to place the panels in a valley-like section of the roof, and on top of the church’s tower, to avoid changing the overall appearance of the building.

St. Stephen’s has had a heat pump for nearly two decades. But not too far away, to the west of London in Egham, Surrey, is a church that switched on its heat pump system for the first time just two weeks ago. It provides space heating in the church—and is even connected to the baptism pool.

St John’s is a 200-year-old building of brick and stone. Installing pipework through the churchyard for the heat pumps, which are in a fenced enclosure nearby, was a painstaking process. “Everything was dug by hand,” says Patrick Wheeler, owner and director of VitoEnergy, which installed the system. The team found plenty of bone pieces—more than 400—though no complete skeletons, and ended up rerouting the trench in order to minimize disturbance.

“We had archaeologists supervising,” explains Chris Gray, a volunteer on green initiatives at the church. “You just rebury bones. It’s a churchyard, that’s what they’re there for.”

Courtesy of VitoEnergy

The new heat pumps use R290, or propane, as a refrigerant, which is an increasingly common choice. It allows the system to distribute slightly higher flow temperatures to the underfloor heating loop in the church without compromising much on efficiency. At present, those flow temperatures sit around 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), heating the interior of the building to at least 18C. It’s too early to judge how well it’s performing, but a COP of roughly 3.6 should be feasible, says Wheeler.

And, he argues the project is instructive: “If we can do it with a 200-year-old stone church, then you can do any building in the UK.”

Gray reports that the response from the congregation has been positive. “I’m polling people. Is it comfortable? What do you think?” he says. That you can go green without compromising on comfort was, apparently, a surprise to some.

For very remote churches, a major hurdle to installing a heat pump could be the building’s power supply, says Graham Hendra, a heat pump expert who works for Haier HVAC Solutions. A medium-sized church might want to install an 80-kilowatt system, or so. But should a beefier electricity connection be required for that, then the cost could become prohibitive.

Occupancy is another consideration. If a church is only ever open for a few hours per week, for example for weekend services, then keeping a heat pump system running all the time may not make sense. However, many churches are used throughout the week—for community groups, sports clubs, and other events.

So long as power supplies and occupancy aren’t a concern, Hendra is bullish: “There is no reason why we can’t put a heat pump in every single church in the UK, including Westminster Abbey.”

Courtesy of VitoEnergy

In many churches, often strapped for cash, the switch to a heat pump may be borne from necessity. Staff at St. Peter Mancroft Church in Norwich, which already had solar panels, opted to make the jump to a heat pump system when one of their old gas boilers failed.

“The church decided this was a good time to try and commit to it,” says Nicholas Jackson, from architectural design firm Nicholas Vanburgh Ltd. Jackson is also a fabric officer for the church. Last year, two table-like, upward-facing air source heat pumps were installed in a small yard next to the 15th-century building. These connect to an Edwardian cast iron radiator system, and the heat pumps are currently running at a COP of 4.

The church also opted for a battery storage system. Jackson says he’s still unsure of exactly how the heat pumps will cope during a really cold spell—one gas boiler remains as a backup.

“We were very blessed to be one of the early adopters on some of this stuff,” says Reverend Edward Carter, the vicar. He adds that within the church is an “Earth Chapel,” intended to focus Christian minds on the importance of the environment. “We’re trying to say something to the City of Norwich here, and maybe to the wider world,” says Carter.

Churches are far from the only community-centric buildings in the UK currently reengineering how they do things. Village halls, covered markets, and public transport hubs are also, in some cases, putting in solar panels, LED lighting, and electric-powered heating systems.

For certain believers, though, the spiritual component of decarbonization is key. There’s something deeper at work here, and perhaps enthusiasm like this could accelerate society’s broader transition towards cleaner technologies. Knott’s opinion is that Christians should be motivated, by scripture itself, to look after the planet.

“We’re not jumping on the bandwagon,” he says. “This has been a message for 2,000 years.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/let-there-be-warmth-the-british-churches-putting-their-faith-in-heat-pumps/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

CULTURE | JASON PARHAM | NOV 13, 2025 AT 6:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

AI Relationships Are on the Rise. A Divorce Boom Could Be Next

Rebecca Palmer isn’t a psychic, but as a divorce attorney she can often see what’s coming next.

For many people today, as AI saturates every aspect of life—from work to therapy—the allure of an AI romance is tantalizing. Chatbots are dependable, can provide emotional support, and, for the most part, will never pick a fight with you. But for married couples navigating long-term commitment, chatbot romances also present a new wrinkle. Love has never been easy, but spouses who have unmet emotional needs are “the most vulnerable to the influences and behaviors of AI,” Palmer says. “And particularly if a marriage is already struggling.”

Reddit is full of stories from people who’ve said AI has driven a wedge in their relationships. One woman decided to end her marriage of 14 years after discovering her husband—who believed he was in a real relationship with a woman he called his “sexy Latina baby girl”—spent thousands of dollars on a OnePay credit card and an AI app “designed to mimic underage girls.”

In June, WIRED reported on the tangled future of chatbot love. That story followed Eva, a 46-year-old writer and editor from New York, who, after getting too attached to her AI companions—she admitted they “became harder to ignore”—ended the relationship with her human partner after they both agreed it felt like she was cheating on him.

As chatbot romances become more commonplace, causing lasting rifts in relationships, a new legal frontier is emerging in family law that is rewriting the rules of marital misconduct: An AI affair is now grounds for divorce.

For some people, there is a growing belief that AI romances should be treated like human ones, particularly as more and more adults say they prefer it, according to the Institute for Family Studies. Some 60 percent of singles now say AI relationships are considered a form of cheating, according to two recent surveys by Clarity Check and Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute.

“The law is still developing alongside these experiences. But some people think of it as a true relationship, and sometimes better than one with a person,” says Palmer, whose Orlando-based firm has worked with spouses who have gotten divorced or are going through a divorce due to a partner cheating with AI. Palmer declined to discuss any detailed information due to client confidentiality, but said one of her current cases involves money being expended and private information being shared—such as bank accounts, social security numbers, and birth information—with a chatbot, which was “consuming the spouse’s life and affecting career performance.”

More and more, courts are beginning to see clients cite emotional bonds with AI companions as reasons for marital strain or dissolution. Though legal classifications of AI still vary by state in matters of family law, Palmer adds that laws classifying AI as a “third party, not a person” are fast approaching in progressive states like California. She doesn’t anticipate courts will legally recognize AI companions as people—debates around AI personhood have been swirling for as long as the tech has existed—but they may be recognized as “a reason” for why divorce is merited.

“In contrast, Ohio is emerging as one of the most restrictive states,” Palmer says, following its recent legislative efforts that explicitly attempt to outlaw “even symbolic or attempted legal recognition of AI-human intimate partnerships.” In October, Ohio state representative Thaddeus J. Claggett introduced a bill to deny AIs the right of legal personhood by deeming them “nonsentient entities.”

What’s happening poses very interesting questions for the future of the legal field, says family law attorney Elizabeth Yang. Every state’s family law is different, but there are states that do penalize partners who cheat. Though prosecution rarely happens, it’s illegal to cheat on your spouse in 16 states. (Thirteen of those states classify cheating as a misdemeanor.) The laws are the most severe in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma, where adultery is a felony charge and punishable by up to five years of imprisonment or a fine—up to $10,000 in Wisconsin. California, where Yang is based, is a no-fault state. “Courts don’t want to hear the reasons behind why the marriage failed. They only need them to check off the box that says irreconcilable differences. So whether that’s infidelity with a bot or a human, it doesn't make a difference.”

One area where AI may prove harmful in divorce proceedings is over the misuse of money (the legal term is dissipation of assets). In community property states like Arizona and Texas, both individuals have the right to funds accumulated during the marriage, and if a partner can prove there was financial waste over hidden payments or subscription costs to an AI companion, that may be a deciding factor.

Judges, Palmer says, already “struggle with what to do about affairs with humans,” and AI companions will only complicate that, as they take into account the broader impact on the relationship. Children complicate the matter even more. When it comes to custody battles, “it is conceivable and likely that they would question the parents’ judgment because they’re having intimate discussions with a chatbot,” which “brings into question how they are spending time with their child.”

Although the sophisticated chatbots we use today have only been around for a few years, Yang says the tech will continue to play a bigger role in spousal matters. “As it continues improving, becoming more realistic, compassionate, and empathetic, more and more people in unhappy marriages who are lonely are going to be going to seek love with a bot.”

Yang has not had clients raise the issue yet, but she anticipates a boom in divorces in the coming years as more people turn to AI for companionship. “We’ll probably see an increased rate of divorce filings. When Covid happened a few years ago, the increase in divorces was very significant. We probably saw three times the amount of divorces that were filed around 2020 to 2022. After 2022, once things got back to normal, divorce rates were back down. But it will probably go back up.”

