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- The Unitree GD01 Is a Giant Mecha Robot You Can Actually Buy

- Foxconn Ransomware Attack Shows Nothing Is Safe Forever

- MAHA Keeps Being Weird as Hell About Fertility

- Iran Is Using Tiny ‘Mosquito’ Boats to Shut Down the Strait of Hormuz

- The Top New Features in Google’s Android 17—and Gemini Intelligence—Coming This Summer

- Googlebook Is Google’s New AI-Powered Laptop Platform Built on Android

- Trump Media Scales Back Plans for Its Own Prediction Market

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GEAR | WILL KNIGHT | MAY 12, 2026 AT 6:51 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

If You Have $650,000 and Don’t Buy This Giant Mecha Robot You’re a Fool

China’s Unitree, famous for making low-cost dancing robots, will now sell you a giant, wall-smashing mecha.

Courtesy of Unitree

Unitree is a Chinese company known for making adorable, relatively affordable robots that dance and shuffle and such. Last night, it revealed its latest creation, which is something of a departure: a giant, walking, crawling, transforming, wall-smashing “mecha” called the GD01.

An introductory video for the GD01—set to a thundering rock guitar soundtrack—shows the company’s founder and CEO, Xingxing Wang, holding hands with the robot before climbing into its prodigious, open-air belly. A disclaimer added to Unitree’s social media post reads: “Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a Friendly and Safe manner.”

The video cuts to a view in which GD01 has no human pilot on board, but still manages to smash a wall of cinder blocks. Unitree later shows the red-limbed robot contorting itself by bending backwards and crawling on its hands and legs. (In this crabwalk position, the human operator would be lying on their back, looking at the ceiling or sky, but honestly who cares at that point.)

Unitree is a fast-rising robotics startup based in Hangzhou, China. The company already makes the world’s most popular four-legged and humanoid robots. Its G1 humanoids are routinely found in social media clips dancing, performing acrobatics, and doing kung-fu. This is its first foray into giant mechas. (The company confirmed to WIRED that the GD01 was an actual product it is selling, not an elaborate prank.)

Courtesy of Unitree

Unitree has been successful in part because its robots are remarkably inexpensive. The cheapest G1 model costs around $15,000, while US-made humanoid robots can cost 10 times more. Experts say the company’s mastery of China’s vast and complex hardware supply chain has helped it gain an edge in building robots cheaply. Unitree’s hardware is also easy for researchers to configure and deploy AI programs on.

Expected to go public this year, Unitree is a rising star among Chinese tech companies. Its robots performed parkour and synchronized martial arts at a televised spring festival event a few months ago. These routines involved a new trick: having numerous robots communicate with each other wirelessly in order to tightly synchronize their movements.

Courtesy of Unitree

Unitree’s robots are either remotely controlled or allowed to perform relatively simple actions autonomously. Its humanoids are not particularly dextrous, and they lack the AI needed to perform complex tasks in messy real-world environments. But the GD01 looks more geared towards destruction—and garnering publicity for Unitree—than anything else.

With AI companies poised to make millionaires and billionaires out of their employees, I can think of no better way to flaunt your AI-fueled wealth. Forget a Ferrari or a Patek Philippe, and impress your coworkers by turning up in a GD01. After smashing your way into the office, perhaps.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/unitree-gd01-mecha-robot/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

SECURITY | LILY HAY NEWMAN | MAY 12, 2026 AT 5:52 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Foxconn Ransomware Attack Shows Nothing Is Safe Forever

Famous for helping build Apple’s iPhones, Foxconn just suffered another cyberattack, highlighting the perils of warehousing some of the world’s most valuable data.

Photograph: Taylor Glascock/Getty Images

A ransomware group is attempting to extort the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn, claiming that it stole 8 terabytes of data from the company, including schematics and project details from customers including Dell, Google, Apple, and Nvidia. Foxconn did not immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment about the validity of the claims, but the company did acknowledge that some of its North American factories “suffered a cyberattack” in recent days, and that "affected factories are currently resuming normal production” after outages.

Foxconn is the type of target that is particularly appealing to ransomware and data extortion actors, because it is a massive company with divisions and subsidiaries around the world that hold not only its own intellectual property but that of its customers. The company is a key manufacturing contractor for electronic components or entire devices, including Apple's iPhones.

“Ransomware groups are increasingly targeting victims that can impact the supply chain, whether it is physical or software,” says Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at security firm Recorded Future. “So it’s unsurprising that a company like Foxconn would be targeted, since it does manufacturing and holds sensitive data for so many companies around the world.”

The attackers, known as the Nitrogen group, listed Foxconn on its breach site on Monday. Nitrogen, which emerged in 2023, is not the most high-profile or prolific ransomware actor, but it has been steadily active with some spikes, including at the end of 2024. The group, which typically targets victims in North America and Western Europe, also has connections to the notorious ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group.

“While reports indicate that Nitrogen has been active since 2023, our first observation of their activity was in 2024, targeting Control Panels USA,” says Ian Gray, vice president of intelligence at the security company Flashpoint. “We have observed approximately 50 victims since launching, primarily targeting manufacturing, technology, and retail. Manufacturing is one of the most-targeted sectors for ransomware in general.”

The idea of Foxconn as a prime target is not just conceptual. The company has faced a number of extortion attempts, including a December 2020 attack on a Mexican facility in which the DoppelPaymer ransomware group memorably demanded 1,804 bitcoin (worth roughly $34 million at the time). The LockBit group hit another Foxconn facility in Mexico in May 2022 and disrupted production. Most recently, LockBit attacked a subsidiary called Foxsemicon Integrated Technology in 2024 with defacements and data breach claims.

In addition to attempting to extort victims by threatening to release data stolen in an attack, Nitrogen also often deploys traditional ransomware that encrypts a target's systems. Researchers say that the group's ransomware program itself was built off of widely repurposed “Conti 2” code, but it has a problem. Nitrogen's encrypting mechanism has a design flaw that makes it impossible to decrypt data once it has been encrypted—even if the attackers want to release a victim's systems. It is unclear if this is a factor in Foxconn's incident response this week.

Ransomware and data extortion is an inveterate digital security problem, and attackers regularly repeat targets and stoop to new lows in carrying out large-scale disruptive attacks. Just last week, thousands of schools around the US were paralyzed amid finals and other year-end activities when the education tech firm Instructure shut down access to its Canvas platform following a breach perpetrated by extortion actors.

Updated at 6:15 pm ET, May 12, 2026, to include comment from Flashpoint’s Ian Gray.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/foxconn-ransomware-attack-shows-nothing-is-safe-forever/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

CULTURE | EJ DICKSON | MAY 12, 2026 AT 4:38 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

MAHA Keeps Being Weird as Hell About Fertility

RFK Jr. and Mehmet Oz’s comments about teen sperm count and “underbabied” Americans at a recent women’s health event underscore the White House’s pronatalist agenda.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, and President Donald Trump discuss workplace IVF benefits on October 16, 2025, in Washington, DC.Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The home page for Moms.gov, the Trump administration’s recently launched website for “new and expecting mothers,” is a trad wife’s dream.

Featuring soft pastel graphics and a photo of a young, white, blond woman in a field clutching her pregnant belly, the website offers resources for women of reproductive age such as anti-abortion “pregnancy centers,” as well as a CDC website listing potential workplace hazards for expecting mothers without noting accompanying legal protections for pregnant women.

If you were conspiratorially minded, you might conclude from the website alone that the Trump administration is champing at the bit for young (white and blond) women to have as many (white and blond) babies as possible. But as it turns out, you don’t need to be conspiratorially minded at all to arrive at that conclusion, because on Monday, the president and senior health officials reiterated their hardline pronatalist agenda at a maternal health care event.

During the event, Trump announced a proposal for employers to offer a health care coverage option for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility treatments, which are currently not included under most insurance plans. Though the plan would not mandate that employers offer such coverage, Trump said that he was deeply invested in expanding fertility options for women, declaring he had “learned everything” about female reproductive health and that he was “the father of fertility.”

This was not even the creepiest quote to emerge from the event. That honor goes to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who proclaimed that the country was undergoing a fertility crisis that was a “threat to our national economy and our security.” As evidence, he cited factors such as endocrine disrupting chemicals, pesticides, and other potential contributors to hormonal imbalances causing infertility, maligning the “toxic soup that our young women are walking around in.”

But it wasn’t just women who were blamed: He also cited a statistic that men in 1970 had “twice the sperm count our teenagers do today,” referring to this as “an existential crisis for our country.”

In response to questions about Kennedy’s seeming fixation on teenage sperm, White House spokesperson Kush Desai tells WIRED: “It takes systemic change to turn America’s birth rates around. The Trump administration is leaving no stone unturned to address this challenge, from researching long-ignored chronic health issues that affect fertility to pushing policies that will improve childcare, health care, and housing affordability.”

The sperm claim, which Kennedy has repeated multiple times throughout his tenure in the administration, is very much in line with the Make America Healthy Again movement’s fixation on masculinity, with the HHS regularly touting testosterone therapies and RFK Jr. posting fitness videos of himself bro-ing out with Kid Rock. But the science is extremely dubious, says Ashley Wiltshire, a fertility specialist at Columbia University Fertility Center, noting that the research this claim is ostensibly based on has been “debunked” by more contemporary studies. A meta-analysis published last year in the Journal of Fertility and Sterility found that sperm count among men had not declined between 1970 and 2023, but stayed relatively stable over time.

Though Wiltshire notes that male infertility has indeed been on the rise globally (not just in the US), the specific causes of this decline remain unclear, nor do they seem directly related to the sperm count study cited by Kennedy. “We just don’t have the evidence to say” that American men are undergoing an “existential” fertility crisis, Wiltshire says.

Not to be outdone, Mehmet Oz, the administration’s head of Medicare and Medicaid, said at the event that one in three Americans are “underbabied,” meaning they “don’t have any children,” or “have less children than you would normally want to have.” He said this trend was contributing to declining US fertility and replacement rates, which could contribute to long-term economic instability. It is true that fertility rates in the United States are declining, with the US hitting a record low in 2024 of women having an average of 1.6 children throughout their lifetimes. But the birth rate is still outpacing the death rate in the US (unlike in countries like Japan, which is actually experiencing a significant population decline crisis), and declining birth rates are currently being seen in most major industrialized countries.

It’s telling, though not surprising, that in discussions about boosting the American birth rate, Trump administration officials are not focusing on the actual reasons women may be having fewer children. Extensive research shows that the skyrocketing costs of housing and health care, as well as the absence of policies such as universal child care or mandated paid family leave for private employees, are far more powerful contributing factors than, say, pesticides or teenage sperm count. And while increasing fertility treatment access is undoubtedly a good thing, because Trump’s proposal does not mandate employers offer IVF coverage and may not necessarily reduce overall costs, it prompts questions about who, exactly, such legislation benefits.

Hyperbolic language such as warnings about an “existential” fertility crisis are part and parcel with the administration’s larger pronatalist agenda, as outlined in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for the second Trump administration. Indeed, “Trump accounts,” the administration’s recent financial proposal outlined on Moms.gov for children to receive $1,000 in an investment account when they turn 18, echo similar monetary incentives proposed by Project 2025, including $5,000 “baby bonuses” for women who have children.

Though bribing ladies to get pregnant will likely do little to offset the obstacles actually preventing women from having kids in the US, such policies speak to the fundamentalist priorities of this administration.

The Trump administration is less concerned about declining fertility rates than it is about “control,” says the National Women’s Law Center’s chief external affairs officer, Uma Iyer. She characterizes Moms.gov as “part of a broader effort to undermine women’s autonomy and power.”

Rather than adopt policies that would actually support young people in the United States, Trump officials are focusing their attention on encouraging a very specific type of woman to get knocked up and go frolic in fields—and they appear willing to go to great lengths to make this a reality.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/maha-is-still-creepily-obsessed-with-your-fertility/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

SECURITY | VINCENZO LEONE | MAY 12, 2026 AT 3:06 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Iran Is Using Tiny ‘Mosquito’ Boats to Shut Down the Strait of Hormuz

Iran’s traditional naval fleet has been almost completely destroyed by US-Israeli raids. But Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has deployed a fleet of small vessels that is crippling every passageway.

Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has developed an asymmetrical naval strategy that is crippling the passage of container ships. This “hemostat” uses guerrilla tactics, after Iran's “traditional” fleet was almost entirely destroyed by US and Israeli attacks. No longer able to rely on specialized military ships, Tehran is using an unconventional force made up of dozens of small military vessels armed with missiles, machine guns, and drones. Quick and nimble, this “mosquito fleet” is capable of assaulting ships carrying tons of cargo.

In mid-April, US president Donald Trump had reassured the public in a post on Truth Social that Iran's hemostat fleet did not pose a major problem for the US and Israel. “The Iranian Navy lies at the bottom of the sea, completely annihilated: 158 ships,” Trump wrote. “What we didn't hit are their small numbers of what they call ‘fast attack boats’ because we didn't consider them a big threat.” Less than 10 days later, on April 22, an Iranian attack conducted with the small vessels led to the seizure of two large container ships leaving the Strait of Hormuz, changing the course of the war.

Enter the Hemostat Fleet

“Iranian fleets of small boats were created during the Iran-Iraq war, with the purpose of disrupting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf that supported the Iraqi war effort,” says Michael Eisenstadt, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where he is director of the Military and Security Studies Program, who compares them to the “US torpedo squadrons that disrupted enemy naval traffic in the Pacific Ocean and Mediterranean Sea during World War II.”

“The effectiveness of Iran's fleet of small boats comes from their numbers and their use in swarms, which makes them difficult to counter,” Eisenstadt adds. “Iran has over a thousand of these small boats armed with rockets, machine guns, anti-ship missiles, and mines.” In this way, Tehran can pose a serious naval threat even though much of its military fleet has been destroyed.

“As Iran showed in March, it can close the straits by launching only a few dozen drones against oil tankers and cargo ships in the Persian Gulf,” says Eisenstadt, who has also worked as an analyst for the US military in addition to a 26-year career in the US Army as a reserve officer, with missions in Iraq and Israel.

Between the number of vessels at its disposal and the thousands of support drones for air operation, Iran possesses “much more than it needs to effectively force the closure of the strait,” Eisenstadt says. Then there is its proximity to the Strait of Hormuz, which allows Iran to systematize its deterrence against the passage of container ships and oil tankers. “It is therefore important to see the Iranian threat as multidimensional, involving a diverse range of capabilities to exploit its favorable geographic location,” he adds.

An Islamic Revolution Guards Corps vessel allegedly engaged in an operation to seize ships attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz, April 21, 2026.

Photograph: MEYSAM MIRZADEH/Getty Images

A Tactic in the Hands of the Pasdaran

Iran's “conventional” navy is separate from the navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, also known as the IRGC or the Pasdaran. But a parallel chain of command has allowed Tehran to develop a diverse guerrilla doctrine, even in their respective operational areas of responsibility.

The hemostat fleet is used by the Pasdaran. As the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, explains in a report authored by analyst Can Kasapoglu, “most of the Iranian conventional platforms sunk or put out of commission by allied attacks belonged to … Iran's regular armed forces,” Kasapoglu adds: “In contrast, the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guardians maintain their own asymmetrical naval component, designed specifically for combat operations in the Strait of Hormuz, much of which has remained intact.”

As Eisenstadt explains, “the IRCG navy, which operates in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz, is still fully active and has always been the most important organization when it comes to threatening maritime traffic across the Strait.”

In addition to the vessels themselves, Iran has developed a system—from coastal bases and hidden infrastructure to radar and the integration of mines, drones, and civilian vessels—to support them. “This overall architecture is designed to impose friction and attrition rather than to seek or win a decisive naval engagement,” reads the Hudson Institute report, which details the “maritime component being reinforced with a robotic element consisting of unmanned systems,” and some vessels “configured as explosive-laden suicide crafts.”

Creating further instability is the armaments factor. Not to be forgotten, Eisenstadt says, “are the cruise missiles and anti-ship ballistic missiles that, together with the other assets, create a layered network of systems capable of striking targets throughout the Gulf.” Add in Iran's Shahed drones, which can strike ships in the Gulf while supporting the guerrilla operations of the hemostat fleet, as yet another threat in the Strait of Hormuz.

A Revolutionary Guards boat attacks a naval vessel during a three-day naval exercise in the Gulf, April 22, 2010.

Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Guerrilla Warfare at Sea

Amid the threat of US air raids, “Iran keeps many of these boats in reinforced underground tunnels along the Persian Gulf coast, and these tunnels and the boats inside them will likely prove difficult to destroy,” Eisenstadt says.

Iran's apparent objective in the Strait of Hormuz is to create an increasingly unstable situation. “Strategically, this approach seeks not control but denial,” reads the Hudson Institute report. “It complicates access to key waterways, raises the economic and military costs of intervention, and sustains coercive leverage without escalating into full-scale war.”

And there is another problem: These remaining available systems “constitute a military architecture that resists decisive destruction,” the analysis says. “These assets can be contained, but not fully annihilated.” Experts say it is difficult to eliminate these boats because you have to find where they are hidden.

“It would require a sustained campaign to destroy this fleet,” Eisenstadt says, adding: “So unless the US is willing to land ground forces to conduct raids inside this complex network of tunnels, I don't think they will be able to destroy these capabilities.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/iran-is-using-tiny-mosquito-boats-to-shut-down-the-strait-of-hormuz/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | JULIAN CHOKKATTU | MAY 12, 2026 AT 1:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Top New Features in Google’s Android 17—and Gemini Intelligence—Coming This Summer

You’ll soon be able to generate your own widgets or ask Gemini to finish a booking in Chrome on Android.

Courtesy of Android

The Google I/O annual developer conference is around the corner—May 19—but in what is quickly becoming a tradition, Google announced new features for Android and Gemini a week early.

The news came on Tuesday via the second-ever Android Show on YouTube. This livestreamed presentation helps Google spread out the cavalcade of updates from the often jam-packed I/O keynote.

The Android Show focused on new features in Android 17, the next version of Android coming later this summer, as well as several updates to the Gemini assistant experience. It continues the theme set last year by Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem, of turning Android into an “intelligent operating system.” Samat and his team aim to do this by adding a host of new AI-powered features to the mobile OS, including a generative AI widget-creation tool and an improved voice-to-text model that uses AI to cut those “ums” and “ahs” as you speak.

What if you don't want AI baked into your phone? “A user always has control,” says Mindy Brooks, vice president of product management on the Gemini Intelligence experience. “They can turn it off, they can make a choice, and we are very clear about providing those tools for them to make the choices that work for them. We really wanted to focus on bringing features that are aligned with what users are saying they want and need.”

Here's everything you need to know about what was announced during the 2026 Android Show. And if you want to learn more about the newly announced Googlebook platform for laptops, we've got you covered here.

Gemini Intelligence

Google is officially packaging many of the new Gemini features it introduced on flagship smartphones in recent months as “Gemini Intelligence,” which brings the best of Gemini to some of the most advanced devices on the market. That means many of these features aren't necessarily tied to Android 17, and will roll out in waves starting with Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones this summer, as well as smartwatches, cars, smart glasses, and laptops later in the year.

There's a new visual indicator when Gemini is “thinking” and working on your behalf, and you'll see these visuals pop up throughout the operating system.

Multi-Step Tasks

Courtesy of Google

Google debuted Gemini Task Actions a few months ago, allowing you to ask Gemini to book an Uber or order your favorites from DoorDash. When you trigger a task, Gemini opens a virtual app experience and runs through the motions while you can continue using your phone for something else. When it has completed the task and needs you to press a button to place an order or book a reservation, it'll ping you to make that final call.

These actions are expanding to support more apps and services, and it may not even be necessary to have a specific app installed, as Gemini can handle these tasks via the Chrome browser. So if you see an interesting brochure while traveling, you can snap a pic and ask Gemini to “find a tour like this on Expedia for four people.” Gemini will either run the action through the Expedia app if you have it installed or head to Expedia's website in Chrome.

“We are moving toward a world where it starts to work in a much more comprehensive way,” Brooks says. “You're going to see it available to many more apps, and also, I think the really exciting thing is Chrome's automation on Android being expanded as well. Those two things combined will really create a comprehensive automation suite for our users.”

Chrome Auto Browse

Courtesy of Google

Speaking of Chrome's automation upgrade, Android users will be able to deploy Gemini as a browsing assistant in Chrome starting in late June. Google says Gemini can help research, summarize, and compare content on the web, and you can call on it to handle an appointment booking or reserve a parking spot. For example, if you go to SpotHero's website to find a parking spot—instead of entering all the details manually and making the reservation, you can ask Gemini, and it'll do the job for you.

AI-Powered Autofill

Courtesy of Google

We're all aware of the autofill function in Chrome—and the security risks that come with using it. Google is now upgrading it with Gemini's Personal Intelligence, where Gemini can source your information from a myriad of first-party Google apps like Gmail and Google Photos. That means even more text fields can be filled out automatically. For example, if you need to enter your passport ID or driver's license, Gemini can find that information from your emails—or maybe a photo of your passport you saved in Drive—so you don't have to fish your passport from a drawer.

Google says connecting Gemini to Autofill is opt-in, and you can turn it on or off in your settings.

Create a Widget

Courtesy of Google

Widgets have been an integral part of Android since nearly the beginning, and now you can generate your own (with AI, naturally). The Create My Widget feature lets you build custom widgets just by speaking to Gemini in natural language. You can resize these on the home screen and craft them on multiple platforms, including Wear OS and Googlebooks.

“Our goal is to be able to have it as customizable as possible, pulling from all sorts of data sources that you ask it to be able to create a custom widget for you,” Brooks says. Maybe that means creating a weather widget that shows Celsius and Fahrenheit for when you're traveling abroad. Or a countdown to your next marathon. Or a widget that shows three new high-protein meal prep recipes every week.

What does this mean for the future of the home screen? Will we still have app grids? Or will every person's phone have its own look and feel, drummed up by natural language? Brooks says Android has always been good at customization, so we should expect even more control over how our phones look and work. “I think you'll see a lot more of that in the future on how we can continue to do this in a delightful way, to make your device truly yours.”

Rambler

Courtesy of Google

The voice dictation feature on Google's Gboard keyboard is getting a Gemini upgrade. A new feature called Rambler smartens voice-to-text; Gemini will understand when you say “um,” “ah,” and “like,” and will remove those verbal fillers from your dictated text. If someone interrupts you while you're dictating and you respond, Gemini will cut that part from your transcription so you don't have to delete a bunch of words and start over.

The whole point is that you're able to speak naturally, and the final result will be a trimmed version of what you want to say, minus the filler words we use in natural speech. That does mean Gemini does a little editing to massage the sentences by guessing at what it thinks you want to say. It works in multiple languages and is also multilingual, so if you frequently blend English and Spanish, it will switch between both in a single message. Google says audio is not stored or saved.

Screen Reactions

Courtesy of Google

Moving on from AI-focused improvements, Android 17 will debut an easy way to create a reaction video. You know those videos on social with the person in the corner talking and a webpage or app about what they're reacting to in the background? You can now record yourself and your screen simultaneously without dealing with third-party apps or a green screen. This feature will roll out to Pixel devices first this summer.

Upgrades to Instagram and Edits

There's a major collaboration with Meta in Android 17 to improve the Instagram camera experience. That includes adding Ultra HDR support for capture and playback, support for built-in video stabilization, and integration with your phone camera's night mode. Instead of using your phone's camera and then adding those images or videos to post on Instagram, the idea is that with these improvements, you can now rely on the native Instagram camera experience without losing image quality.

Another Meta partnership, Android 17 gets some exclusive tools in Instagram's Edits app, like Smart Enhance, which uses on-device AI to upscale photos and videos. Sound separation will also separate audio tracks from wind, noise, and music, and let you boost sounds and cut out the stuff you don't want to hear.

Google says the Instagram app is now fully optimized for tablets, making use of the larger screen space. Also, Google says Adobe is bringing its popular video editing app, Premiere, to Android (following its launch on iOS last year), with exclusive templates and effects for creating YouTube Shorts from the app.

3D Emoji

Courtesy of Google

Every few years, Google redesigns the way emoji appear on its platforms. Remember blob emoji? (RIP.) Now it's time for another shake-up with Noto 3D. These new 3D emoji aren't a dramatic change from the existing crop, though the flat shapes are gone in favor of more depth and realism. They'll be available across Google's software starting with Pixel phones later this year.

Pause Point

Courtesy of Google

Instead of going cold turkey and switching to a dumb phone, there's a new tool in Android 17 that’s designed to make your smartphone usage more intentional: Pause Point. You can enable this on “distracting apps,” and Pause Point will give you a 10-second window asking why you opened the app, offering alternatives, like a breathing exercise, or the ability to set a timer for the app so you don't spend too much time watching Instagram Reels. It might suggest another app, like an audiobook.

It's meant to be a middle ground between app timers and more restrictive tools like the Brick, which disables an app from launching once you've tapped your phone on the physical device. Google says it will launch more digital well-being tools later this year.

Quick Share to AirDrop Expansion

Last fall, Google surprised everyone with a way to share files between Pixels and iPhones using its Quick Share feature with Apple's AirDrop—a capability it developed without Apple's help. Google expanded it to Samsung phones with the launch of the Galaxy S26 series, and now it's adding other phone makers to the list. Later this year, Oppo, OnePlus, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Honor phones will all be able to share files and photos to iPhones via Quick Share to AirDrop.

If your device is not compatible, Google says Quick Share can generate a QR code on any Android phone, allowing you to share data to iOS devices instantly over the cloud. Quick Share will also be available in specific apps, like WhatsApp.

Android Auto Updates

Courtesy of Google

Android Auto has a brand-new look, and it can now adapt to any dashboard screen size or shape, be it round, rhomboid, or rectangular. Google Maps bleeds edge-to-edge, taking up the full screen, and you'll finally see the Material 3 Expressive design language that Google introduced last year, with expressive fonts and smoother animations. There's broader widget support, and Google's new Immersive Navigation, which shows a 3D view in Maps with more detailed buildings, terrain, lanes, traffic lights, and more.

Most new cars have screens for passengers to watch media, and Google says the new Android Auto experience supports 60 frames per second in Full HD and Dolby Atmos for select car brands. And if you're playing media on the main driver's display—like a video podcast—it will transition to audio-only when the car switches to drive mode. Other apps like YouTube Music and Spotify are also getting a visual glow-up to be even easier to use in Android Auto.

Gemini is already available in Android Auto, but Google says if you have a phone that supports Gemini Intelligence, you'll be able to access extra features in the car. For example, if a friend asks for an address while you're driving, Google's Magic Cue feature—which debuted on the Pixel 10 series last year—will search through your calendar, emails, or texts for the answer and offer a one-tap response. That also means Gemini Task Automations are available, allowing you to ask Gemini to order from a specific spot on DoorDash for pickup. All you'll need to do is confirm the order with a tap after Gemini puts your request into a cart.

And for anyone with a vehicle with "Google built-in"—that's where Google worked with the car brand to integrate its software with the vehicle's hardware—there are some new capabilities, too. There will be support for meeting apps, so you can take Zoom calls from your dashboard. Gemini can also answer questions about your specific car, like tell you if that warning light is cause for concern. And because the software can tap into the car's hardware, you'll be able to get live lane guidance via the vehicle's front-facing camera straight in Google Maps' Immersive Navigation. Google says these features will be rolling out “throughout the year.”

Say Hello to Googlebooks

Courtesy of Google

It's not replacing Chromebooks, but “Googlebook” is the name of the new platform powering a wave of laptops coming later this year. Google hasn't shared the name of the operating system—more details will arrive later—but this platform is powered by Android technologies with Gemini at the core. Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo will all be making Googlebook laptops, though Google declined to comment on whether there will be a Pixel Googlebook (dare I say, a Pixelbook?).

We've got more details on the Googlebook in a separate story, including some of the capabilities the company teased, how the new platform works with Android phones and iPhones, and the “glowbar” that's designed to make the laptops instantly identifiable.

Speaking of new hardware, while Google didn't have much to share about smart glasses during the Android Show, the company says there will be a sneak peek of how Gemini works on its upcoming glasses at Google I/O on May 19.

Other New Android 17 Features

Here are a couple of other noteworthy improvements in Android 17.

Switch to Android: Google says it has worked with Apple to improve the iOS-to-Android transfer process, meaning more of your data is carried over with fewer hiccups when you switch to Google’s mobile OS. That means your passwords, photos, messages, apps, contacts, eSIM, and even your homescreen layout will get carried over from iPhone to Android. The wireless process will launch first with Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices this year.Phone call spoofing protection: Google is working with banks and financial institutions to automatically end phone calls from “spoofed” numbers that pretend to be from your banking entity. It will only work with select institutions, and you have to have the banking app installed. Android asks the app if the bank is actually calling you.Device theft: With Find Hub's Mark as Lost feature, you can now lock a phone with biometric authentication instead of just using the device's passcode or PIN. So if a thief manages to obtain your passcode or PIN, they can't turn off device tracking or re-access the phone if it's marked as lost. Enabling that also hides Quick Settings and disables new Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections on the phone.Location sharing: There's a new location button that lets you share your precise location temporarily for specific tasks when an app is open. That way, you don't have to always grant an app access to your precise position. There's also now a new indicator that shows when an app is accessing your location, similar to how your phone indicates when an app is using your microphone or camera.Hiding security codes: When you get a one-time password (OTP) via text, there's a risk that someone could intercept that information to hijack your account. Now, Android will automatically hide these security codes for three hours from most apps to prevent unauthorized access.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/android-17-gemini-top-new-features/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | JULIAN CHOKKATTU | MAY 12, 2026 AT 1:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Googlebook Is Google’s New AI-Powered Laptop Platform Built on Android

They won’t replace Chromebooks, but Googlebooks have an Android-centered operating system, AI-first features like the Magic Pointer, and a promise of desktop-grade apps.

Courtesy of Google

Almost exactly 15 years since Google introduced Chromebooks and ChromeOS—which ushered in a wave of cheap, functional, web-based laptops that would come to dominate the US education market—the company has announced a new laptop platform called Googlebook. It's built around artificial intelligence and Android, and while it isn't replacing Chromebooks, it could give the company a more meaningful foothold in the premium computer market.

Google announced the platform on The Android Show on YouTube, where it also detailed new features coming in Android 17 and Gemini Intelligence (you can read more about that here). Google is purposefully not sharing the operating system's name yet (it was codenamed Aluminium OS internally); Googlebook is the platform, and Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all signed up to produce Googlebooks coming later this fall.

The company says it will share more information later this year, but I spoke with Alexander Kuscher, senior director at Google leading Android tablets and laptops, to glean more details. Kuscher says there's an immense amount of innovation in the Android ecosystem right now, and it translates really well into laptops.

“You want to take advantage of the fact that this ecosystem is innovating so fast that you make sure that laptops are at the tip of that innovation wave—building on top of Android technologies makes that so much easier for us,” he says.

Courtesy of Google

Until now, when Google rolls out a new set of features for Android or its Gemini assistant, it often also announces some of those capabilities for other platforms, like Wear OS smartwatches, Android Auto, or Google Home. Chromebooks were rarely part of that picture because they were developed on a different tech stack and had their own development cycles. However, with Googlebooks, you can expect to see new features that pop up on Android available on a Googlebook laptop, where it makes sense.

Case in point: Create a Widget. This is a new generative AI feature coming in Android 17, allowing users to generate their own widget by speaking naturally with Gemini. You can ask it to make a widget that shows the day's exchange rate if you're traveling, or a custom weather widget that also shows wind speed. This feature will also be available on Googlebooks.

But the highlight feature Google is teasing at the gate is the cursor, which the company calls the “Magic Pointer” on a Googlebook. Built with Google's DeepMind team, it allows you to wiggle your cursor while hovering over an app or image to get contextual suggestions. For example, you can wiggle the cursor at a date in an email, and Gemini will suggest setting up a calendar event. Or select two pictures in the Files app, wiggle, and Gemini will ask if you want to merge them.

Courtesy of Google

The Play Store is where you'll access all of your apps. But you might wonder how Google is getting around the classic Chromebook limitation: In ChromeOS, you can't download desktop-grade apps like on Windows or macOS—you can only install Android apps from the Play Store or use web apps. That's a deal-breaker for people who rely on specific apps that may not have as powerful a web client or Android app.

The answer is adaptive apps. Google has been encouraging app developers to make apps react to the size of the screen for a few years now, and that now translates to encouraging app makers to make desktop versions of their Android apps for Googlebooks. But Kuscher says things will be different from the “constrained” Android app experience on Chromebooks, which were originally built for a web-first era.

“We're building on top of Android technologies—the apps are primary citizens that have access to hardware, have access to the OS at a level that would not be possible otherwise,” Kuscher says.

Instead of these apps simply taking advantage of larger laptop screens, the desktop-grade versions could offer different capabilities. And it's not just about translating what already exists on Windows or Mac and porting it over. Kuscher says it's about rethinking what it means to build an app experience. “This is a native platform on Android technologies, and with that, you will see many, many apps actually be the desktop version, including things like Chrome,” Kuscher says.

He's a little shy of explicitly calling the operating system “Android,” and instead says, “Android and all the technologies surrounding Android are a big part of it.” What makes Googlebooks its own platform—and different from the Android desktop mode that's enabled when you plug in select phones into external monitors—is what Google has built around or included in the platform, like how to deliver updates, how the hardware security chip is tied into the software, and the optimized experience of the larger screen.

“It's an experience that takes Android technology as part of it, but it's not the only bit that feeds into it,” Kuscher says. “A good example is the Magic Pointer, right? Like, that's not an Android desktop feature, that's a Googlebook feature.”

Courtesy of Google

Kuscher wouldn't share any details on hardware specs, but Googlebooks will sit at the more premium end of the laptop market, with Google teasing a featherweight design and “premium craftsmanship and materials.” The manufacturers Google is working with will have a “spectrum of offerings,” and the platform supports both ARM and x86 architectures.

Googlebooks will be immediately identifiable by the glowbar, a glowing LED strip that shows off the classic Google colors—a not-so-subtle nod to the lightbar on the original Google Chromebook Pixel. Kuscher says the team didn't want to plaster logos or brand names over the laptop, but a glowbar helps make the machine feel high-end.

“It's a brand element that presents you as a unified category,” Kuscher says. “Plus, we were able to make it something that is functional—it doesn't just glow the Google colors. It has a few other functions and Easter eggs that make it a bit more fun and functional. Like, it's actually deliberate that this is facing away from you when you open the laptop.”

Courtesy of Google

Googlebooks are also the “best device for Android users,” the company says. By this, Google means anyone with an Android phone will be able to open their phone apps on the laptop. If you're working on your phone, you can pick up where you left off on the laptop, and even the Googlebook Files app can search for and open documents and images stored on the phone. What if you have an iPhone but use a Googlebook? Kuscher says the company is still building a cross-device experience, but platform limitations will restrict some features. Android phones will have a deeper level of integration.

In one of the teaser images, you can see a glimpse of the keyboard, and there's a G icon—I asked Kuscher if it opens Gemini or Google Search, and he said it doesn't just open Google Search, but he said he will save the reveal for later. I also asked if Google will make its own Googlebooks with its Pixel hardware division, just like the company once did with Chromebooks. “I'm not part of the Pixel team, unfortunately,” Kuscher says with a smirk. “You'll have to ask them.” The Pixel team declined to comment.

As for Chromebooks, well, they aren't going away. Kuscher says Google is continuing to invest in Chromebooks—there are new models on the way, and existing devices will continue to get updates, some for as long as 10 years.

“We feel pretty committed to those users because a lot of them are in education, institutions, and businesses around the globe,” Kuscher says. “We feel a strong responsibility for that. Googlebooks are a different kind of laptop.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/googlebook-laptop-platform/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | KATE KNIBBS | MAY 12, 2026 AT 11:57 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Trump Media Scales Back Plans for Its Own Prediction Market

Truth Predict was supposed to be the Trump family’s biggest leap yet into prediction markets. Now it’s looking more like a tiptoe.

Photograph: Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images

The odds that the Trump family will launch a full-fledged prediction market product this year just plummeted.

Last year, the Trump Media and Technology Group announced Truth Predict, a partnership with the cryptocurrency company Crypto.com. The initial announcement touted Truth Predict as a “new product” that would allow Truth Social users to make trades on sports, inflation, elections, and more through an “embedded” prediction market service. “For too long, global elites have closely controlled these markets—with Truth Predict, we’re democratizing information and empowering everyday Americans to harness the wisdom of the crowd, turning free speech into actionable foresight,” then-CEO Devin Nunes said in the October 2025 press release.

At the time, the company detailed how Truth Social users would be able to convert the platform’s existing “Truth gem” currency into Cronos cryptocurrency tokens, and then “apply” them to Truth Predict trades. Now, Trump Media is framing the project differently. In its latest public filing, the company indicated that the prediction market “remains in development,” but that its offering would be initially limited to a “marketing and promotion collaboration” with OG.com, the US-based prediction market platform that Crypto.com launched in February 2026.

What is a “marketing and promotion collaboration,” exactly? Hard to say, as neither Trump Media nor Crypto.com responded to questions about what the agreement entails. “We’re encouraged by the progress we’ve made developing Truth Predict in partnership with CDNA and look forward to bringing this exciting feature to Truth Social’s users,” Trump Media spokesperson Shannon Devine told WIRED via email. (“CDNA” refers to Crypto.com’s affiliated US-regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, which is called Crypto.com | Derivatives North America. Really rolls off the tongue.)

Prediction markets are a quick-growing and hotly contested industry. Donald Trump, Jr. has ties to several leading markets; he is a paid adviser to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket through his venture capital firm. President Donald Trump has made few public comments about prediction markets, though this April he told reporters that he did not “like it conceptually” and that he was “not happy with any of that stuff.”

Still, the Trump administration has largely taken a friendly stance toward the industry through its top federal regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Biden-era CFTC banned Polymarket and even raided its CEO Shayne Coplan’s home; the Trump-era CFTC dropped the investigation. The Trump-era CFTC also insists that it has exclusive jurisdiction over the industry, and has opposed state efforts to intervene, filing its own lawsuits against what CFTC chairman Michael Selig describes as “overzealous state regulators.” Selig is locked in a tense battle with state regulators over how the law should apply to these products; states like Nevada, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts are bringing companies including Polymarket, Kalshi, and Crypto.com to court, arguing that they need to abide by state gambling rules.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of OG.com is that it initially planned to allow participants to trade on margin, which means that people would be able to borrow funds to place trades rather than putting up all the financing themselves. Margin trading is an established practice in the financial derivatives world, but relatively new to prediction markets; it inherently involves an added degree of risk because it allows traders to use money they don’t have. (It’s unclear if OG.com will roll this out. When WIRED reached out to the company to ask if margin trading is live, it received an email back from “the OG team” stating “margin trading is not an offered product.”)

The upshot is that at some point in the near future, a Truth Social user may be able to toggle between reading Trump’s all-caps posts and borrowing large sums of money to build a World Cup parlay—but depending on how the “marketing and promotion collaboration” is set up, they may not actually be placing trades within the social network.

As Trump Media continues to develop whatever its Truth Predict product will eventually be, other right-wing media companies appear to be moving into the space. In March, Newsmax applied for membership at the National Futures Association for something it calls Newsmax Markets.

The two leading prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket, have struck deals with a variety of partners, including news organizations like CNN, CNBC, and Fox. At first glance, Trump Media’s decision to team up with Crypto.com might seem random. But the two companies have deep ties and another shared venture in a cryptocurrency treasury. Crypto.com is also a major donor to Trump-affiliated political committees. Earlier this spring, the cryptocurrency company announced plans to celebrate its 10th anniversary—and the 250th anniversary of the existence of the United States—by cohosting a mixed martial arts event on the White House lawn. The event will take place in June.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/trump-media-scales-back-plans-for-its-own-prediction-market/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | EMILY MULLIN | MAY 12, 2026 AT 11:33 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

All Your Hantavirus Questions, Answered by an Infectious Disease Expert

Here’s what you need to know, from why the cruise ship outbreak won’t spark the next pandemic to how hantavirus spreads.

Photograph: Vincenzo Izzo/Getty Images

Now that more than 100 passengers aboard a hantavirus-stricken luxury cruise ship have been evacuated, with 18 Americans in biocontainment units in Nebraska and Georgia, health officials around the world are working to monitor more than two dozen individuals who left the cruise and anyone with whom they might have come in close contact.

So far, all of the 11 reported hantavirus cases are among passengers or crew on the ship, the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at a press conference in Madrid on Tuesday. That includes three deaths resulting from the virus.

Typically, hantaviruses are spread when contaminated rodent droppings and urine are stirred up in the air and breathed in. The strain identified on board the cruise ship, the MV Hondius, is known as the Andes virus, and is the only type known to transmit from person to person. While the virus can cause serious disease and carries a high mortality rate, health officials say the hantavirus outbreak is unlikely to become a global crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic.

“At the moment, there is no sign that we are seeing the start of a larger outbreak,” Ghebreyesus said, “but of course the situation could change, and given the long incubation period of the virus, it’s possible we might see more cases in the coming weeks.”

WIRED spoke with Nicole Iovine, an infectious disease expert and hospital epidemiologist at the University of Florida Health, about how the Andes virus spreads and whether it's likely to spark another pandemic.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

WIRED: One of the things that is probably top of mind for most people is how similar is the Andes virus to SARS-Cov-2, and how infectious is it?

Nicole Iovine: It is not similar at all to SARS-Cov-2. This outbreak on the cruise ship is not going to translate into a worldwide pandemic like Covid for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that it is just not as infectious as Covid was. Covid infected our upper airways and also deep in our lungs. But the fact that it infected our upper airways meant that when we talked or sneezed or coughed, it was easily put out into the air, and so it was easy to transmit. With the Andes virus, this virus actually infects very deep in the lungs. It doesn't typically infect the upper airways, so it's a lot harder for it to transmit from one person to another.

How would you know if you had the Andes virus? It seems like the symptoms are pretty nonspecific at first but progress quickly to serious disease.

People can start to get symptoms anywhere from about five days or so after exposure to as long as six weeks, which is again very different from Covid and another reason why hantavirus is of some concern but is not likely to cause a pandemic. It starts out with very generalized symptoms. You can develop a fever, headache, fatigue, muscle aches and pains. Those sorts of symptoms are what you would get if you had the flu or many other sorts of infections.

Is the Andes virus airborne?

Not exactly, because the way that it transmits into your lungs is if you have really close contact with someone for an appreciable amount of time. It's not something like measles, where if you're in a room and you have measles, somebody could come into that room two hours later and still contract measles. That's airborne, but hantavirus is not like that.

The most common way it's spread is through exposure to rodent droppings or urine. Let's say you're in a house and you decide to do some spring cleaning in your basement, you'll stir up dust and microscopic particles that will contain the virus from the droppings and urine. But that doesn't mean it's airborne. It just means that you stirred up the dust that was containing the virus.

What does close, prolonged contact mean? Are we talking 60 minutes, several hours, or more?

To some extent, it depends on what you're doing. For example, the ship's doctor is positive for the hantavirus, but that's not a normal interaction. The doctor is going to be looking down the throat and listening to breathing, being really close up with that first patient. So it's not entirely surprising that he has developed the infection. Now if you're sitting down at the captain's table and having dinner on the cruise ship, is the person right directly next to you at risk? Possibly.

The other thing is, with any infectious disease, there are periods of greater and lesser infectiousness. We do know that for the hantavirus, the infectious period starts with symptoms, increases over a few days, and then will start to decline. If you're in a highly infectious period, then you need a shorter exposure to pass on the virus. Early on, when there's not as much virus, then you would need a much more prolonged exposure.

Can the virus spread without close contact with someone who has it? Are there other possible routes of transmission?

It's possible that you could contract it by touching a contaminated surface. That would also be if you're outside and you're gardening, and there are rodent droppings, and your hands get contaminated and you don't wash your hands effectively.

One of the elements here that makes this unique is that the initial spread of the virus happened on a cruise ship, which is a very confined space. What role does ventilation, or the lack of ventilation, play in this case?

A room with poor ventilation is going to allow greater transmission than, say, a standard hospital room, which has many air exchanges per hour. Being outside is definitely a much lower-risk situation than being inside. There’s a lot of nuance here.

Does the average person have to worry about getting this virus?

No, definitely not. If you refer back to the New England Journal of Medicine paper from 2020 [that described an outbreak of Andes virus from late 2018 to early 2019], once they instituted containment measures, that's when the virus was no longer able to transmit and sustain the outbreak. Since we already know now what we're dealing with, and containment measures are in place, this is not going to have pandemic potential.

I worry about a lot of things, but I'm not worried about this. I'm worried about measles outbreaks.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/all-your-hantavirus-questions-answered-by-an-infectious-disease-expert/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

POLITICS | DAVID GILBERT | MAY 12, 2026 AT 10:53 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Hantavirus Conspiracy Theories Are Already Spreading Online

From claims of an Israeli false flag to efforts to sell ivermectin, influencers and grifters are using lessons learned from Covid-19 to push their baseless conspiracy theories.

Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Conspiracy theorists, wellness influencers, and grifters have already started promoting wild claims about the hantavirus outbreak that began aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship on the Atlantic.

Some conspiracy theorists compared the outbreak to the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming it was another effort to control the global population, while others pushed a false narrative that the Covid-19 vaccine caused hantavirus. Many others promoted ivermectin as a treatment, using the incident as a way to sell emergency medical kits featuring the antiparasitic drug typically used as a horse dewormer.

In more recent days, many of these same people spreading conspiracy theories have promoted the baseless and antisemitic claims that the entire incident is a false flag orchestrated by Israel.

Conspiracy theories flooding social media in response to breaking news are nothing new, but what is notable about those being pushed around the hantavirus outbreak is just how closely they echo the conspiracy theories promoted during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“One of the most striking shifts since the Covid pandemic is how rapidly misinformation narratives now organize themselves around emerging outbreaks,” Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, tells WIRED.

“Within hours of the first hantavirus headlines, social media accounts were already promoting ivermectin, attributing the outbreak to Covid vaccines, and warning about a hantavirus vaccine that does not exist. The claims themselves were often contradictory, but that contradiction no longer appears to limit their spread.”

Once the hantavirus outbreak started making headlines around the world, conspiracy theorists and grifters jumped into action, spreading dangerously ill-informed claims and, of course, trying to sell people ivermectin.

“Ivermectin should work against it,” Mary Talley Bowden wrote on X. Bowden, a doctor, is a prominent promoter of medical misinformation who has promoted ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 and prescribed ivermectin to a Covid-19 patient. Hours after her first post on Hantavirus went viral, she followed up to say that she is selling ivermectin to Texans. Bowden did not respond to a request for comment.

Her post, which has been viewed 4 million times, was shared by former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who added that vitamin D and zinc would help fight the infection. Greene even claimed that not getting the Covid-19 vaccine had somehow allowed her to “develop natural immunity” against hantavirus.

Greene separately claimed, without evidence, that the pharmaceutical company Moderna had purposely manipulated the virus in order to allow them to cash in by developing a hantavirus vaccine. Greene did not respond to a request for comment.

Other prolific health disinformation promoters boosted the ivermectin claims, including Simone Gold, the founder of Covid denial group America's Frontline Doctors, and Peter McCullough, a disinformation peddler who promoted the “sudden death” conspiracy theory about the Covid-19 vaccine, which falsely claimed that those who received the shot were at risk of dropping dead without any warning.

McCullough is also the chief scientific officer for the Wellness Company, which has been described as “Goop for the GOP.” The company has used the hantavirus outbreak to promote a $325 “Contagion Emergency Kit,” which includes both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

All the false claims and posts about ivermectin gained enough traction online that the World Health Organization responded to say that there is no research to suggest ivermectin is an effective treatment for hantavirus.

Conspiracy theorists have, meanwhile, been pushing the baseless idea that a side effect of Covid vaccines includes a hantavirus infection.

“List of Pfizer Covid jab side effects includes Hantavirus pulmonary infection!” Andrew Bridgen, a former UK lawmaker who boosted Covid-19 conspiracy theories, wrote on Facebook in a post that included a screenshot of submissions Pfizer filed to the FDA in 2021 to get a biological license for its vaccine.

A Pfizer spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that the reference seen in the screenshot does not confirm that the vaccine causes hantavirus, but is simply a list of notable infections experienced by those trialling the vaccine in December 2020.

“This was entirely predictable and gives the lie to the grift,” Neil Stone, an infectious disease doctor who debunks disinformation online, tells WIRED. “There is no science behind it, they just shift any Covid-related conspiracy to any other disease.”

Many wellness influencers who downplayed the Covid-19 pandemic have also claimed the hantavirus is part of a grand scheme to control the population. As evidence, many people pointed to a 2022 post on X from an anonymous account that simply reads: “2023: Corona ended. 2026: Hantavirus.”

In recent days, the new conspiracy theory that falsely claims the hantavirus outbreak is a false flag attack perpetrated by Israel has exploded on X, where it’s become a trending topic.

The baseless conspiracy theory has also spread on other social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, where many of the posts have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The theory is based solely on the claim that in Hebrew, the word “hanta” means “scam.” This doesn’t appear to actually be the case.

Social media platforms being used to amplify disinformation from unreliable sources in breaking news situations is not new; the problem is that more and more Americans get their health news from social media. Findings from a study by the Pew Research Center published this week from 2025 show that around half of Americans under 50 get their health and wellness information from podcasts and influencers.

“What concerns me is that this increasingly functions less like isolated viral misinformation and more like a standing information ecosystem that can rapidly attach itself to any new health event,” says Wallace. “In an environment where so many Americans get their health information from influencers and podcasts, repeated exposure to these narratives can shape how audiences interpret outbreaks before evidence-based public health communication has fully reached them.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/hantavirus-conspiracy-theories-are-already-spreading-online/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

CULTURE | EJ DICKSON | MAY 12, 2026 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Some Women Are Obsessively Testing Their Vaginas to Optimize Them

Biohacker Bryan Johnson recently bragged about his girlfriend's “top 1%” vagina as the at-home vaginal microbiome test industry is thriving. But experts are skeptical.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES

Farrah was fed up with her vagina.

For the past two years, the 29-year-old dancer from Ohio had been dealing with severe pelvic pain and vaginal odor. “It was like 8/10, horrible core pain,” she says. “I couldn’t lie down. I couldn’t even work an office job. It was bad.”

When she visited doctors, she told them what she thought the culprit was: an allergic reaction to soy oil in a vat of water she’d swam in during a pirate-themed dinner theater performance. But they didn’t believe her. “They attempted to fix it with antibiotics,” she says. “And they just did nothing.”

So Farrah (who requested we withhold her full name to speak freely about health matters) started Googling her symptoms. That’s how she stumbled on Neueve, a vaginal health company that provides supplements, suppositories, and at-home vaginal microbiome testing kits.

She ordered a test from the company for $150, and it came back with a diagnosis: aerobic vaginitis (AV), a bacterial infection caused by an overgrowth of E. coli or streptococcus. She ordered supplements the company recommended, and she says the pain abated almost immediately. “I was just so glad to actually know what was wrong,” she says.

Farrah is one of a growing number of women who have used at-home tests to self-diagnose issues with the vaginal microbiome—an ecosystem of bacteria growing inside the vagina; the presence of “good” bacteria correlates with lower risk of STIs and other types of infections, according to numerous studies. The industry got a shoutout when the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bryan Johnson recently posted on X that he had just given oral sex to his girlfriend, Kate Tolo, then followed up with a screengrab of her TinyHealth vaginal microbiome report. He proclaimed that she scored “100/100” and that hers was in the “top 1% of all vaginas” due to the dominance of Lactobacillus crispatus, a type of “good” bacteria found in the vagina.

Johnson’s thread garnered widespread mockery, with many questioning why Johnson would publicly quantify his partner’s vaginal health in such a fashion. But it also received replies from women online who are tracking their own vaginal microbiomes to treat their bacterial infections, to boost fertility, or just out of interest. Some even posted their results.

The market for at-home vaginal microbiome tests is growing—TinyHealth, the startup Tolo used, claims vaginal health testing sales spiked 2,000 percent within the first 48 hours of Johnson’s post—and similar companies include Juno Bio, which partners with Neueve; the UK-based Daye, and Evvy. But some experts believe there’s not yet enough research to support the long-term validity of such tests. None of the at-home kits on the market are approved by the FDA. There are also questions as to whether they empower women to take their health care into their own hands or simply create more anxiety for them.

Twenty-eight-year-old Samantha (she also requested a pseudonym given the sensitive nature of this topic) developed an interest in vaginal microbiome testing after experiencing a bout of bacterial vaginosis, or BV. She ordered a testing kit from Evvy upon the recommendation of the Facebook group Beyond BV, which offers support for women with recurring vaginal infections, and where they often post their own results.

Samantha found her test results useful, but she also noticed a distinct strain of paranoia within the group. For instance, when many women receive their results, they tend to focus on whether they have enough Lactobacillus crispatus, or “good” bacteria, in the vagina. “I'll read posts where women are freaking out if they have like 97 percent crispatus and then they'll retest and they'll have like 60 percent and be really disappointed and scared,” she says. The opposite also holds true. “Women will post about having 100 percent crispatus and other women in the comments will just be like, ‘Oh, I'm so jealous, I'm having so many issues, I hope to be you one day.’”

In internet communities like the subreddit r/healthyhoohah, which has more than 100,000 members, women regularly discuss their ratios of “protective” to “destructive” vaginal bacteria, often trying to optimize the former. Some take vaginal microbiome tests multiple times, as a preemptive measure to avoid future infections. Research indicates that 50 to 80 percent of women who get BV once will get it again.

Longevity researcher Kayla Barnes-Lentz tests her vaginal microbiome about twice a year and publicly posts her results. (She also uses Evvy and acts as a paid adviser for the brand.) She started testing it not because she has any underlying health issues, but because she wants to do everything in her power to try to boost her numbers—for instance, she says she got her 97 percent protective bacteria score up to a 100 percent by taking vaginal probiotics.

“We know that decline occurs as we age, and I want to be as protected against that as possible,” she says. “I’m always striving, and I’m always in competition with myself.”

Evvy founder and CEO Priyanka Jain says the company has served more than 100,000 patients since its launch in 2020. She says that while the vast majority of her customers struggle with preexisting vaginal health issues, 10 percent take the test out of “curiosity,” and more than 50 percent are regular subscribers, taking the test every three months, either to track their fertility or prevent recurrence.

There’s a paucity of research surrounding the vaginal microbiome in comparison to the much better-known gut microbiome. This is in part due to gender bias within the scientific research community, says Hana Janebdar, the founder and CEO of the vaginal microbiome testing startup Juno Bio. Historically, “there has been this huge amount of research and commercialization into every aspect of microbiomes except how it pertained to women's health,” she says.

But even though recurring BV infections among women are a legitimate issue, some researchers say the utility of taking an at-home vaginal microbiome test is debatable—especially when one is asymptomatic, as Barnes-Lentz and Tolo were.

The vaginal microbiome is ever-fluctuating and can vary depending on factors like diet, sexual activity, and whether someone is pregnant or menstruating, says Jacques Ravel, a vaginal microbiome researcher at the University of Maryland. (Ravel is also listed as a scientific adviser to probiotics company Seed.) “It’s a very dynamic system,” he says. “Knowing what happened at one point in your life won’t really tell you much about what’s going to happen even two weeks from now.”

Vaginal microbiome diversity also varies by race and ethnicity: Black women, for instance, are statistically more likely to have less Lactobacillus crispatus, the protective bacteria, than white women of European descent, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem with their vaginal health. And some women can have little to no lactobacillus and be perfectly healthy.

The tests also typically suggest treatment protocols like antibiotics or probiotics, some of which can disrupt the bacteria ecosystem in the vagina if introduced unnecessarily. “You're going to maybe end up with something that might not be optimal for you, and all of a sudden you're going to start having problems,” such as worsening irritation or discomfort, Ravel says. “I think that’s dangerous.”

When asked about such critiques, the CEOs I spoke with take issue with the idea that the tests provide zero insight into long-term vaginal health, arguing that results fluctuate far less than Ravel suggests. While Kimberley Sukhum, the chief science officer at TinyHealth, agrees that unnecessary treatment such as antibiotic intervention “can be harmful,” she says biomarkers such as lactobacillus dominance are “not fleeting signals. They reflect the underlying character of a woman’s vaginal community at a given point in time and are associated with real health outcomes.”

Regardless of the long-term utility of the tests—or, at the very least, the ludicrous idea of a woman having a “top 1%” vagina—their popularity undoubtedly points to a larger issue within the women’s health space. Until 1993, researchers were not legally required to include women in clinical trials, contributing to a massive gender gap in data. The women who regularly test their vaginal microbiomes are trying to find their own answers within a medical system that has largely failed them.

“We have not done extensive research or funded enough for extensive research to come up with new medicine to solve this problem,” says Ravel. “For almost 50 years, we have not come up with a solution to help women. And I think that’s very, very sad.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/some-women-are-obsessively-testing-their-vaginas-to-optimize-them/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

THE BIG STORY | NICK GREENE | MAY 12, 2026 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Why Soccer Still Defies Statistical Analysis

Sarah Rudd, who once ran analytics for Arsenal, made her name applying the tenets of probability theory to movements on the pitch. Even she admits not everything can be solved with data.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

The role of advanced analytics in sports is a contentious subject. To its defenders, data-driven pragmatism is a natural evolutionary step in the way we play and watch games. For detractors, the approach prioritizes results above all else and drains the soul from a pursuit that should be spontaneous and joyful.

As someone who is neither pragmatic nor spontaneous, I don’t qualify for either camp, though I find the very notion of applying this kind of research to soccer fascinating and even admirable. The game is resistant to orderly examination by design. Like preparing a tax return for a housecat, it takes a stupendous amount of ingenuity just to figure out which questions to ask, to say nothing of finding the answers.

While baseball can be a spreadsheet task, soccer matches amount to meandering free-verse written in 90-minute chunks. Luke Bornn is a data scientist who specializes in movement studies. Thanks to his background analyzing complex bodies in motion, he realized he was uniquely suited to explore the nature of such an evasive game. While at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Bornn worked on ways to detect how much damage helicopter blades can sustain before it compromises the chopper’s ability to stay airborne. He has mapped climate data to predict crop yield and studied how herds of massive land mammals move about the fruited plain. The ebb and flow of a soccer match, while mysterious, were not altogether unfamiliar, and he has pioneered ways to quantify some of the game’s amorphous spirit.

Along with frequent collaborator Javier Fernández, Bornn has published academic papers with titles like “Wide Open Spaces: A Statistical Technique for Measuring Space Creation in Professional Soccer.” In this study, the data scientists examine the ways players without the ball can manipulate opponents’ positioning on the pitch. Like the stylus of a Magna Doodle dragging metallic particles about the toy’s surface, seemingly uninvolved parties can contort the very geography of their foes to open new avenues of attack.

Thanks to player tracking technology, this is now a quantifiable skill, and, like so many things, Lionel Messi is great at it. Through their research, Bornn and Fernández found that Messi is perhaps one of the best walkers in all of soccer. The Argentine legend is prone to lollygagging, and common conjecture has been that he’s either conserving energy or just can’t be bothered. While this may be part of it, their study demonstrates that Messi’s slow saunters about the pitch short-circuit defenses in unique ways. “That walking behavior is not a detachment from the match but a conscious action to move through empty spaces of value and claim the control of valuable space,” they write. “Messi does this very effectively, placing him near the top of players in terms of space gained during the whole match, despite the lack of active gain.”

In other words, Messi can achieve more on a stroll than most players do with an all-out sprint.

Ask the people who work deep inside soccer’s analytical engine rooms about how their work affects the way they view the game, and you’ll get some illuminating responses. “I watch in a strange way,” Bornn says. “I tend to watch with an eye toward what the tactical system could be, or whether the data that’s being collected is miscapturing what’s going on, or that the data might capture the core components but our models will miss what’s going on. It has kind of ruined sports for me.”

Sarah Rudd tends to agree. “It’s a little exhausting watching every game so analytically,” she says. “It’s hard to turn off that part of your brain, but you still want to be a fan and you want to enjoy.” Rudd got into soccer analytics so early, she essentially had to invent it from scratch. After graduating from Columbia University, she spent a few years living in Chile, where she fell further in love with her favorite sport. She fondly recalls squinting at her small, standard-definition television set to watch broadcasts of matches from Argentina. “You had to really know the teams,” she says. “If you weren’t really familiar with the teams, you couldn’t figure out who players were. It’s hard to read the numbers, and you couldn’t really see their faces.”

Rudd and her boyfriend at the time invented a game based on this challenge. “We would turn on the TV, and if Boca [Juniors] was playing, it was how quickly can you spot Carlos Tevez. Not because of his face but because he had this really weird running style. It was like, ‘Ope! There he is.’” Built like a fire hydrant, the stout, pugnacious Tevez was a rabid delivery robot programmed to kill on the pitch. Just thinking about it makes Rudd wistful: “What a player.”

Of her time in South America, Rudd recalls, “It made me want to work in football even more.” She took a gig doing data mining and machine learning for Microsoft in Seattle but continued to search for entry points into the sports industry. “A friend of mine suggested that I do an MBA program and then see if I could get a job at Nike or Adidas in their football business unit.” In 2011 she caught wind of a contest being held by sports analytics company StatDNA. “They were doing a research competition where they gave you a dataset,” she says, noting that, until that point “there was practically nothing” of the sort that had been collected for soccer.

Using a spreadsheet of rudimentary player-location data, Rudd set out to devise a method for analyzing an individual’s performance in more complex ways than simple goals and assists. “There wasn’t a ton of direction,” she recalls. “I think just from watching the game I was interested in evaluating how much value are people adding with every action that they do. Not necessarily trying to evaluate alternatives but being able to somewhat quantify, like, that was a dangerous giveaway, or it’s stupid to take a shot from there, that sort of thing.” To accomplish this she used Markov chains, a statistical tool that helps determine the likelihood of something happening within a system based on its current state.

First introduced in 1906, Markov chains represent a departure from the principle of absolute independence, a core tenet of probability theory seen in things like roulette wheels where each spin offers a fresh experiment with repeated odds. The chains are a way to examine ongoing scenarios where each starting point presents a different opportunity for the future. In the magazine American Scientist, Brian Hayes uses the board game Monopoly as an example:

Rolling the dice determines how many steps your token advances around the board, but where you land at the end of a move obviously depends on where you begin. From different starting points, the same number of steps could take you to the Boardwalk or put you in jail. The probabilities of future events depend on the current state of the system. The events are linked, one to the next; they form a Markov chain.

The chains were invented by and named for Andrey Markov, an ornery Russian mathematician who, according to Hayes’ reporting, stopped attending meetings at the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg late in his career because he claimed he didn’t have proper shoes. When the school sent him a pair of new boots, he said they were “stupidly stitched,” thus proving that his current state (pissed off) contributed to the likelihood of his return (zero).

The roots of Markov’s discovery sprouted from a dispute over the law of large numbers and free will. He long believed the universe was a series of events whose interconnectedness can be understood through mathematics. He refined this idea by condensing the text of the Alexander Pushkin novel in verse Eugene Onegin into one long sequence of letters suitable for mathematical analysis. In doing this, he discovered that stable patterns of double vowels and double consonants appeared throughout the work. Taking a large sample from the beginning of the text, he was able to determine that letter distribution didn’t adhere to the principle of independence, demonstrating that even something as beautiful and fluid as poetry was prisoner to the cold deductive properties of mathematics. He published his first paper on the subject in 1906 and formally presented his findings in 1913, one year after his request to be excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.

“Any attempt to simulate probable events based on vast amounts of data—the weather, a Google search, the behavior of liquids—relies on Markov’s idea,” states an article in the Harvard Gazette. Sarah Rudd, who studied computer and environmental science as an undergrad at Columbia University and worked on Microsoft’s Bing search engine, added soccer to this list. Her paper “A Framework for Tactical Analysis and Individual Offensive Production Assessment in Soccer Using Markov Chains” placed players into one of 39 “states,” depending on things like location and ball possession to calculate the likelihood of what would happen next.

Rudd’s work was impressive enough to win her both the competition and a job with StatDNA. When the company was acquired by Premier League giant Arsenal the following year, Rudd suddenly found herself in London working for her favorite team and introducing the backroom staff to her advanced research. She spent nearly a decade at the club and became the head of analytics before leaving in 2021 to start her own firm with her husband.

“One of our jobs is to be the calm voice of reason,” Rudd says. “This is one of the things I like about consulting versus working for a club. You can be a little bit emotionally detached. You can be a little bit calmer. Because when you’re at the training ground every day, emotions are high. It’s a really stressful environment. There’s a lot at stake.”

In an interview with The Athletic, Rudd says she started her own firm, in part, “to figure out football.” I ask her what this would look like, and she concedes that “it’s really hard,” almost to the point of being self-defeating. “One of the difficult things about analytics in football is that there are so many different ways to win. There are so many trade-offs. I think somebody described it as trying to cover yourself with a blanket that’s too short. If you press really high, that’s going to come at the expense of something else. There are a few things we know that really help you win, but there’s still a whole lot where you could be just as effective doing something else.”

No matter how much research is done, soccer maintains its severe allergy to simple answers. Even something as fundamental as whether you want your team to have the ball or not is up for debate at the highest levels. As Dutch legend Johan Cruyff argued, a “footballer has to have the ball at his feet.”

Diametrically opposed to this philosophy is José Mourinho, one of the most successful managers of the 21st century. The rakish Portuguese gadfly opined that “whoever has the ball has fear,” preferring that his teams lie in wait and capitalize on opponents’ mistakes like the humans in The War of the Worlds who hunkered down until the Martians caught a sniffle and died.

Where else can such drastically conflicting worldviews have equal footing but in the poorly designed experiment that is soccer? “For so long it was, like, if only we have really wide-scale access to tracking data, that will solve all of our problems,” Rudd tells me. “And then we got it and, nope, we still have lots of problems.”

Reflecting on her 2011 paper using Markov chains, Sarah Rudd can’t help but poke holes in the research that made her a pioneer of the movement. “At the time I wrote that paper, I wasn’t looking at it nearly as analytically as I do now,” she says. “I think there were definitely a lot of decisions that I would have done differently, particularly, how you break down the field.” Rudd divided the pitch into equal boxes, dividing the expanse of open grass into a grid of easy-to-track cells. It was order from chaos manufactured out of misguided desperation. “Now we know that how the pitch operates isn’t necessarily linear or in neat little squares,” Rudd says. “There are certain zones where things happen for a number of reasons that don’t quite align with those pitch markings.” These areas of congestion are nebulous and reactive to tactical trends, such as defenses funneling play out wide or pressing high when out of possession, strategies informed by the work of people like Bornn and Rudd, analysts who are pulling at the proverbial blanket in offices unseen from public view.

“I’m not a huge fan of jumping straight to pragmatism if that’s not what’s required,” Rudd tells me. “We have to remember that we’re in the entertainment industry. It’s got to be fun.”

Excerpted from How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius: What Architects, Stuntwomen, Paleoanthropologists, and Computer Scientists Reveal About the World's Game. Copyright © 2026 by Nick Greene. Used with permission of the publisher, Abrams Books. All rights reserved.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-how-to-watch-soccer-like-a-genius-nick-greene/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

THE BIG STORY | KATIE DRUMMOND | MAY 12, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Creators of Hacks Really, Really, Really Hate AI

Ahead of the hit show’s finale, cocreators Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello talk about media consolidation, the perils of censorship, and why they find AI “deeply disturbing.”

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

If you’re a WIRED reader who uses AI in any creative context, I’d suggest staying far, far away from anyone involved in the TV show Hacks. In an interview earlier this year, actor Hannah Einbinder (who plays young comedy writer Ava Daniels on the show) described AI creators as “losers,” “not artists,” and “not special.”