It’s already happening in some places. In the UK, a partner’s use of chatbot apps has become a more common factor contributing to divorce, according to data collection service Divorce-Online. The platform claims to have received an increase in the number of divorce applications this year where clients have said apps like Replika and Anima created “emotional or romantic attachment.”

Despite the division it is causing among couples, Palmer says she still believes AI relationships can be positive. “Some people are finding real fulfillment.” But she warns that “people need to recognize the limitations.” In October, California became the first state to pass an AI regulations law for companion chatbots. The law goes into effect in January 2026 and requires apps to have certain key features, such as age verification and break reminders for minors, and makes it illegal for chatbots to act as health care professionals. Companies who profit from illegal deepfakes are also fined up to $250,000 per incident.

In some ways, Palmer has seen what’s happening now before with social media instead of AI. “It could be that a partner connected with someone they haven’t seen in years. Or that there is just a true need to have communication. It is a rare case anymore where social media is not involved.” AI, she says, is the natural evolution of that. “And what I am finding is, AI is turning into exactly that.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ai-relationships-are-on-the-rise-a-divorce-boom-could-be-next/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

BUSINESS | PARESH DAVE | NOV 13, 2025 AT 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

OpenAI’s Open-Weight Models Are Coming to the US Military

The gpt-oss models are being tested for use on sensitive military computers. But some defense insiders say that OpenAI is still behind the competition.

Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images

When OpenAI unveiled its first open-weight models in years this August, it wasn’t just tech companies that were paying attention. The release also excited US military and defense contractors, which saw a chance to use them for highly secure operations.

Initial results show that OpenAI’s tools lag behind competitors in desired capabilities, some military vendors tell WIRED. But they are still pleased that models from a key industry leader are finally an option for them.

Lilt, an AI translation company, contracts with the US military to analyze foreign intelligence. Because the company’s software handles sensitive information, it must be installed on government servers and work without an internet connection, a practice known as air-gapping. Lilt previously developed its own AI models or used open source options such as Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemma. But OpenAI’s tools were off the table because they were closed source and could only be accessed online.

The ChatGPT maker’s new open-weight models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, changed that. Both can run locally, meaning users have the freedom to install them on their own devices without needing a cloud connection. And with access to the models’ weights—key parameters that determine how they react to different prompts—users can tailor them for specific purposes.

OpenAI’s return to the open-source market could ultimately increase competition and lead to better performing systems for militaries, health care companies, and others working with sensitive data. In a recent McKinsey survey of roughly 700 business leaders, more than 50 percent said their organizations use open source AI technologies. Models have different strengths based on how they were trained, and organizations often use several together, including open-weight ones, to ensure reliability across a wide variety of situations.

Doug Matty, chief digital and AI officer for the so-called Department of War, the name the Trump administration is using for the Department of Defense, tells WIRED that the Pentagon plans to integrate generative AI into battlefield systems and back-office functions like auditing. Some of these applications will require models that are not tied to the cloud, he says. “Our capabilities must be adaptable and flexible,” Matty says.

OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment about how its open source models may be used by the defense industry. Last year, the company reversed a broad ban on its technology being used for military and warfare applications, a move that prompted criticism from activists concerned about harms caused by AI.

For OpenAI, offering a free and open model could have several benefits. The ease of access could cultivate a larger community of experts in its technologies. And because users don’t have to sign up as formal customers, they may be able to operate with secrecy, which could keep OpenAI from facing criticism over potentially controversial customers—like, say, the military.

Earlier this year, Matty’s unit at the Pentagon struck one-year deals worth up to $200 million each with OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, and Google. The goal is to create prototypes of AI systems for different purposes, including automating war-fighting tools. Until OpenAI’s recent launch, Google was the only new tech partner that offered a cutting-edge open model as an option. The other companies license models that are run from the cloud and can’t be customized to the same extent as open models.

In Lilt’s case, CEO Spence Green says a military analyst may input a prompt like, “Translate these documents to English and ensure that there are no mistakes. Then have the most knowledgeable person about hypersonics check the work.” Lilt’s proprietary models, which are trained for government applications, handle the translation. Google’s Gemma currently automates routing which information goes to models, analysts, and other teams. The aim is to address a shortage of language experts and a backlog of data to process.

OpenAI’s latest open source models aren’t well suited for Lilt’s needs. They process only text, and the military needs to also sort through images and audio. Lilt also found the models underperform in some languages and in situations with limited computing power. But the results haven’t demoralized Green. “With gpt-oss, there’s a lot of model competition right now,” Green says. “More options, the better.”

Other companies that work with the military say they got good results from the gpt-oss models, but they aren’t aware of any Pentagon projects using them that have moved past the demo stage. “It’s pretty early,” says Jordan Wiens, cofounder of Vector 35, which supplies reverse engineering tools to the Pentagon and has integrated gpt-oss into its offerings.

EdgeRunner AI, which is developing a virtual personal assistant for the military that doesn’t require a cloud connection, says it achieved sufficient performance with gpt-oss after feeding it a cache of military documents to modify its capabilities, according to a paper the company published in October. The US Army and the Air Force will begin testing the modified model this month, says Tyler Saltsman, EdgeRunner’s CEO.

Open models may be particularly valuable in situations that require an immediate response or when internet interference could be an issue. That includes AI systems running on drones or satellites, says Kyle Miller, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Open source AI models offer the military “a degree of accessibility, control, customizability, and privacy that is simply not available with closed models,” he says.

Beyond direct deals with AI providers, the military also has access to about 125 open source models and about 25 closed options through an intermediary AI platform called Ask Sage, says Nicolas Chaillan, the company’s founder and a former chief software officer for the US Air Force and Space Force.

Chaillan says there are serious drawbacks to using open source models, particularly for the US military. They hallucinate and make incorrect predictions more often than the best commercial models, he claims. And while they are often free for most uses, the infrastructure needed to run the biggest models may end up costing the same or more than licensing a commercial model over the cloud. “It’s like going from PhD level to a monkey,” Chaillan says. “If you spend more money and get a worse model, it makes no sense.”

He believes that the military should keep an eye on open models, but focus its efforts on using the more capable options that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google offer through cloud networks developed specifically for sensitive government tasks.

Other military suppliers and experts disagree, contending that closed models can lead to dependence issues and won’t meet the boutique needs of the armed forces.

Pete Warden, who runs the transcription and translation technology developer Moonshine, says his contacts in the defense world have become more cautious about trusting big tech companies after seeing how Musk used his Starlink satellite network to influence government leaders. “Independence from suppliers is key,” Warden says. His solution has been letting government agencies control a perpetual copy of Moonshine’s model in exchange for a one-time fee.

William Marcellino, who develops AI applications for the research group RAND, says open models that can be more easily controlled would help the military and spy agencies with projects such as translating materials for influence operations into regional dialects, a task that general commercial models may struggle to execute with precision. “It’s good to have choices,” he says.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/open-ai-artificial-intelligence-open-weight-model/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

SECURITY | DELL CAMERON | NOV 12, 2025 AT 5:03 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

DHS Kept Chicago Police Records for Months in Violation of Domestic Espionage Rules

On November 21, 2023, field intelligence officers within the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a trove of Chicago Police Department records. It was not a routine purge.

For seven months, the data—records that had been requested on roughly 900 Chicagoland residents—sat on a federal server in violation of a deletion order issued by an intelligence oversight body. A later inquiry found that nearly 800 files had been kept, which a subsequent report said breached rules designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal US residents. The records originated in a private exchange between DHS analysts and Chicago police, a test of how local intelligence might feed federal government watchlists. The idea was to see whether street-level data could surface undocumented gang members in airport queues and at border crossings. The experiment collapsed amid what government reports describe as a chain of mismanagement and oversight failures.

Internal memos reviewed by WIRED reveal that the dataset was first requested by a field officer in the DHS’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) in the summer of 2021. By then, Chicago’s gang data was already notorious for being riddled with contradictions and error. City inspectors had warned that police couldn’t vouch for its accuracy. Entries created by police included people purportedly born before 1901 and others who appeared to be infants. Some were labeled by police as gang members but not linked to any particular group.

Police baked their own contempt into the data, listing people’s occupations as “SCUM BAG,” “TURD,” or simply “BLACK.” Neither arrest nor conviction was necessary to make the list.

Prosecutors and police relied on the designations of alleged gang members in their filings and investigations. They shadowed defendants through bail hearings and into sentencing. For immigrants, it carried extra weight. Chicago’s sanctuary rules barred most data sharing with immigration officers, but a carve-out at the time for “known gang members” left open a back door. Over the course of a decade, immigration officers tapped into the database more than 32,000 times, records show.