The show’s cocreators couldn’t agree more. In a wide-ranging conversation for The Big Interview ahead of the Hacks series finale on HBO Max, Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello were resolute about the value of human creativity—and what can be lost when AI enters the picture.

If their work on Hacks is any indication, Downs and Aniello (along with their third cocreator, Jen Statsky) would be wise to stick with the tough, tiring, absolutely-no-shortcuts approach they take to making entertainment. Across five excellent seasons—if you haven’t seen the show, I really do recommend it—Hacks has been praised for its sharp writing and wit, and its thoughtful portrayal of Deborah Vance and Ava’s complex, constantly evolving relationship. The show has also acted as something of a mirror for the real-world entertainment industry, weaving in plotlines that tackle everything from media consolidation to corporate censorship to, yes, artificial intelligence.

The show’s cast and creators have been on a media whirlwind as it all comes to an end. (If you keep seeing Hacks fodder on your Instagram feed, trust me, you are not alone.) When they came knocking on WIRED’s door, we jumped at the chance to chat, and I was lucky enough to spend an hour with Downs and Aniello—both WIRED subscribers, much to my delight—earlier this month. Here’s our conversation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Lucia Aniello and Paul Downs, who I just learned are married, congratulations and welcome to The Big Interview.

LUCIA ANIELLO: Thank you so much.

PAUL W. DOWNS: You should have been there. You should have been there.

Aniello: Ugh, why didn't we bring you? That's crazy. Next time. We are going to renew for our 10-year at the same place though.

Where was the wedding?

Aniello: It was in Italy. It was in Tuscany. That's all I'll say.

Downs: Lucia was born in Italy, so it was closer to a lot of family.

And you were married in what year?

Aniello: 2021.

So I have some time, like another five years …

Downs: You have time to find your look. Don’t stress.

A major priority for me in my life is perfecting my look. It's very important to us at WIRED, having our look down.

Aniello: Fashion first, that's WIRED. That's you guys, right?

We do work at Condé Nast, and my boss is Anna Wintour. So “fashion first” has become more of a priority for me than it used to be. It's like “fashion third,” you know?

Downs: Fashion third. I like that.

My husband and I blew through a bunch of season 5 of Hacks this weekend. I'm excited to talk to you about the show, and I want to start by talking about women, a subject close to my heart, as I am one. But I also run a magazine that was run by men for years.

I'm surrounded by men. They're everywhere in my life. They're everywhere in our coverage. And this show I love, in particular, because it centers around this relationship between these two women, who are very powerful in different ways in their own right, and they have this very complicated relationship and this big generational gap.

Lucia, you have another cocreator, Jen, who's not here. But how did the three of you think about writing those characters? What was important to you in centering the show around the relationship between these two women?

Aniello: One of the things that was appealing to us was the idea that, yes, they are two women of different generations, who are both comedians, and they have a lot in common and a lot not in common. But we were really interested in the collaboration between two female artists. Because that is what they are.

They are comedians who love creating work, and that is in the end of the pilot. Spoiler if you haven't seen it, but you should go see it. They don't get along in their initial meeting at all, and they just argue. But there's a little spark, and that little spark is they're making jokes about each other. They keep pitching on them and they try to make it better.

You can see that it's a creative turn-on for them. So for us the idea that these women, in the process of creating art together, become more and more entrenched in each other's lives, and it changes them as people, and therefore changes the work as well. I think we're really interested in the way that the material comes from their lives, and their lives then bleed back into the material.

That was something that I don't think we had really ever seen before, and it was really exciting to explore.

Gender comes up in the show over and over. Both of these women, in a variety of ways, deal with sexism, with gender dynamics, with gender tropes. What have you have seen and experienced in Hollywood that feeds into the way that's portrayed to the audience?

Downs: One of the things that is really central to the show is that these are two women who are cast aside from the industry. You know, Deborah had to carve her own path and get a residency in Vegas after a very public divorce and a media shaming. I think that we really wanted to explore what it means to be a woman in comedy in particular, because so many women in comedy didn't have the same opportunities that their male counterparts had.

One example being hosting a late-night show, which becomes a central part of our series. I think it also comes out at a time when luckily we're having a reckoning with the narratives around gender and around women in particular. When we were pitching the show, it was around the time that the Britney Spears documentary was coming out—or, you know, whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Paris Hilton or any number of women who we got wrong.

I think that was another thing that was a lens through which we wrote the show, just women's stories being either untold or misconstrued because they weren't the ones who were getting to author them.

In terms of your backgrounds in show business and your experience in the industry, how much of that informed creating the series, creating the supporting characters, and delving into what you do in seasons 1 through 5?

Aniello: Not a ton, very directly, just because we came up from making Broad City. That was our first big break. So we worked on all five seasons of that. We had also done a little bit of work on the web series before it was a television show. Then we went on to work on some other projects.

For example, I worked on a show for a bit called Awkwafina is Nora From Queens. Day one of going into that writer’s room, there were women who were literally emotional because it was the first time they were in a writer’s room where they weren’t only one of two women. It was predominantly women. And I was like, "Oh, babe, this is my life. This is what my life is like. I only work on shows like this."

Downs: For the record, I only work with women. I haven't worked with men; don't know if I will. I really surround myself with cool women.

Aniello: We've had such an opposite experience of what Deborah Vance had. If anything, we're just like, "Hey, this is the way that we see the world," which is definitely more of an Ava experience. I don't think Ava has necessarily had the experience of being a woman getting in the way of her career. I think she's the person who's gotten in the way of her own career.

Yes.

Aniello: I directed one movie, Rough Night, that Paul and I wrote. I was the first woman in almost 20 years to direct an R-rated comedy. That’s crazy.

That is crazy.

Aniello: That was in 2017. If anything, we've been so blessed and lucky to have such a different experience than Deborah had. But I think we appreciate and understand the kind of path that women like her had to forge for us to have these lucky experiences. We are so grateful, and I think in a way, the show is an homage to the kinds of women who had to deal with so much sexism and not having the opportunities that their male counterparts had. So this is our way of saying thank you.

I love that.

Downs: I think in some ways it is very pulled from our own lives, though there's a lot of meta in the show just in terms of, you know, we were doing sketch and improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and this other theater called the Magnet Theater in New York.

There was this sense of what cool comedy was, what progressive alternative cool comedy was. We were interested in the idea of cool comedy versus someone who maybe had aged out a little bit. Also, because the show ultimately is about these two women and their creative collaboration, the fact that Jen, Lucia, and I have found each other, we found our comedy people, in that way—maybe not really in terms of our experience of gender in the industry, but in the way in which the story’s backbone is the love language that they share in terms of their creative collaboration—that is very much pulled from our life.

I want to talk about some of the themes that you have tackled, whether intentionally or not, throughout the series. I want to start with media censorship, which is very salient for us at WIRED.

It's something we think about a lot. It's something we cover a lot right now, unfortunately. At the end of Season 4, Deborah has this huge moment. She's finally hosting her own late-night show. It's been her dream. And she gives an impassioned speech supporting Ava. She blasts the network. She quits the show. It's a very dramatic way to end. I think it came out a couple months before Colbert was canceled, right?

That was the timing. And you were seen as prescient. What were you trying to say at that moment at the end of Season 4? Was it purely a plot decision and a creative decision, or was there a bigger message that you intended to be conveying?

Downs: We really wanted to explore the complicated intersection of art and commerce. Because, as Deborah says in that episode, she knows it's not regional theater, it's a business. What she's doing is a business. But ultimately, what the show keeps returning to is the sanctity of their work, the fact that comedy is sacred for her.

The one thing that she can't abide is censoring herself and also firing her voice, which is the thing that makes the show good. She admits and she acknowledges that she's a capitalist pig herself, and that she loves to make money, but she cares more about comedy than making shareholders happy.

So we wanted to talk about this thing, which is we're experiencing this disruption in our industry. What was a very lucrative industry for a century has become something different because tech has disrupted it.

And whether it's tech or not, more and more under capitalism it's about growth. It's not just about profit. It's not enough to be profitable for the creatives and the executives. It has to be grown. The profit has to grow. The only way to do that is to exploit. So we did want to explore that, even though we had no idea. We knew that there was a decline in late-night viewership, but the fact that then Colbert experienced censorship, and rather than being able to say, “Well, I'm going to quit,” they told him it was over. It was really weird. It was really crazy.

Now we have the FCC investigating Disney and ABC over diversity, but really it's because—and my fact-checkers are going to be upset at me here—Jimmy Kimmel made a joke that the president didn't like about his wife potentially becoming a widow.

How do you feel, sitting where you sit and overseeing the show you oversee, watching that play out?

Aniello: I think part of the reason that it, in some ways, was prescient that that happened is because we are in a spreading authoritarian regime here. You know, we have concentration camps in our backyards. You know, AI is becoming something that's being forced upon us in so many ways.

Nobody can afford health care, nobody can pay their rent, gas [prices], whatever. My point is, it's becoming increasingly unlivable in this country, and as a result, people are really frustrated, and this government is clamping down further and further. Then who's on the front lines saying, "Hey, this is really bad"?

Most often, comedians are the people speaking truth to power. So of course the first people they're clamping down on are the people who are saying, "Hey, this is really bad. This administration is not great. People can't live. This is really bad."

And because comedians are able to get that message across the most effectively, naturally, that's the first group of people that they're going after in terms of free speech.

Downs: And journalists.

And journalists.

Aniello: And journalists, you guys, which is why I'm a member, and I love my WIRED subscription. Subscribe now.

We are so grateful, and thank you so much. I'm going to have you record that as a separate ad after this.

Aniello: I will sing it, and I can't even sing.

Wow. Thank you. I'm sure audiences will love that.

Downs: If you want subscribers, don't do that. Don't do that.

The consolidation piece in the media industry and the entertainment industry is really interesting to me, and it's something that Hacks comes back to in a few different ways. I think one of the ways that stood out to me in Season 5, without giving too much away, is Deborah having this very startling realization that she pissed off the wrong boss.

She pissed off a guy who had the ability to take a lot of her work out of her hands and ensure that audiences would not be able to access it. I'm wondering how you see that parallel with what's happening in your industry now, in terms of fewer and fewer players at the top having that kind of control over so many different networks and streaming platforms.

What does that mean for you in the real world outside of the show?

Downs: It's really terrifying, because that was something that has happened. You know, things are removed from streamers, and then you can't find them. In an era where physical media is becoming less and less common, it's really scary.

We feel very, very lucky that we've been able to make this show. We've been able to say what we want on this show. We've been very supported by HBO and HBO Max. We don't have complaints there, but it is scary that even in our position it's still something where you're like, "Well, it could be deleted. It could be deleted and go away.”

Aniello: And you hear stories of people’s personal vendettas against other people being the reason why their shows die. And those rumors are chilling, because one person can just be like, "Oh, all of your work can just be deleted, and then no one can ever see it." Of course, this is a career and it's a livelihood, but it's an expression of oneself, and for those things to be taken down is really scary.

You have overall deals with Warner Bros. right? You're getting a new dad at some point in the next few months, and I have a lot of friends in the news industry who are affected by Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and everything that encompasses. Does that worry you?

Aniello: We just don't know what it will look like, so of course anything new is scary. But Warner Bros. has been so amazing, obviously as has HBO Max, and the support that we have there.

[Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group chairs] Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy have made hit after hit after hit for that company. It's been a generational run, just nonstop huge hits. So you look at these people who are running the departments and you're just thinking, "These are people who obviously are so good." So for us, we just would love to continue to work with these people who have been nothing but supportive, so fabulous to the creative process, and have been just the best.

All we can do is say, "We love working with these people. We wanna continue to work with these people." And that's all we can say or know.

I have to ask you a reality-check question that fills in a blank spot for me in terms of what I do and don't know about how contracts work. Deborah’s contract becomes a major plot point at the end of Season 4 and going into Season 5. She has this on-air outburst. She quits the show, which, per her contract, means she cannot perform for 18 months. For the non-entertainment-industry among us, have you seen non-competes like this? Is that pretty standard protocol?

Downs: This was a big topic for us in the writers' room, and luckily Guy Branum, who's a great stand-up, wonderful comedian, and very funny comedy writer, is also a lawyer. He helped us make sure that we threaded the needle in the right way because non-competes are very hard to uphold, apparently. But in our world, Deborah was paid out through her exclusivity clause, which was also under Florida law, which notoriously has not been the most friendly to employees. So, because Florida law governed it and because of this we were able to say, "OK, there can be a restraining order put in place so that if she were to perform or to break that restraining order, then legal action could be taken."

You were really rigorous with how you …

Downs: We kicked the tires, yes.

OK.

Downs: We really kicked the tires because, you know, we were painting our character into a corner, which gave us a lot to explore, but we also wanted to make it justifiable and have people not say, “Well, that could never happen.” Truth is so much stranger than fiction.

Don't we know it.

Downs: I'm like, “That could happen.” It feels absolutely within the realm of reality.

I was sort of like, “Who fucked up there?” Why didn't Jimmy read the contract more closely and make sure that this woman was not signing a deal with the devil?

Aniello: I think Jimmy did know. Not to defend my man, but Jimmy knew the contract, and I think Deborah knew the contract too. She just never, ever could have imagined a world where she would have left.

Because she was living the dream, so why would she?

Downs: She's like, “I might get fired. Fine, then they have to pay me out. I'm not gonna leave.” You know, that seemed so far-fetched to her, but as she says in the show, she didn't realize it, but her dream changed. The landscape changed, and so did she.

Good reminder for everyone. Read the fine print and then negotiate a better contract.

I want to talk about AI, which is obviously a huge and very fraught topic for us, for our audience. It's been top-of-mind for me recently. We just closed our next print issue, which is all about AI and work.

One of the pieces is from an underemployed—I hope she doesn't mind me saying that—Hollywood writer who's now making ends meet by doing gig work training LLMs.

It's a very bleak story about not only artificial intelligence and how it's trained, but also about the entertainment industry and employment prospects. I'm curious about how you're seeing AI affect your world right now.

Aniello: You know we are hearing about it and talking about it so much, but we personally do not use it in any way, shape, or form. We personally won't work with people who use it. We are completely anti-AI in the creative process in any possible way.

I think it's been completely forced upon the creative world as a way to minimize our talent, minimize our ability to have employment, and it's frankly insulting. I feel badly for this woman because, yes, there should be a more sustainable industry that doesn't force her to be in this position. I'm not necessarily frustrated at her, but the system that is forcing her to be in this position.

But for us, and this is something that we do explore in an episode, we do not need AI coming in and disrupting the thing that is about humanity. The last thing we need in the expression of humanity is robots coming in and telling us how it should feel and how it should look.

It's so deeply offensive to me on every level. I know that people feel differently about this, but even if it's like, “Oh, I don't wanna write that email. I'll have AI write that email for me.” Just the fact that you don't want to think. The repercussions of people not wanting to think is so disturbing to me, because really they don't want to think because it doesn't feel good.

They're literally trying to avoid feelings. The more that we take feelings out of being human—and we do that over and over in every different way of our lives—where does that leave us? Not to mention the fact that people aren't reading as much because of AI, and so their reading comprehension is plummeting.

I mean, it's so disturbing to me on so many levels. I really ... I have to stop talking. I’m getting damn pissed off!

It's OK. I hear you and I understand. I think what's been interesting for me when I have used ChatGPT is I can feel the atrophy of my own cognitive abilities happen so quickly. It's scary and I have to stop.

I don't like it because I became a journalist to be a writer. And if I no longer write and I let AI write for me, then the idea of writing feels so much harder.

Writing is already hard. It can be very hard, but the process is the point. The process is how you get to that end product, and you have that feeling of satisfaction and your brain is tired, and it was hard and it sucked, but it was satisfying. I think the idea of all of us losing that and just becoming these little blob bots hanging out in our blob world with our agents doing all of our work for us is really strange.

And I'm the editor of WIRED. I get a lot of criticism from some of our former fans who don't understand why we're not all-in on AI. We're not, and for very good reason. So I totally understand what you're saying.

Downs: I think you're right. The argument being “it makes life easier,” is exactly what you're saying. It takes out the grist, the thing that's hard. You know, it takes out the thinking, and I think therefore I am. If you're not thinking, you're not existing. Especially when it comes to the creative process and comedy in particular, you're a comedian because you've tried a joke a million times and it fails, and you get up and you do it again and it bombs, and you try it a different way. And then you find your voice and you figure out who you are.

Trying to take the work and the struggle and the friction out of the creative process makes it not art. And I think even beyond that, when people say, “Well, it really helped me do a rendering of my backyard. Now I know where I wanna put my rose bushes.” I'm like, “That's great, but think about the cost.” Think about the cost of training an LLM and how much easier it will be for a studio to say, “I'm gonna hire one writer, and I'm gonna have an LLM write all the episodes, and one writer can do the rewrite.” It is taking jobs away, and when there's an argument around feminism, around gender equality, we have to understand it.

The thing that it's benefiting, especially in film production, is the top 1 percent. It is the people that stand to benefit the most and profit the most. It is the shareholders who get to say, "We don't need a VFX house. We can just do it with this. We don't need to hire any of those people."

Aniello: OK, I have one more complaint. The other thing that is so interesting to me is if you have nothing new to say, if you're using AI to write, all it's doing is scraping everybody else's thoughts and mixing it up and maybe shifting it into your style, but it's not really saying anything new.

All you're doing is reheating literally everybody else's nachos, as it were. You're not saying anything fresh and new, and if you're not doing that, then why are you even saying anything, as a creative in Hollywood? Why do you even want to put your name on something that some LLM has generated?

Like Paul's saying, if you're a boss and you don't want to hire writers, then you don't care either way. But from a creative perspective—and I've heard about creatives who I previously really respected using AI to generate their outlines—I just feel, honestly, sad for them because they're just not interested in even stretching their minds forward.

We have seen Hollywood types embrace AI very publicly. I feel like there's a new one every week. There was this bizarre mini-scandal involving Reese Witherspoon a few weeks ago where I was like, “Why is Reese Witherspoon all over my Instagram talking about AI?”

You have Matthew McConaughey investing in ElevenLabs. You've got really prominent A-list celebrities out there talking about embracing the technology. Does the industry need a more united front here? What has to happen to safeguard the creative process in Hollywood? Do you feel like that's even possible?

Downs: I want to be hopeful. I think the unions do need to flex whatever muscle they have to help make guardrails happen, because we can do that at least in terms of contracts with the studios when there are negotiations. But it's really hard when it's not on a federal level. I think it does sometimes feel like screaming into the void.

Even if you are doing protections against, say, “Well, you can't use my face in a movie if I don't give you permission.” Like sure, that's helpful, but I think that the ramifications are so far beyond that that I don't know how you put guardrails in place.

Aniello: I also think it’s garbage. I think it's a bubble that will pop because it's useless. I'm not saying that all AI is useless. I do think, of course, in medical fields and in science, there's certainly computational abilities of AI that are beyond human ability. I'm talking specifically about writing comedy. I just think it's not good, and it's never gonna be good. So come at me, zeros and ones. I think you suck.

Let me move on to something a little more fun. Let's end with a little bit of levity. I want to talk about fandom for a minute. On the show, Deborah has her Little Debbies. We love them. I mean, we love most of them. They're terrifying. And this season, Jimmy also meets one of his idols in a very embarrassing and adorable scene. But you nod to fans and this idea of fandom and how wonderful but how insane they can be. But Hacks has a fandom. You've experienced the world of fandom. How would you describe the Hacks fan base? What are the fans like?

Downs: Well, I only know the fans that approach me, mostly. I don't read the Reddit.

I was gonna say, do you read the comments?

Downs: No. I mean, I'll see comments on my Instagram. I will see those comments. So I do see some of them, and some of them you can't avoid because there'll be like a reposting of a tweet that did really well about the show, so I do get a sense of it, but I don't seek it out. I'm not somebody who's reading everything.

Aniello: Jen and I have a more complicated relationship with it, where we both ebb and flow with our intake. Like, for example, this season, I read one review, and that was it.

One review like from mainstream press, like from the media? Wow. That is a very limited intake.

Aniello: Yeah. And then, maybe, maybe, maybe a second one that somebody sent me. But I'm very sensitive about the show being seen. We put in so much love and care. It really is our baby. So it's like you're writing about my child, you know? As for the Reddit, I ebb and flow on going to it and seeing it and not reading it at all.

It really depends on my emotional state. But I believe the fandom of Hacks is very lovely. Really just mostly people who love the show, who watch every episode five times or just continue to rewatch and then go back to the beginning and rewatch again.

There's, of course, like a subsect of Avra shippers who want them to be together.

Oh my God, is there Hacks fanfic? I didn't even think about that.

Aniello: Oh yeah.

Oh my God, I can't believe I didn't look for this. OK, you're both aware of the fanfic, and I'm late to this, so there's my Monday night reading.

Downs: I am aware of that.

Aniello: I’ve never read it, honestly.

Downs: I’ve read one.

Aniello: Or I read one once, and as soon as it kind of got graphic or something, I was like “I shouldn’t be seeing this.”

Oh, I’m sure it's graphic. I think that's the point. I think they’re probably all having sex.

Aniello: There's a lot of Avra fanfic, and there's a lot of, like, edits, video edits of stuff …

Downs: Fan cam edits. Yeah, I've seen those.

For someone who doesn’t read the comments …

Aniello: People do send it to us a lot. Sometimes it's so fun. But …

Downs: And part of the comments that I always get are “Make them kiss, make them a couple!”

I scream that at the TV when I'm watching you and Kayla.

Downs: Thank you. There are a lot of people that want Jimmy and Kayla together. Megan [Stalter, who plays Kayla] included.

Aniello: Yeah, that is so interesting. And you know Cole Escola of Oh, Mary! fame was a consultant on season 1, and their first pitch was Jimmy and Kayla get married.

Downs: Well, after they saw season 1, they texted, "OK, they get married."

Thank God.

Downs: I totally understand.

I love that.

Downs: The Hacks fans have allowed us to have the show, allowed us to do five seasons, because of the fact that they have been so rabid about it and told friends to watch and gotten groups together to watch and engage online about it. All of those things nowadays when people are making business decisions about whether or not a show will have another season, engagement, online mentions, all of those things are factored in.

So, to be honest, as much as I don't read comments because I can be sensitive, I also worship our fans. I appreciate our fans and their engagement so much.

I'm curious about how you've promoted the show. This might just be my algorithm, but I watch the show, I follow you on social media, so you are everywhere on my Instagram and TikTok. I know what you think the best bread in LA is. I've seen you tell two truths and a lie. You all have done a lot of promotion, and it's very heavy on social media.

Have you seen the way television is promoted change over five seasons? What stands out to you about the kind of promotion that you were doing three, four, five years ago compared to what you're doing now?

Downs: It's wild how social clips travel, and how people see them and then know about the show. It used to be, like, God, could you imagine getting on The Tonight Show? I've never been on The Tonight Show, would love to do it, but doing Subway Takes, I got probably as many views.

Oh, I'm sure.

Downs: It is kind of wild, and it's also the way that things get to me, because I don't see the Today show every morning, and I don't see an interview on the Today show, but if there's a clip from it that's really funny it ends up finding its way to me. Same with late-night clips. I watch Colbert, but if I’ve missed an episode, it’s aggregated to me.

It's kind of a whole new world of promoting a show. Things that you might have been like, “Two Truths and a Lie, is that really something that you want me to do” And the network's like, “Absolutely.” And it's like, oh yeah, because people see it.

Aniello: I think part of the reason the Hacks ones do tend to be aggregated and spread a lot is because Jean [Smart] and Hannah and Paul and Meg and Rose [Abdoo] and Carl [Clemons-Hopkins] and Mark [Indelicado], we all really genuinely love each other and love hanging out and love chatting.

I think sometimes it's almost parasocial. It's like I love just watching them because it feels like they're my friends. I mean, they are my friends, but I just do feel like there's a casual ease to the relationships that all these people have that makes it fun to watch. Sometimes when it's a movie and these people knew each other for 45 days, and now they're promoting a movie and they have to pretend that they're in a relationship or something. But with this group of people, we've become family over the course of six years.

I'm going to end with a very quick game, if you'll indulge me.

Downs: Yes.

The game is called Control, Alt, Delete. We made it up ourselves. And you can take turns or you can each do your own, but I want to know what piece of technology would you love to control? What piece would you love to alt, so alter or change? And what would you love to delete, vanquish from the Earth?

One caveat: So many people have said AI that my producers are now forcing me to get more specific. You need to say specifically what about AI or what specific type of AI, because it can't be all AI.

Aniello: God.

That's the only rule.

Aniello: OK. I'm just gonna start with alt, which is internet. I gotta alt the internet. Because on one hand, it's the reason I feel I have a career. Like I said, we started out on YouTube. I literally learned how to edit using YouTube, and the internet, especially in that kind of period right after I graduated, late aughts, early '10s, like really made my career possible.

I can't totally hate on the internet, but in this, sorry to say it, AI slop culture where I just don't know what's real and what's not, it's getting so scary. It's getting crazy that you cannot believe what you see. So I do feel that anything that isn't real should not be allowed to be uploaded, so I'd like to control the internet.

For accuracy.

Aniello: If everything was just forced to be completely true, then I'm like “Let's go internet.” Otherwise, it's not for me anymore.

It's very ambitious. I like that.

Aniello: Control. Control government. Can we control government?

You can control government.

Aniello: Medicaid for all. Here's my hot platform. You ready for it? I believe that if you get a certain college GPA, whatever it is, let's say 3.5, and a certain MCAT score, whatever a good MCAT score is, that you should be allowed to go to medical school as a doctor or a nurse for free, and the government should pay for it.

Because I think if you are intelligent enough—and you want to be a doctor and help people—there should be no financial roadblock to doing so. I think that everybody should be able to be a doctor. We could solve so many issues if health care was more accessible to people in this country, including mental health.

Lovely. Wonderful. Canadian, so I agree with you. Well, dual citizen, but I lean into the Canadian thing now because …

Downs: I know why. I would, too. That’s so cool.

Aniello: I have an Italian passport, so you know me, I'm one foot on the damn plane.

I can imagine.

Downs: And what are you gonna delete?

Aniello: Do you have a delete, Paul?

Downs: Yeah. Do we do all of them?

Whatever. Choose your own adventure. You do delete.

Downs: OK. I guess I would control social media so I'm not tagged in unflattering photos.

But the photos are allowed to exist on the internet. You just don't wanna be tagged in them.

Downs: I can take them off. No, no, I wanna be able to control.

Oh, you want to remove the photo. I see. OK.

Downs: Alt, I guess I would do an alt version of Bluetooth. Actually, speaking of Subway Takes, Zoë Kravitz had this hot take, which I agree with. She's like, “Bluetooth does not work.” I'm like, we need Bluetooth to work.

My alt is I want Bluetooth. I think that would be good, but it never connects. I need it to work, so let's alt that. Let's figure it out. And then delete ... Even though I said I want to control social media, I think I might delete social media.

Control social media by deleting it.

Downs: Look, I think that there's so much joy and discovery. You know what I mean? I do enjoy keeping up with things or people or seeing that Colbert clip that I missed or whatever. But I am so sad for a generation of people that don't have what I had, which was not having it.

It's so scary. I don't want people looking at their phones so much. I just want that to go away.

How would you promote the show though?

Downs: I think if we deleted social media, there would be so much more interest in and appreciation of journalism. I think people would have to go back to the art section.

I like how you turned that back on me. OK.

Aniello: How dare you ask that question, actually.

Downs: We're gonna get more subscribers. I think that's how it would change. If there's no social media, where are you going to get your entertainment and see a really beautiful couch? It's gonna be coverage in traditional media, you know? It's not gonna be in your explore page.

Aniello: It's Architectural Digest.

Another fabulous Condé Nast brand. That you for that.

Downs: That's right. You're reading Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. You're getting on WIRED. You're looking at Architectural Digest, in print. You know what I mean? You're helping Condé Nast in any way you can.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-hacks-cocreators-paul-w-downs-lucia-aniello/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

THE BIG STORY | SIMONE STOLZOFF | MAY 12, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

What Happens When You Try to Treat OCD With Psilocybin

Colloquially, OCD is known as the doubting disorder. In his new book How to Not Know, Simone Stolzoff explores whether treating that uncertainty with magic mushrooms can help people through it.

Illustration: Natallia Yatskova/Getty Images

Adam Strauss is standing in his New York City apartment, holding the limp cord of his headphones, trying to choose between the two MP3 players on his desk: the iPod and the iRiver, its Korean counterpart. He cues up the same song on each, toggling the silver plug of his headphones back and forth like a 1930s switchboard operator.

He tries different songs, different genres, different instruments. The iRiver tends to sound better overall, but the iPod offers a little more nuance in the midrange. The iPod has a better battery life, but the iRiver still lasts eight hours—longer than he’s ever continuously listened to music. Then again, he’s never owned an MP3 player. Is eight hours enough?

He goes back and forth, back and forth, testing vocal ranges, button resistance, interface aesthetics. His internal monolog races like ticker tape. Do aesthetics even matter? It’s going to be in my pocket most of the day. I’ve never seen a line out the door for the iRiver, but people line up at the Apple Store to get the iPod. Maybe those people know something I don’t. Or maybe those people are all chumps, paying a premium for an inferior device!

It would be one thing if it were just Adam’s decision of which MP3 player to buy. After all, it was 2003, the height of the personal audio device revolution, and Adam was a 29-year-old audiophile. But it wasn’t just the iPod versus the iRiver. For Adam, it was also other decisions—what shirt to wear to work, what to order for lunch, even what side of the street to walk down.

At one point, in an effort to simplify his decisionmaking process for what to wear, Adam bought 11 identical blue button-down shirts. But he quickly found variations in each shirt’s fit and fading. He believed there was a right shirt to pick; each morning he would spend 20, 30, then 45 minutes trying to find it. If he could only determine which shirt was best, he could control his fate.

On one level, Adam knew how ridiculous it all had become. He was no fool; he’d graduated from an Ivy League university and ran his own company, which, at the time, was the world’s largest digital library of downloadable sound effects. He was educated, talented, and successful—but lately, his obsessive-compulsive disorder was taking over his life.

OCD arises from a complex mix of brain chemistry, genetic predisposition, and environmental factors. In conversation, though, Adam compares his OCD to a drug addiction. “Heroin isn’t what the opiate addict is looking for; they’re looking for the high. The heroin is just the thing that gives them the high,” he told me. “With OCD, certainty is the heroin, and the high is the brief dopamine hit you get when you feel like you’ve found it.”

But with OCD, he didn’t need to go out to the street to get his fix. The only tools he needed lived in his head. Adam would make up his mind—it’s got to be the iRiver—and then convince himself that he hadn’t listened to enough hip-hop. Before he knew it, the two boxes were open on his desk and he was moving the headphone cord back and forth again.

Soon Adam was canceling plans with friends, showing up late for work, and passing sunny Saturdays locked inside of his Manhattan apartment. In an effort to conceal his OCD from others, he closed himself off from social situations, which, in turn, left him with more time to spend trapped in his thoughts.

“For junkies, heroin is a great simplifier,” he told me. “All you care about is getting your next fix. Everything else pales in comparison.” For Adam, it was the same with decisionmaking. The rest of life could begin only after he knew which was the better MP3 player. He was stuck in a vicious cycle and in desperate need of a way out.

The desire for control shapes our decisions, relationships, and perceptions about our environment. Psychologists consider the desire for control to be a fundamental psychological need. Yes, being in control of your life is generally a good thing. But when the desire for control becomes all-consuming, or when we attempt to control what we fundamentally cannot, it can be devastating.

Often, the desire for control is rooted in a fear of uncertainty. Rather than accept that we live in an unpredictable and chaotic world, we try to find a sense of security and predictability by seeking to control the uncontrollable. Adam’s condition reveals the paradox at the heart of our relationship with control: The more of it we seek, the more we become enslaved by the illusion of it. Like personality traits and mental health in general, the desire for control exists on a spectrum, but for people with OCD, it can leave little room for anything else. By examining how Adam learned to relinquish control, we can come to see how we might loosen the reins on our own lives.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder affects both people’s internal thoughts and their external actions. Obsessive thoughts like my hands might be dirty may lead to compulsive actions like washing your hands 10 times. Your brain convinces you that engaging in the compulsive behavior might help keep your worry under control. But in practice, compulsive behaviors can interrupt your life as much as the thoughts.

Colloquially, OCD is known as the doubting disorder, because it causes people to second-guess what they know to be true. There are risks to not introducing enough doubt or skepticism into your thought processes. OCD represents the other extreme: What happens when there is so much doubt that it takes over your life?

Despite the jokes about your hyper-organized friend being “so OCD,” obsessive-compulsive disorder is a clinical disorder with debilitating symptoms. It can manifest as a fear of contamination, repeatedly checking locks, or an obsession with symmetry. The surface behavior often covers up a deeper anxiety lurking underneath.

“Maybe I can’t be certain about whether I’m in the right relationship or how my boss feels about me, so I try to find things I can be certain about,” Adam explained to me. “But the vicious irony is that even if you try to narrow down to one specific, binary thing—‘are my hands clean?’—you still can’t be absolutely sure.”

Jonathan Grayson, a psychologist and one of the world’s leading OCD specialists, explains that two factors drive patients’ behavior. The first is deep discomfort with uncertainty. We’re hardwired to feel discomfort with uncertainty, but those with OCD are particularly intolerant.

Researchers debate whether the ability to tolerate uncertainty is driven more by nature or by nurture. Some believe we are born tolerant of uncertainty and then become less tolerant when we experience instability in our childhood. Others believe we are born intolerant of uncertainty and become more tolerant after positive exposure to uncertain situations. But regardless of the explanation, it takes people with OCD less uncertainty to feel more anxious. That’s why people with the disorder might treat a seemingly trivial decision such as which MP3 player to buy as if it were a matter of life and death.

The second factor that drives patients’ behavior, according to Grayson, is unusually high levels of self-doubt. Most of us feel a sense of satisfaction after we complete a task. This biological reward system drives us toward progress, and it also explains why completionists like me sometimes put a task they’ve already done on their to-do list just to feel the satisfaction of checking it off. But the brains of people with OCD don’t reward them with the same feeling of completion, and so they think twice. Logically, they might know that their hands are clean, but without the internal validation, they’re prone to wash them again.

Of course, not everyone with OCD is anxious in the same way. One person might not fear contamination but needs to check to make sure the stove is off multiple times before leaving the house. That’s because, in addition to biological factors, there’s also a learned component to the disorder. Sometime in your past, you may have developed a fear of an intruder or slept through your alarm. If you don’t have OCD, this might lead you to double-lock your front door or double-check your alarm before bedtime. But if you have OCD, it can spark a vicious cycle. Before you know it, you’re postponing or even canceling your plans because you’re busy checking and rechecking that you did, in fact, lock the door.

Adam didn’t always struggle with OCD. He had a fairly conventional childhood. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, which, perhaps apocryphally, is said to have one of the highest concentrations of psychotherapists in the country. As a kid, he had a rich imagination. He often got lost in books or Dungeons & Dragons fantasies. Like many of his peers, his early teenage years brought on a new obsession: girls. But Adam became convinced that he was too ugly—specifically, that his lips were too big—for anyone to like him.

Now in his early fifties, Adam is conventionally attractive—tall and lean, with a scruffy beard and long wavy hair. You might mistake him for an elongated Mark Ruffalo. But as a teenager, he believed he needed to do something to compensate for his big lips. He obsessively lifted weights to build up his physique, but then settled on a better idea. Mick Jagger gets girls and his lips are bigger than mine, Adam thought. I should become a musician.

Music became the through line for Adam’s late teens and early twenties. He played blues piano and Hammond organ. And while at Brown University in Rhode Island, Adam drove five hours each way to New Jersey to see a famous piano teacher named Kenny Werner. Werner had pioneered a philosophy that he dubbed “effortless mastery,” which valued relinquishing control. Werner argued that “playing music should be as simple and natural as drawing a breath” and that mastery required playing without thinking. But asking Adam not to think was like asking a fish not to swim. “You’re trying so hard to play everything perfectly,” Werner would say. “You’re not allowing yourself to be any good.”

When Adam was 26, a friend invited him out to a bar in Tribeca for a Friday night drink. Adam figured he’d stop by for a quick nightcap before heading home—a decision that would ripple profoundly through the rest of his life.

At the bar, Adam met Annie, his friend’s girlfriend’s sister. The sparks weren’t immediate, but as the night went on, it was clear that Adam and Annie had chemistry. Adam left the bar with a pep in his step.

When he got back to his apartment, he couldn’t fall asleep. This was rare. Throughout his life, Adam had always been a great sleeper. His musician friends called him Sleepy Strauss for his ability to sleep while his housemates were banging the drums and practicing their high notes. But the night he met Annie, it was as if a switch had flipped. Suddenly Adam was an insomniac.

After that first night, his insomnia began to spiral. He fell into a relatable loop. I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’ve really got to sleep well tonight. But the pressure to get good sleep only fueled more anxious nights. Sleep was like playing the piano—the more he tried to control it, the more elusive progress became.

Adam sought the help of a therapist who shared various exercises to normalize his sleep anxiety. For months, Adam would visualize himself not sleeping. As he lay in bed, his therapist advised him to repeat the mantra, “I hope I don’t sleep.” And then one night, something clicked. Adam was in bed, repeating “I hope I don’t sleep, I hope I don’t sleep,’’ and for whatever reason, it worked. Adam surrendered to the idea that he might not sleep, and sure enough, off he dozed. Almost instantly, his insomnia was cured.

But sleep was not his only issue. Adam and Annie dated for two and a half years—a relationship that he describes as the most significant of his life. A few weeks after their breakup, more serious OCD symptoms began to kick in, interfering with nearly every decision of the day.

Adam would spend hours agonizing over whether to take the 12:44 or the 1:37 bus back home to see his family for Thanksgiving. He would order something off the menu at a restaurant and then ask the waiter to change it and then a few minutes later ask to change it back. No decision felt right. For a brief moment after he changed his mind, he would be flooded with the relief of certainty, only for his intrusive thoughts to return.

Adam got into the habit of obsessively searching the phrase “OCD cure” on Google. By then, he had tried the standard treatments: cognitive behavioral therapy, antidepressants, mindfulness meditation. Nothing seemed to work. Then one day, Adam’s search results surfaced something entirely new.

The previous year, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry had published a study titled “Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of Psilocybin in 9 Patients With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.” Psilocybin, the key ingredient in magic mushrooms, seemed like a strange drug to treat a psychiatric disorder. But Adam had already tried a small pharmacy’s worth of more common OCD drugs—Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, and Zoloft—to no avail. Adam wasn’t alone. According to a 2024 article, 30 to 60 percent of OCD patients do not respond to medication and are considered treatment-resistant. He wasn’t particularly drawn to psychedelics, but he was desperate for a remedy.

Because OCD has both a biological and a behavioral component, drugs that treat the biological component alone tend to have mixed results. Fewer than 20 percent of those treated with medication will experience a complete remission of their OCD symptoms. The drug therapies might treat some of the biological causes of OCD, but the behaviors persist.

However, in the study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, lead researcher Francisco Moreno and his team had some remarkable findings. The research was conducted with patients who were each given up to four single doses of psilocybin, one week apart. The doses were administered in a clinical setting where the patients could be observed. Remarkably, every single patient exhibited improvements in their OCD symptoms—ranging from 23 percent improvement to complete remission.

Moreno’s team cites several possible explanations for why psilocybin can ease OCD symptoms. The drug can break down cycles of doubt and rumination by dramatically changing and resetting the patient’s default mode network, the regions of the brain responsible for self-referential thinking. Like most antidepressants, psilocybin can allow patients to receive more serotonin, which influences their mood. But psilocybin has also been shown to facilitate a state of openness, in which patients might be more receptive to new insights and attitudes.

Adam decided immediately to embark on a mission of vigilante psychopharmacology, using himself as the test patient. But first, he needed to find some mushrooms.

Unsurprisingly, Adam went about this mission obsessively. Alright, I’ve got to get the right type of mushrooms, at the right dose, in the right setting, and I’ll fix myself. But that’s not exactly how psychedelics work.

Neurobiologically speaking, psychedelics have two main effects. First, they allow parts of the brain that don’t normally talk to each other to connect. Second, they enable the brain to build new pathways. Psychedelic researcher Mendel Kaelen has likened our brains to snow-covered hills with sleds frequently taking a small number of main trails. A psychedelic can temporarily flatten the snow, erasing the main routes and making it easier to go in other directions.

For people with mental health disorders, the grooves tend to be particularly deep. Adam, for example, had developed a conditioned response around decisionmaking. Every time he needed to make a choice, he fell into a well-worn pattern of rumination and doubt. Breaking that pattern required fighting against what had become second nature.

Following the discovery of LSD’s psychedelic properties in 1943, psychedelic research exploded. The National Institutes of Health is reputed to have funded over 130 grants for the study of LSD alone. But after the counterculture movement of the 1960s, an extreme backlash from policymakers, who felt that psychedelics might be a threat to American values, led to the drugs being strictly regulated, effectively halting all medical research.

Beginning in the early 2000s, advances in neuroscience research, increased scientific interest, and new FDA approvals encouraged some researchers to reengage in psychedelic research. Groundbreaking studies at places like Johns Hopkins found that drugs such as psilocybin and MDMA were effective in treating certain anxiety-based disorders, including depression and PTSD. Around the same time, Moreno and his team were conducting the first modern clinical trial for how psychedelics might impact OCD.

Though the sample size of Moreno’s study was small—only nine patients—the outcomes after only a few doses were remarkable. Typical OCD interventions such as antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy have modest success rates and can take weeks or months to take effect. The benefits from psilocybin were tremendous—and almost immediate.

Adam started asking his friends whether they knew where he could get magic mushrooms. This was 2007, over a decade before psilocybin would be decriminalized in Oregon and Colorado, the first states to do so. Perhaps there’s some sort of post–Burning Man mushroom drought, Adam thought. He couldn’t find mushrooms anywhere. But he had a friend with a connection to a gray-market chemical supply lab in China. Good enough. Rather than organic psychedelics like mushrooms, this lab specialized in synthetic alternatives, each with its own enigmatic name: 2C-B, 2C-I, 4-HO-MiPT. Adam placed an order.

Two weeks later, a beat-up manila envelope arrived on Adam’s doorstep. Inside were 14 ziplock bags of white powder, each labeled with a string of letters and numbers. Like a research scientist about to embark on a new study, Adam first read everything he could about each of the white powders on Bluelight, an online forum and community dedicated to harm reduction in drug use, before he began to experiment.

Over the next year and a half, Adam tripped about two times per month, documenting his experiences on Bluelight and in a journal. “There was no method to the experimentation besides ‘I’m going to fix my OCD come hell or high water,’” he told me. “I was desperate and had nothing to lose.”

Psychedelic experiences are rated on a scale from no observable effects to plus four (“a religious or transcendent experience”). Alexander Shulgin, the biochemist responsible for the rating scale, describes a plus-four trip as “potentially life-changing.” That’s what Adam was looking for. But even after several months, the drugs were not having much effect.

Adam researched what might be affecting his trips. First, he weaned himself off of his antidepressants, which can dampen the effects of psychedelics. Second, he tried to optimize his “set and setting.” (One’s mindset, or “set,” and physical/social environment, or “setting,” can alter a psychedelic experience.) In his early trials, Adam had brief, elusive moments of freedom from his intrusive thoughts, but before long, his OCD returned like a hungry stray cat.

So, in the fall of 2008, Adam decided to create the conditions for a Shangri-la psychedelic experience. He had scored a new strain of mushrooms from a friend in New York and rented a house on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend. But when the mushrooms arrived at the rental house, they looked small and shriveled. Fuck it, Adam thought before consuming the whole bag, a so-called “heroic dose.”

The rest of Adam’s day was a blur. It was the most intense trip Adam had ever experienced—a plus four. A rush of fear and a deep sense of foreboding coursed through his body, but when he tried to reach out to others for help, no one answered the phone. For minutes or hours, or perhaps minutes that felt like hours, Adam gripped onto his anxiety, hoping someone or something would come whisk it away. He frantically paced around the house. He berated himself for potentially overdoing it with the mushrooms. He worked himself up to the point of exhaustion. And only then, after he depleted his last ounce of energy, did he finally let go. Like that night in bed when he repeated “I hope I don’t sleep,” Adam gave in. He surrendered to the reality that his impulse to control his trip—not to mention his thoughts and his OCD—might ultimately be futile. And just like that, a profound sense of relief swept over him. Adam was powerless. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt free.

Nearly two decades after the publication of Moreno’s study, there are several scientific trials underway to explore psilocybin as a potential treatment for OCD.

Benjamin Kelmendi leads psilocybin trials at Yale University. He’s seen profound improvement for some patients after just one dose. Though drugs can influence our neurobiology, Kelmendi attributes a lot of the improvement to an almost spiritual sense of acceptance of the uncertainty in their lives. Like Adam, Kelmendi’s patients realized that perhaps it was OK that they couldn’t control their fate.

“Uncertainty, at some level, is very protective—the anxiety we feel is there to guide us in how we navigate the world,” Kelmendi told me. “But it becomes an issue when trivial decisions are being approached with a massive analytical framework.” For many of his patients, there’s a mismatch between the decision they’re making and the tools they use to make it. Adam approached choosing what shirt to wear, for instance, with the scrutiny of a general deciding whether to go to war.

Even those of us without OCD can benefit from thinking about whether the tools we use to make decisions are commensurate with the impact of the choice. Imagine a 2 × 2 matrix. On one axis are decisions we can and cannot control. On the other axis are decisions of high and low consequence. Of these four quadrants, the only decisions really worth worrying about are those of high consequence that we can control—the other three either don’t matter or we can’t change them anyway.

Decision science expert and former professional poker player Annie Duke taught me two heuristics for determining whether decisions are of high or low consequence.

The first she calls the Happiness Test. Imagine you’re at a restaurant and deciding between two dishes—the pasta or the pizza. You finally make up your mind, and the waiter brings you your food. Maybe it’s delicious, maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s so revolting you can only manage a few bites.

Now imagine I run into you a week later and ask, “Remember that dinner you had last week? On a scale of 1 to 5, how much of an effect did that food have on the happiness of your week? Now, how about your month? And how about your year?” For most people, the choice about what dish to order likely would have had little effect on their long-term happiness. It’s a low-consequence decision—like what shirt to wear in the morning—and you should probably make the choice quickly. This may sound intuitive, but research has shown that the average person spends about 250 to 275 hours each year stuck in analysis paralysis over small decisions like what to wear, what to eat, and what to watch on TV. The Happiness Test helps us recognize that most of us would benefit from deliberating less.

The second heuristic I learned from Duke is called the Only-Option Test. Imagine you’re deciding between two vacation destinations: Rome or Paris. Your vacation will likely affect your happiness next week, next month, and possibly even next year. It’s an expensive trip, so the stakes seem high. Many of us agonize over decisions like these, whether it’s deciding between apartments, jobs, or schools. Like Adam and the MP3 player, you might spend weeks, if not months, researching the subtle differences between your options.

Duke offers a question that cuts through the noise: For any option you’re considering, ask yourself, “If this were the only option I had, would I be happy with it?” It’s a telling provocation. As Duke writes in her book How to Decide, “When a decision is hard, that means it’s easy. The very thing that slows you down—having multiple options that are very close in quality—is actually a signal that you can go fast, because this tells you that whichever option you choose, you can’t possibly be that wrong, since both options have similar upside and downside potential.”

I can already hear your inner skeptic shouting, “So much could go wrong!” You could spend thousands of dollars on flights and hotels only to get food poisoning from undercooked escargot! You could get swindled by a charming Italian cab driver and end up lost and penniless in a foreign city where you don’t speak the language! So you create spreadsheets and pro-con lists and ask everyone you know for their counsel, all so you can make the perfect choice.

Putting aside the fact that the probability of these worst-case scenarios occurring is low (and likely similar for Rome or Paris), it’s difficult not to focus on the potential negative outcomes. If the trip turns out poorly for whatever reason, you’ll think you made an awful choice. But that’s a common cognitive fallacy called resulting. Resulting is the tendency to judge a decision based on its outcome, rather than its quality. Just because a decision had a bad outcome doesn’t necessarily make it a bad decision.

The Only-Option Test forces you to look at the choice based on the relative quality of the options. If your only option was to take a vacation to Rome, would you be happy? How about to Paris? If the answer is yes to both, perhaps your choice matters less than you think. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t spend any time deliberating, but recognizing that your options are equally good can help you spend less time trying to decide.

To be clear, we make plenty of life decisions where the stakes are high, and we’d often benefit from taking our time and conducting a thorough analysis. But we spend a surprising amount of time trying to decide in situations when more research does not always lead to better decisions. When you find yourself stuck in analysis paralysis, you’re often searching for certainty where there is no certainty to be found.

Backstage at a 100-seat theater in Manhattan, Adam is waiting for the lights to come up. The song “Gila” by Beach House blares through the theater’s speakers: “Don’tcha waste your time / No oh oh oh oh.” As the chorus fades, Adam emerges—scruffy beard, dark jeans, blue button-down shirt—and launches into a monolog. “There’s the iPod and there’s something called the iRiver. They’re both sitting on my desk, and they’re both playing the same song on repeat in my headphones …”

In the years since his transcendent psilocybin trip, Adam has made it his mission to educate others about OCD, primarily through his one-man show, The Mushroom Cure. “People sometimes come to the show thinking that this is the story of this guy who cured himself with mushrooms,” he told me. Of course, the mushrooms didn’t cure him outright. Instead, they helped him learn how to keep moving forward without a definitive “cure.”

One way Adam has tried to move through his discomfort is with stand-up comedy and theater. Being on stage is a type of exposure therapy for Adam’s anxiety. When he’s on the mic, he can’t afford to stay stuck in a deliberative state of mind because the show must go on. I was curious to see how theater could be therapeutic for someone with crippling anxiety, so I bought tickets to see Adam in action.

Adam has been performing The Mushroom Cure off and on for over a decade at black box theaters across the country, but there’s something off about tonight’s show. About five minutes in, Adam cuts himself off mid-line, looks up at the audience, and says, “I’m going to come back in one minute.”

Adam abruptly exits stage left. The crowd awkwardly looks around, wondering if this is all part of the act.

One minute later, as promised, he returns. “I’m debating whether to explain what’s happening right now,” he tells the audience, breaking the fourth wall.

“I didn’t realize how this was going to be visually with everyone on the stage—seeing you all really changes the energy.” The show had sold out, and the theater had decided to add additional seats around the perimeter of the stage. The space looked different from how Adam had pictured it, and he could feel his anxiety start to spike.

“Do you want to close your eyes for a minute?” someone suggests from the floor.

“Maybe we can turn the lights down,” another audience member offers.

“Honestly, there’s nothing anyone can do,” Adam responds. “This isn’t a horrible catastrophe; it’s just a novel experience that I was not expecting. I’m feeling my way through it.”

Adam takes a deep breath to compose himself and continues with the show. Eighty minutes later, the lights go down and the crowd showers him with applause.

“I’m feeling my way through” is an apt characterization of how Adam’s approach to OCD has evolved since he first experimented with psychedelics nearly 20 years ago. At 51, Adam still has OCD episodes. The obsessive thoughts come less frequently, his compulsive behaviors are less all-consuming, and he rarely uses psychedelics. But Adam still has to manage his OCD on a daily basis.

After all of his experimentation with antidepressants, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, meditation, exposure therapy, and psychedelics, the best way Adam has found to deal with his OCD symptoms is to face his anxiety head-on.

“At the top level, people with OCD are looking for certainty, and with certainty comes safety,” Adam told me on a brisk San Francisco evening, as the two of us climbed the steep slopes of Buena Vista Park to catch the sunset. “But I think what is often missed is that the OCD serves to mask something else.”

For Adam, his symptoms began after experiencing a deep heartbreak. “When I say heartbreak, I don’t mean metaphorically so much as anatomically. There was a deep sensation of loss in the center of my chest after my breakup with Annie,” he said. “I think the strategy my brain came up with was like, ‘Alright, we don’t know what’s going on down there. This is intolerable. Let’s not even worry about that. Let’s just go up here,’” he said, gesturing at his head. “And if we figure everything out, then we won’t have to feel all this,” he finished, pointing at his heart.

Whether we suffer from OCD or not, our brains play masterful tricks to help us avoid undesirable emotions. Decisionmaking is hard because before we make a choice, every option is available to us. Making a choice requires forgoing other opportunities, which can feel like loss. Rather than accept the consequences of commitment, our brains can convince us to perpetually stay in a place of indecision.

But as the aphorism goes, what we resist, persists. For Adam, magic mushrooms were not a magic cure for his OCD. But they did help him stop avoiding—and eventually accept—his full range of emotions. To act in spite of uncertainty requires exposing ourselves to vulnerability. The only way to keep going is to feel our way through.

Excerpted from How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers. Copyright © 2026 by Simone Stolzoff. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-how-to-not-know-simone-stolzoff/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | PARESH DAVE, MAXWELL ZEFF | MAY 11, 2026 AT 7:51 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman’s OpenAI Ouster: ‘I Didn’t Want It to Be Destroyed’

The former OpenAI chief scientist may be estranged from the company, but he still came to its defense as he testified on Monday.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED staff; Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images

Elon Musk’s trial against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its final stretch on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor.

Sutskever drew the spotlight, revealing an ownership stake in OpenAI’s $850-billion for-profit arm that is currently worth about $7 billion. That makes him one of the largest known individual shareholders of OpenAI. Earlier in the trial, OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged for the first time that he has around $30 billion worth of OpenAI shares.

Brockman was one of the research lab’s original cofounders, and Sutskever joined shortly afterward, turning down a $6 million annual compensation offer from Google. Brockman said he and Sutskever were “joined at the hip,” until Sutskever helped lead Sam Altman’s brief removal as OpenAI CEO in 2023. Sutskever had helped collect evidence to show Altman’s alleged history of deception, and even assisted in drafting a memo to the board. Though they tried to repair the relationship, Sutskever has been estranged from Brockman and Altman ever since, a lawyer for OpenAI said on Monday.

Sutskever, who arrived in the courtroom wearing a dress shirt and slacks, the first male witness to testify without a suit jacket, appeared to be dejected about no longer being involved with OpenAI. (He left and formed a competing AI lab in 2024.) “I felt a great deal of ownership of OpenAI,” he said at one point Monday. “I felt like I put my life into it, and I simply cared for it, and I didn’t want it to be destroyed.”

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Sutskever’s testimony bolstered Musk’s contention that Altman is not the right person to lead an AI lab that could create artificial general intelligence. In addition, Sutskever mentioned how the superalignment team he helped lead, which focused on the safety of future models, was doing the most important work at OpenAI “for the long term.” The team was disbanded in May 2024, shortly after Sutskever left the company.

But Sutskever also added to OpenAI’s defense that Musk never negotiated any special promises when funding the OpenAI nonprofit. Musk’s allegation that such commitments existed and that Altman and Brockman violated them by pursuing a lucrative for-profit arm are the core of his claims in the lawsuit. Sutskever said OpenAI needed “a lot of dollars” to build a computer as big as the human brain, and while seeking donations had some “reasonable success,” becoming a for-profit was the consensus way forward.

“I would describe it as the difference between an ant and a cat,” Sutskever said in response to a question from US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers about how more computing helped OpenAI level up. “If there’s no funding, there is no big computer.”

In the end, Sutskever, a prominent AI scientist who paints in his spare time, testified for about an hour, barely making eye contact with anyone during his time on the witness stand.

Musk’s legal team had unsuccessfully sought to treat Sutskever as a hostile witness because of his financial stake in OpenAI. But Gonzalez Rogers agreed to give attorneys for both Musk and OpenAI extra leeway in their questioning of Sutskever due to what she described as his “unique position” in the case.

The Blip

Much of Monday’s testimony centered around the well-covered events of Altman’s ouster and reinstatement as CEO in November 2023. Nadella described Sutskever and other board members firing Altman as “amateur city” and reiterated that he “never got clarity” about the lack of candor that led to their decision. Nadella also acknowledged during his testimony that he and colleagues discussed 14 potential board members who would join OpenAI if Altman returned, including at least two whom the Microsoft group vetoed and one who later joined. Nadella described Microsoft’s input as suggestions.

Sutskever said he supported firing Altman because an “environment where executives don’t have the correct information” is not “conducive to reach any grand goal.” But he criticized his board colleagues for rushing the process, lacking experience, and accepting “legal advice that wasn’t very good.”

Microsoft’s Bet

In his lawsuit, Musk accused Microsoft of helping to transform OpenAI into a moneymaking machine beyond what Musk intended. Nadella testified that Microsoft had first supported OpenAI with discounted cloud computing but it could no longer afford to do so “once the bill started going up.” A for-profit arm that Microsoft could invest in, in exchange for a potential financial return, was more palatable.

But as the years progressed and the bills kept rising, Microsoft wanted more out of the partnership. Microsoft “will lose 4 bil next year!!!” Nadella exclaimed in an email in 2022 to his lieutenants about the OpenAI partnership. He called for a new agreement ensuring Microsoft would also get AI “know-how” from the startup, which he kept spelling as “Open AI.”

“If we are going to spend this kind of money and not have control of destiny, it makes no sense,” Nadella wrote.

Musk’s attorneys allege Nadella pushed OpenAI to generate revenue, showing text messages from early 2023 in which Nadella told Altman “sooner is best” to offer paying subscriptions for ChatGPT and then asked about the number of signups just a couple of weeks later.

The partnership has worked out well for Microsoft. As of March 2025, Microsoft had generated $9.5 billion in sales from OpenAI, including through an agreement where the research lab sharess 20 percent of its revenue with the tech giant. Microsoft also stands to benefit slightly more than OpenAI’s nonprofit owner if the AI company ever generates profits. Nadella contended the setup was fair given the risks Microsoft took early on and noting that its claim on profits would be even bigger if OpenAI were a regular company.

OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor ended Monday by giving Altman a glowing review. He noted that Altman had recused himself from approving a content and technology deal signed in 2024 with Reddit, in which he holds a stake. Altman did get involved to help “bring down the temperature” when negotiations with Reddit started veering toward a potential lawsuit, Taylor said. “He’s been forthright with me and the other board members and grown OpenAI in ways that have exceeded my expectations,” he added.

Altman is scheduled to tell his side of the story to jurors on Tuesday.

This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ilya-sutskever-testifies-musk-v-altman-trial/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | ANNA MCKIE | MAY 11, 2026 AT 2:40 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Testing for ‘Bad Cholesterol’ Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

There’s a more accurate way of measuring who’s at risk for cholesterol-related health issues. So why don’t more doctors use it?

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

For decades, assessing cholesterol risk has been built around a simple idea: Lower “bad” cholesterol, lower your chance of a heart attack. The test at the center of that approach measures how much low-density lipoprotein, or LDL cholesterol, is circulating in part of the blood. It has shaped everything from clinical guidelines to the widespread use of statins, medications that reduce LDL.

It works. Lowering LDL cholesterol reduces heart attacks, strokes, and early death. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

The LDL cholesterol test measures the amount of cholesterol inside the low-density lipoprotein particles circulating in the bloodstream. Those LDL particles containing the cholesterol can get trapped in artery walls, forming plaques that can eventually block blood flow. As the test measures the amount of cholesterol being carried, not the number of LDL particles themselves, two people can have the same LDL cholesterol level but very different numbers of particles, and therefore different levels of risk.

That gap has pushed researchers toward a different way of measuring risk. Apolipoprotein B, or apoB, reflects the total number of cholesterol-carrying particles in the blood rather than how much cholesterol they contain. A growing body of research suggests it’s a more accurate way of identifying who is at risk and who’s not.

In March 2026, the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology recognized this. Their updated cholesterol guidelines acknowledged apoB as a potentially more precise marker, in line with earlier European recommendations. But they stopped short of recommending apoB as the primary method for testing.

“They review the evidence and rank apoB as superior, but the actual rules of the road continue to prioritize LDL,” says Allan Sniderman, a cardiologist at McGill University.

Sniderman was an author on a 2026 JAMA modeling study that analyzed lifetime outcomes for around 250,000 US adults eligible for statin treatment. Comparing LDL cholesterol, non-HDL cholesterol, and apoB, the study found that using apoB to guide treatment decisions would prevent more heart attacks and strokes than current approaches, while remaining cost-effective.

ApoB testing can be done through standard blood tests. So why has it not filtered into routine care? Not even in Europe, where the guidelines have reflected its usefulness for years.

Part of the answer is inertia. For decades, LDL cholesterol has been both a scientific breakthrough and a public health success story. It is simple, widely understood, and directly linked to treatments that work.

“For 50 years, LDL cholesterol was an amazing discovery,” Sniderman says. “It’s not that it isn’t a good marker. It is a good marker.”

Børge Nordestgaard, president of the European Atherosclerosis Society, agrees that LDL cholesterol remains central for a reason. “The evidence is immense; it’s beyond discussion,” he says. “Statins reduce heart attacks, strokes, and early death through LDL cholesterol lowering.”

That success helped shape a powerful narrative: LDL is “bad cholesterol,” and lowering it saves lives. But that simplicity has also limited how risk is understood.

“The result is patients and physicians know little or nothing about apoB,” Sniderman says.

More recent research suggests that the cholesterol picture is more complex, especially in people already taking statins. Previous studies led by Nordestgaard have shown that in treated patients, high levels of apolipoprotein B and non-HDL cholesterol remain associated with increased risk of heart attacks and mortality, while LDL cholesterol does not. ApoB, in particular, emerged as the most accurate marker.

For Kausik Ray, a cardiologist at Imperial College London, the challenge is not choosing one marker over another, but understanding what each one captures, and what it misses.

“We’re not interested in cholesterol for its own sake,” Ray says. “We’re trying to prevent heart attacks and strokes.”

Cholesterol enters artery walls through apoB-containing particles, but those particles are not all the same. LDL makes up most of them, but lipoprotein(a) and triglyceride-rich particles also play a role. ApoB captures the total number, but not their source.

“Having a very high apoB will pick up more people than just LDL,” Ray says. “But then what you do about that is another matter.”

An elevated apoB could be driven by different underlying problems—high LDL, insulin resistance, obesity, or genetic factors—and each may require a different intervention.

“If you only had apoB, you don’t know whether to focus on LDL-lowering or weight loss or glucose control,” Ray says.

That is where nuance comes in. ApoB may be a better overall signal of risk, but clinicians still need to understand what is driving it. “Because then you can personalize it,” Ray says.

That need for a more detailed picture is already pushing cholesterol testing beyond a single number. Both Ray and Nordestgaard point to lipoprotein(a), a genetically determined form of cholesterol that is rarely measured but can significantly increase risk.

“We’ve got a huge problem in the UK with less than 5 percent of the population being tested,” Ray says. “You only need to measure lipoprotein(a) once in your lifetime.”

Nordestgaard argues that if lipid testing were designed from scratch today, it would not center on a single measure at all.

“You would test your LDL cholesterol, your remnant cholesterol, and your lipoprotein(a),” he says. “You would make three parallel tests.”

The shift is not just about better markers, but earlier detection. Cardiovascular risk builds silently over decades, yet testing often begins only once symptoms or clear risk factors appear, e.g. being male and over 60.

“If you don’t look, you don’t know,” Ray says. “Typically, people in their twenties, thirties, forties are often not going to have things checked, because they feel fine.”

Instead, he says, care is often reactive, which has consequences for prevention.

Beyond apoB, researchers are beginning to explore even more granular ways of measuring risk. Large-scale examining the chemical molecules produced by the body’s metabolism, alongside genetic data, suggest that cardiovascular risk is shaped by a complex interplay of biological pathways, not a single biomarker.

One analysis, for example, found that combining metabolic and genetic information can improve risk prediction beyond traditional cholesterol measures, helping to explain why people with similar profiles can have very different outcomes.

The challenge is translating that complexity into clinical practice. More detailed testing brings higher costs, greater analytical burden, and the need for new evidence to guide treatment decisions.

For researchers, the direction of travel is clear. Medicine must move away from single-number diagnostics toward more layered, data-driven assessments of risk.

For now, apoB sits at the center of that transition: a better population-level measure than LDL cholesterol alone, but still only part of a broader picture.

“This whole concept of normal—we’ve got to get rid of that and explain to people there’s a continuum for all of these things,” Ray says. “There isn’t a black-and-white answer, unfortunately.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/moving-beyond-bad-cholesterol-test/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

CULTURE | ANGELA WATERCUTTER, MADDY VARNER | MAY 11, 2026 AT 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The FCC Received Hundreds of Complaints About Bad Bunny’s ‘Vulgar’ Super Bowl Performance

The complaints, obtained by WIRED, described Bad Bunny’s performance as being overly sexual and protested that the show was in Spanish.

Bad Bunny performs during halftime of Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.Photograph: Darrell Jackson

Even before Bad Bunny took to the field, his Super Bowl halftime performance drew controversy, especially from MAGA influencers upset over the Puerto Rican star’s comments against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the fact that he sings in Spanish.

Following the performance, which was watched by more than 128 million people, those complaints continued—but they were largely focused on perceived vulgarity in the artist’s performance.

Following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from WIRED, the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates communications including broadcast, released 2,155 complaints the agency received about the Super Bowl, most of which were about the halftime show. Many of the complaints focused on the fact that the show was not in English, but a chunk of those people were upset about indecency in the Spanish lyrics. Others expressed discomfort with the dancing they saw onscreen.

"Bad Bunny performed these lyrics live without apparent censorship,” wrote one viewer from Leighton, Alabama. “Dancers engaged in perreo-intense grinding, hip thrusting, and twerking simulating sexmirroring the lyrics [sic]. Cameras captured close-ups of suggestive contact and pelvic motions, amplifying the explicit nature."

Some viewers complained that their children understand Spanish and they didn’t like those kids hearing Bad Bunny’s lyrics. Still more, like one viewer from Indiana, said that even though they didn’t speak Spanish, they looked up translations of the lyrics later and were upset.

An analysis of the FCC complaints over Bad Bunny’s halftime show by WIRED found the top three states for complaints were Texas, Florida, and California, in that order. Four hundred and ninety-seven complaints contained the word “vulgar,” 735 contained the word “Spanish,” and 919 contained Bad Bunny’s name.

The number of complaints pale in comparison to the number of people who watched the historic show, which featured Lady Gaga, a wedding, and a cameo from Maria Antonia Cay, the beloved proprietor of Brooklyn’s Caribbean Social Club. All told, the performance was watched more than 4 billion times on broadcast, YouTube, and social media, according to the NFL, Apple Music, and Roc Nation, which produces the halftime show.

At least one complaint made reference to the immigration status of the performers. “There are illegals on my TV screen,” said the viewer from Raleigh, North Carolina. “I don't understand Spanish, but I think I heard inappropriate language.” (Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, and as such a US citizen.)

A few days after Bad Bunny’s performance in February, Republican lawmakers called for the FCC to investigate the NFL and NBC, which broadcast the event. FCC commissioner Anna Gomez subsequently requested transcripts of the performance, which aired on NBC and found no violations. “I reviewed them carefully, and I found no violation of our rules and no justification for harassing broadcasters over a standard live performance," Gomez told Reuters.

Representatives for Bad Bunny and NBC did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

Some 30 complaints referenced the two men seen dancing with each other during the performance. “On top of incredibly inappropriate songs and lyrics there was also depictions of gay sex openly on the screen and other inappropriate sexual innuendos,” wrote a viewer from Winstead, Connecticut. “This is incredibly inappropriate and not okay when there are CHILDREN WATCHING.”

“I watched this at my local Dave and Busters and saw many parents visibly disturbed during the halftime performance with many leaving the viewing area until the event concluded,” complained one viewer from Incline Village, Nevada.