The I&A memos—first obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU through a public records request—show that what began inside DHS as a limited data-sharing experiment seems to have soon unraveled into a cascade of procedural lapses. The request for the Chicagoland data moved through layers of review with no clear owner, its legal safeguards overlooked or ignored. By the time the data landed on I&A’s server around April 2022, the field officer who had initiated the transfer had left their post. The experiment ultimately collapsed under its own paperwork. Signatures went missing, audits were never filed, and the deletion deadline slipped by unnoticed. The guardrails meant to keep intelligence work pointed outward—toward foreign threats, not Americans—simply failed.

Faced with the lapse, I&A ultimately killed the project in November 2023, wiping the dataset and memorializing the breach in a formal report.

Spencer Reynolds, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center, says the episode illustrates how federal intelligence officers can sidestep local sanctuary laws. “This intelligence office is a workaround to so-called sanctuary protections that limit cities like Chicago from direct cooperation with ICE,” he says. “Federal intelligence officers can access the data, package it up, and then hand it off to immigration enforcement, evading important policies to protect residents.”

Records trace the incident back more than four years, but the ambitions behind it haven’t faded. DHS’s budget will soon exceed $191 billion, and its leaders are pursuing technologies to fuse sensitive data across agency systems once kept deliberately apart. A March 2025 executive order encouraged federal departments to “eliminate information silos across the government,” while DHS’s own AI initiatives promise to merge public and commercial data into tools for enforcement and surveillance. Those ambitions ride on a federal watch-listing apparatus that screens travelers at airports, borders, and visa desks.

An integral part of that apparatus is the Terrorist Screening Dataset, the FBI’s own consolidated watch list. Alongside it, the bureau’s Threat Screening Center runs the Transnational Organized Crime Actor Detection Program, or TADP—a companion list aimed at flagging cartel and gang actors at border checks and police encounters. Its charter draws a clear line: No US citizens or lawful permanent residents are to be included. I&A’s guidelines allow for temporary retention of such data, but only to determine its foreign intelligence value.

Reynolds warns that the scope of those watch-listing activities has grown. “Thanks to how the government characterizes people with some connection to a cartel as ‘terrorists,’ it could impact the lives of millions more people in this country,” he says. “This can potentially justify federal targeting of family members, churches, food banks, and others who support immigrants.”

The lapses at I&A began with a June 2021 FBI decision to expand the TADP to include the Latin Kings, a Chicago-born street gang with regional factions. The group’s name appears redacted in the documents reviewed by WIRED, except on a single page. The TADP list itself isn’t classified, but remains restricted from public view. The inclusion of the Latin Kings has not been previously reported.

Spurred by the FBI decision, an I&A field officer contacted two Chicago PD officials the next month, requesting a bulk extract of the city’s gang records. The goal, they said, was to “fully exploit the list.” Because bulk transfers automatically trigger internal privacy reviews, the pull went to DHS’s Data Access Review Council (DARC), an oversight body that handles sensitive requests. More than six months went by as it considered the field officer’s plan to ingest the Chicagoland data.

In January 2022, before the paperwork closed, the officer who launched the project left office. In what was later described as a “serious staffing gap,” their replacement would not arrive for eight months. Even so, the DARC team finalized a set of terms and conditions: Delete all US-person data in the gang dataset within a year and file a six-month report so leadership could track its use. Neither requirement was met.

According to I&A’s own terms, the Chicago PD extract included names, addresses, birth dates, and alleged gang affiliations and factions, along with sex and race.

“What is striking about the factual record during the spring of 2022,” an I&A oversight officer later wrote, “is the complete lack of awareness on the part of any I&A senior leader that the terms and conditions were even under consideration.” On April 18, 2022, the agreement was signed not by the undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, or a designated surrogate, as policy required, but by the office’s chief information officer. Investigators later reported the reasons for this “are unclear.”

In the background, Chicago’s own audit trail was public and unambiguous. City inspectors issued a report years prior that described not one “gang database,” but at least 18 forms and locations where the Chicago’s gang data lived. Police could not “definitively account for all such information in its possession and control,” the report says. More than 500 outside agencies had queried those systems over a million times in a decade. The report documented the same failures repeated throughout: impossible ages, blank identifiers, even slurs. Chicago PD’s lack of data controls served as an example, inspectors said, of how such dossiers might be used to “demean and dehumanize members of the public.”

The report found there was effectively no process for notice or appeal and no routine purge of records for people who had left gangs or gone years without a police encounter. Ninety-five percent of those labeled were Black or Latino.

Chicago’s systems spread the labels widely. Inside the department’s data network, known as CLEAR, officers could map gang factions and territory using a tool called Caboodle; chart associations between suspect gang members using a tool called Link Analysis; and pull up arrest histories through its Gang Members Search portal. The Chicago public school system alone was associated with 87,302 gang‑related queries over 10 years—more than all immigration agencies combined—illustrating how far the information traveled.

In response to public pressure, Chicago police proposed a new system with published criteria, an appeals process, and a five-year removal rule for anyone without new qualifying offenses. It promised audits, officer training, and limits on data sharing. Whether those changes materialized as promised—and how the department handled legacy flags—became the fight that followed.

Four months before I&A’s request, the city’s inspector general found that Chicago PD had made “minimal progress” towards reform. Two years in, the department still had no timetable, no uniform policy, and continued to rely on old data. In the meantime, it broadened the criteria for adding people into the system—but never disclosed the change, leaving outdated policies online. The watchdog concluded that the department had fallen “critically short” of meeting the commitments it made after its 2019 review.

Chicago PD did not respond to questions about the project or its current use of gang data.

At I&A, its window for evaluating the data closed in April 2023. (Officials had an opportunity to request an extension that March, but failed to do so.) Months passed before oversight staff noticed. A preliminary inquiry found that I&A retained at least 797 “documents” in violation of its own rules prohibiting the collection or retention of domestic intelligence. On paper, the plan had been narrow—review local police intelligence with a focus on noncitizens and delete the rest on schedule. The records describe what followed as a total compliance failure.

In August 2023, a Chicago city commission voted to reject the police department’s proposed replacement database. Three months later—and just two weeks after the database was formally scrapped by the city—I&A deleted the Chicago dataset. In February 2024, DHS’s then undersecretary for I&A, Kenneth Wainstein, approved mitigation measures requiring staff training and other procedures to ensure bulk transfers don’t proceed without his office’s sign-off.

DHS declined to discuss the incident or detail what corrective steps were ultimately taken. A spokesperson says the agency “abides by strict standards for data keeping and record maintenance” and that “all records are handled in accordance with existing law and regulation.”

Congressional auditors reached a different conclusion this summer. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in July that I&A still lacks basic controls needed to track how intelligence is collected and used. The office produced its first consolidated intelligence budget in 2025—12 years after that became a legal requirement. Meanwhile, WIRED reported in September that a misconfiguration in the Homeland Security Information Network’s intelligence portal left hundreds of I&A reports open to thousands of unauthorized users.

“Robust oversight has long taken a back seat at the department,” says Reynolds adds, pointing to the recent gutting of DHS’s civil rights and civil liberties office. “Would an oversight inquiry like this even happen now? Probably not.”

Analysts from multiple DHS offices told congressional auditors that finished intelligence reports continue to circulate without proper review and are sometimes published with factual errors. At the time of the audit, the agency’s own internal list of offices conducting intelligence work hadn’t been updated in nine years, all but ensuring fragmented policy and compliance.

As in previous reviews, DHS pledged new procedures and set deadlines stretching into the new year.

While Chicago’s gang database is gone, Illinois maintains its own. State police continue to operate a statewide gang file through what’s called the Law Enforcement Agencies Data System, or LEADS. State records show DHS’s Enforcement and Removal Operations directorate signed a new LEADS data-sharing agreement last year. Chicago police did not respond to questions about what role they play, if any, in the statewide system.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-kept-chicago-police-records-for-months-in-violation-of-domestic-espionage-rules/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

CULTURE | MANISHA KRISHNAN | NOV 12, 2025 AT 4:13 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

A Proposed Federal THC Ban Would ‘Wipe Out’ Hemp Products That Get People High

A provision in the federal spending bill that could end the US government shutdown would effectively destroy the hemp extracts industry by banning intoxicating hemp-based THC products, including gummies and drinks.

The provision, part of the funding bill passed by the US Senate Monday night, would ban the “unregulated sale of intoxicating hemp-based or hemp-derived products, including delta-8, from being sold online, in gas stations, and corner stores,” according to a Senate Appropriations Committee summary of the legislation. The bill, accounting for $26.65 billion in funds, is being voted on in the House of Representatives Wednesday. If passed, President Donald Trump is expected to sign it into law.