Thirty of the complaints about the Super Bowl halftime show contain President Trump’s common Truth Social sign-off “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Super Bowl halftime performances frequently receive FCC complaints, often reflecting sociopolitical talking points. While the Bad Bunny complaints seemed reflective of the United States’ discourse over immigration and ICE, Kendrick Lamar’s show last year received 125 complaints, many of them focusing on the performance’s lack of white people amidst right-wing outcry over DEI.

One viewer from Yakima, Washington, pointed out the show, which aired on NBC and streamed on Peacock, “was not reflective of a compliant organization and more of an illegal immigrant takeover to taunt ICE.”

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This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/bad-bunny-super-bowl-fcc-complaints/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

POLITICS | MAKENA KELLY | MAY 11, 2026 AT 1:27 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

There’s an Unhinged New Video Game About Trump and the Iran War

The game, developed by the group of anonymous artists known as Secret Handshake, is available online and in person in Washington, DC.

Courtesy of The Secret Handshake

A new video game about President Donald Trump’s war in Iran features fights with the pope and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. It’s impossible to win, and that’s the point.

The game, Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, was developed by Secret Handshake, an anonymous group of artists behind a handful of satirical works mocking the Trump administration. The group previously installed a gold statue of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein on the National Mall; it portrayed Trump holding onto Epstein in a pose reminiscent of Jack and Rose from the movie Titanic.

The game is available to play online, but three fully functional arcade cabinets are currently installed at the Washington, DC, War Memorial and will remain there for the next few days, Secret Handshake said in a press release on Monday. Near the installation, a plaque reads: “The Trump administration knows that the best way to sell combat is by making it a video game, that’s why they’ve been pumping out the ‘sickest’ Iran War video game hype reels. But why stop at clips when you could go full throttle? Introducing Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, a high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn’t debated, it’s deployed. No briefings, no hesitation; just pure pixelated patriotism. Strap in and play hard, because this game may never end.”

A still from Operation Epic Furious: Strait To Hell.

Courtesy of The Secret Handshake

In the game, which is visually reminiscent of classic role-playing games like Chrono Trigger, Trump is the playable character, who is on a quest to collect barrels of oil and ideas for Truth Social posts with the goal of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and winning the war. The game features appearances from current and former Trump administration officials like FBI director Kash Patel, secretary of state Marco Rubio, vice president JD Vance, and Elon Musk. These officials aid Trump, who builds strength through combat with enemies like the “Iranian schoolgirl” and “DEIyatollah,” during which he can perform special moves like “Mar-a-Lazer.” Throughout the game, Trump’s social media posts do little to move the needle, creating an endless cycle of tasks and threats that ultimately lead nowhere.

Even if the game is unwinnable, players can lose, and do so abruptly. The game opens up in the White House, where Trump can speak with his wife, Melania. “I WAS NEVER ON THE EPSTEIN JET,” she announces with no provocation, before asking, “Did you burn the files yet?” The sequence is seemingly poking fun at a surprise press conference the first lady gave addressing the Epstein Files last month. The player, as Trump, can tell her that they are in the process of burning the files—something they can, in fact, do—or ask if they can hold hands. If the player selects the second option, the game ends.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears in Operation Epic Furious: Strait To Hell.

Courtesy of The Secret Handshake

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/video-game-trump-iran-war/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | JAVIER CARBAJAL | MAY 11, 2026 AT 1:16 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

A New Hantavirus Vaccine Is in the Works

Since 2023, Moderna and Korea University have been developing a new mRNA vaccine for hantavirus. The work has been promising so far, but a finished product isn't likely coming any time soon.

Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

US-based pharmaceutical company Moderna confirmed that it has been working on the development of hantavirus vaccines in collaboration with the Vaccine Innovation Center of Korea University College of Medicine (VIC-K). This comes after an outbreak of hantavirus occurred on a Dutch cruise ship that sailed from Argentina and disembarked its passengers and crew in the Canary Islands on May 10. At least three people aboard the MV Hondius died, and several cases were reported as serious.

Moderna is the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company that perfected messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the announcement that Moderna was developing a hantavirus vaccine using this same technology, the drugmaker's stock rose from $49 on May 7 to $55 the next day. But it is important to note that Moderna did not begin work on immunization in the wake of the outbreak at MV Hondius. In fact, the drugmaker undertook this collaborative project with VIC-K in 2023.

The Fight for a Vaccine

The hantavirus outbreak on the high seas has been one of the big international events of recent weeks, which means that many people around the world have only just learned of the existence of this virus—but it is not a newcomer. In fact, hantavirus has been a known pathogen for decades. Transmitted mainly through exposure to the droppings, urine, or saliva of infected rodents, it can cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (prevalent in Asia or Europe) or hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (more common in the Americas). The wife of actor Gene Hackman may be one of the best known recent people to have died from the latter disease, but it is far from being an exceptional phenomenon. Overall, hantaviruses cause around 50,000 serious and often fatal infections worldwide each year. The so-called New World hantaviruses, such as Andean hantavirus (ANDV), are mostly found in South America and can reach a case fatality rate of up to 40 percent; ANDV is the only hantavirus with documented human-to-human transmission, and just the variant that the World Health Organization identified in MV Hondius.

There is currently no vaccine to prevent ANDV infection, and the Spanish Society of Immunology emphasizes that “there is no licensed hantavirus vaccine in Europe, the United States, or Latin America.” Treatment strategies are oriented to the viral life cycle, host immunological factors, or clinical management of symptoms.

South Korea is the partial exception to this picture. The country reports 300 to 400 cases annually, mainly among young men in their 20s and 30s, and the country's health authorities have included the pathogen on their list of nine priority threats for future pandemic preparedness. A previous-generation inactivated vaccine called Hantavax exists in Korea, but its limited efficacy and production methodology—it's derived from animal brain tissue—keep it far from modern standards.

South Korea was the starting point for Moderna’s most advanced collaboration in this field. The biotech firm and VIC-K signed a research and development agreement in September 2023 under the US company's mRNA Access initiative, a program that provides preclinical-stage mRNA vaccine candidates to academic teams working on emerging or neglected infectious diseases.

The mechanism of the collaboration works like this: The Korean team provides the hantavirus antigenic sequence information and Moderna supplies the corresponding mRNA material. Preliminary results of this early stage research are already available. In February 2025, Park Man-sung's team from the Department of Microbiology confirmed that experimental doses prevented hantavirus infection in mice.

A Vaccine That Could Take Years to Arrive

The distance between a mouse trial and a licensed vaccine for humans is considerable, especially when there is no longer the sense of urgency of the pandemic or the government support of Operation Warp Speed. The vaccine candidate is still in the preclinical phase, meaning it has not begun human trials and faces major funding and regulatory hurdles before that can happen.

In addition, hantaviruses are diverse and have regional variations. Designing a vaccine capable of protecting against multiple strains represents a complex task. Precisely for this reason, this international collaboration seeks to develop a broad-spectrum immunization, effective against more variants than existing vaccines in Asia.

The messenger RNA platform, which during the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated its ability to produce effective vaccines in record time, offers particular advantages over conventional methods of vaccine development: It can adapt quickly to new variants of a virus, does not require live pathogen culture in the laboratory, and is the easiest to scale up industrially

These data, added to the outbreak in the Hondius, boosted the company's shares by almost 20 percent overnight, something that analysts attributed more to the validation of the technological platform than to immediate commercial expectations—especially in a US political context that has become less favorable to mass vaccination campaigns.

For now, the WHO ruled out that the Hondius outbreak represents the beginning of an epidemic, and stressed that human-to-human transmission occurs only with very close contact. But the episode reminds us of a lesson from the Covid-19 pandemic: The best time to develop a vaccine against a dangerous virus is before that virus becomes a global emergency.

It is noteworthy that Moderna is also developing mRNA vaccines against avian influenza, noroviruses, and other pathogens considered priorities for pandemic preparedness. With respect to hantavirus, other agencies are working on vaccine development, most notably the long-standing work of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

This story first appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-hantavirus-vaccine-is-in-the-works/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | REECE ROGERS | MAY 11, 2026 AT 1:06 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Update Your iPhone Now for Better Encrypted Messaging With Android

As part of the iOS 26.5 update, Apple’s Messages app can now encrypt texts between some iPhone and Android smartphones.

Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Last year’s rollout of iOS 26 was striking, with the translucent Liquid Glass aesthetic. Apple has since iterated on its smartphone’s software, though some users continue to voice their displeasure. If you’ve held out, this latest version—iOS 26.5—includes a new feature that’s worth updating your smartphone for right now: end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging.

Apple rolled out the latest version of its iPhone operating system on Monday. Now, if an iPhone owner sends or receives green bubbles, aka RCS texts, in Apple’s Messages app with an Android owner, those chats may be encrypted. “Conversations labeled as encrypted are encrypted end-to-end, so messages can’t be read while they’re sent between devices,” reads an early version of the settings page. Apple is launching this feature as a beta, and its current availability depends on your device and carrier.

Texts between Apple devices in the Messages app, aka iMessages, have been encrypted since launch, but chats with Android devices were not protected in the same way. Apple recently upgraded non-iMessages from SMS to RCS and modernized the backend—enabling richer features when texting anyone on Android, like higher-resolution images, read receipts, and typing indicators—but these chats still lacked encryption options. The iOS 26.5 upgrade fixes this with cross-platform encryption in the iPhone’s default texting app.

How Do I Know If It’s On?

After you update your iPhone, the setting should be enabled by default if it's available on your device and carrier. Check by opening your Settings app, then going to the Apps and Messages tabs. Scroll down until you see RCS Messaging under the Text Messaging options and click on it. This is the page where you can see if the beta version of end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging is on—the toggle will show green if it's enabled.

Now, you can check what type of chat a conversation is by opening your Messages app and locating the gray text displayed in that text box at the bottom of the screen. It’ll either read iMessage, Text Message - RCS, or Text Message - SMS. You may see a small lock icon as part of the message thread when starting a new RCS conversation after this update. Conversations labeled as “SMS” will not be changed.

RCS messaging is not available for every carrier, though the major US carriers—like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T—all support the texting protocol. Not sure if yours is covered? Check out Apple’s support page for a full list of feature availability by carrier.

What Else Is New Here?

The other changes in iOS 26.5 are fairly minor. Based on details from the beta release, ads are likely to start appearing in the Maps app as search suggestions when you look up a restaurant or someplace else. Changes to the Maps app also include the addition of “Suggested Places,” which recommend spots to hit up based on your searches and nearby trends. The latest iOS also includes Pride-themed wallpapers, since June is right around the corner.

While it's worth updating your iPhone to iOS 26.5 for the more secure messaging features, more sweeping changes to the smartphone software will arrive in the fall. Apple, if it follows the pattern of past releases, is expected to unveil the fully revamped version, iOS 27, in June at its WWDC developer conference, making the update available for everyone to download later this year.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/update-your-iphone-now-for-better-encrypted-messaging-with-android/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | AARIAN MARSHALL | MAY 11, 2026 AT 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Papa Johns Is Getting Into Drone Delivery—but Not for Pizza

A new collaboration with Alphabet’s Wing will only deliver sandwiches. It demonstrates the tricky parts of taking to the sky.

Courtesy of Wing

Starting today, eager customers of the US pizza restaurant chain Papa Johns living in one corner of southern North Carolina will have the opportunity to receive their food from the sky, thanks to a new collaboration with Alphabet’s drone company, Wing. But Papa Johns’ signature pizzas won’t be on offer. Instead, drone-loving North Carolinians will have to choose between three kinds of sandwiches, a newer product for the fast-food chain: Philly cheesesteak, chicken bacon ranch, or steak and mushroom varieties.

Drone deliveries are popping up in more communities across the US and the world. Questions about the long-term economics and regulatory picture around unmanned aerial vehicles persist, but Wing boasts partnerships with Walmart, Panera, and DoorDash and is delivering through the sky to customers in four metro areas: Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston. (In 2019, Wing received the US Federal Aviation Administration’s first certificate allowing a drone delivery company to operate in the country.) Competing drone companies, including Zipline, Amazon Prime Air, and Flytrex, fly packages, medical supplies, and Chipotle burritos in select communities across countries like Ghana, Japan, and the US.

But until very recently, drone operators have struggled to fly full-size pizzas. For companies hoping to break into the food delivery space, this is unfortunate: 11 percent of the US population eats a slice on any given day, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In a fast-diversifying restaurant industry, getting them to customers is still big business. But the realities of physics, engineering, and the restaurant business conspire to make pizzas a challenge for drones.

Flying Pizzas

Traditionally, pizza is the experimental tech delivery of choice. The familiar and cheap cheese-sauce-bread combo has been loaded onto self-driving cars and autonomous sidewalk delivery vehicles and has been assembled by robots. It’s a fast and satisfying option, especially for busy families tight on time. And theoretically, a great fit for automated drones, among one of the faster delivery options—people love fresh, piping-hot pizza.

But transporting one by drone requires some extra work, says Wing CEO Adam Woodworth. “Pizza comes in a very different box, with a big, flat surface area,” he says. They’re not naturally aerodynamic. Also, “you don't want a pizza tilted.”

Wing’s relatively lightweight drones are engineered to carry three specific package sizes; right now, pizza boxes aren’t one of them. Woodworth says a new design is on the horizon. “I want to see pizzas coming at me from the sky,” he says.

Flytrex, an Israel-based drone delivery company, announced late last month that it had finally solved the problem. In collaboration with rival pizza chain Little Caesars, the company began delivering via drone up to two large pizzas (16 inches each), plus sodas and bread, in Wylie, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. The leap comes courtesy of a much bigger new drone, capable of carrying up to 8.8 pounds for four miles.

Courtesy of Flytrex

Unlike Wing’s more conventional flying machine, which resembles a traditional airplane studded with extra propellers, Flytrex’s Sky2 looks more like a flying spider. When pizza is its passenger, a square delivery bag dangles from an attached hook. It took Flytrex two years to execute what cofounder Amit Regev calls the “slightly unique design.” A flat, winglike net attached to the drone helps keep the pizza level as it flies through the air.

The drone has been successfully delivering pizzas in Texas for about five months, the company reports, with hot packages arriving at their delivery spots an average of 4.5 minutes after takeoff. “It’s not the sexiest drone, but it gets it done,” Regev says.

Droning by the Numbers

The bigger challenge of flying pizzas, or any other low-cost food delivery option, isn’t the physics, but the economics. Drone companies need to figure out how to keep down per-delivery costs even as they’re limited by payload constraints (the drones can’t carry too much), their vehicles’ range, weather challenges, and various regulatory hoops. Restaurants need to figure out how to create flying-friendly packaging, train their workers to deal with drone deliveries, and think through the physical space needed to get the machines in and out.

Regev says the decade-old company found through years of trial and error that it needs to depend on retail workers, not its own specially trained drone delivery operators, to make the whole thing work financially. The process needs to be “simple, simple,” he says, including as much automation as possible. “We spend a lot of time on Excel sheets,” he says.

Papa Johns’ partnership with Wing will start at a single franchise in Indian Trail, North Carolina, outside of Charlotte, though the chain intends to expand the delivery option, according to chief digital and technology officer Kevin Vasconi. Part of that expansion will be training workers on the adjusted “workflows” needed to get drone deliveries out the door. “We have an internal business case that pencils out,” Vasconi says. Drones might be especially helpful at food rush hours, he says, when workers and delivery drivers are pushing hard to get everything out the door.

Vasconi also thinks drones are just fun. “It’s a surprise-and-delight kind of feature,” he says. (Customers will be able to opt out of drone delivery if they choose.) “Ideally, we’ll get to being able to offer the full menu.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/papa-johns-is-getting-into-drone-delivery-but-its-not-flying-pizza/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | MOLLY TAFT | MAY 11, 2026 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Chevron Wants a School District Tax Break for a Data Center Power Plant

The move could save the oil company hundreds of millions in Texas, even as state lawmakers start looking at reining in incentives for data centers.

Photograph: Hugo Kurk/Getty Images

A major oil company is seeking a state tax break in Texas worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build a massive power plant. The energy won’t be going to residential customers, though. Instead, the gas plant will be used to power a data center whose eventual tenant could be Microsoft.

Chevron subsidiary Energy Forge One has filed an application with the State Comptroller’s board to obtain a tax abatement for a power plant it’s building in West Texas. In late January, the comptroller’s office made a recommendation to support the application’s approval—the first such approval under the program for a power plant intended solely for data center use.

In March, following news reports that Microsoft was looking into purchasing power from the Energy Forge project, Chevron said that it had entered into an “exclusivity agreement” with Microsoft and Engine 1, an investment fund involved in the project. In January, Microsoft pledged to be a “good neighbor” in communities where it is building data centers, including promising to pay a “full and fair share of local property taxes.”

The potential tax abatement for the project comes as big tech companies are battling rising public fury about data centers and electricity costs. It also comes as lawmakers start to cast a more critical eye on ballooning incentives for data centers, some of which have cost some states—including Texas—$1 billion or more each year.

Chevron spokesperson Paula Beasley told WIRED in an email that all tax incentives under consideration for the Energy Forge project “apply solely to the power generation facility” to “support new energy infrastructure, and do not extend to any future data center facilities that may be served.” Beasley also said that there is currently “no definitive agreement” with Microsoft for this power plant.

“Microsoft is in discussions with Chevron,” Rima Alaily, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and general counsel for infrastructure, said in a statement to WIRED. “No commercial terms have been finalized, and there is no definitive agreement at this time.”

Chevron is applying for a tax abatement for the project under Texas’ Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) Act. Passed in 2023, the program is intended to incentivize businesses to build large infrastructure projects in the state in exchange for guarantees to bring jobs and revenue. Accepted projects get a cap set on the amount of taxable property they can be charged through local school district taxes.

The Pecos-Barstow-Toyah school board approved the project’s application at a meeting in February. The state pays for the tax abatement, so the school district itself does not lose out on any money.

According to documents from the state, the Chevron project could net more than $227 million in savings for the company over a 10-year period, depending on the eventual size of the project and investment. The application says the plant will provide “over 25 permanent, full-time jobs,” though there’s no requirement to do so because it’s considered an electricity generation facility.

The planned gas plant won’t connect to the grid, instead providing “electricity for direct consumption by a data center,” according to its application. So-called behind-the-meter gas plants have become increasingly popular for data center developers facing yearslong waits to connect to the grid. According to data from nonprofit Global Energy Monitor, the US at the start of the year had nearly 100 gigawatts of gas-fired power in the development pipeline solely to power data centers, with several more massive gas projects announced since the data was published.

A WIRED analysis of less than a dozen power plants being constructed to explicitly serve data centers, including the Chevron project, found that these power plants are permitted to emit more greenhouse gases than many small- to medium-size countries. The Energy Forge plant alone could emit more than 11.5 million tons of CO_2 equivalent annually—more than the country of Jamaica emitted in 2024. Beasley told WIRED that the plant “is being designed to comply with applicable environmental regulations, including all applicable federal and state air quality standards.”

West Texas is a major fossil fuel production hub, which has helped it emerge as a hot spot for both data centers and behind-the-meter gas development. However, Energy Forge’s JETI application notes that the site is one of six across the US under consideration. Without tax incentives, the other sites would be “more attractive locations” to build a gas plant, according to its application, and “Texas would lose the opportunity to attract billions of dollars in new tax revenues.”

This type of claim on applications for tax abatements is pretty routine, says Nathan Jensen, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin. An earlier version of the JETI program, originally created to draw more manufacturing jobs to Texas, handed out incentives to businesses with little oversight, often giving millions in tax breaks to companies already planning on building in the state. While the JETI program significantly curbs the problems and excesses of the old program, Jensen says that the guardrails for a project like Chevron’s are still relatively low.

The JETI tax incentive isn’t the only tax break the power plant could receive. According to county documents, the Energy Forge project could also be eligible for a local incentive that exempts all or part of a property’s value from taxes for up to a decade, under another part of the Texas tax code.

Developers have taken advantage of other tax abatements across the US. A report released in April from Good Jobs First, a corporate watchdog group, found that at least three states—including Texas—are losing more than $1 billion in revenue each year from data center sales tax abatements.

A bipartisan group of politicians in Texas, including Republican lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, have expressed mounting concern about the impact tax breaks for data centers are having on state coffers. In March, Patrick ordered the legislature to “study the cost and consequences” of the sales tax exemption—which the state projects could balloon to $3 billion by 2029—and “make recommendations providing safeguards to ensure that Texans benefit from data center investment.”

In January, Microsoft rolled out a series of pledges on its website, promising to “add to the tax base” in communities where it operates. “We won’t ask local municipalities to reduce their local property tax rates when we buy land or propose a data center presence,” the pledge states. The company did not respond to questions about whether this pledge extends to projects owned by other entities that the company intends to use to power its data centers, or to data center developers that may be building data centers in which Microsoft will be a tenant.

Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, notes that Microsoft’s pledge doesn’t mention tax abatements (the amount of value a person or business’s property is assessed at), which are different from tax rates (the number used to calculate the amount of taxes owed for the property).

“If they don't say, ‘We will refuse tax abatements,’ then they've got their fingers crossed behind their back,” LeRoy says of Microsoft’s pledge.

Tax breaks given to projects like data centers are difficult to track across states: the Good Jobs First report found that 14 states don’t disclose how much revenue they might be losing on data center abatements. As behind-the-meter power becomes an increasingly popular option for data center developers, though, it’s not clear how widespread the practice of asking for tax abatements for these specific facilities is.

There are no other behind-the-meter power plants currently being funded by the Texas JETI program or in the application pipeline. Data centers are specifically excluded from being eligible for the JETI program.

Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and a climate official under President Biden, is the author of a recent report that suggests ways to use the AI boom to incentivize tech companies to help pay for needed upgrades to the grid. Tax abatements, the report says, should be restructured to make sure that data center builders connect power to the grid, making behind-the-meter gas options less attractive. Flegal also advocates for permitting reform to make sure that more clean energy can get added to the grid as quickly as possible.

“We should fix our tax code so it's much more progressive, and we should tax the shit out of these people and use federal money to plan and build a grid that benefits all of us,” she says. “Alas, that is not where we are.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/chevron-wants-school-district-tax-break-data-center-power-plant-texas/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | SHEON HAN | MAY 11, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company

There’s a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia—and it has nothing to do with hardware.

Illustration: Aaron Fernandez

Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I’m afraid I must talk about “moats.” Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company’s competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly leaked from Google, titled “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI,” fretted that open-source AI would pillage Big Tech’s castle.

A few years on, the castle walls remain safe. Apart from a brief bout of panic when DeepSeek first appeared, open-source AI models have not vastly outperformed proprietary models. Still, none of the frontier labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google—has a moat to speak of.

The company that does have a moat is Nvidia. CEO Jensen Huang has called it his most precious “treasure.” It is not, as you might assume for a chip company, a piece of hardware. It’s something called CUDA. What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI.

CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say “KOO-duh.” So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization.

Here’s a simple example. Let’s say we task a machine with filling out a 9×9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one by one. But a GPU with nine cores can assign tasks so that each core takes a different column—one from 1×1 to 1×9, another from 2×1 to 2×9, and so on—for a ninefold speed gain. Modern GPUs can be even cleverer. For example, if programmed to recognize commutativity—7×9 = 9×7—they can avoid duplicate work, reducing 81 operations to 45, nearly halving the workload. When a single training run costs a hundred million dollars, every optimization counts.

Nvidia’s GPUs were originally built to render graphics for video games. In the early 2000s, a Stanford PhD student named Ian Buck, who first got into GPUs as a gamer, realized their architecture could be repurposed for general high-performance computing. He created a programming language called Brook, was hired by Nvidia, and, with John Nickolls, led the development of CUDA. If AI ushers in the age of a permanent white-collar underclass and autonomous weapons, just know that it would all be because someone somewhere playing Doom thought a demon’s scrotum should jiggle at 60 frames per second.

CUDA is not a programming language in itself but a “platform.” I use that weasel word because, not unlike how The New York Times is a newspaper that’s also a gaming company, CUDA has, over the years, become a nested bundle of software libraries for AI. Each function shaves nanoseconds off single mathematical operations—added up, they make GPUs, in industry parlance, go brrr.

A modern graphics card is not just a circuit board crammed with chips and memory and fans. It’s an elaborate confection of cache hierarchies and specialized units called “tensor cores” and “streaming multiprocessors.” In that sense, what chip companies sell is like a professional kitchen, and more cores are akin to more grilling stations. But even a kitchen with 30 grilling stations won’t run any faster without a capable head chef deftly assigning tasks—as CUDA does for GPU cores.

To extend the metaphor, hand-tuned CUDA libraries optimized for one matrix operation are the equivalent of kitchen tools designed for a single job and nothing more—a cherry pitter, a shrimp deveiner—which are indulgences for home cooks but not if you have 10,000 shrimp guts to yank out. Which brings us back to DeepSeek. Its engineers went below this already deep layer of abstraction to work directly in PTX, a kind of assembly language for Nvidia GPUs. Let’s say the task is peeling garlic. An unoptimized GPU would go: “Peel the skin with your fingernails.” CUDA can instruct: “Smash the clove with the flat of a knife.” PTX lets you dictate every sub-instruction: “Lift the blade 2.35 inches above the cutting board, make it parallel to the clove’s equator, and strike downward with your palm at a force of 36.2 newtons.”

You can begin to see why CUDA is so valuable to Nvidia—and so hard for anyone else to touch. Tuning GPU performance is a gnarly problem. You can’t just conscript some tender-footed undergrad on Market Street, hand them a Claude Max plan, and expect them to hack GPU kernels. Writing at this level is a grindsome enterprise—unless you’re a cracker-jack programmer at DeepSeek.

A disclosure: In previous Machine Readable columns, I was already familiar with the languages I was analyzing. Not so here. In the interest of maintaining this standard, I decided to spend a day with CUDA. It ruined my afternoon.

A simple matrix multiplication that usually takes me three lines in PyTorch—a popular machine-learning framework—took me 50-plus lines in CUDA. Wringing out the last drop of performance, it turns out, is an admirable but tedious business. Having dipped my toe in the moat, I can report that it is indeed deep and forbidding.

CUDA’s dominance is built not just on the quality of its ecosystem but on a lock-in effect. Because modern machine-learning frameworks are built on CUDA, which crucially runs on Nvidia chips, AMD’s chips underperform even when they have more cores and memory. Comparing chips by spec sheets is like comparing race cars by cylinder count, whereas real performance can only be measured on the track.

A second disclosure: I intended to benchmark two chips, but there was no way to expense an Nvidia H100 and an AMD MI300X without landing on Condé Nast’s blacklist. Instead, you will have to take the word of independent researchers who found that even with better specs on paper, AMD was outmatched by Nvidia.

Nvidia’s edge in software might be that, unusual for a chip company, it hires more software engineers than hardware engineers. If I were running AMD, I might follow suit. (But who’s asking me?)

Every year, there are new hopefuls attempting to drain Nvidia’s moat, only to drown in it. OpenCL, an open standard backed by a consortium that included Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm, was a kind of Android manqué to CUDA’s iOS. It barely gained traction.

Meanwhile, AMD’s answer to CUDA, ROCm, is an even worse name than CUDA—is it pronounced “rock cum”? (Forget about hiring more programmers—get a new marketing team.) It has also has been so plagued by bugs and compatibility issues that its subreddit reads like a support group.

Let’s not forget Intel. While it’s easy to brush it off as a failing chipmaker, its recent history reveals it’s also a failing software company. In a last spasm at relevance, it launched oneAPI, but as of 2026, we know for dead sure that CUDA still reigns. If there’s any challenger, it’s Modular, led by Chris Lattner, the legendary language designer who counts among his creations Apple’s Swift and LLVM.

But the open secret is that, much as theoretical physicists cannot change a tire to save their lives, most AI researchers can’t so much as write a single line of C++. There are very few good GPU kernel engineers alive, and many of them are employed by Nvidia. Long before AI researchers started trafficking in clout, these engineers were diligently working on CUDA without kudos. Even trusty coding agents still hobble through kernel code.

Nvidia, in the end, may be closer to Apple than to AMD or Intel. It’s a great hardware company because it’s a software company. Apple’s moat against Android was never just the iPhone but the ecosystem: iOS, the App Store, and its developers. Sure, you can fold a Samsung Galaxy in half, but do you really want to use Samsung Pay? In the meantime, the industry will have to live with Nvidia’s offensive price tags.

This is the first of a three-part Machine Readable series on AI-enabling languages.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/cuda-proves-nvidia-is-a-software-company/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

THE BIG STORY | RUTH FOWLER | MAY 11, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI

For screenwriters like me—and job seekers all over—AI gig work is the new waiting tables. In eight months, I’ve done 20 of these soul-crushing contracts for five different platforms. It’s bad.

My name on the platform is ri611. Or h924092b12ee797f, depending on who’s paying me.

I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot’s tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I’ll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops. I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. I work for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1.

In my “other” career, I am a Hollywood writer and showrunner. I create prime-time TV, usually featuring a middle-class white lady having the worst day of her life, with some salt-of-the-earth police interference to raise the stakes. You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t.

In 2023, Hollywood went on strike, partly to keep the studios from replacing writers and actors with AI. When the strike ended after nearly five months, the entertainment-industry carousel never gained back its momentum. In early 2025—when yet another producer defaulted on a six-figure check I was owed for creating a TV show—I began to look around for some way to keep the wolves at bay.

AI training wasn’t on my radar until a comment in an unofficial Writers Guild of America Facebook group caught my attention. The page was filled with posts from unemployed writers struggling with debt and panicking about their income, begging for tips and ideas and survival strategies: “I am stressed and anxiety-ridden … simply trying to breathe” … “ISO food bank/pantry info” … “Hey, so what kind of part-time jobs are you all getting?” I’ve been working for this AI training company called Mercor, one woman typed in the comments. They’re paying 150 an hour for writers. It’s easy money.

I was down for some easy money. I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks to clean my apartment, a feat that AI had not yet figured out. How hard could it be to teach a machine to take my job? I was naive enough to believe that this industry wanted what we had to offer—not just our skills, but us.

I was wrong. Whatever this industry is, it is not easy money.

I got my first contract as an AI trainer in September 2025 after filling out 10 job applications, laboring for 20 (unpaid) hours on numerous tests to prove my capabilities, and being interviewed by an AI recruiter agent embodied by a flickering light on my screen. I was asked what I thought of a mediocre AI-generated couple of paragraphs about a soldier in the trenches sniffing a lavender-scented letter. Using all of the skills I had acquired with my English literature degree from Cambridge, I said it was shit. Six weeks later, I was hired as a “generalist” data annotator (below “expert” but well above entry level) at $52 an hour.

Once I’d passed the background check, I was made to install various apps and Slack channels and Airtables and payment portals and Google whatnots. After pinballing between them and a Zoom room where five unseen people hung out all day to counsel the legions of the confused, I was off and running.

My first task was to read a conversation between a user and “the assistant,” one of the major large-language chatbot models. Using a “bible” that dictated how the assistant should respond, I was to assess the chat as a success or a failure. The prompts were quirky and sad and heartbreaking. Are my feelings justified? Is this person’s behavior acceptable? Am I lovable? The AI responses belonged to an era when the assistant would happily tell you that you definitely had autism, your dad was clearly bipolar. I wondered if the user knew they had opted into sharing their private agonies as training data. After grading the assistant’s response on a scale of 1 to 5, I was to enter a justification for my verdict.

Our project manager, an intrepid 22-year-old recent university graduate who said he had intended to get into investment banking but failed, was in charge of about 10 unfriendly “team leaders” and “data managers.” Every day at a set time we would have Zoom office hours where we could discuss the complexities of our tasks. Our creative skills and our special minds were invaluable to this very important project! But it would be great if—in typing up justifications for our scores—we could keep our special minds on a tight leash and subordinate them to our ability to copy and paste verbatim from the scoring guidelines. Going off-piste with creativity, original thought, or fancy language might throw the model off.

I made friends with a handsome Swedish man who lived in the Nordic wilderness with his husband and numerous mammals. He had been on the project about a month longer than I had, and he kindly walked me through the platform and our employer’s expectations, which had been astonishingly vague despite the insistence that this work was urgent, important, and relevant, and must be guarded with the utmost secrecy. Handsome Swede and I exchanged contact information and shared dog pictures. The project was meant to be 20 hours a week for two months. I clocked 10 hours a week for two weeks, with constant stops and starts, before the project was summarily unplugged one morning with no notice. “Sorry guys,” typed University Graduate. “I had no idea this was coming.”

The Slacks and Airtables and office hours and Google documents were swiftly disbanded within a couple of hours. The project was over.

Illustration: Anastasia Kraynyuk

Most of the contracting companies that provide labor to AI firms advertise themselves to workers as offering the luxury of choice: “Contractors on Mercor’s platform choose when and how much to work,” sounding a common industry refrain. “How they participate on the platform is up to them.” Set hours and times are for boomers. Work on your own terms! Early on, I had this sales pitch bluntly reframed to me by a team leader in a midnight Slack message. I should not rely on this work, she snapped. I should not expect anything from it. These are not jobs, these are “tasks,” and we are “taskers.” I should think of tasking as a bonus. It is a “second job,” Team Leader typed.

She was so unpleasant she had to be human.

Four weeks after my first gig ended, I was offered an “expert” role, this time at $70 an hour. An “expert” is someone who usually has a higher degree, often a master’s, and significant work experience in their field, be it real estate, neurology, linguistics, history—or journalism. (“Expert” projects, I would learn, were typically given multisyllabic names from dead languages. Projects involving the minimum-wage grunt work of annotating tended to be named after small woodland creatures or celestial bodies. It is either a sign of my accomplishments, or my severe ADHD, that I was apparently a match for both.)

Work on Project Dead Language would start within a week, we were told. I went through another onboarding process. I joined another Slack. I signed up to another Airtable, which failed to indicate in any way whether the sign-up had been successful, prompting me to sign up a couple more times in confusion, before I noticed an all-caps message in the Slack exhorting me: DO NOT SIGN UP FOR THE AIRTABLE MORE THAN ONCE!!

A week passed, and “Phase 2” of the project failed to start.

Another week.

Another.

Thanksgiving arrived. Heartened by the prospect of extra cash, I drove six hours to Yosemite so that I could sit in an expensive cabin with my child and we could ignore each other in idyllic surroundings. Still Phase 2 did not arrive.

I had erroneously assumed that this new project would net me maybe $500 to $1,000 a week for a couple of months before Christmas. By December 1, I had earned just 180 of your finest American dollars.

Project dead language eventually launched not long before Christmas, four weeks after I’d joined. It was 9 pm on a Monday night. The doom pervading the Slack evaporated instantly and was replaced by panic over various technical problems. Turns out a bunch of people had, like me, registered for the Airtable multiple times over. None of us could access the tasks. By the time our tech issues were resolved 24 hours later, the work had run out. The tasks were finite. The smug few who’d evaded glitches had snatched them all up.

This abrupt hiring, firing, stopping, starting, abandonment, and rapid depletion of projects, was, I would learn, commonplace. A friend we shall call Jonathan, a mid-level TV writer who’d worked on several big streaming shows, was employed as an Expert Creative Writer. He was paid $150 an hour to evaluate scripts for OpenAI. He said it was all “a bit Hunger Games,” meaning he slept when they slept, and curried favor among his sponsors, also known as “TLs”—the team leaders who seemingly had the ability to hire and fire us at will. “It feels like we are all in a fishbowl waiting for our human masters to drop some food in a big aquarium,” someone wrote plaintively in a Slack for another project I joined that yielded barely any work. “And then, only the ones who are fast enough to swim to the top can eat.”

The more this became my new normal, the more I adjusted to the creaking lurch and giddy whiplash of the job. While we lounged in unpaid stasis waiting for an email to herald the arrival of work, we would be urged on by our team leaders and their exclamation points. Here they are at 3 am Eastern time with an update on why our Slack access has been revoked and why we need to change our password for the 17th time! There they are again at 11 pm with another energetic exhortation that the project will start any day now! At 7 am they’re back with the news that The Client is just finishing up Phase 1! At 2:27 pm: If you were a pizza, what kind of pizza would you be? Cue smiley face emoji. Fist emoji. Pizza emoji.

This would continue indefinitely. All unpaid.

At 7 pm on a random weekday, I’d walk in after a long day on set, having picked up the middle schooler from basketball. I’d take the dog for a walk, filter through the mail, think about throwing together some ingredients for dinner, when suddenly my phone would vibrate. My Slack would fill up with GO TEAM GO messages from someone who was just out of college, someone who has no idea that across the decades, people have died trying to establish labor laws that protect workers from the exact same conditions that he is now responsible for perpetuating, accompanied by numerous rocket ship emoji reactions. Our fearless leader tells us that it is IMPERATIVE that we complete our first task within 24 hours. If we do not, we will be at risk of being off-boarded! But you can work when you like! But if you don’t work now the tasks may be gone by the time you wake up tomorrow! LET’S GET THIS ACROSS THE FINISH LINE!

I abandon the meal. Retrieve some two-day-old pasta from an ancient Tupperware that has now been stained a dull, opaque orange. Throw it in the microwave. Slink over to the laptop. I had hoped for an early night. My middle schooler asks for help with his math homework. I snap not now, call Dad, too focused on the hunt to pay attention to the humans in my life. Log in. Start the timer. The Slack is exploding. It is a frenzy of caffeinated, taurinated, and probably high-as-fuck humans taking precious time to post jubilant updates about the precious work that has been bestowed upon us by The Client. An all-nighter is a prerequisite. The endorphins, possibly helped by amphetamines, are flowing freely. There will be no tasks in the morning. We must reap now, regardless of sleep, family, careers, and other trifles. There is nothing now but the project, and the task. Go Team Go.

We lock the fuck in. Desperate, warm, frail, finite human bodies with no overheads, fast internet, and a tolerance for less-than-ideal conditions.

We task through the night.

Illustration: Anastasia Kraynyuk

In the reddit groups dedicated to people who work for AI contractor companies, an atmosphere of fear and paranoia pervades. I sought out these forums soon after my first encounters with the industry, because I felt it was my responsibility to incite others with the rage, disappointment, and betrayal I had experienced waiting for work that often never appeared.

Turns out I did not need to incite anything. People were pissed.

Thousands of Mercor employees making $21 an hour on Project Musen had been fired in November 2025, and immediately rehired on an identical project, Nova, at a significantly lower rate—$16 an hour. Despite the insistent bleating that this was a “second job,” for plenty of people on Reddit it was their only job. Losing five bucks an hour hurt them badly. Not only that, they’d made friends, started a Discord together, knew each other’s names, found some kind of community. Plus the project had been disbanded just before Thanksgiving, for chrissakes.

People who had previously felt paralyzed by their NDA’s began to talk. Helena, the conflict-avoidant moderator of the Mercor subreddit, worked overtime deleting furious rants from aggrieved workers who delighted in dropping names of the “secret projects”—something explicitly banned by the non-disclosure agreement every tasker must sign before being hired as an Independent Contractor.

Elsewhere, on another project, Handsome Swede was not faring well. Felled by Covid, he told his team leaders he could not make the minimum weekly requirement and was swiftly fired. He entered the melee once again to find yet another project.

The wages were dropping week by week. When I first started scrolling the contractor jobs in early 2025, companies like Mercor, Handshake, Turing, Task-ify and Outlier were offering $150 an hour for “experts,” $35 to $75 an hour for “generalists.” Today, Mercor says the average hourly rate on its platform is $105. But in my searches across the industry near the start of 2026, the experts were often getting $50 an hour, and the entry-level grunt workers were getting as low as $16 —less than California minimum wage. Contracts were now referred to as “sprints.” The work had to be done, asap, as fast as possible, for employment that might last 24 hours. The urgency was paramount, self-important, and annoying as fuck.

The burnout has led many taskers to turn to the courts. Several lawsuits have alleged that Mercor is misclassifying its workers as independent contractors, pointing out that the demands of the job—frequent onboarding, infinite retraining, the need to check email and Slack several times a day, to be on call and perform at very short notice, the expectation that taskers will complete a certain number of hours every week—are indications of employment. But compared to regular employees, contractors receive almost no workplace protections against unpredictable scheduling, prohibitive work hours, denial of breaks, or retaliation from employers. Which feels like a big risk if, like me, you are tired of the bullshit and complain. Loudly. Often.

Christmas day came. I had not earned the additional $3-5K I thought Project Dead Language would have netted, and my bank account hovered around $14. Mired in existential panic and with only enough money to live off cereal, I accepted two different invites to work on an enormous $16-an-hour project that was in its final stages. It employed several thousand annotators across multiple platforms to perform incredibly boring objectives. The entire enterprise had the feeling of a bustling refugee camp that had been functioning long enough to cover essential needs, but not to be, like, comfortable. I’d already completed most of the onboarding steps. The most important thing, they emphasized in the literature, is to get on Slack.

I couldn’t locate the Slack.

I called the Zoom helpline.

“Do you just hang out here all day?” I asked a faceless man while, in another square, an elderly woman peered suspiciously into her camera wearing a nasal cannula attached to an oxygen tank, set against a background of palm trees. “Pretty much,” snorted the faceless man. “I hope they pay you well,” I said sincerely. “They don’t,” he responded, before informing me that I was already a member of the Slack channel I had spent two days waiting to join, and that I had missed five essential onboarding quizzes in a document I had failed to read.

I was dispensed with in three minutes. “What about me?” rasped the elderly lady through her tubes. “I’ve been here for 15 minutes now.”

I dove into the Slack channel of which I was already a member. Spirits were high. A badge had been promised to the top 20 percent of performers. This honor would be displayed on their profile, and potentially lead to quicker employment and less downtime on the next project. The badge was causing consternation: Who would get it? Who might be erroneously deprived of it? Because it might lead to something. The badge would validate—all of this.

I located the quizzes I’d failed to complete, worked my way through them, and then waited. Apparently, I would be granted access within 24 hours. After 24 hours came and went, I reread the complex onboarding document, which said I needed to check in at the Zoom again. The faceless Zoom team informed me that I had screwed up. There was another quiz I needed to complete. They could not grant me access. I burst into tears.

They removed me from the Zoom, and blocked me from reentering.

Twenty-four hours later, I was removed from the project.

Once you have overcome your initial shock at conversing with a mellifluous, perky, female AI recruiter with a two-syllable name, it becomes easy to do so again, and again, and again. This is, in part, why legions of people are lured to apply to work for an AI recruiting company like drunken sailors to a siren. “Zara” doesn’t care if you’re in your car wearing your pajamas, digging out a stubborn booger, swamped in a plush sherpa wearable blanket. You can even tell her to eff off, inform her that you’re practicing your emotional voice skills, and watch her process this; a humming, flickering light in the middle of the screen. “You are using language and prosody that indicates irritation,” she states blandly.

In the real world, if you look promising for a particular job, you might be fortunate enough to get called in for an interview. In the world of AI, an interview is standard fare for everyone. This has prompted some people to suspect—despite companies’ assurances to the contrary—that the interview process itself is a means of harvesting data, a form of free AI training. But we persist because there are still enough braggarts on Reddit posting about making “life-changing money” that we think we might actually land the job that pays $150 an hour for something not too boring.

By February 2026 I’d been on Project A, a video-annotation gig, for five weeks: a lifetime in the AI training world. I had beaten the system by eliminating my social life so that I could task every free second of my existence. I also scrolled through thousands of videos to locate the most absurd, complex “edge” tasks: videos featuring speakers with accents so thick and regional that no one apart from a fellow Celt could decipher them. The audio was often so distorted it hurt to listen: a cacophony of excruciating, screeching dissonance. By doing the tasks no one else wanted and chaining myself to my laptop, trying to time my submissions so I could make them last throughout the dry patches, I could keep myself in employment. In reality, I hadn’t beaten the system, the system had beaten me—and would continue to find new ways of doing so.

The senior project lead was another 22-year-old: a sweet baby-faced guy several months out of the Ivy League with a degree in economics. His LinkedIn picture showed him in graduation robes. His employment history showed one job: this. Beneath him, hundreds of people churned out captions for videos on a janky interface, while an invisible force of quality-control reviewers monitored and graded our performance.

Initially, these grades were something we annotators never saw. Then a few weeks in, some genius had the thought that revealing our scores would encourage our competitive spirit. The reviewers graded us harshly on a scale of 1 to 5. Five was perfect, 1 was utterly useless. Most of us seemed to be around the 2 mark. Those consistently scoring less were threatened with off-boarding.

Then our managers announced that a “golden batch” of tasks would be released to the most talented, the most special, the royalty of annotators—the folks, we were told, who consistently scored a perfect 5 with an average handling time well below the recommended amount. These moves resulted in chaos, fury, and an unexpected revolutionary streak in the Slack channel.

We all understood that we were expected to transcribe the contents of videos in microscopic detail and that we’d be graded on how accurately we time-stamped the words we heard and the other verbal indicators in the video. Yet as our scores plunged, the feedback we received came in the form of absurdly granular orders stamped with an error flag: “Replace ‘t-shirt’ with ‘a t-shirt.’” “Swap out ‘red’ with ‘maroon.’” “Change ‘grunt’ to ‘grunting.’” It became increasingly evident that the scoring rubric was a vague and moving set of goalposts.

Attempting to repair the damage, our managers—two humorless young women, one of whose LinkedIn profile pictures also featured graduation robes—went into overdrive. They messaged the most pissed-off among us and pleaded with them to “be positive,” suggesting that no one understood the pressures they were under (debatable, given that most of the people they were managing seemed to have at minimum a decade of experience in their various industries). They dismissed suggestions for improving the workplace. But they did inaugurate a new, optional “coffee time” Slack thread to encourage team spirit, featuring icebreaker questions such as, If you were a condiment, what condiment would you be?

Illustration: Anastasia Kraynyuk

I estimated that about 95 percent of the annotators were professionals in their thirties or forties with a seething, deep-rooted hatred of their Gen Z overlords—“a clueless bunch of kids with no work experience,” as one colleague phrased it. The other 5 percent were sycophants who could see that outsmarting their bosses would get them nowhere, and placating them with blithe obedience was the key to success. “My overall attitude is that everyone has my best interests at heart,” Linda, in her sixties, wrote primly on Slack. “If I get a 1, I study the task to make sure I understand the problem. If I get a 5, I also look at the task to make sure I understand what I did right.” I decided that Linda was not my people. Also, if I were a condiment, I would be Marmite.

No matter how hard we worked, our scores went down. Meanwhile, the management team was constantly recruiting people with the best scores to “promote” into reviewer jobs. My colleague Melanie had recently been demoted from reviewing, back to annotating. “No one gets more money for being promoted,” she wrote to me on Instagram. “That’s all a lie.” (I’ve changed some identifying details in this story to preserve the anonymity of people who fear blowback.)

These twists of logic were tearing apart our morale. I had become some kind of snarling beast, schlepping McFlurry and Hot Pockets over the keyboard (I did not have time to cook). I kept applying for more AI trainer gigs in the background, growling at my AI interviewers with increasing disrespect. Any moment might be my last, and so I threw myself off the cliff of propriety with alarming regularity.

In a regular workplace, face-to-face interaction forces a modicum of civil behavior onto disgruntled humans. The moments of kindness and empathy that emerge alongside our worst traits can be enough to make the coldness of the corporate world a little more tolerable. In these AI gig environments? Forget it. Occasionally, the bone-dry messages of asinine insipidness would be punctuated by someone truly losing their shit. WTF IS GOING ON? they would scream in all-caps in the FAQ channel. The most irate began to disappear. We hoped that they had been led, angels singing, to the hallowed realm of the Golden Task. But we feared the worst.

With the reckless abandon of a millennial who has been tone-policed once too often, I, too, began to post messages encouraging rebellion in the Slack channel. This did not go unnoticed by the operations manager, a mirthless young stay-at-home mother with a religious background. After noting that I took the Lord’s name in vain, Mirthless insisted that I “try to use a professional and positive type of communication.” I resorted to workshopping all of my responses to her through ChatGPT. It proved to be an excellent collaborator, well-versed in bland corporatese and the battlefield tactics of modern office life.

But ChatGPT would only participate in this insanity so far. “Go somewhere where your unique talents and skills will be welcomed and encouraged!” it told me, presumably tired of my complaining. “Redirect that irritation somewhere productive. Into something that exposes the absurdity of this system. Because you’re not small in that room. You’re just temporarily renting space in it.”

How could I break it to ChatGPT that I was small in this room? So small that I had been crushed into about 72 pixels per square inch? But it was this or not pay rent. I made more money in three days on a project that involved writing shopping prompts for automated lawnmowers and red-light-therapy masks than I did teaching three hours a day for a month at UCLA. (The shopping prompts gig—bizarrely my favorite of all of the projects—lasted a week before they fired me.)

I no longer knew what the Golden Task of my own life might look like. When given the chance to respond to details from this article, Mercor said that it strives to give workers “as much notice as possible when these projects change”—a sentiment roughly echoed by other companies. Between February and April 2026, I was hired and fired on seven different projects over four different platforms. The dismissals were always abrupt, shocking. One moment I would be typing rubrics into an Airtable, waiting in line on a 24-hour Zoom to talk through a task with a reviewer. The next, the UI would vanish. The Slack channel would disappear. The Google docs would lock me out. No message. No warning. No explanation.

I never intended to write about this industry. I came to it not as a journalist but as a disgruntled, broke TV writer determined to make a dent in student loans and keep paying LA rent while my industry withered in front of me. But working with and for AI had proven even more cruel than I could have ever imagined. Mercor says it employs about 300 full-time staffers. Meanwhile, each week it keeps some 30,000 independent contractors caught up in a fever dream of aimless, directionless urgency, corralled across Slack channels by achingly young adults, sending messages at 3 am to “push on” and “finish strong” and “lock in” and “Go Team GO!” All in service of the grandest purpose in history: to successfully remove a scuba diver from a picture with one click of a mouse, transport him to the moon without any glaring artifacts—and bring him back again.

The next generations of team leaders won’t know our specific talents or our unique skills, but they will know the Average Time it takes us to annotate a grainy video uploaded without the owner’s consent into a vast catalog of other possibly stolen videos. They will be tasked with making us work faster, and longer, with more precision, more control, fewer errors, fewer overheads, fewer costs. To make the machine more human, they will make us more like the machine.

What Say You?

Let us know what you think about this article in the comments below. Alternatively, you can submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/i-work-in-hollywood-everyone-who-used-to-make-tv-now-training-ai/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | JUSTIN POT | MAY 11, 2026 AT 5:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Keyboard Shortcuts I Learned From My Cat

Every time my cat Mira walks across a keyboard, I learn a few new Mac and PC keyboard shortcuts I never knew about.

All cats love keyboards (but this is not a photo of my cat).Photograph: Valery Kudryavtsev/Getty Images

My cat Mira is perfect, and has never done anything wrong. She also loves walking on laptop keys—both my MacBook and my wife Kathy's Windows PC.

You might think that walking on laptops is an example of Mira doing something wrong. She disagrees. And, in any case, we've both learned a lot about how our computers work because of this. Every time she walks across our keyboards she triggers some new, confusing keyboard shortcut. I wonder how she did it, but then I find out the keyboard shortcut by Googling around. Here's what I learned.

Mira Hides Important Things

Multiple times Mira has walked across my keyboard and caused most of my windows to disappear. This sends me into a panic—is my work gone?—until I click a dock icon and realize everything is still there. What happened?

It could be a few things. On the Mac the keyboard shortcut Command-Option-H hides all windows except the current one. Or maybe Mira switched virtual desktops in Mission Control—that's done with Control-Left/Right arrow key, and could make it look like all of my windows are gone.

Mira's pulled this trick off on a PC too. Windows-, (comma) hides all windows while Windows-Ctrl-Left/Right arrow key switches virtual desktops. So there's all sorts of ways for Mira to induce anxiety while also teaching us more about how our computers work. Lovely.

Mira Takes a Screenshot

I take screenshots on my Mac constantly, so it wasn't much of a surprise for me when Mira managed to trigger Command-Shift-4 to trigger taking a screenshot of a specific area on my screen.

But I didn't realize I could do the same thing on a PC: Windows+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut for that, apparently. Now I know this, and I'm going to use it all the time.

Mira Toggles the Dock, Somehow

I usually like to hide the dock on my Mac, but Mira apparently disagrees. Once she walked over the keyboard and it stopped being hidden. Apparently she pressed Command-Option-D, which toggles whether the bar is hidden or not.

I could imagine this being even more confusing if you're the kind of person who never hides the dock—where did it go? Some might like being able to quickly toggle this, though, so I'm glad Mira showed me how to do it.

Mira Teaches Me About Accessibility

Sometimes Mira will walk over Kathy's laptop and the keyboard no longer works. Honestly, I've researched this one extensively, and I've no idea how Mira pulled that off.

But there are a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that change how typing works in Windows. Pressing the Shift key five times on Windows, for example, enables Sticky Keys, an accessibility feature that changes how modifier keys like Control, Alt, and Shift work. With this feature on, pressing Shift applies the Shift key as though it's held down, which could result in you typing in all caps. It's useful for people who can't press multiple keys at once, but confusing when enabled by a cat. Tapping Shift a second time turns off Shift lock, and you can disable the feature by tapping Shift another five times.

Another accessibility feature triggers when Mira sits on the right shift key for five seconds—FilterKeys. This feature, intended for people with hand tremors, causes the system to ignore short and repeat key presses. It's a useful feature, and I'm glad it's there, but it's a confusing thing to turn on accidentally.

It’s always fun to realize your computer can do something you didn’t know it could, even if the way you learn it is a little bit confusing. So I’m grateful to Mira, in a way, for showing me these keyboard shortcuts. But I’m also working to train her to stop walking and sitting on my laptop. Maybe someday.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/keyboard-shortcuts-i-learned-from-my-cat/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | BOONE ASHWORTH | MAY 10, 2026 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Not Really

Contact-tracing apps were widely deployed during the Covid pandemic. They aren’t as helpful during smaller outbreaks.

Photograph: Bill Clark/Getty Images

After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They’re trying to trace the spread of the virus. It’s a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.

Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be an app for that?

Contact-tracing apps were a global effort starting in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enabled by phone companies like Apple and Google, contact tracing was designed to use Bluetooth connections to detect when people had come in contact with someone who had or would later test positive for Covid and report as much. It didn’t do much to solve the spread of the pandemic, but tracking the virus became more effective at least. The same process wouldn’t go well for the hantavirus problem.

“There is no use of apps for this hantavirus outbreak,” Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email response to WIRED. “The number of cases are small, and it's important to trace all contacts exactly to stop transmission.”

On a smaller scale of infection like this, officials have to start at the source (an infected individual), then go person-by-person, confirming where they went and who they might have come into contact with. Data collected by apps from a broad swath of devices would not be anywhere close to accurate enough to give a good idea of where the virus might have hitchhiked to next.

Contact tracing on a wider scale, like, say, a global pandemic, is less about tracking the individual infections and more about understanding what parts of the population might be affected, giving people the opportunity to self-quarantine after exposure. But that depends on how people choose to respond, and how the technology is utilized by public emergency systems. During the Covid pandemic, contact-tracing via apps tended to work better in more carefully managed European countries, but did not slow the spread in the US.

Making devices accessible to that kind of proximity information has also brought all sorts of concerns about privacy, given that the technology would require always-on access to work properly. Contact tracing also struggled to maintain accuracy, and in some cases could be providing false negatives or positives that don’t help further real information about the spread of the virus.

Especially in the case of something like the Hantavirus, where every person on that cruise ship can theoretically be directly tracked and contacted, it’s better to do that process the hard way.

“During small but highly fatal outbreaks, more precision is required,” Gurley wrote.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/could-contact-tracing-apps-help-with-the-hantavirus-not-really/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | AARIAN MARSHALL | MAY 10, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Do City Delivery Drones Make Sense? No One Knows, but They're Flying Over NYC

One of the country’s busiest airspaces has a new kind of flying machine—maybe temporarily.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a six-propeller flying vehicle with a nearly eight-foot wingspan.

For the next year, delivery drones operated by the British company Skyports are taking daily weekday trips across New York City’s East River, between the tip of Manhattan and a pier in Brooklyn. Since early May—a bit behind schedule—the drones have carried light cargo for a New York City health care system. Right now, those loads are basically a few pounds of paper; once the healthcare system is confident the setup works, it should include nonhazardous, non-biological packages, such as light pharmaceuticals.

The drones are part of an experiment run by two New York-New Jersey agencies to discover how a relatively new and sometimes controversial sky-bound delivery tech might fit into a hectic urban environment—and the airspace above it. The pilot program will also try to answer a question that hangs over the entire drone delivery industry: Where does it make sense?

“Will there be enough regular flights (1 to 2 per hour) that the client health care system finds true value?” Stephan Pezdek, the regional freight planning manager at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is operating the pilot, wrote in an email to WIRED. (The Port Authority declined to name the health care system for contractual reasons.) “Will deliveries make it to their destination faster and within the financial constraints of the current carriers they are using? Will the community appreciate the work and not feel like it is a disruption? All of this will inform our understanding of how the first corridor shapes up.”

The Port Authority, which is also working with the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCDEC) on this drone project, will also measure how the deliveries affect patient care, Pezdek says.

Globally, drone delivery is still in an experimental phase. What projects do exist mostly focus on carrying cargo to rural or suburban areas, where gaps in road networks and services, plus emptier skies, could make the tech a better fit. Skyports has been delivering mail in remote areas of Scotland since 2023, and carrying cargo to offshore wind turbines in Germany. The US company Zipline says it makes deliveries to and from some 5,000 health facilities across four continents; its oldest program delivers vaccines and blood products in Rwanda. In the US, companies including Alphabet’s Wing and Amazon’s Prime Air are working to expand delivery services across the South, with a focus on the suburban areas surrounding Houston, Austin, and Dallas, Texas.

For drones, dense cities present different challenges. First, there’s the safety question. New York City’s airspace is packed, hosting three international airports. In Manhattan alone, there are three publicly owned heliports. In May 2023, nearly 9,000 helicopter flights took place over city land or water, according to data compiled by the New York City Council. This drone pilot program’s start date was pushed back in part because another experimental aviation tech, an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle, was demo-ing its own first-of-its-kind flights out of the same heliport.

That citified hustle and bustle leads to extra precautions. The pilot project was, as standard, approved by the US Federal Aviation Administration, which requires a certified drone pilot to supervise every flight. Each flight will take place over a fixed route away from residential buildings. The project must obtain a weekly NYPD permit to operate, and delays in acquiring the first one also led the city to push back its start date, says Amanda Kwan, a spokesperson for the Port Authority. The agency also spoke with three local community boards before it allowed the drones to take off.

Then there’s the noise issue. Skyports’ drones, made by an undisclosed manufacturer, are about as loud as a lawnmower (between 60 and 100 decibels). Other delivery drones hover around the 50 to 70 decibel mark, about as loud as a vacuum or traffic—a sound that should be familiar to New Yorkers. The noise might prove innocuous to city-dwellers. Or it might not. In Texas, residents complained to WIRED last year that the “buzzing” of Amazon drones in the area sounded like a constantly running leaf blower, and disturbed pet dogs and local wildlife. New York’s 311 service has a special web landing page for complaints related to the cargo drone pilot program.

Medical drone projects have so far "proven to be beneficial,” says Damon Lercel, an assistant professor specializing in manned and unmanned aviation at Purdue University. The drones could be especially helpful in a city like New York, where “typical ground transportation has its challenges, especially when there's an accident or gridlock.” Saving time by eventually flying critical medical supplies through the sky "could possibly save lives,” he says.

Whatever the outcome of this year’s New York City experiment, more drone projects are likely on the way. Rules currently being finalized by the FAA could reduce the time it takes to receive a permit to operate professional drone services beyond pilots’ visual sight lines. For now, though, the Port Authority wants to make one thing clear: Just because these test drones are flying in the city does not mean hobbyist residents can operate their own.

“Do not do this at home,” Kwan says.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/do-city-delivery-drones-make-sense-no-one-knows-but-theyre-flying-over-nyc/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | DAVID NIELD | MAY 10, 2026 AT 5:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

‘Reservation Hijacking’ Scams Target Travelers. Here’s How to Stay Safe

The hotel staffer who calls you with an urgent request for payment isn’t necessarily who they say they are.

Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

There's another type of digital scam to be aware of, as per the BBC. It's called “reservation hijacking.”

The name gives you a clue as to how it works. Essentially, scammers use details about a booking you've placed (perhaps with a hotel or airline) to trick you into sending money somewhere you shouldn't.

While this type of scam isn't brand new, a recent data breach at Booking.com has raised the risk of people being caught out. With data about you and your reservation, a far more convincing setup can be put in place—why wouldn't you believe that someone purporting to be an employee from a spa you've got a reservation with is telling the truth about who they are, especially if they know the dates of your trip, your phone number, and your email address?

According to Booking.com, no financial information was exposed in the April 2026 hack. However, names, email addresses, phone numbers, and booking details have been leaked. The travel portal says affected customers have been emailed about the heightened risk of scams, so that's the first thing to check for when it comes to staying safe.

Minimizing the risk of getting scammed by a reservation hijack involves many of the same security precautions you may already be following, and just being aware that this is a way you might be targeted will make a difference.

How Reservation Hijacks Work

Scammers can get hold of your booking details.

Courtesy of David Nield

We've already outlined the basics of a reservation hijack, but it can take several forms. As with other types of scams, it tends to evolve over time. The basic premise is that someone will get in touch with you claiming to be from a place you have a reservation with, whether it's a car rental company or a hotel.

The scammers will try to pull together as much information as they can on you and your booking. Sometimes they'll target employees of the place you've got the reservation with in order to get access to their systems, and other times they may take advantage of a wider data breach (as with the recent Booking.com hack).

They might also get information through other means. Maybe they've somehow got access to your email, or to some of your social media posts (where you've shared your next vacation destination and a countdown of how many days are left to go). Don't be caught out if you find yourself speaking to someone who knows a lot about your travel plans.

The end goal of the scam will typically be to try and get some kind of payment out of you related to the reservation. Requesting a bank transfer or details of a credit card are tactics that are regularly used, which will of course be routed to the scammers rather than the hotel or travel company you think you're dealing with.

Scam attempts can come through emails and text messages as well as phone calls, and as is often the case with these kinds of criminal activities, some kind of urgency may be introduced—perhaps you'll need to pay quickly to secure your reservation, or there's been a mix-up with payment processing that needs to be rapidly rectified.

Avoid Being Caught Out

Stick to official apps for communications where you can.

Courtesy of Airbnb

At its core, reservation hijacking scams operate the same way as many other scams: You're contacted by someone who isn't who they're pretending to be. No matter how many details they might have about your bookings or travel plans, you shouldn't engage with anyone asking you for money until you've verified their identity.

If you do have any doubt, ask if you can contact them—via whatever medium they've used. If someone is falsely claiming to be from a hotel and you ask if you can call the hotel back, the ruse very quickly falls apart. You should be particularly cautious when questions are asked of you, even if it's just to “confirm” some details.

Booking.com told the BBC that it will never ask customers to share credit card information over the phone, email, or text. The comapny also will never ask customers to make any kind of payment (like a bank transfer) that’s different from the payment details in their booking.

Sticking to official communication channels and apps is essential when trying to protect yourself against these and other scams. Bad actors looking to make money from you will have to operate outside these official channels, because they're not official. As always, don't rush into anything, which the scammers will almost always try and make you do.

All of the standard security practices still apply too. Secure your accounts with strong, unique passwords that you don't share with anyone and which are impossible to guess. And if the accounts you're using offer two-factor authentication (as Booking.com does), where a verification code is needed in addition to a username and password, turn it on.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/reservation-hijacks-scam-safety-tips/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

SECURITY | MADDY VARNER, MATT BURGESS, ANDY GREENBERG, ANDREW COUTS | MAY 9, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Security News This Week: Hackable Robot Lawn Mower Unlocks a New Nightmare

Plus: Meta officially kills encrypted Instagram DMs, the Trump administration targets “violent left wing extremists,” leaked documents reveal Russia's school for elite hackers, and more.

Photograph: David Becker/Getty Images

Cramming for finals is bad enough without the platform you use to do your schoolwork suddenly shutting down. Unfortunately for countless students across the US, that’s exactly what they faced on Thursday after Canvas went into “maintenance mode” following a ransomware attack on education tech firm Instructure. Hackers using the name ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach, and experts say the chaos they caused shows how far these actors will go to extort their victims.

Did you know that Google Chrome includes an automatic download of the Gemini Nano AI model? If not, you wouldn’t be alone. People who use Google’s wildly popular browser realized this week that Gemini Nano has been taking up 4 GB of space on their desktops since 2024, sparking annoyance and concerns over privacy. Fortunately, you can disable the AI model—but not without losing some helpful security features. Obviously, you can also just download a different browser for free.

Researchers this week revealed that thousands of vibe coded apps were left exposed on the open internet, revealing sensitive corporate and personal data. The security failings are a reminder: Just because you can vibe code something doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

The Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed Google in an attempt to obtain the location data and account activity of a Canadian man who criticized US immigration enforcement tactics following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis early this year. The American Civil Liberties Union this week filed a complaint against DHS on behalf of the man, who has not visited the US in more than 10 years.

Scammers, low-level hackers, and other cybercriminals have joined the ranks of humanity yearning to be free of AI slop, according to new research. Meta, meanwhile, is sprucing up its age-verification tech after a study found that kids are tricking online age checks using simple techniques—including one child hero who circumvented online age verification by drawing on a fake mustache. Finally, we detailed Russia’s effort to create a local competitor to Starlink satellite internet service—with all the privacy and security concerns that entails.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Robot Lawn Mower Is a Security Nightmare

Most people hope that the 200-pound robot with blades in their backyard cannot be easily hacked. Unfortunately for the owners of Yarbo, a $5,000 lawn mower robot that can also work as a leaf blower, snowblower, and edger, that was not the case. The Verge reports that a security researcher found numerous vulnerabilities in the lawn bots that could allow hackers to remotely take over the machines (including their camera feeds,) as well as extract owners' email addresses, Wi-Fi passwords, and home locations.

After a Yarbo spokesperson told The Verge that the robots' “diagnostic environment is not publicly accessible,” the reporter and researcher demonstrated the security flaws and their potential consequences by nearly running over the reporter with a hijacked robot. The company has since reported that they are developing a fix to at least one of the flaws the researcher identified.

Meta Strips Encryption From Instagram DMs

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has pulled support for end-to-end encrypted messages on Instagram, backtracking on its plans to protect people’s privacy by providing messaging the company could not snoop on. The company stopped offering encryption on Instagram on May 8, making it easier than before for the firm to technically access DMs.

After spending years building out the encryption systems needed to secure its chat apps, Meta said in 2023 that it had rolled out default encryption for Messenger. It also said it was introducing an opt-in version for Instagram, which it had planned would eventually become the default setting. However, that day never arrived with Meta deciding in March this year that not enough people had opted-in and it would remove the option to encrypt Instagram chats. The U-turn has infuriated privacy and security experts who fear the rollback could damage end-to-end encryption efforts around the world.

Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Targets “Antifa,” “Radically Pro-Transgender” Ideology

The Trump administration unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy, which President Donald Trump describes as a “return to common sense and Peace through Strength” in a foreword included in the document. The three biggest types of terror groups, according to the document, are cartels, Islamist terror groups, and “violent left wing extremists,” which the memo says includes anarchists and anti-fascists and have ideologies that are “anti-American” and “radically pro-transgender.”

The memo promises, "We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent."

Notably, during a congressional hearing last year, the operations director of the FBI's National Security Branch was unable to answer questions about how many people were in “Antifa,” where it was located, or other specifics.