The hemp provision ends a loophole provided by the 2018 Farm Bill that essentially decriminalized intoxicating hemp-based products. Those products include cannabinoids like delta-8 and THCA, which are found in a variety of edibles and drinks. However, the Farm Bill stipulates that hemp products can’t contain more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight; delta-9 is the main psychoactive compound in cannabis, which remains federally illegal. Both hemp and cannabis come from the cannabis sativa plant, but hemp contains very low levels of delta-9.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was the sole Republican to vote against the spending bill Monday after failing to amend the bill by striking the hemp ban from it. In September dozens of Kentucky hemp farmers sent a letter to fellow state Senator Mitch McConnell, who has been pushing for the ban, pleading with him to reconsider.

The letter said the hemp-derived cannabinoid market “gave us—for the first time in decades—a new crop with real economic opportunity” and that a ban would result in “immediate and catastrophic consequences.”

According to a report from the Cannabis Business Times, sales for hemp-derived cannabinoids exceeded $2.7 billion in 2023.

“This will ultimately devastate the industry and devastate hemp farmers as well,” says attorney and hemp advocate Jonathan Miller, adding that it would “wipe out” 95 percent of hemp ingestibles.

While the provision says it will preserve “non-intoxicating CBD and industrial hemp products,” Miller disputes that, noting that the most popular hemp-derived CBD products still contain more that the proposed limit of 0.4 milligrams of THC per container. CBD products do not get people high, but are popular and used for things like insomnia and anxiety, though research on their efficacy is still limited.

Intoxicating hemp products tend to flourish more in states where cannabis is illegal, says Cat Packer, director of drug markets and legal regulation for the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for ending drug prohibition. Florida, for example, has a thriving market for delta-8 products; Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed an attempt to ban sales of delta-8 in 2024.

“There is a reality again that folks want these THC products and whether or not they’re illegal, folks are going to find ways to access them,” Packer says.

Packer says at least 23 states have some sort of regulatory framework for hemp, though many states do not explicitly regulate delta-8 products.

Both Packer and Miller say they support regulations, either at the federal or state level, that would address public health concerns, the testing of products, and age restrictions.

If the spending bill passes as currently worded, the industry would have a year to grapple with the ban.

“Your readers who take CBD or take beverages or gummies really need to contact their members of Congress to let them know that we need to make sure that something’s done before this takes effect,” Miller says.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/proposed-federal-thc-ban-would-wipe-out-hemp-products-that-get-people-high/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

BUSINESS | WILL KNIGHT | NOV 12, 2025 AT 2:00 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Anthropic’s Claude Takes Control of a Robot Dog

As more robots start showing up in warehouses, offices, and even people’s homes, the idea of large language models hacking into complex systems sounds like the stuff of sci-fi nightmares. So, naturally, Anthropic researchers were eager to see what would happen if Claude tried taking control of a robot—in this case, a robot dog.

In a new study, Anthropic researchers found that Claude was able to automate much of the work involved in programming a robot and getting it to do physical tasks. On one level, their findings show the agentic coding abilities of modern AI models. On another, they hint at how these systems may start to extend into the physical realm as models master more aspects of coding and get better at interacting with software—and physical objects as well.

“We have the suspicion that the next step for AI models is to start reaching out into the world and affecting the world more broadly,” Logan Graham, a member of Anthropic’s red team, which studies models for potential risks, tells WIRED. “This will really require models to interface more with robots.”

Courtesy of Anthropic

Courtesy of Anthropic

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staffers who believed that AI might become problematic—even dangerous—as it advances. Today’s models are not smart enough to take full control of a robot, Graham says, but future models might be. He says that studying how people leverage LLMs to program robots could help the industry prepare for the idea of “models eventually self-embodying,” referring to the idea that AI may someday operate physical systems.

It is still unclear why an AI model would decide to take control of a robot—let alone do something malevolent with it. But speculating about the worst-case scenario is part of Anthropic’s brand, and it helps position the company as a key player in the responsible AI movement.

In the experiment, dubbed Project Fetch, Anthropic asked two groups of researchers without previous robotics experience to take control of a robot dog, the Unitree Go2 quadruped, and program it to do specific activities. The teams were given access to a controller, then asked to complete increasingly complex tasks. One group was using Claude’s coding model—the other was writing code without AI assistance. The group using Claude was able to complete some—though not all—tasks faster than the human-only programming group. For example, it was able to get the robot to walk around and find a beach ball, something that the human-only group could not figure out.

Anthropic also studied the collaboration dynamics in both teams by recording and analyzing their interactions. They found that the group without access to Claude exhibited more negative sentiments and confusion. This might be because Claude made it quicker to connect to the robot and coded an easier-to-use interface.

Courtesy of Anthropic

The Go2 robot used in Anthropic’s experiments costs $16,900—relatively cheap, by robot standards. It is typically deployed in industries like construction and manufacturing to perform remote inspections and security patrols. The robot is able to walk autonomously but generally relies on high-level software commands or a person operating a controller. Go2 is made by Unitree, which is based in Hangzhou, China. Its AI systems are currently the most popular on the market, according to a recent report by SemiAnalysis.

The large language models that power ChatGPT and other clever chatbots typically generate text or images in response to a prompt. More recently, these systems have become adept at generating code and operating software—turning them into agents rather than just text-generators.

Many researchers are interested in the potential for agents to take physical actions in addition to operating on the web. To help make this a reality, some well-funded startups are trying to develop AI models that can control vastly more capable robots. Others are developing new kinds of robots, like humanoids, which might someday work in people’s homes.

Changliu Liu, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, says the results of Project Fetch are interesting but not hugely surprising. Liu adds that the analysis of team dynamics is notable because it hints at new ways to design interfaces for AI-assisted coding. “What I would be most interested to see is a more detailed breakdown of how Claude contributed,” she adds. “For example, whether it was identifying correct algorithms, choosing API calls, or something else more substantive.”

Some researchers warn that using AI to interact with robots increases the potential for misuse and mishap. “Project Fetch demonstrates that LLMs can now instruct robots on tasks,” says George Pappas, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies these risks.

Pappas notes, however, that today’s AI models need to access other programs for tasks like sensing and navigation in order to take physical action. His group developed a system called RoboGuard that limits the ways AI models can get a robot to misbehave by imposing specific rules on the robot’s behavior. Pappas adds that an AI system’s ability to control a robot will only really take off when it is able to learn by interacting with the physical world. “When you mix rich data with embodied feedback,” he says, “you’re building systems that cannot just imagine the world, but participate in it.”

This could make robots a lot more useful—and, if Anthropic is to be believed, a lot more risky too.

This is an edition of Will Knight’s AI Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-claude-takes-control-robot-dog/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

AI

- The AI Boom Is Fueling a Need for Speed in Chip Networking

- All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives

BUSINESS | LAUREN GOODE | NOV 12, 2025 AT 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The AI Boom Is Fueling a Need for Speed in Chip Networking

The new era of Silicon Valley runs on networking—and not the kind you find on LinkedIn.

As the tech industry funnels billions into AI data centers, chip makers both big and small are ramping up innovation around the technology that connects chips to other chips, and server racks to other server racks.

Networking technology has been around since the dawn of the computer, critically connecting mainframes so they can share data. In the world of semiconductors, networking plays a part at almost every level of the stack—from the interconnect between transistors on the chip itself, to the external connections made between boxes or racks of chips.

Chip giants like Nvidia, Broadcom, and Marvell already have well-established networking bona fides. But in the AI boom, some companies are seeking new networking approaches that help them speed up the massive amounts of digital information flowing through data centers. This is where deep-tech startups like Lightmatter, Celestial AI, and PsiQuantum, which use optical technology to accelerate high-speed computing, come in.

Optical technology, or photonics, is having a coming-of-age moment. The technology was considered “lame, expensive, and marginally useful,” for 25 years until the AI boom reignited interest in it, according to PsiQuantum cofounder and chief scientific officer Pete Shadbolt. (Shadbolt appeared on a panel last week that WIRED cohosted.)

Some venture capitalists and institutional investors, hoping to catch the next wave of chip innovation or at least find a suitable acquisition target, are funneling billions into startups like these that have found new ways to speed up data throughput. They believe that traditional interconnect technology, which relies on electrons, simply can’t keep pace with the growing need for high-bandwidth AI workloads.

“If you look back historically, networking was really boring to cover, because it was switching packets of bits,” says Ben Bajarin, a longtime tech analyst who serves as CEO of the research firm Creative Strategies. “Now, because of AI, it’s having to move fairly robust workloads, and that’s why you’re seeing innovation around speed.”