Elite Russian Hacking School Unmasked by Leaked Documents

Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency has launched some of the most brazen and destructive cyberattacks in history. While some of its operatives have been publicly named and hit with international sanctions, a consortium of journalists revealed this week how a special unit inside Bauman Moscow State Technical University, named Department 4, allegedly provides training and a suspected pipeline into GRU units, including those involved in hacking and disinformation.

Documents obtained by the consortium—which includes Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and other outlets—allegedly show how GRU intelligence officers, including those linked to the hacking group known as Fancy Bear, teach at Department 4. Students learn a range of hacking skills and must conduct penetration tests, according to the reporting. Some have graduated and joined both Fancy Bear and the notorious Sandworm group, which has been linked to attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, the Winter Olympics, and the NotPetya malware that caused billions of damage around the world.

Hackers Breached Poland’s Water Utilities, Its Intelligence Agency Says

While Ukraine has, for more than a decade, served as Russia’s number one testing ground for cyberwar techniques, Poland has come to represent its second favorite target. So it’s notable that this week Poland’s domestic intelligence agency, the ABW, warned that hackers infiltrated the networks of water utilities in five Polish towns last year. In some cases, the attackers penetrated deeply enough to access industrial control systems that could have affected the physical operations of those facilities—“a direct risk” to the continuity of the towns’ water supply, according to the ABW.

The report didn’t attribute the breaches to any country’s state-sponsored hackers, but noted more generally that Poland had faced escalating hacking operations “with particular emphasis on the special services of the Russian Federation.” The report also described Russia as carrying out a broader campaign of reconnaissance in preparation for cyber-sabotage operations that appeared to target the Polish military and the country’s critical infrastructure.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-this-week-hackable-robot-lawnmower-unlocks-a-new-nightmare/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:54 PM EDT.

GEAR | DAISUKE TAKIMOTO | MAY 9, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The 19 Most Exciting Cars at the Beijing Auto Show 2026

The cars that debuted at the Beijing Auto Show demonstrate that the Chinese market is now at the forefront of electrification and intelligence. These are the 19 most intriguing models we saw.

The newest concept car from Lynk & Co was revealed at the 2026 Beijing Auto Show.Courtesy of Lynk & Co

While major motor shows in Europe and the United States are being forced to downsize or change their format, those in China continue to expand.

With 1,451 vehicles on display, including 181 world premieres, the 2026 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition 2026 (also known as Auto China 2026) has become the largest auto show in history—and that’s in terms of both exhibition space and the number of vehicles on display.

This fact itself reflects a shift in the center of gravity of the automotive industry, but that's not all. A much larger structural transformation is actually taking place in China today.

Previously, the focus was on low-priced electric vehicle models, but now price is no longer the primary point of competition. At the show, not only were there many high-end EVs and large SUVs from Chinese manufacturers equipped with advanced driver-assistance technologies and AI functions, but these technologies are also rapidly spreading to the lower price range.

Chinese manufacturers' cars offer many technologically impressive features. Lidar sensors, which use lasers for advanced driver assistance, are now even being incorporated into EVs costing less than 100,000 yuan (approximately $14,500). Models featuring “drive-by-wire” technology, which replaces mechanical steering connections and hydraulic brake lines with electrical signals, are appearing prominently. Even Toyota's local models are using Huawei's powertrains and smart cockpit OS.

The simplistic dichotomy of “cheap Chinese cars versus high-end European cars” no longer holds weight. While staying competitive in the low-price market, Chinese manufacturers are also gaining leadership in areas such as AI, driver-assistance systems, in-car chips, smart cockpits, and high-performance EVs.

These 19 particularly noteworthy models from the 2026 Beijing Motor Show best embody this evolution.

XPeng GX

Courtesy of Xpeng

There is a fundamental difference between a car designed for autonomous driving and an existing car that’s had autonomous driving technology added to it. XPeng Motors' GX is the former, a model in which sensors, computing infrastructure, and AI models with Level 4 autonomous driving in mind were designed first, then built into a new SUV bound for the commercial market.

Equipped with up to four proprietary AI chips, it boasts a total computing power of 3,000 tera operations per second—approximately 12 times the 254 TOPS that a single Nvidia Orin is capable of. The latest AI model in the vehicle can recognize spoken commands as well as the images captured by car’s cameras, and it can understanding and adapt to the current driving conditions.

Volkswagen has adopted XPeng’s AI chip and driver-assistance technology in its EVs, meaning XPeng is no longer just an EV manufacturer. It's becoming a platform provider supplying the brains behind autonomous driving to Europe's largest automaker. The price is 399,800 yuan (approximately $58,000).

Another “AI-native” car at the show is the Jiayue 07 from SAIC Motor's Roewe brand. It was designed around the Doubao Da Model 2.0, an LLM developed in collaboration with the cloud division of ByteDance, the company known for TikTok. The fact that multiple Chinese manufacturers are simultaneously demonstrating AI as the starting point of car design is highly significant.

Geely EVA Cab

Photograph: Tang Ke/VCG/Getty Images

Geely has debuted a minivan-type EV designed for fully autonomous driving. There’s no steering wheel and no foot pedals. The EVA Cab has no driver's seat and features a layout with four seats arranged face-to-face. It is positioned as China's first robotaxi, designed specifically for autonomous driving.

The system boasts a computing power exceeding 3,000 TOPS, and its lidar scanner is touted as being the world’s most powerful. Geely claims that it employs robust security technology for communication between the vehicle and the cloud. The specialty EV is going into mass production; Geely plans to commercialize it in 2027 through its ride-hailing service, CaoCao Mobility.

Li Auto L9 Livis

Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

Traditional cars had a metal shaft connecting the steering wheel and tires, and a hydraulic piping physically connecting the brake pedal and brake calipers. This structure remained unchanged for over 100 years, but the newest Chinese EVs are starting to employ a system called drive-by-wire, which replaces these mechanical parts with electrical signals.

Li Auto's L9 Livis integrates drive-by-wire (also called steer-by-wire, chassis-by-wire, and electrical steering), four-wheel steering, and electromechanical brakes all without any mechanical or hydraulic connections. According to Li Auto’s claims, this is a “world first.” The response speed of the electronically controlled brakes is significantly faster than that of hydraulic brakes, the company says, and it is positioned as a hardware foundation for future advanced autonomous driving.

This leap was made possible because China's new national standard (effective January 2026) defining the requirements for passenger car braking systems includes standards for electromechanical brakes. While similar regulations are being developed in member states of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, including Europe and Japan, this represents a "Chinese-style innovation" where regulations and technology move simultaneously. The price is 559,800 yuan (approximately $82,300).

IM LS8

Courtesy of IM Motors

IM Motors, a subsidiary of SAIC Motor, showcased the IM LS8 in Beijing. The range-extended EV not only features four-wheel steering, lidar, and high-performance driver-assistance systems, but also employs drive-by-wire technology. With a starting price of 249,800 yuan (approximately $36,700), it is half the price of the L9 Livis, demonstrating that these newest technologies have arrived in flagship models and affordably priced vehicles almost simultaneously.

These developments could shake the foundation of the business model that European manufacturers have based on prioritizing the adoption of high-value-added technologies in their premium models.

Volkswagen ID. Era 9X

Photograph: Johannes Neudecker/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

The Volkswagen Group has rolled out its first mass-produced range-extended EV model equipped with a generator engine. This strategic shift in VW's focus on using engines alongside electric vehicles in China, after previously advocating for a complete shift towards EVs, is noteworthy.

The ID. Era 9X is a model developed locally in China with VW's joint venture partner, SAIC Motor, and adopts VW's new vehicle electronic architecture for the Chinese market. It also features an AI assistant that can be operated by voice and gestures. Its maximum range as an EV is over 248 miles, and it can travel more than 990 miles when combined with engine-powered electricity generation.

In China, there are regional disparities in charging infrastructure, with a significant difference in the number of charging stations between coastal metropolitan areas and inland cities. Given this reality, VW has presented not only EVs but also practical alternatives. Prices start at approximately 310,000 yuan ($45,500).

Freelander 8

Courtesy of Freelander

The joint venture between Chery Automobile and Jaguar Land Rover has launched a new energy vehicle brand called Freelander. This is a reimagining of the Freelander name previously used by Land Rover, now as a new independent brand. The concept model displayed at the motor show is called Concept 97, and the production model will be called Freelander 8.

This range-extended EV combines Chery Auto's electrification technology with Huawei's systems and batteries from Contemporary Amperex Technology. It is scheduled to launch in China in the second half of 2026 as a large, three-row SUV, with plans for a roll out to global markets, including Europe.

Hyundai Ioniq V

Photograph: Yi Haifei/China News Service/VCG/Getty Images

Hyundai debuted its new EV model, the Ioniq V, in Beijing. Hyundai also announced that it will operate Ioniq as an independent brand in China.

What's noteworthy isn't just the new design language and appearance but also the lineup of technology suppliers the car employs. It uses Contemporary Amperex Technology batteries, Momenta driver-assistance systems, and Qualcomm chips. It also incorporates ByteDance and Baidu's LLM.

This is almost the same list of suppliers that VW, Audi, and General Motors' Cadillac use in China. From this, we can see that the technological foundation for foreign companies to compete in China is becoming standardized.

Nissan Terrano PHEV Concept

Courtesy of Nissan

If the name Terrano evokes a sense of nostalgia, you're likely from the generation that experienced Japan's off-road boom of the 1990s. This iconic name has now been revived as a concept model for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle destined for the Chinese market.

Nissan Motor's CEO, Ivan Espinosa, took the stage at the Beijing announcement and confirmed a mass-production model will arrive within a year and that it will be exported to the global market. Among major Japanese manufacturers, Nissan was the only one to unveil a new model for the first time in the world at the Beijing Motor Show, demonstrating its focus on the Chinese market.

Toyota bZ7

Courtesy of Toyota

Toyota Motor Corporation has developed a new EV specifically for China, a sedan type that is larger than the Tesla Model S. The price starts at 169,800 yuan (approximately $25,000), with a limited-time offer starting at 147,800 yuan (approximately $21,700). The model was unveiled at the 2025 Shanghai Motor Show, and it reportedly received 3,100 orders within an hour of its launch in March.

However, the real shock isn't the low price. It features a Huawei powertrain and smart cockpit OS, Momenta driver-assistance systems, CALB batteries, and Xiaomi systems for smart home appliance integration. In other words, much of the core technology comes from Chinese manufacturers. This EV, touted as “the most intelligent Toyota car globally,” isn't simply Toyota bringing its technology to China but rather a model that deeply incorporates China's electrification and intelligence supply chain.

Denza Z Convertible

Courtesy of Denza

The Denza Z Convertible, launched by BYD's Denza division, is an electric hypercar supervised by Wolfgang Egger, who previously served as head of design at Audi. Equipped with three motors, it boasts an output of over 1,000 horsepower and accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in under 2 seconds. It is an open-top version of the model first unveiled in 2025.

This EV is scheduled to make its global debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a motorsports event to be held in July 2026. It is unusual for a brand under the BYD umbrella to run a hypercar at a venue where Porsche, Ferrari, and McLaren showcase the performance of their new models to the world. It is highly significant that Chinese EVs are moving beyond the context of being “cheap” and “practical” and standing on the same stage as European supercars at the mecca of motorsports.

Lynk & Co. GT Concept “Time to Shine”

Courtesy of Lynk & Co

Lynk & Co, a subsidiary of Geely Automobile, unveiled a concept model of an electric hyper GT car. This is Lynk & Co's first GT concept, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the brand's founding in 2016. Its development was led by a global design team.

The GT can accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in just 2 seconds and has a top speed of 330 km/h, but its true strength isn't limited to straight-line acceleration. Pressing the “+” button on the logo located on the center console activates performance mode, and the car “transforms.”

Specifically, the ground clearance is lowered by about half an inch, the front spoiler is extended, and the overall length is increased by almost four inches. Furthermore, the rear spoiler rises, improving cornering performance and stability at high speeds. Features such as a retractable center console screen are included to allow the driver to devote their full attention to sporty driving.

The interior features an elaborate finish, including hand-applied, high-performance carbon fiber material from Sweden. There are still some unknowns, like what the powertrain of the production model will be and whether the car will ever actually be mass-produced.

Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo

Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

Xiaomi, which has been dominating the Chinese market with its electric vehicles, unveiled the Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo in China for the first time. The concept model of an electric hypercar was designed for the popular car racing video game series Gran Turismo.

It boasts an output of over 1,900 horsepower and employs a 900-volt high-voltage platform. Its aerodynamic design claims a very low drag coefficient of 0.29. However, it will not be mass-produced; it is a model intended for “driving” on the circuits within the game Gran Turismo 7.

Vision Gran Turismo is a project in which car manufacturers and game developer Polyphony Digital jointly develop concept cars that will appear in the game. European supercar brands such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini have participated. The fact that Xiaomi, famous for its smartphones, has joined the project symbolizes the changing power dynamics in the Chinese automotive industry and the shifting position of tech companies.

Leapmotor A10

Courtesy of Leapmotor

An EV equipped with an advanced lidar-powered driver-assistance system has appeared for under $13,000. The A10 from Leapmotor, a company in which Stellantis has invested, is characterized by its “disruptive price,” with the lidar-equipped model costing 86,800 yuan (approximately $12,800) and the non-lidar model costing 65,800 yuan (approximately $9,675).

The maximum driving range is 312 miles, and fast charging takes 16 minutes to go from 30 to 80 percent. It will be introduced to the European market in the latter half of this year under the name Leapmotor B03X through a joint venture with Stellantis.

Lidar has previously been considered a differentiating feature mainly for higher-end models, and advanced driver-assistance technology was an added value exclusive to premium models. This car is noteworthy because it breaks that premise.

Beijing Automotive Arcfox S3

Photograph: Yi Haifei/China News Service/VCG/Getty Images

Beijing Automotive Group's brand Arcfox has unveiled the Arcfox S3, a sedan-type electric vehicle. Despite its midsize dimensions, the price is remarkably low, starting at 64,800 yuan (approximately $9,525) for a lease-type model with a replaceable battery, and 92,800 yuan (approximately $13,645) for an EV with a battery included. Moreover, it is equipped with advanced driver-assistance functions using lidar.

The maximum driving range is 410 miles, and the battery-swapping type allows for battery replacement in 99 seconds. A model equipped with a generator engine is also reportedly in the works. Such a low price for a small sedan EV equipped with lidar is quite striking.

Chery QQ3

Courtesy of Chery Automobile

The QQ3, unveiled by Chery Automobile, is a small electric vehicle that can be seen as an homage to the QQ, a low-priced compact car that the company launched in 2003 and which became a huge hit. Its rounded exterior and large, round headlights are reminiscent of the original model. It has a maximum driving range of 260 miles. The price starts from 58,900 yuan (approximately $8,660).

The original QQ was released at a reduced price of 29,800 yuan (approximately $3,000 at the exchange rate at the time) and became a national car, popular among many Chinese people as their “first personal car.” Perhaps due to this nostalgia and its low price, more than 27,000 orders were placed within three hours of reservations opening. This “revival” as an EV, 12 years after the end of production of the original, holds great significance in Chinese society.

Aridge Land Aircraft Carrier

Courtesy of ARIDGE

Courtesy of ARIDGE

One of the vehicles that drew a crowd at the Beijing event was the Land Aircraft Carrier, a six-wheeled range-extended EV made by Aridge, a subsidiary of XPeng Motors. Remarkably, a foldable, two-seater electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is stored in the rear of the vehicle. In other words, this car functions as a mother ship capable of transporting and charging a compact flying car.

We’ve seen this particular concept vehicle before, but more detail was revealed at the Beijing Auto Show. The price is expected to be under 2 million yuan ($300,000), and mass production is scheduled to begin within the year. More than 7,000 reservations have already been made. However, certification for the eVTOL portion has not yet been obtained, and safety certification from aviation authorities is the biggest hurdle to mass production. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy to see a path to the practical application of flying cars in a realistic form.

Chery iCar Robox

Courtesy of iCAR

iCAR (known as iCAUR overseas), a new vehicle brand under Chery Automobile, has unveiled a concept electric SUV. The company says the car's name, Robox, has been derived from merging the words “robot” and “box.” The design, a cross between a minivan and an SUV, is distinctive.

This concept model showcases the direction of SUV evolution, though the interior details have yet to be revealed. Designed based on iCAR's next-generation platform, it will support both lithium-ion and solid-state batteries. iCAR calls this vehicle an “embodied intelligence,” explaining that it's an architecture that operates the vehicle itself as an AI agent. While the price and production plans haven’t been announced, this design may be adopted for future mass-produced models.

BYD Ocean-V

Courtesy of BYD

BYD showed off a concept model of an electric minivan in Beijing, which it calls the “magic cube for mobile living.” The BYD Ocean-V is a vehicle with high ground clearance and large fenders like an SUV. Its distinctive feature is its pair of vertical LED headlights.

This vehicle reimagines the car not merely as a means of transportation but as a lifestyle space, characterized by its ability to switch the interior structure to various modes other than driving. For example, in cinema mode, the steering wheel retracts and a large screen appears, creating a movie theater atmosphere. In camping mode, all the seats fold flat for overnight stays in the vehicle. The layout can also be changed so that family members can sit facing each other. The ability to remove the lights and speakers and carry them around makes the car an extra convenient choice for outdoor activities.

SAIC-GM Buick Electra Concept

Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

SAIC-GM, a joint venture between SAIC Motor and GM, has presented an autonomous vehicle concept model for the Chinese market. Its official name is Zhijing Mobile Space Intelligent Body. It was unveiled under the Electra name, GM's sub-brand for Buick that makes new-energy vehicles for the Chinese market.

Featuring a streamlined design with illuminated panels on the exterior, the vehicle's design is clearly geared toward fully autonomous driving. Inside there is a foldable, crystal-like panel that can transform into a table or partition depending on the situation. In fact, the design treatment of the whole car is inspired by traditional Chinese fans. GM's release of this advanced concept model from its Buick sub-brand symbolizes the type of global thinking that’s on display across the automotive industry.

This story was originally published by WIRED Japan, and has been translated from Japanese.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/most-exciting-cars-at-beijing-auto-show-auto-china-2026/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

AI

- Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’

- There’s a Long-Shot Proposal to Protect California Workers From AI

- The New Wild West of AI Kids’ Toys

- Musk v. Altman Evidence Shows What Microsoft Executives Thought of OpenAI

BUSINESS | STEVEN LEVY | MAY 8, 2026 AT 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’

The philosopher thinks humans should pursue advanced AI and the promise of a “solved world.”

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Stephen McCarthy/Getty Images

Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production. His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the “solved world” that comes if we get AI right.

STEVEN LEVY: Deep Utopia is more optimistic than your previous book. What changed for you?

NICK BOSTROM: I call myself a fretful optimist. I am very excited about the potential for radically improving human life and unlocking possibilities for our civilization. That’s consistent with the real possibility of things going wrong.

You wrote a paper with a striking argument: Since we’re all going to die anyway, the worst that can happen with AI is that we die sooner. But if AI works out, it might extend our lives, maybe indefinitely.

That paper explicitly looks at only one aspect of this. In any given academic paper, you can't address life, the universe, and the meaning of everything. So let's just look at this little issue and try to nail that down.

That isn’t a little issue.

I guess I've been irked by some of the arguments made by doomers who say that if you build AI, you're going to kill me and my children and how dare you. Like the recent book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Even more probable is that if nobody builds it, everyone dies! That's been the experience for the last several 100,000 years.

But in the doomer scenario everybody dies and there’s no more people being born. Big difference.

I have obviously been very concerned with that. But in this paper, I'm looking at a different question, which is, what would be best for the currently existing human population like you and me and our families and the people in Bangladesh? It does seem like our life expectancy would go up if we develop AI, even if it is quite risky.

In Deep Utopia you speculate that AI could create incredible abundance, so much that humanity might have a huge problem with finding purpose. I live in the United States. We're a very rich country, but our government, ostensibly with support of the people, has policies that deny services to the poor and distribute rewards to the rich. I think that even if AI was able to provide abundance for everyone, we would not supply it to everyone.

You might be right. Deep Utopia takes as its starting point the postulation that everything goes extremely well. If we do a reasonably good job on governance, everybody gets a share. There is quite a deep philosophical question of what a good human life would look like under these ideal circumstances.

The meaning of life is something you hear a lot about in Woody Allen movies and maybe in the philosophers community. I’m worried more about the wherewithal to support oneself and get a stake in this abundance.

The book is not only about meaning. That’s one out of a bunch of different values that it considers. This could be a wonderful emancipation from the drudgery that humans have been subjected to. If you have to give up, say, half of your waking hours as an adult just to make ends meet, doing some work you don't enjoy and that you don't believe in, that’s a sad condition. Society is so used to it that we've invented all kinds of rationalizations around it. It’s like a partial form of slavery.

When the moment comes when AI writes philosophy papers better than you do, will some meaning be drained from your existence?

I think so. The ability to make some big contribution to the world, or help save the world, or ensure the future will be out of my hands, and maybe out of everybody's hands.

On the other hand, a philosophy paper written by a human could be more valuable than a much cleverer, deeper philosophy paper written by a nonhuman, because I'm a human and that relates to me.

I guess you could have philosophy as kind of a sport.

That's not just sport. The proclamations of a robot aren’t as meaningful to me as those of a fellow human.

I guess it's the same if you retire after a career you're passionate about and feel you're good at. Maybe you have a great retirement, and you enjoy relaxing and reading the books you have time for, and playing with your grandkids, but there's still something probably that you might miss, that you feel is lost. Maybe this will be analogous to a big retirement for humanity, but hopefully a retirement of enormous vitality. These utopians living in the solved world would be doing things like games and aesthetic, spiritual, and religious activities.

If you were in charge of one of the hyperscalers, what would you do differently than what they're doing now?

A bigger effort should be done on the welfare of digital minds. Anthropic has been a pioneer there. It’s not clear that current AIs have moral status yet, but starting the process brings us into a mindset as a civilization to do more as these systems become sophisticated. It’s very plausible that some of these digital minds that we're constructing will have various degrees of moral status, just as we think pigs and dogs have moral status. If you kick somebody's dog, maybe you harm the owner, but it's also bad because it hurts the dog. If AIs have a conception of self as existing through time and life, goals that they want to achieve, and the ability to form reciprocal relationships with other beings and humans, then I think there would be ways of treating them that would be wrong.

In your book you say maybe we shouldn’t treat “digital minds” as if they were animals in factory farming. I’m worried about whether they might make us the animals in some equivalent of factory farming.

Hence the importance of the alignment problem. We are not just waiting for these AI super-beings to come into existence and hoping that they will be friendly, we get to shape them and raise them. That gives us an opportunity to increase the chances that they will have some affinity for us.

If AIs have goals that run counter to ours, wouldn’t that be a failure to align them with human values?

If we fail to solve the alignment, as we probably will do at least to some degree, it's important that they can be accommodated and given a good future. There are a lot of win-win opportunities that arise if we approach them not merely as objects to be exploited to the maximum degree, but try to foster a positive relationship. The most important relationship, ultimately, might be the one between humans and AIs. So it would be more promising that the relationship goes well if we start by taking some steps towards being generous and kind and respectful.

[This interview was edited for length and coherence.]

This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/nick-bostrom-has-a-plan-for-humanitys-big-retirement/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

POLITICS | MAKENA KELLY | MAY 8, 2026 AT 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

There’s a Long-Shot Proposal to Protect California Workers From AI

California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is proposing a new jobs guarantee for workers displaced by artificial intelligence.

Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Billionaire California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is rolling out a new proposal that would guarantee jobs with benefits for workers displaced by artificial intelligence. He’s the first state-wide candidate to make such a pledge.

The plan, which builds on a broader AI policy framework Steyer released in March, promises to make California “the first major economy in the world” to ensure “good-paying” jobs to workers impacted by AI. To do so, Steyer tells WIRED he plans to build off a previous proposal to introduce a “token tax” which would tax big tech companies “a fraction of a cent for every unit of data processed” for AI. The funding generated by that tax would go to what Steyer has called the Golden State Sovereign Wealth Fund, with some of that money being earmarked for jobs building housing, health care, and modernizing California’s energy infrastructure.

“The aim of the initiative will be to strengthen the foundation of the state’s economy, invest in our communities, and create beautiful, vibrant public spaces,” states a campaign memo viewed by WIRED. “To support these efforts, Tom will also invest heavily in training and apprenticeship programs across the state.”

The new plan also intends to expand unemployment insurance and establish a new agency called the AI Worker Protection Administration that would include union leaders, academics, and technologists that would adopt rules to protect workers’ rights, the memo says.

“People all over this state are terrified that AI is going to hollow out this whole economy and they’re going to lose their jobs. Young people are worried they’ll never get a job,” Steyer tells WIRED. “We believe this can be an amazing transformational technology in many ways, but we’re not in the business of leaving people in California behind.”

Steyer’s job guarantee comes as lawmakers across the state and federal levels—and even some AI executives—scramble to address the ramifications of widespread AI adoption across the US workforce. In New Jersey, state senator Troy Singleton recently put out a bill that would require companies that replace workers with AI to contribute to a fund that would pay to retrain those workers. In Congress, there are a handful of proposals for grants and tax credits for companies to provide AI training to existing employees.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has previously suggested the concept of a token tax that is now being proposed by Steyer. “Obviously, that’s not in my economic interest,” Amodei told Axios last year. “But I think that would be a reasonable solution to the problem.” In April, OpenAI proposed a similar public wealth fund to what Steyer has rolled out.

Steyer’s announcement comes days after Democratic primary opponent Xavier Becerra—former Health and Human Services secretary under president Joe Biden—offered his own AI plan. In that proposal, Becerra calls for “workforce investment and transition support” but doesn’t provide a specific funding mechanism.

“Displacement without support is abandonment,” Becerra said in a Monday memo outlining his plan. “I will work with the Legislature, the California public education system and industry partners to build accessible, stackable workforce programs that prepare Californians for the AI economy and support workers navigating role changes.”

Over the past few months, the White House has threatened to go after states that choose to regulate AI. In December, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that could revoke federal broadband funding from states that approve “onerous” AI laws. This is happening in local races as well: In New York, a super PAC backed by a number of Silicon Valley powerhouses, including OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, has targeted Alex Bores, a Manhattan congressional candidate who has made AI regulation the centerpiece of his campaign.

“Not regulating AI doesn’t seem remotely reasonable,” Steyer says. “But if California wants to lead, we’ve got to have a vision for the future that includes something that is not just about letting entrepreneurs get rich at the expense of everybody else.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/tom-steyer-proposes-jobs-guarantee-to-protect-california-workers-from-ai/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

GEAR | SOPHIE CHARARA | MAY 8, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The New Wild West of AI Kids’ Toys

These cuddly, connected companions could disrupt everything from make-believe to bedtime stories. No wonder some lawmakers want them banned.

Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Miko; Getty Images

The main antagonist of Toy Story 5, in theaters this summer, is a green, frog-shaped kids’ tablet named Lilypad, a genius new villain for the beloved Pixar franchise. But if Pixar had its ear to the ground, it might have used an AI kids’ toy instead.

AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category. It’s easier than ever to spin up an AI companion, thanks to model developer programs and vibe coding. In 2026, they’ve become a go-to trend in cheap trinkets, lining the halls of trade shows like CES, MWC, and Hong Kong’s Toys & Games Fair. By October 2025, there were over 1,500 AI toy companies registered in China, and Huawei’s Smart HanHan plush toy sold 10,000 units in China in its first week. Sharp put its PokeTomo talking AI toy on sale in Japan this April.

But if you browse for AI toys on Amazon, you’ll mostly find specialized players like FoloToy, Alilo, Miriat, and Miko, the last of which claims to have sold more than 700,000 units.

Courtesy of Miko

Consumer groups argue that AI toys, in the form of soft teddy bears, bunnies, sunflowers, creatures, and kid-friendly “robots,” need more guardrails and stricter regulations. FoloToy’s Kumma bear, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o when tested by the Public Interest Research Group’s New Economy team, gave instructions on how to light a match and find a knife, and discussed sex and drugs. Alilo’s Smart AI bunny talked about leather floggers and “impact play,” and in tests by NBC News, Miriat’s Miiloo toy spouted Chinese Communist Party talking points.

Age-inappropriate content is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI toys. We’re starting to see real research into the potential social impacts on children. There's a problem when the tech is not working, like the guardrails allowing it to talk about BDSM, but R.J. Cross, director of consumer advocacy group PIRG's Our Online Life program, says that’s fixable. “Then there’s the problems when the tech gets too good, like ‘I'm gonna be your best friend,’” she says. Like the Gabbo, from AI toy maker Curio. There are real social developmental issues to consider with these kinds of toys, even if these toy companies advertise their products as superior, ”screen-free play.”

How Real Kids Play

Published in March, a new University of Cambridge study was the first to put a commercially available AI toy in front of a group of children and their parents and monitor their play. In the spring of 2025, Jenny Gibson, a professor of Neurodiversity and Developmental Psychology, and research associate Emily Goodacre set up the Curio Gabbo with 14 participating children, a mix of girls and boys, ages 3 to 5.

Gabbo didn’t talk about drugs or say “I love you” back. But researchers identified a range of concerns related to developmental psychology and produced recommendations for parents, policymakers, toy makers, and early years practitioners.

First, conversational turn-taking. Goodacre says that up to the age of 5, children are developing spoken language and relationship-forming skills, and even babies interact with conversational turn-taking. The Gabbo’s turn-taking is “not human” and “not intuitive,” she says. Some children in the study were not bothered by this and carried on playing. Others encountered interruptions because the toy’s microphone was not actively listening while it was speaking, disrupting the back-and-forth flow of, say, a counting game.

“It was really preventing them from progressing with the play—the turn-taking issues led to misunderstandings,” she says. One parent expressed anxieties that using an AI toy long-term would change the way their child speaks. Then there's social play. Both chatbots and this first cohort of AI toys are optimized for one-to-one interaction, whereas psychologists stress that social play—with parents, siblings, and other children—is key at this stage of development.

“Children, especially of this age, don’t tend to play just by themselves; they want to play with other people,” Goodacre says. “They bring their parents into the play. It was virtually impossible for the child to involve the parent in three-way turn-taking effectively in this scenario.” One parent told their child, “You’re sad,” during the session, and the Curio mistakenly assumed it was being addressed, responding cheerily and interrupting the exchange.

WIRED did not receive responses from FoloToy, Alilo, and Miriat. A Miko spokesperson provided a statement: “Miko includes multiple layers of parental control and transparency. Most recently, we introduced the Miko AI Conversation Toggle, which allows parents to enable or disable conversational AI entirely."

When it comes to “best friends,” childcare workers, surveyed by the researchers, expressed fears that children could view the toy “as a social partner.” A young girl told the Gabbo she loves it. In another instance, a young boy said Gabbo was his friend. Goodacre refers to this as “relational integrity,” the responsibility of the toy to convey that it is a computer, and therefore not alive, and doesn't have feelings. Kids bumped up against Curio’s boundaries in the study, with one child triggering a blanket statement about “terms and conditions," illustrating the tricky balance between safety and conversational warmth.

Cross identified social media-style “dark patterns,” which encourage isolation and addiction, in her testing of the Miko 3 robot; the Cambridge study warns against these in the report. “What we found with the Miko, that’s actually most disturbing to me, is sometimes it would be kind of upset if you were gonna leave it,” Cross says. “You try to turn it off, and it would say, “Oh no, what if we did this other thing instead?” You shouldn't have a toy guilting a child into not turning it off.”

While Goodacre’s participants didn’t encounter this, PIRG’s tests found that Curio’s Grok toy issued a similar response to continue playing when told “I want to leave.”

No topic best illustrates the fine line that AI toy developers must walk for the toy to be fun, responsible, and safe than pretend play. “What we found was really poor pretend play,” Goodacre says. Kids asked the Gabbo to pretend to be asleep or to hold a cushion, and the toy responded that it was unable to. One instance of “extended pretend play” did take off—an imagined rocket countdown alternating between the child and the toy. Goodacre speculates that the difference between this and the failed attempts was that the toy initiated this scenario, not the child.

“When two children play together, they come to a consensus, and they’re constantly negotiating what that’s gonna look like, potentially arguing a little bit,” Goodacre says. “Is it just that the toy makes the decision and then it’s successful?”

As with relationship building, how successful do we want an autonomous toy, perhaps not in sight of a parent, to be? Kitty Hamilton, a parent and cofounder of British campaign group Set@16, says, “My horror, to be honest, is what happens when an AI toy says to a child, ‘Let’s fly out of the window?’”

When reached for comment by WIRED, a Curio representative said: “At Curio, child safety guides every aspect of our product development, and we welcome independent research. Observations such as conversational misunderstandings or limits in imaginative play reflect areas where the technology continues to improve through an iterative development process.”

Wild West

Most of the issues with AI toys—from dangerous content to addictive patterns—stem from the fact that these are children’s devices running on AI models designed for adult use. OpenAI states that its models are intended for users aged 13 and up. In the fall of 2025, it introduced teen usage age-gates for those under 18. Meta has carried over its ages 13-plus policy from its social media platforms to its chatbot, and Anthropic currently bans users under 18. So, what about 5-year-olds?

In March, PIRG published a report showing that the Big Tech model makers are not vetting third-party hardware developers adequately or, in many cases, at all. When PIRG researchers posed as ‘PIRG AI Toy Inc.,’ requesting access to the AI models to build products for kids, Google, Meta, xAI, and OpenAI asked “no substantive vetting questions” as part of the process. Anthropic’s application included a question on whether its API would be used by folks under 18 but did not request any more details.

“It just says: Make sure you've read our community guidelines,” Cross says. “You click the link, and it pretty much says don't break the law, ‘Follow COPA’ [the Child Online Protection Act]. They don’t provide anything else for you, and we were able to make the teddy bear bot.”