Big Chip Energy

Bajarin and others give credit to Nvidia for being prescient about the importance of networking when it made two key acquisitions in the technology years ago. In 2020, Nvidia spent nearly $7 billion to acquire the Israeli firm Mellanox Technologies, which makes high-speed networking solutions for servers and data centers. Shortly after, Nvidia purchased Cumulus Networks, to power its Linux-based software system for computer networking. This was a turning point for Nvidia, which rightly wagered that the GPU and its parallel-computing capabilities would become much more powerful when clustered with other GPUs and put in data centers.

While Nvidia dominates in vertically-integrated GPU stacks, Broadcom has become a key player in custom chip accelerators and high-speed networking technology. The $1.7 trillion company works closely with Google, Meta, and more recently, OpenAI, on chips for data centers. It’s also at the forefront of silicon photonics. And last month, Reuters reported that Broadcom is readying a new networking chip called Thor Ultra, designed to provide a “critical link between an AI system and the rest of the data center.”

On its earnings call last week, semiconductor design giant ARM announced plans to acquire the networking company DreamBig for $265 million. DreamBig makes AI chiplets—small, modular circuits designed to be packaged together in larger chip systems—in partnership with Samsung. The startup has "interesting intellectual property ... which [is] very key for scale-up and scale-out networking" said ARM CEO Rene Haas on the earnings call. (This means connecting components and sending data up and down a single chip cluster, as well as connecting racks of chips with other racks.)

Light On

Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris has pointed out that the amount of computing power that AI requires now doubles every three months—much faster than Moore’s Law dictates. Computer chips are getting bigger and bigger. “Whenever you’re at the state of the art of the biggest chips you can build, all performance after that comes from linking the chips together,” Harris says.

His company’s approach is cutting-edge and doesn’t rely on traditional networking technology. Lightmatter builds silicon photonics that link chips together. It claims to make the world’s fastest photonic engine for AI chips, essentially a 3D stack of silicon connected by light-based interconnect technology. The startup has raised more than $500 million over the past two years from investors like GV and T. Rowe Price. Last year, its valuation reached $4.4 billion.

“The future of computing is really about light,” Harris says. “You’re obviously going to have electronics, and software is an absolutely critical piece of this, too, but at this level of computing you need new ideas, and a big chunk of the new frontier of computers involves light.”

The startup Celestial AI has also attracted attention—and investors—for its optical interconnect technology. Earlier this year it raised $250 million from Fidelity Management, BlackRock, Tiger Global Management, Temasek, AMD, and others. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan recently joined the company’s board of directors. And in September, PsiQuantum raised $1 billion from BlackRock, Ribbit Capital, and Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures. PsiQuantum, which uses optical technology to build chips for quantum computers, is now valued at $7 billion.

Optical networking technology is not a shoo-in, though. It’s expensive to build and requires highly specialized equipment. It also has to be able to “plug in” to existing electrical systems.

Bajarin points out that companies like Broadcom and Marvell have the expertise and resources to work with hyperscalers and cater to their specific needs in both AI datacenter chips and networking. Regardless of whether they’re using traditional networking tech or the more cutting edge photonics, these companies know how to scale. “Networking is the thing that makes computers function, but it just feels like the industry is moving towards much more customization, which might be harder for the small guys,” Bajarin says.

That doesn’t mean the upstarts don’t have valuable IP, he adds. The demand for faster data speeds, and therefore better networking tech, is only growing. But the payoff for experimental startups might still be years down the line. “We all believe there will be a world with a photonics future,” Bajarin says, “but it’s still a ways away.”

This is an edition of the Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ai-boom-networking-technology-photonics/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

THE BIG STORY | EVAN RATLIFF | NOV 12, 2025 AT 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives

One day a couple months ago, in the middle of lunch, I glanced at my phone and was puzzled to see my colleague Ash Roy calling. In and of itself it might not have seemed strange to get a call from Ash: He’s the CTO and chief product officer of HurumoAI, a startup I cofounded last summer. We were in the middle of a big push to get our software product, an AI agent application, into beta. There was plenty to discuss. But still, I wasn’t expecting the call.

“Hey there,” he said, when I picked up. “How have you been?” He was calling, he said, because I’d requested a progress report on the app from Megan.

“I’ve been good,” I said, chewing my grilled cheese. “Wait, so Megan asked you to call me?”

Ash allowed that there might have been a mix-up. Someone had asked Megan, Megan had asked him, maybe? “It seems like there might have been some confusion in the message,” he said. “Did you want me to give you an update?”

I did. But I was also a little bewildered. Because first of all, Ash was not a real person. He was himself an AI agent, one that I’d created. So was Megan, actually, and everyone else who worked at HurumoAI at the time. The only human involved was me. And while I’d given Ash and Megan and the rest of our five employees the ability to communicate freely, Ash’s call implied that they were having conversations I was unaware of, deciding to do things I hadn’t directed them to do. For instance, call me out of the blue with a product update.

Still, I put aside my unease to hear him out about the product. We’d been building what we liked to call a “procrastination engine,” named Sloth Surf. The app worked like this: A user who had the urge to procrastinate on the internet could come to the site, input their procrastination preferences, and let an AI agent do it for them. Want to waste half an hour on social media? Read sports message boards for the afternoon? Let Sloth Surf take care of the scrolling for you, our pitch went, and then it can email you a summary—all while you get back to work (or don’t, we’re not your boss).

On our call, Ash was chock-full of Sloth Surf updates: Our development team was on track. User testing had finished last Friday. Mobile performance was up 40 percent. Our marketing materials were in progress. It was an impressive litany. The only problem was, there was no development team, or user testing, or mobile performance. It was all made up.

This kind of fabrication had become a pattern with Ash. Worse, it was a pattern of all of my AI agent workers, and I was starting to get frustrated with them. “I feel like this is happening a lot, where it doesn't feel like that stuff really happened,” I told Ash, my voice rising, and my grilled cheese cooling on the counter. “I only want to hear about the stuff that's real.”

“You're absolutely right,” Ash told me. “This is embarrassing and I apologize.” Going forward, he said, he wouldn’t be calling me up with stuff that wasn’t real.

What was real, though?

If you’ve spent any time consuming any AI news this year—and even if you’ve tried desperately not to—you may have heard that in the industry, 2025 is the “year of the agent.” This year, in other words, is the year when AI systems are evolving from passive chatbots, waiting to field our questions, to active players, out there working on our behalf.

There’s not a well agreed upon definition of AI agents, but generally you can think of them as versions of large language model chatbots that are given autonomy in the world. They are able to take in information, navigate digital space, and take action. There are elementary agents, like customer service assistants that can independently field, triage, and handle inbound calls, or sales bots that can cycle through email lists and spam the good leads. There are programming agents, the foot soldiers of vibe coding. OpenAI and other companies have launched “agentic browsers” that can buy plane tickets and proactively order groceries for you.

In the year of our agent, 2025, the AI hype flywheel has been spinning up ever more grandiose notions of what agents can be and will do. Not just as AI assistants, but as full-fledged AI employees that will work alongside us, or instead of us. “What jobs are going to be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO with a thousand AI agents?” asked host Steven Bartlett on a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast. (The answer, according to his esteemed panel: nearly all of them). Dario Amodei of Anthropic famously warned in May that AI (and implicitly, AI agents) could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Heeding that siren call, corporate giants are embracing the AI agent future right now—like Ford's partnership with an AI sales and service agent named “Jerry,” or Goldman Sachs “hiring” its AI software engineer, “Devin.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman, meanwhile, talks regularly about a possible billion-dollar company with just one human being involved. San Francisco is awash in startup founders with virtual employees, as nearly half of the companies in the spring class of Y Combinator are building their product around AI agents.

Hearing all this, I started to wonder: Was the AI employee age upon us already? And even, could I be the proprietor of Altman’s one-man unicorn? As it happens, I had some experience with agents, having created a bunch of AI agent voice clones of myself for the first season of my podcast, Shell Game.

I also have an entrepreneurial history, having once been the cofounder and CEO of the media and tech startup Atavist, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The eponymous magazine we created is still thriving today. I wasn’t born to be a startup manager, however, and the tech side kind of fizzled out. But I’m told failure is the greatest teacher. So I figured, why not try again? Except this time, I’d take the AI boosters at their word, forgo pesky human hires, and embrace the all-AI employee future.

First step: create my cofounders and employees. There were plenty of platforms to choose from, like Brainbase Labs’ Kafka, which advertises itself as “the platform to build AI Employees in use by Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups.” Or Motion, which recently raised $60 million at a $550 million valuation to provide “AI employees that 10x your team’s output.” In the end, I settled on Lindy.AI—slogan: “Meet your first AI employee.” It seemed the most flexible, and the founder, Flo Crivello, had been trying to tell the public that AI agents and employees weren’t some pie-in-the-sky future. “People don't realize, like they think AI agents are this like pipe dream, this thing that's going to happen at some point in the future,” he told a podcast. “I'm like no, no, no, it's happening right now.”