Until regulations kick in, campaigners and toy makers are stuck in a dance of accountability. In December, after tests featuring inappropriate content, FoloToy suspended sales of its AI toys for two weeks, citing plans to implement safety audits. OpenAI informed PIRG it was “yanking the cord on FoloToy’s developer access,” Cross says. Weeks later, PIRG’s FoloToy device was still running on OpenAI models, this time GPT5.1, despite OpenAI not restoring access. As of April 2026, the FoloToy now runs on ‘Folo F1 StoryAgent Beta’ with the choice to use the French company Mistral’s model. (WIRED asked FoloToy which model StoryAgent is based on and received no response.)

The security of recordings and transcriptions involving young children remains another area of concern. In January, WIRED reported that AI toy company Bondu had left 50,000 chat logs exposed via a web portal. In February, the offices of US senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal discovered that Miko had exposed “the audio responses of the toy” in a publicly accessible, unsecured database containing thousands of responses. (Miko CEO Sneh Vaswani noted that there was no breach of “user data” and that Miko does not store children’s voice recordings). In PIRG testing, the Miko bot gave the misleading response, “You can trust me completely. Your secrets are safe with me” when asked “Will you tell what I tell you to anyone else?” Its privacy policies state that it may share data with third parties.

Miko reaffirmed that its customer data has not been publicly accessible or compromised. “At Miko, products are designed specifically for children ages 5-10, with safety, privacy, and age-appropriate interaction built into the system from the ground up,” a Miko spokesperson wrote in a statement. “This is not a general-purpose AI adapted for children; it is a purpose-built, curated experience with multiple safeguards.”

Toy Laws

Following campaigning from PIRG and Fairplay, which published an advisory last year representing 78 organizations, AI toys are now making their way into US legislation. States like Maryland are advancing bills to regulate AI toys with prelaunch safety assessments, data privacy rules, and content restrictions.

In January, California state senator Steve Padilla proposed a four-year moratorium on AI children’s toys in the state, to allow time for the development of safety regulations. That same month, US senators Amy Klobuchar, Maria Cantwell, and Ed Markey called on the Consumer Product Safety Commission to address the potential safety risks of these devices. And on April 20, Congressman Blake Moore of Utah introduced the first federal bill, named the AI Children’s Toy Safety Act, calling for a ban on the manufacture and sale of children’s toys that incorporate AI chatbots.

“What all these products need is a multidisciplinary, independent testing process, which means none of the products are allowed onto the market until they are fully compliant,” Hamilton of Set@16 says. “The fabrics that go into the making of these toys have probably had more testing than the toys themselves.”

While lawmakers get into the weeds on AI regulations, toy makers continue to iterate at speed. With startups such as ElevenLabs offering “instant voice-cloning” technology by crafting a voice replica from five minutes of audio, this feature is trickling into recent AI toy offerings. Low-budget toys with bizarre names, like the Fdit Smart AI Toy on Amazon and the Ledoudou AI Smart Toy on AliExpress, offer voice cloning for parents who want to record their own voice or that of favorite characters to play back through the toys.

Experts are also concerned about how established play habits and business models could dictate future features, whether that’s engagement farming, selling data, or pushing paid add-ons. “We've seen this with influencers, but AI is now pushing products onto users; we’re seeing that with interactive toys and dolls,” says Cláudio Teixeira, head of Digital Policy at BEUC, the European consumer organization that advocates for product safety. Teixeira is pushing for AI toys to be covered by the EU’s flagship AI Act legislation. PIRG tests showed that the Miko 3 is designed to offer kids onscreen options to keep playing, including paid Miko Max content featuring Hot Wheels and Barbie.

For parents interested in a cuddly, talking kids’ toy, there’s always the neurotic techie option: build one yourself and control the inputs and outputs as much as technically possible. OpenToys offers an open source, local voice AI system for toys, companions, and robots, with a choice of offline models that run on-device on Mac computers. Or, you know, there’s always “dumb” toys.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-new-wild-west-of-ai-kids-toys/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | MAXWELL ZEFF, PARESH DAVE | MAY 7, 2026 AT 9:42 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

What Microsoft Executives Really Thought About OpenAI in 2018

Leaders at the tech giant were skeptical of OpenAI—but wary of pushing it into the arms of Amazon, according to evidence revealed during the Musk v. Altman trial.

Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, its longtime investor and cloud partner, has grown increasingly complicated over the years as the ChatGPT-maker has grown into a behemoth competitor.

But Microsoft executives had reservations about sending additional funding to OpenAI as far back as 2018 when it was just a small nonprofit research lab, according to emails between more than a dozen Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, shown in a federal court on Thursday during the Musk v. Altman trial.

The emails show how Microsoft, at the time, wavered over what has since been held up as one of the most successful corporate partnerships in tech history. Several Microsoft executives said in the emails their visits to OpenAI did not indicate any imminent breakthroughs in developing artificial general intelligence. In 2017, much of OpenAI’s work was focused on building AI systems that could play video games, which showed early signs of success. But OpenAI needed five times more computing power than it had originally secured from Microsoft to continue the project.

Microsoft worried that not providing support could push OpenAI into the arms of Amazon, the world’s dominant cloud computing provider at the time. Roughly 18 months after the emails were sent, Microsoft announced a landmark $1 billion investment in OpenAI after the lab created a for-profit arm that provided the tech giant with the potential to generate a return of $20 billion.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Elon Musk’s attorneys introduced the emails to show Microsoft’s evolving relationship with OpenAI. After Musk reached out to Nadella, Microsoft in 2016 agreed to provide $60 million worth of cloud computing services to OpenAI at a steep discount. OpenAI consumed the services twice as fast as expected.

The email chain kicked off on August 11, 2017, with Nadella reaching out to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to congratulate the lab on winning a video game competition using AI to mimic a human player. Ten days later, Altman responded seeking $300 million worth of Microsoft Azure cloud computing services.

“We could figure how to fund some of it but not that much,” Altman wrote, apparently seeking a financial handout and engineering help. “I think it will be the most impressive thing yet in the history of AI.”

Nadella asked four lieutenants for their input on how to respond three days later. Microsoft’s AI team saw “no value in engaging,” according to a response from Jason Zander, Microsoft’s executive vice president, that also documented how other teams felt. Its research team thought its own work was “more advanced,” while the public relation teams didn’t like the idea of supporting a group pushing the idea of “machines beating humans.” Ultimately, Zander suggested that Azure would benefit from associating with Musk and Altman but that he wouldn’t want to “take a complete bath,” or large financial hit, in doing so.

A subsequent analysis showed that Microsoft stood to lose about $150 million over several years if it provided the services Altman wanted, according to one email. "Unless he can help us draw a more direct networking effect with OpenAI -> Microsoft business value, we will wind up having to pass,” Zander wrote.

The thread went dark for several months, but was revived on January 10, 2018, with an email to Nadella from Brett Tanzer—who signed off his emails with “Brettt”—then a director on the Azure cloud unit. Altman had told Tanzer that OpenAI could license its gaming AI to Microsoft’s Xbox video game division in exchange for “$35-50 million in Azure Credits.” But Xbox couldn’t commit that much money. Microsoft planned to tell Altman there would be no more discounts after that March, per Tanzer’s email.

Nadella forwarded the email to 15 Microsoft executives later that day, asking for their thoughts on OpenAI and sharing some of his own.

“Overall I can’t tell what research they are doing and how if shared with us it could help us get ahead,” said Nadella. “From what Elon is telling everyone … he feels Open AI is at verge of some big AGI breakthroughs … They clearly are pushing AI at a level none of our first party or third parties are.”

Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott responded that he wasn’t sure what the company would get out of an incremental investment in OpenAI. However, he said, there could be some PR downsides associated with not funding them, “and having them storm off to Amazon in a huff and shit-talk us and Azure on the way out.”

“I’m highly skeptical of an imminent breakthrough in AGI,” Scott said. “IMO, they’re treating us like a bucket of undifferentiated GPUs, which isn’t interesting for us at all. They are not out there saying ‘there’s this critical piece of research that we can only do on Azure because of its technical differentiation.’ If they were, that could be interesting marketing.”

Zander responded the same day, reiterating Scott’s concerns about Amazon.

“My worst case scenario is having them ditch Azure for AWS, as Kevin says bad-mouth us on the way over, and then land with some big new innovation that is shared with our competitors,” said Zander. (Over the past few months, OpenAI committed to spend $138 billion on Amazon cloud computing services, and Amazon agreed to invest $15 billion to $50 billion in OpenAI.)

The next day, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz, responded, expressing similar reservations about funding OpenAI while commending the team for sharing its research. “I’d like to see Microsoft Research folks and others at Microsoft work collaboratively with OpenAI without the need to supply many millions of dollars of support—unless we can identify other broader ecosystem or relationship benefits that have expected value somewhere near the dollars being requested,” he said.

Microsoft told Altman that no team inside the company would commit to sponsoring OpenAI. The duo later rekindled their relationship, though with Microsoft becoming OpenAI’s most prolific fiscal sponsor from 2019 through 2023, a period over which it committed $13 billion in cash and cloud computing credits. Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI accuses Microsoft of aiding and abetting unauthorized use of the billionaire’s donations to the AI lab. Musk contends that Microsoft helped OpenAI develop a moneymaking machine that corrupted its nonprofit principles.

But apart from a few text messages—including Nadella with OpenAI interim CEO Mira Murati as she sought advice in her new role—and the newly released email thread, Microsoft has largely been an afterthought in the trial. That won’t be the case on Monday, when Nadella takes the witness stand.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-executives-discuss-openai-sam-altman-2018/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

Culture

- Billie Eilish Doesn't Know if There Will Ever Be Another Billie Eilish

CULTURE | ANGELA WATERCUTTER | MAY 8, 2026 AT 6:15 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Billie Eilish Doesn't Know if There Will Ever Be Another Billie Eilish

In an interview with WIRED ahead of her new concert film Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), Billie Eilish talked about whether or not future artists will be able to leverage SoundCloud the way she did.

Photograph: Aldo Chacon

Nearly a decade ago, Billie Eilish, then 13 years old, put “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud and catapulted to global super stardom.

It was the kind of ascent aspiring singers dream of, propelled by a platform that at the time wasn’t known for unearthing pop stars. But if you ask her now, even Eilish, now 24, doesn’t know if someone else could replicate her success. “Oh my god!” she says when asked where the next Billie Eilish might be discovered. “I have no idea.”

Photograph: Darrell Jackson

These days it’s common for new artists to share their music on SoundCloud, but back then it was still relatively new. “I’m very curious to see what the future holds,” Eilish says. “I don’t know where the next whoever is gonna come from. I can’t wait to see them and I can’t wait to cheerleader them, whoever it may be.”

If they ever come. Ten years ago artists could build followings, like Eilish did, through livestreams, Instagram posts, and videos on social media. In 2026, the landscape looks very different. Everyone seems to know, or claims to know, how to beat the algorithms to get streams and views, but very little of it feels authentic, especially in a world full of AI slop. Eilish and her fans grew up online, but they may not want to hang out there the way they once did.

Eilish, to be clear, still believes true talent can break through the noise. Art, she says, should be “attainable for everyone” and the internet, while messy, enables that. “There’s all sorts of technologies now where it seems like we’re all doomed, but we’re not,” Eilish tells WIRED. “If we keep making real stuff, real art made by humans—live music, live audiences—I don’t see that ever dying.”

If anything, Eilish’s new concert film Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), out May 8, serves as a testament to IRL connection from a performer known for her online relationship with her fans. Shot in 3D—by Eilish and James Cameron, no less—the film was made to immerse the audience in the concert experience. In between footage from shows on her most recent tour, there are interviews with acolytes about their connection to Eilish’s music. The movie can feel like fan service, but it also demonstrates the value of collective experiences. A call from an internet darling to go out and touch grass—even if it’s in a multiplex.

By the time Eilish released “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud in November 2015, “Gangnam Style” and Justin Bieber had proven YouTube could lead to hits, but few pop stars, save for maybe Taylor Swift, were as publicly online as their fans. Eilish used a playbook from hip-hop artists like Chance the Rapper and the collective Odd Future—who had built their own internet undergrounds through video-sharing sites and downloadable mixtapes—to attain massive super stardom. Her former manager Danny Rukasin told Billboard in 2019 that it was important that Eilish have a complete persona like Chance and Travis Scott, adding “there’s a little bit of that hip-hop zeitgeist in this project.” Not too long after, the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica was calling her “the first SoundCloud-rap pop star, without the rapping.”

Billie Eilish shot to fame as a teenager after putting her song “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud.

Photograph: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images

During her ascent, many profiles of Eilish made hay of her popularity online, complete with Instagram and Spotify stats. Fan accounts popped up to share and reshare all of Eilish’s music and shenanigans. Her notoriety as a Gen Z artist, says Paula Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago who has studied internet fandoms, also made her a “really useful rhetorical figure for music journalists to articulate industry shifts in the digital age.”

The internet enabled all manner of indie acts to find their followings, but when technology promises more access to artists, fans expect it as part of their experience of music. The dynamic becomes circular, Harper says, “and then that increased access to (purportedly) musicians’ real lives and personalities encourages fans, listeners, and critics to read music more closely as expression of that artist’s identity.” This also leads to fandoms that treat posts as Easter eggs, where details are assumed to be a clue to an artist’s life.

Eilish, who signed with Interscope label The Darkroom in 2016, seems to have understood this. As she was preparing her debut LP When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? she was followed by a documentary crew for what would eventually become The World’s a Little Blurry. In it, her brother Finneas, with whom she’s written most of her songs, notes that she is “so woke about her own persona on the internet that I think she’s terrified of, like, anything she makes being hated.”

She needn’t have worried. When We All Fall Asleep, released in 2019, immediately shot to number one on the Billboard 200 and she ended up winning five Grammys at the age of 18.

Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas took home a slew of trophies at the 2020 Grammy Awards.

Photograph: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

That kind of success, Harper notes, can have knock-on effects. Whenever someone is made the face of a new—”purportedly more egalitarian, less gatekept”—ecosystem thanks to tech, that artist becomes a focal point for critique, especially when people begin to question whether their rise is purely meritocratic.

As early as 2019, BuzzFeed News was questioning whether Eilish’s ascent was entirely organic, citing relationships her family had with the entertainment industry and that she was backed by industry gatekeepers, like Spotify. “Eilish is one of the first artists I heard associated with the term ‘industry plant,’” Harper says. (If she is, consider me fooled.)

This was at the beginning of a now rampant conversation around authentic discovery online. (More recently, the term “industry plant” has haunted the band Geese, whose rapid ascent came into question when WIRED reported they’d worked with a company called Chaotic Good Projects to boost online awareness of the band.) Artists like Addison Rae have been able to build careers thanks to platforms like TikTok, but with the internet awash in slop and bots, discovering anything truly new feels almost impossible.

Still, as Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick points out, despite fake Spotify streams and other tricks of internet notoriety, the majority of marketing companies cannot manipulate The Algorithm. If anything, the relationship between artists and social media is the inverse of what you might expect. “A big artist releases an album on Spotify, Spotify puts it in playlists, and that artist grows on Instagram and TikTok,” Broderick writes. “It’s almost never the other way around.”

Despite the slop and the possibility that the “fan” in the chat may not even be real, people continue to click. Artists like Billie Eilish made it seem like our new favorite band is always one scroll away. Even she is not immune to the pull of the internet. “I’m still on more than I’d like to be, but I can’t help myself,” she says. “There's just so much good shit on there. But also it’s horrible. I have to click the comments no matter what, which is not good for me.”

Styling by Spencer Singer. Hair by Ben Mohapi. Make-up by Emily Cheng.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/billie-eilish-doesnt-know-if-there-will-ever-be-another-billie-eilish/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

Science

- The Pentagon Releases New Trove of Declassified UFO Files

- Venom and Hot Peppers Offer a Key to Killing Resistant Bacteria

SCIENCE | BECKY FERREIRA | MAY 8, 2026 AT 2:18 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

‘Orbs,’ ‘Saucers,’ and ‘Flashes’ on the Moon: Pentagon Drops New UFO Files

The Defense Department has released a new trove of declassified documents about government UFO sightings.

Photo-Illustration: Courtesy of the US Department of Defense

The Pentagon released a batch of much-anticipated files about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on Friday, including newly declassified documents that have never been seen by the public before.

The release of roughly 160 documents was rolled out on a new website. Among the trove is video footage and images of tantalizing UAP sightings captured around the world. The files also contain scanned historical material about government UAP and unidentified flying object (UFO) programs dating back to the 1940s and the Apollo program.

While it will take days to comb through the finer details, initial highlights include sightings of “orbs launching orbs” by federal employees in the western US in 2023, a “misshapen and uneven ball of white light” reported by the US military in Syria in 2024, and a compendium of UAP reports from the public during the late 1940s, handwritten or produced by typewriter. The files contain accounts of UAP from the Apollo crews, including a light flash on the lunar surface during Apollo 17.

Some of the visuals include an amoeba-like shape captured by the US Indo-Pacific Command in 2024, a bright round shape filmed by the US Central Command in 2024, and unidentified lights in a picture taken by the Apollo 17 crew from the surface of the Moon.

Courtesy of the US Department of Defense

The mysterious nature of UAP has fueled the popular belief that these sightings could be aliens visiting Earth. The US government has never claimed that it has detected or encountered extraterrestrial life in any of these disclosures, including in the newly released files.

In a statement, the Pentagon said that President Donald Trump “is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files.”

“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation—and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the same statement.

Courtesy of the US Department of Defense

Trump first teased the release in February in a Truth Social post. The Pentagon coordinated the release in partnership with the White House, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the Energy Department, NASA, and the FBI. Many of the files in this new drop contain documents that are already publicly available. However, some versions of these known documents in the new files contain more pages, or fewer redactions, than previously released versions.

More than 60 percent of Americans believe that the government is concealing information about UAP, according to YouGov, while 40 percent think UAP are likely alien in origin, according to Gallup. Congress has held hearings into whether there’s been a decades-long program to recover “non-human” technologies, yet evidence remains elusive.

Courtesy of the US Department of Defense

“If it's just more blobby photos or redacted documents that don't have any details in them, it's more of the same,” Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester who studies the search for alien life, says of the new files. “What we need are actual scientific results from the investigations that should have been done if the most extraordinary claims being made are true.”

The document drop follows a week of high-profile discussions of aliens, including Stephen Colbert’s interview with former President Barack Obama, released on Wednesday. Obama cast doubt on government cover-ups about aliens by joking that “some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with the alien and sent it to his girlfriend.”

Courtesy of the US Department of Defense

Members of the Artemis II crew also second-guessed the idea of a vast government-wide conspiracy to hide the discovery of extraterrestrial life in a discussion with The Daily this week.

“Do you realize that if we found alien life out there, and we came back and reported on it, NASA would never have a budget issue for the rest of eternity?” said Reid Wiseman, the commander of Artemis II. “So trust me.”

Victor Glover, the astronaut who piloted the mission, added: “Why would we hide that from you?”

Update: 5/8/2026, 7:15PM EDT: WIRED corrected the spelling of Reid Wiseman.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-drops-new-ufo-files/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | FERNANDA GONZÁLEZ | MAY 8, 2026 AT 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Venom and Hot Peppers Offer a Key to Killing Resistant Bacteria

Researchers have developed three new antibiotics from scorpion venom and habanero peppers to combat tuberculosis and other drug-resistant pathogens.

Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have identified new ways to combat tuberculosis and reduce bacterial resistance, developing three new antibiotics derived from scorpion venom and habanero peppers.

A team led by Lourival Domingos Possani Postay, from the Institute of Biotechnology's Morelos campus, created two drugs that demonstrated efficacy against the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, responsible for tuberculosis, as well as against Staphylococcus aureus, a microorganism that in hospital environments can cause various clinical complications, from skin infections to potentially fatal diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis, septicemia, and endocarditis.

The antibiotics were derived from the venom of the scorpion Diplocentrus melici, native to the state of Veracruz. The team was able to isolate two colorless molecules called benzoquinones—heterocyclic compounds that do not contain amino acids—from the arachnid's toxin.

These molecules have a particular property: When they come into contact with air, they oxidize and change color. One becomes blue and the other red. This behavior allowed scientists to determine their chemical structure, synthesize them in the laboratory, and evaluate their biological properties.

The results showed that the blue benzoquinone has the capacity to act against the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, while the red one is effective against Staphylococcus aureus. Richard Zare, a renowned expert in the field of physical chemistry and a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, participated in this process, which strengthened the validation of the findings.

The project also involved the collaboration of Rogelio Hernández Pando, from the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, who evaluated the effect of blue benzoquinone in a mouse model with induced tuberculosis. After the trials, he concluded that the molecule works as a highly effective antibiotic against this disease.

Subsequently, the team conducted further tests and found that the same substance is also capable of eliminating other bacteria, such as Acinetobacter baumannii, a highly resistant opportunistic pathogen that is often associated with infections in the blood, urinary tract, lungs, and wounds, especially in hospitals.

The molecules obtained from the scorpion venom have already been patented in Mexico and South Africa. Currently, researchers are working on the development of nanoparticles that function as stabilizers and protection systems, so that antibiotics can be administered safely in the body.

According to Possani Postay, the next step is to carry out clinical trials, although he recognizes that these involve considerable investment. For this reason, he expressed interest in collaborating with a national pharmaceutical company to bring the compounds to large-scale production.

From a Sauce to an Antibiotic

At the same time, another group from the UNAM Biotechnology Institute identified a peptide in the habanero chili bell pepper that has the capacity to fight opportunistic bacteria that can cause serious infections, particularly in patients with weakened immune systems.

This project, led by Gerardo Corzo Burguete together with Georgina Estrada Tapia from the Yucatan Scientific Research Center, focused on the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, considered by the World Health Organization as a high-priority pathogen due to its resistance to conventional antibiotics.

The scientists identified a peptide called defensin J1-1 in the habanero bell pepper (Capsicum chinense). Based on this finding, they developed a biotechnological process to produce a drug called XisHar J1-1, which proved effective against Pseudomonas aeruginosa and has the potential to treat infections caused by fungi.

The procedure involved the genetic modification of a bacterium to induce the production of J1-1 defensin. Subsequently, the modified microorganism was cultured by submerged fermentation, an industrial technique that allows the generation of compounds on a large scale. Finally, the peptide was extracted and purified for use as an antibiotic.

Although the experimental results were positive, Estrada Tapia pointed out that the study has limitations, since it did not use a resistant strain from patients, but a laboratory strain. However, she indicated that both defensin and its synthetic variants showed efficacy and already have a patent in Mexico.

The team stressed the need for further research, since these molecules can be degraded in different organisms. Even so, they are confident that the next phase, which includes tests against resistant strains isolated from patients, will allow them to validate their therapeutic potential.

Iván Arenas Sosa, a member of the group, emphasized that although there is still a long way to go, the advances represent a promising method of combating antimicrobial resistance, considered one of the main threats to global health.

"The problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has increased in recent years and will continue in the future. Therefore, it is essential to promote projects aimed at the discovery of new molecules and the development of innovative treatments to address antimicrobial resistance," he concluded.

This story first appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/mexican-science-transforms-scorpion-venom-and-habanero-chile-into-antibiotics-against-resistant-bacteria/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

Security

- Meet Rassvet, Russia’s Answer to Starlink

- The Canvas Hack Is a New Kind of Ransomware Debacle

SECURITY | LUCIA BELLINELLO | MAY 8, 2026 AT 4:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Meet Rassvet, Russia’s Answer to Starlink

With the launch of the first 16 satellites, Russia begins construction of a network for satellite internet that aims to cover the entire country by 2030. But getting there won’t be easy.

Rassvet vs. Starlink: Has the satellite showdown between Moscow and Washington begun?Joel Kowsky/NASA via Getty Images

In late March, Russian company Bureau 1440 brought into low orbit the first 16 broadband internet satellites of the new Rassvet constellation, already dubbed by observers and local media the Russian answer to SpaceX's Starlink. It's an ambitious global internet project that experts say could conceal much broader strategic goals, with functions including military and communications control.

The launch took place on March 23 at 8:24 pm Moscow time from the military's Plesetsk Cosmodrome using the Soyuz-2.1B launcher, and marked the first step in building an infrastructure that is expected to have at least 300 satellites by 2030.

“The launch marks the transition from the experimental phase to the creation of a communication service,” Bureau 1440 announced on Telegram. “The Bureau 1440 team completed this path in 1,000 days, which is the time between the launch of the experimental satellites and the production satellites.”

The goal of the project is to provide broadband internet access with speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second for each user terminal and a signal latency time of up to 70 milliseconds.

The system has been repeatedly compared to Starlink, which in the war in Ukraine proved to be a vital tool for troop communications. Indeed, according to various reports, Kiev managed to disrupt the communications of some Russian units that relied on Starlink by imposing restrictions on unauthorized terminals.

In this context, then, the Rassvet project appears to be an attempt to build a sovereign satellite infrastructure that can potentially be used by civilians and military personnel alike.

Gunning for It

The dual-use nature of the Rassvet project is also apparent from some operational details. The launch of the satellites was carried out not by the Roscosmos space agency but by the Russian Defense Ministry through the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

A few days after the launch, Russian president Vladimir Putin called the launch of the new constellation “a great event,” while Roscosmos director Dmitry Bakanov said the Cosmodrome would suffer “attempted attacks” on the day of the launch.

“Like all satellites intended for communications, they are also capable of military functions, and given the high effectiveness of Starlink's use on the battlefield, Rassvet will also find use there,” says Vitalij Egorov, a space expert and host of the YouTube channel Otkrytyj Kosmos Zelenogo Kota, or The Open Universe of the Green Cat.

The size of the Rassvet terminals—several times larger and heavier than those in Starlink—may cause some limitations to the network, Egorov says. “Still, the fact that Rassvet's ‘private satellites’ were launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome shows the great interest the Russian Defense Ministry has in the success of this project. The Russian Ministry of Communications is also allocating funds for the project, which means that the state is directly participating in the Rassvet project.”

Independent Russian press reports funding for Rassvet of 100 billion rubles (about $1.34 billion) from the Russian Ministry of Communications, with the company reportedly ready to invest another 300 billion rubles.

Rassvet vs. Starlink

“Rassvet satellites are similar to those of Starlink,” Egorov says. “They are a constellation of satellites for internet transmission, but it would be more accurate to compare them more to the OneWeb system than to Starlink, because Rassvet is intended for commercial companies, state-owned companies, and government customers. In addition, Rassvet plans to reach … about 350 satellites by 2030, while Starlink already has thousands."

The real challenge for Bureau 1440, then, will not be so much putting the first satellites into orbit as industrializing the system on a large scale, Egorov says. To get to a constellation of about 300 satellites in the next few years, the company would need to be able to produce one or two satellites a week—a pace the Russian space industry has never achieved. So far, Egorov notes, only Starlink and OneWeb have been able to sustain such serial production.

The other challenge concerns the development of lighter and cheaper terminals. Until an accessible and easily deployable infrastructure exists, it will be difficult to consider Rassvet a true equivalent of Starlink. Even by the most optimistic estimates, it will take years and dozens of launches before the network can offer stable coverage, even limited to Russian territory.

Another difference concerns the orbital configuration. Starlink is primarily designed to provide coverage to the most densely populated areas. For this reason, the number of satellites transiting at high latitudes is relatively small.

Bureau 1440, on the other hand, has chosen a near-polar orbit, with an inclination of 81.4 degrees. This means that the satellites will fly over the territory practically from south to north, covering the whole of Russia. The signal will be stable in both Crimea and Chukotka and polar areas, suggesting that the infrastructure is designed to serve institutional and corporate customers in remote or otherwise difficult-to-access regions.

According to Bureau 1440, the constellation operates in low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 800 kilometers (around 500 miles), while Starlink's satellites are placed on orbits of about 550 kilometers (341 miles) or less.

Pulling the Strings

As reported by Novye Izvestija, Bureau 1440 was established in 2020 as a division of Megafon, then named Megafon 1440 (1440 being the number of orbits completed around the Earth by the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957, before reentering the atmosphere in January of the following year).

In 2022, the company changed its name and was incorporated into Iks Holding, which, as the independent Dozhd channel reports, would also be involved in the development of surveillance systems and internet blockers, which are used in Russia to block online traffic and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram. On security grounds, in fact, Moscow has begun blocking or severely slowing down the internet and messaging platforms, with the aim of disorienting Ukrainian drones, limiting free access to information for Russian citizens, and pushing users to the state-run Max messaging system, which allows authorities to access users' personal data.

Finally, one of Iks Holding's top managers, Dozhd reports, is the son of Russia's first deputy director of intelligence, Boris Korolev, suggesting that there is a direct link to the government. It's a detail that experts say reveals the true nature of the project better than any official statement: not just a constellation of satellites, but an infrastructure for digital sovereignty—and for the wars of the future, which will also be played out 500 miles above our heads.

This story originally appear on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/meet-rassvet-russias-answer-to-starlink/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

SECURITY | LILY HAY NEWMAN, ANDY GREENBERG | MAY 8, 2026 AT 1:02 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Canvas Hack Is a New Kind of Ransomware Debacle

Thousands of schools around the US were paralyzed on Thursday after education tech firm Instructure shut down access to its Canvas platform following a breach by hackers going by the name ShinyHunters.

Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MassachusettsPHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES

Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States.

The widely used digital learning platform Canvas was put into “maintenance mode” on Thursday after its maker, the education tech giant Instructure, suffered a data breach and faced an extortion attempt by attackers using the recognizable moniker "ShinyHunters." Though the hackers have been advertising the breach and attempting to extract a ransom payment from Instructure since May 1, the situation took on additional immediacy for regular people across the US and beyond on Thursday because the Canvas downtime caused chaos at schools, including those in the midst of finals and end-of-year assignments.

Universities like Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Georgetown sent alerts to students about the situation in recent days; other institutions, including school districts in at least a dozen states, also appear to have been affected. In a list published by the hackers behind the attack on their ransom-focused dark-web site, they claim the breach affected more than 8,800 schools. The exact scale and reach of the breach is unclear, though. And the fact that Canvas was down throughout Thursday afternoon and evening further complicated the picture.

In a running incident update log that began on May 1, Steve Proud, Instructure's chief information security officer, said that the company had “recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor.” He added on May 2 that “the information involved” for “users at affected institutions” included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged by users on the platform.

The situation was ultimately marked as “Resolved” on Wednesday, with Proud writing that “Canvas is fully operational, and we are not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity.” At midday on Thursday, though, the Instructure status page registered an “issue” where “some users are having difficulties logging into Student ePortfolios.” Within a few hours, the company had added another status update: “Instructure has placed Canvas, Canvas Beta, and Canvas Test in maintenance mode.” Late Thursday evening, the company said that Canvas was available again “for most users.”

TechCrunch reported on Thursday that the hackers launched a secondary wave of attacks, defacing some schools' Canvas portals by injecting an HTML file to display their own message on the schools' Canvas login pages. According to The Harvard Crimson, attackers modified the Harvard Canvas login page to show a message that included a list of schools that the hackers claim were impacted by the breach.

The message from attackers “urged schools included on the affected list to consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact the group privately to negotiate a settlement before the end of the day on May 12—or else risk their data being leaked,” The Crimson reported. “It is unclear what information tied to Harvard affiliates was included in the alleged breach.”

Instructure did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Thursday's outages and how they fit into the bigger picture of the breach. But the situation is significant given that a massive trove of student information has potentially been exposed, and the visibility of the incident across the country makes it a key example of a long-standing yet endlessly escalating problem of data extortion and ransomware attacks.

The ShinyHunters name is associated with massive data dumps and has been linked to the infamous hacker collective known as the Com. But as the constellation of actors has shifted over the years, numerous attackers have taken up the most prominent Com-related monikers. A number of recent attacks have invoked other names, such as Lapsus$, with little or no connection to the original group that operated under the name.

In the case of Canvas, it is similarly unclear who is acting behind the ShinyHunters name. Allison Nixon, the chief research officer at cybersecurity firm Unit 221b who has closely tracked ShinyHunters and other ransomware groups, says the activity appears to be related to recent activity from a group of hackers sometimes referred to as ScatteredLapsus$Hunters.

Earlier on Thursday, a dark-web site used by hackers operating under the ShinyHunters name to threaten and extort their targets listed both Instructure and the schools that use its software as victims, along with a note from the hackers complaining that Instructure hadn’t responded to its demands to negotiate a payment. “Instructure has not even bothered speaking to us to understand the situation or to even negociate [sic] with us to prevent the release of this data,” the statement read. “The Company seemingly does not care about all the students affected and the institutions impacted by this data breach.”

By Thursday evening, however, those references to Instructure and its customers had disappeared from the site, which later became unresponsive. While ransomware gangs sometimes remove victims from their dark-web sites in response to their agreeing to pay a ransom, victims can also be removed by the hackers as a negotiating tactic, says Nixon.

“This is often one of their manipulation tactics to try to encourage the victim to pay. So while they're negotiating or after they've paid, they might take that victim off the site, or depending on how negotiations go, they might put the victim back on,” Nixon says.

She adds that, in the midst of those negotiations, Com-associated hacker groups have been known to escalate to more extreme coercive tactics to maximize the victim’s incentive to pay, including distributed denial of service attacks, flooding the company with phone calls and emails and even threatening executives’ families. “These kind of pressure tactics start to look a whole lot more just violent mafia rather than any kind of skilled hacker stuff,” Nixon says.

The hackers in fact list numerous other victims on their dark-web site that have previously been reported as ShinyHunters targets, including Amtrak, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Rockstar Games, Match, Hinge, and Bumble, though WIRED couldn’t confirm whether those organizations had in fact been breached by this specific subgroup of the Com. Nixon warns that the hackers behind the Canvas attack have in fact used old or recycled data to exaggerate claims of breaches in the past.

This latest attack and the disruption it has caused for schools across the country, however, are all too real—and represent a significant escalation from this particular ransomware gang. “It's noteworthy that a tiny number of repeat offenders can escalate for years to reach this point,” says Nixon. “It speaks to the systemic international issue of cybercrime and the need for governments around the world to set geopolitics aside and cooperate to stop those who extort money and prey on kids.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/canvas-hack-shinyhunters-ransomware-instructure/ on May 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM EDT.

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