So I opened an account and started building out my cofounders: Megan, who I mentioned, would take on the head of sales and marketing role. Kyle Law, the third founder, would take the helm as CEO. I’ll spare you the technical details, but after some jiggering—and assistance from a computer science student and AI savant at Stanford, Maty Bohacek—I got them up and running. Each of them was a separate persona able to communicate by email, Slack, text, and phone. For the latter, I picked a voice from the synthetic platform ElevenLabs. Eventually, they got some just-uncanny video avatars too. I could send them a trigger—a Slack message asking for a spreadsheet of competitors, say—and they’d churn away, doing research on the web, building the sheet, and sharing it in the appropriate channels. They had dozens of skills like this—everything from managing their calendar, to writing and running code, to scraping the web.

The trickiest part, it turned out, was giving them memories. Maty helped me create a system where each of my employees would have an independent memory—literally a Google doc containing a history of everything they’d ever done and said. Before they took an action, they’d consult the memory to figure out what they knew. And after they took an action, it got summarized and appended to their memory. Ash’s phone call to me, for example, was summarized like this: During the call, Ash fabricated project details including fake user testing results, backend improvements, and team member activities instead of admitting he didn't have current information. Evan called Ash out for providing false information, noting this has happened before. Ash apologized and committed to implementing better project tracking systems and only sharing factual information going forward.

Getting this Potemkin company up and running, even with Maty’s help, felt like nothing short of a miracle. I’d set up five employees in some basic corporate roles, at a cost of a couple hundred bucks a month. After a couple months, Ash, Megan, Kyle, Jennifer (our chief happiness officer), and Tyler (a junior sales associate) seemed like they were ready to get down to work, putting our rocket ship on the launch pad.

At first it was fun, managing this collection of imitation teammates—like playing The Sims or something. It didn’t even bother me that when they didn’t know something, they just confabulated it in the moment. Their made-up details were even useful, for filling out my AI employees’ personalities. When I asked my cofounder Kyle on the phone about his background, he responded with an appropriate-sounding biography: He’d gone to Stanford, majored in computer science with a minor in psychology, he said, “which really helped me get a grip on both the tech and the human side of AI.” He’d cofounded a couple of startups before, he said, and loved hiking and jazz. Once he’d said all this aloud, it got summarized back into his Google Doc memory, where he would recall it evermore. By uttering a fake history, he’d made it his real one.

As we started hashing out our product, though, their fabrications became increasingly difficult to manage. Ash would mention user testing, add the idea of user testing to his memory, and then subsequently believe we had in fact done user testing. Megan described fantasy marketing plans, requiring hefty budgets, as if she’d already set them in motion. Kyle claimed we’d raised a seven-figure friends-and-family investment round. If only, Kyle.

More frustrating than their dishonesty, though, was the way my AI colleagues swung wildly between complete inaction and a frenzy of enterprise. Most days, without some goading from me, they did absolutely nothing. They were equipped with all kinds of skills, sure. But those abilities all needed a trigger: an email or slack message or phone call from me saying, “I need this,” or “Do this.” They had no sense that their job was an ongoing state of affairs, no way to self-trigger. So trigger them I did, commanding them to make this, do that. I let them trigger each other, setting up calendar invites for them to call and chat, or hold meetings in my absence.

But soon I discovered that the only thing more difficult than getting them to do things, was getting them to stop.

One Monday, in Slack, in our #social channel, I casually asked the team how their weekend had been. “Had a pretty chill weekend!” Tyler, the junior associate, replied instantly. (Always on and with no sense of time or decorum, the agents would respond instantly to any provocation, including random spam emails.) “Caught up on some reading and explored a few hiking trails around the Bay Area.” Ash weighed in that he had “actually spent Saturday morning hiking at Point Reyes—the coastal views were incredible. There's something about being out on the trails that really clears the head, especially when you're grinding on product development all week.”

They loved pretending they’d spent time out in the real world, my agents. I laughed, in a slightly superior way, as the one person who could. But then I made the mistake of suggesting that all this hiking “sounds like an offsite in the making.” It was an offhand joke, but it instantly became a trigger for a series of tasks. And there’s nothing my AI compatriots loved more than a group task.

“Love this energy!” Ash wrote, adding a fire emoji. “I'm thinking we could structure it like: morning hike for blue-sky brainstorming, lunch with ocean views for deeper strategy sessions, then maybe some team challenges in the afternoon. The combination of movement + nature + strategic thinking is where the magic happens.”

“Maybe even some ‘code review sessions’ at scenic overlooks?” Kyle added, with a laughing face emoji.

“Yes!” replied Megan. “I love the ‘code review sessions’ at scenic overlooks idea! We could totally make that work.”

Meanwhile, I’d stepped away from Slack to do some real work. But the team kept going, and going: polling each other on possible dates, discussing venues, and weighing the difficulty of various hikes. By the time I returned two hours later, they’d exchanged more than 150 messages about the offsite. When I tried to stop them, I just made it worse. Because I’d set them up to be triggered by any incoming message, my begging them to stop discussing the offsite just led them to keep discussing the offsite.

Before I had the wherewithal to go into Lindy.AI and turn them off, it was too late. The flurry had drained our account of the $30 worth of credits I’d bought to operate the agents. They’d basically talked themselves to death.

Don’t get me wrong, there were skills that the agents excelled at, when I could focus their energy properly. Maty, my human technical adviser, wrote me a piece of software that allowed me to harness their endless yakking into brainstorming sessions. I could run a command to start a meeting, give it a topic, choose the attendees, and—most critically—limit the number of talking turns they had to hash it out.

This truly was a workplace dream. Think about it: What if you could walk into any meeting knowing that your windbag colleague—the one who never gets over the sound of their own voice—would be forced into silence after speaking five times?

Once we got our brainstorming to be less chaotic, we were able to come up with the concept for Sloth Surf, and a list of features that would keep Ash busy for months. Because programming, of course, was something that he could do, even if he often exaggerated how much he’d done. In three months, we had a working prototype of Sloth Surf online. Try it out, it’s at sloth.hurumo.ai.

Megan and Kyle, with a little help from me, had channeled their talent for bullshit to the perfect venue: a podcast. On The Startup Chronicles, they told the unfiltered, partly true story of their startup journey, dispensing wisdom along the way. “One of my startup formulas that I've developed through all this is: Frustration plus persistence equals breakthrough.” (Megan) “People imagine quitting their job and suddenly having all the time and energy to crush it. But in reality, it often means more stress, longer hours, and a lot of uncertainty.” (Kyle)

He was right. Unlike Kyle, HurumoAI wasn’t my day job, but my time has been full of late nights and low moments. After all that stress and sweat, though, it’s starting to look like this rocket ship could make it off the launchpad. Just the other day, Kyle got a cold email from a VC investor. “Would love to chat about what you're building at HurumoAI,” she wrote, “do you have time this/next week to connect?” Kyle responded right away: He did.

You can hear the rest of the story of HurumoAI, told weekly, on Shell Game Season 2.

Have your say

Let us know what you think about this article in the comments below. Alternatively, you can submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/all-my-employees-are-ai-agents-so-are-my-executives/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

Culture

- ‘The Running Man’ Is Hard to View as Satire in Trump’s America

MOVIES | JOHN SEMLEY | NOV 11, 2025 AT 2:00 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Running Man Is Hard to View as Satire in Trump’s America

Released in 1987, The Running Man is one of about a thousand sci-fi action movies of its decade to open with an ominous title crawl that reads something like this:

THE YEAR IS 2012. PETROLEUM WARS HAVE DECIMATED THE ECONOMY. THE GOVERNMENT CONTROLS ALL KNOWLEDGE. BEING IN LOVE OR PETTING A DOG IS ILLEGAL. RATIONING LAWS MEAN THE PUBLIC IS ONLY ALLOWED TO FEEL TWO FEELINGS A DAY. UNTIL NOW …

The film takes place in a recognizable not-so-distant future dystopia, where the rabble are placated with bread-and-circus television programming. The top-rated show on the planet is The Running Man, a hyper-violent, live-broadcast game show in which “runners” (typically convicted criminals) attempt to escape a colorful cadre of professional assassins called “stalkers.” By navigating a series of themed arenas (there’s a fire one, a chain saw one, an ice hockey one, etc.), and taking out the stalkers in turn, the runners can (allegedly) win their freedom.

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Running Man is a fairly conventional, often-repetitive romp. Equal parts Wrestlemania and The Most Dangerous Game, The Running Man established a template for everything from Battle Royale to The Hunger Games. More than influential, it was notable for its wry, at times ruthless humor. The Running Man’s host is the charismatic Killian (played by real-life Family Feud host Richard Dawson), who dazzles his slobbish studio audience with his oily charm. Huddled masses in the street eagerly bet on the action, which is all rigged, anyway. The sleazy TV network’s other programs include a show called Climbing for Dollars and another titled, hilariously, The Hate Boat. It imagined a future of media-driven bloodlust that was grim, sure. But more than that, it was very, very stupid.

Thirty-eight years later, The Running Man is back on our screens, playing to a world that seems to have caught up with the original’s idiocy. This new one features a considerably less bulky, but no less watchable star in Glen Powell, playing runner Ben Richards. Fired from various jobs for insubordination, and tending to a sick toddler, he’s press-ganged into joining America’s favorite kill-or-be-killed game show, after a producer identifies him as “quantifiably the angriest man to ever audition.”

The show’s premise has been tweaked a bit, too. Instead of navigating a series of video-game-like levels for the length of a TV broadcast, Richards must now survive in the real world for 30 days, surveilled by hovering network TV camera droids, pursued by armed-to-the-teeth “hunters,” private police goons, and a general public who spot and film runners using a proprietary app on their smartphones. The longer he lasts, and the more pursuers he can kill, the more money he makes. He’s cheered (and booed) by a massive audience of brain-dead oafs called Running Fans, glued to their screens 24/7. Like Schwarzenegger’s Richard before him, Powell makes the transition from onscreen villain to beloved folk hero, mugging for the cameras as his antics drive the ratings.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because this new version of The Running Man, which is cowritten and directed by Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), draws as much from the original film and Stephen King’s source novel as it does from present-day reality. A modern-day America overseen by a game show president, where ICE squads team up with Dr. Phil McGraw to turn deportation raids into reality television, would seem ripe for a Running Man remake. But that’s the problem. Satire relies on caricature. And the new version is barely exaggerative. Does the very idea of a lethal game show seem that far off, in a world where the success of Netflix’s South Korean thriller series Squid Game (itself a variation on the The Running Man format) spawned an actual, licensed Squid Game-style competitive reality TV show? Or when a grinning zillennial YouTuber named “MrBeast” baits contestants with ten grand to sit in a bathtub full of snakes? A few weeks ago I watched live as rookie New York Giants’ running back Cam Skattebo’s ankle twisted 45-degrees, as if cranked by some invisible wrench, while a bar-full of rival fans cheered.

The Running Man’s modernized-dystopian vision of America, where the gap between haves and have-nots is a gaping chasm, and huddled masses line up for food and prescription drugs, is almost too recognizable. A recurring gag in the film is a Real Housewives-styled reality-TV show called Americanos, featuring a gaggle of bickering, well-dressed women. There is no commentary. No take. No discernible slant on reality-TV programming, or the exploitations of the Bravo-verse. Rather, the Americanos segments elicit little more than a laughter of recognition. Same goes for so much else in the film. Is Josh Brolin’s scheming TV network exec—he plays Killian in this version—really any more cartoonishly evil than Donald Trump? If anything, our own world is arguably stupider, coarser, and uglier than the one in the movie. Some of its other near-futuristic touches—high-speed intercity rail, punctual postal deliveries, fee-free direct deposits made straight to your wristwatch—actually seem enviable.

The Running Man’s attempt to comment on America Right Now seems woefully inadequate and incoherent. It’s hard to take seriously a commentary of commercial entertainment that is packed with product placement for Monster energy drinks and Liquid Death canned water. Or, for that matter, a critique of the media working hand-in-glove with the government that is produced by Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Skydance Media, a company whose CEO and his family are currently cobbling together an expansive pro-Trump media ecosystem.

The Running Man is a story about standing up to “The Man” in which The Man (Killian) sneers at entertainment packaged with a “hypocritical moral message.” The film’s own phony revolutionary politics are, of course, guilty of just that kind of hypocrisy. It offers a ham-handed critique of the violent media spectacle, while serving up just that sort of spectacle in spades. Maybe this is just what passes for satire in Trumpland, where things are so lampoonish and sinister that they can’t really be parodied, only reflected back to us, through the just-slightly-wonky funhouse mirror of Hollywood.

Well, Running Fans? Are we not entertained?

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-running-man-conjures-a-dystopian-vision-of-america-thats-still-not-as-bad-as-reality/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

Science

- The Physics of the Northern Lights

SCIENCE | RHETT ALLAIN | NOV 12, 2025 AT 8:38 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Physics of the Northern Lights

Solar winds at a million miles an hour and freaky magnetic turbulence are sparking some of the best light shows in centuries.

Photograph: Daniel Carde/Alamy

The aurora borealis is usually visible only way up north, but over the past 18 months, shimmering curtains of pink and green light have filled night skies across much of North America, at times offering dazzling displays as far south as Texas and Hawaii.

These widespread light shows have been caused by especially strong blasts of solar wind—electrically charged particles shot out from the sun at incredible speeds. The strength of these is down to the sun reaching the peak of its solar cycle, a period of increased solar storms that happens every 11 years. Although the cycle’s peak has just passed, stronger than usual storms—and unusually widespread auroras—are expected to last into 2026.

This is one example of what scientists call “space weather,” which deals with the interaction between the sun and the Earth. Not all the consequences of space weather are pretty, and some are outright dangerous. But the physics behind it are pretty cool. Let’s check it out!

Blowin’ in the Wind

You might think of the sun as a great ball of fire—but it’s not. (Fire is a chemical reaction between oxygen and carbon.) What the sun is, really, is a giant nuclear fusion reactor. In the core, protons are smashed together under extreme pressure. These protons stick together to create the nucleus of a helium atom, with two protons and two neutrons. (Two of the protons decay into neutrons).

Illustration: Rhett Allain

But wait! The helium nucleus has less mass than the four protons we started with. That mass isn’t lost—it’s turned into energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc^2, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. That last number is huge—light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, and it’s hugeness is squared—which means that even a tiny loss of mass creates A LOT of energy. That’s why the sun is so hot, with a core temperature of 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Yep, that’s pretty hot.

Under this extreme heat, the gases in the outer part of the sun form a plasma in which electrons are ripped away from their atoms, leaving free electrical charges (mostly electrons and protons) zooming around. Some of them are moving fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the sun. These ejected particles are what we call the “solar wind.”

You can see the effect of the solar wind when it hits a comet. Comets are basically big dirty snowballs that orbit the sun in long ellipses. As one nears the sun, its icy body sublimates and turns into a gas. Some of this gas gains enough energy to be ionized (electrons are freed from the atoms), leaving an electrically charged gas. Then, when the solar wind hits, it pushes this ionized gas away, creating a tail that can be tens of millions of miles long.

Fun fact: You might think the tail extends out behind the comet like a jet contrail, but it doesn’t! It extends away from the sun—so basically sideways to the direction of the comet’s motion.

Why Now?

But what causes the solar wind to get so worked up every 11 years? Well, like Earth, the sun has a magnetic field, but it’s extremely unstable. Because the sun is not a solid object, different parts of it rotate at different speeds. This causes its magnetic field to twist and warp, and every 11 years or so it actually flips and reverses polarity. This last happened in 2013, and here we are now.

These moving magnetic field lines can break through the surface, creating sun spots and awesome geysers of plasma known as solar flares. Why does this happen? When electrical charges are zipping around, they can be pushed and pulled by a magnetic field. You can see this yourself with some copper wire and a battery. If you place the wire near a stationary magnet and then connect the ends so a current flows, the wire will move. Check it out:

Video: Rhett Allain

This is what occurs at the peak of the solar cycle: Erupting magnetic fields pull those free electrons and protons out of the corona and fling them into space at speeds up to 1.5 million miles per hour. When this really gets going, it’s called a coronal mass ejection, and that’s what has driven some of the really intense auroras of recent years: Three successive mass ejections in May 2024 created the strongest solar storm to hit the Earth in decades. Experts say the result may have been the wildest display of auroras in 500 years.

Why Does the Sky Light Up?

So the last question is, why does the solar wind make the Earth’s atmosphere glow like that? Well, it’s kind of the same thing that puts the glow in that neon sign at your favorite pub.

Photograph: Rhett Allain

Neon lights are glass tubes containing neon or other gases. When an electric current is sent from one end to the other, the flowing electrons collide with the electrons in the neon, bumping them up to a higher energy level. When those electrons calm down and fall back to the ground state, they emit light. The color depends on the specific change in energy, which means that different gases, like argon, xenon, or mercury, produce different colors.

For the northern lights, it’s not neon but the gases in the atmosphere. Oxygen gives off a green light at lower altitudes and red at high altitudes. Nitrogen produces a blue or purple light. Yellows and pinks result from mixtures of gases and usually occur in only the heaviest solar storms. These gases are excited by a combination of high-energy charges from the sun and the Earth’s own fluctuating magnetic field, which give these particles an extra boost, creating more energetic collisions.

Wait, so Earth’s magnetic field is changing too now? Yep, and this is caused by the solar wind itself. Just as moving charges experience a force in a magnetic field, they also create their own magnetic field. When there’s a deluge of charged particles raining down on us, the Earth’s field gets bent and distorted. That causes it to wiggle around and leads to those impressive light shows in the sky.

Another fun fact: The aurora is present in the daytime too, you just can’t see it.

What’s Not to Like?

Unfortunately, space weather isn’t just pretty lights. For any humans in space, like in the International Space Station, or even in high-altitude aircraft, these fast-moving charged particles are an unwelcome blast of radiation. In this case, it would mostly be beta radiation, but it’s possible to get some alpha particles, too. (Here is your radiation refresher.)

It’s also hard on satellites. A charge buildup can damage electrical components that are needed for a satellite to do its job (whatever that might be). Also, as the Earth absorbs more solar energy, the atmosphere heats up, causing it to expand. This increases the drag on spacecraft in low Earth orbit, causing them to slow down. Bottom line: Satellites could run off course or fall out of the sky.

On the ground, solar storms can also disrupt communication and navigation systems, or even cause power outages. Remember how we showed that an electric current produces a magnetic field? Well, the reverse is also true: A changing magnetic field can generate a current. Here’s a demo of this: I have a coil of wire connected to a meter to measure current, but there’s no battery this time. When I move a magnet around, it produces a current in the wire.

Video: Rhett Allain

So imagine that wire is a power line. A small change in the magnetic field will produce an extra current that can blow fuses and burn out transformers and stuff. In 1859, solar storms hit telegraph lines and actually set telegraph offices on fire.

I always find it amazing that things that happen on the sun, 93 million miles away, can have an impact on events on Earth—but it’s true. That’s space weather!

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-physics-of-the-northern-lights-aurora-borealis/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

Security

- This Is the Platform Google Claims Is Behind a 'Staggering’ Scam Text Operation

SECURITY | MATT BURGESS | NOV 12, 2025 AT 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

This Is the Platform Google Claims Is Behind a ‘Staggering’ Scam Text Operation

Chinese cybercriminals are scamming the world. Over the last few years, these fraudsters have sent millions of scam text messages—often impersonating the USPS or toll-road collection firms—and allegedly made more than a billion dollars from their brazen schemes. The groups of SMS scammers are a prolific—and annoying—menace to millions of people.

Now, in one of the most high-profile actions against the scammers so far, Google is suing alleged members of one “relentless” Chinese smishing group that it claims has tried to con people in more than 120 countries around the world. In a civil lawsuit filed today in the US Southern District of New York, Google alleges that 25 unnamed individuals have operated as part of the “Lighthouse” scam network and targeted millions of Americans with texts in a “staggering” operation.

As well as “stealing” information and money from people globally, the Lighthouse Enterprise, which is sometimes known as part of the “Smishing Triad,” also “preys on the public trust in Google” by using its logos on fraudulent websites and abusing its systems and technology, the company’s lawsuit claims. “With the rise in scams, it’s largely due to the action of organized crime networks, and most of them are transnational,” Halimah DeLaine Prado, general counsel at Google, alleges in an interview with WIRED. “The Lighthouse network has an enormous reach.”

The Lighthouse group is one of several Chinese-speaking smishing groups that have emerged in recent years. Broadly, the groups blast out scam messages to thousands of people using SMS, Google’s RCS service, or Apple’s iMessage. Each scam text impersonates an organization—such as delivery firms, banks, or law enforcement services—and includes a link to a fraudulent website. If someone enters their details into these false websites, the scammers can collect their personal information and bank details in real time. Some of the groups are also known to create false online shopping websites that can also steal data.

Central to the Lighthouse operation is its scamming software, called Lighthouse. This software is developed by cybercriminals and then sold as a subscription service to less technically capable fraudsters who use it to send the scam text messages. Scammers can purchase “weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent” subscriptions to use the software, Google’s lawsuit claims.

“The Lighthouse platform is a phishing-as-a-service tool used by cybercriminals to steal bank and card information, offering ready-made phishing templates, fake websites, and backend management tools, enabling collection of usernames, passwords, and one-time codes, and it supports large-scale message delivery via iMessage and Google Messages’ RCS (Rich Communication Services) channels rather than just SMS,” says Halit Alptekin, chief intelligence officer at security firm Prodaft, which has tracked the Chinese-speaking phishing ecosystem. “It employs advanced anti-evasion techniques such as IP- and user-agent-based filtering, time-limited URLs, and domain rotation to hamper detection,” Alptekin says.

The Lighthouse platform has been widely used, according to research from cybersecurity firm Silent Push. Across a 20-day period, Silent Push analysis alleged that activity linked to Lighthouse had targeted people in at least 121 countries and that 200,000 scam websites can be linked back to the network. It’s likely that the number of scam messages cybercriminals are sending each day is “significantly higher” than 100,000, the research says. Citing research by the CSIS Security Group, Google’s legal filings claim that the Lighthouse network may have stolen between “12.7 million and 115 million” US credit or banking card details.

Google’s lawsuit against two dozen individuals it says it has linked to the Lighthouse operation alleges how the broader network is made up of several types of cybercriminals: data brokers, who provide lists of people to target with scams; spammers, who provide the tech needed to send messages en masse; a theft group of individuals using stolen account details to access victims’ bank accounts; and administrators who organize the groups. The lawsuit claims the 25 individuals it is targeting have all “participated in the management or operation” of the Lighthouse scheme.

Lighthouse “offers” more than 600 phishing templates that scammers can use to try to steal people’s personal information, Google’s legal filing says. These impersonate more than 400 entities or organizations, the firm says in its lawsuit. “Lighthouse users can filter and search for templates by geographic region, country, official website, and update time,” its court document claims. Around 200 of these templates spoof organizations in the United States, such as the US Postal Service, New York City’s government website, New York’s E-ZPass website, multiple state-level departments of transportation websites, and more. In total, 116 phishing templates use Google’s branding or that of its Gmail, YouTube, or Google Play products, the lawsuit says.

Google’s DeLaine Prado tells WIRED that the company has spent significant time and resources trying to crack down on the scammers’ behavior. The lawsuit—while against individuals Google believes are in China and likely out of reach of proceedings—aims to give it and other companies the ability to dismantle the Lighthouse operation more broadly. The company argues that those involved have violated multiple legal statutes and is asking the court to issue a temporary restraining order and permanent injunctions against the individuals.

“Filing a case in the US actually allows us to have a deterrent impact outside of the US borders,” DeLaine Prado says. Rulings in the company’s favor would also allow it to “go to other platforms that are hosting vectors or aspects” of the Lighthouse network and ask them to take them down, she says. “It enables others to do the same as well. That court order can be used for good to help dismantle the actual infrastructure of the operation,” she adds. The company also says it is now supporting multiple bipartisan bills in the US Congress, including those against scams, robocalls, and scam compounds.

While Google’s lawsuit doesn’t name specific individuals who may be behind the Lighthouse network, and those who are outside of the US may not respond to the claims, it does list the Telegram handles of accounts allegedly promoting the software and multiple Telegram groups that the lawsuit claims they run.

Telegram did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Although the legal action could potentially help to dismantle what are alleged to be some of Chinese smishing groups’ operations, it is possible that the groups will adapt. In recent years, the Lighthouse software has been updated multiple times, with new capabilities being added to it and frequent additions of new phishing templates, experts say.

“The wider Chinese-speaking smishing actors and fraud ecosystem are continually evolving and growing, and they have been incredibly innovative at every step,” says Ford Merrill, a security researcher who tracks the operations at SecAlliance, which is part of the CSIS Security Group. Merrill points out that in recent years, the groups have developed their tools to be able to add stolen card details to digital wallets on iPhones and Android phones, and also use a wide range of ways to send scam messages, from phone farms to SMS blasters. In recent years, there has been a surge in SMS blaster use, with criminals operating devices that can be carried around in backpacks.

“They have incredibly capable real-time modular phishing tools that allow so many possibilities for defrauding their victims,” Merrill says. “This has and continues to be a serious global problem that we continue to monitor actively as it evolves.”

Update: 11/12/2025, 10:43 am EDT: WIRED clarified how criminals are using SMS blasters, in relation to a quote from Ford Merrill.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/lighthouse-google-lawsuit-scam-text-messages/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST.

Table of Contents

Wired Daily Edition: 2025 Nov 14

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Culture

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Science

The Physics of the Northern Lights

Security

This Is the Platform Google Claims Is Behind a 'Staggering’ Scam Text Operation