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- Orange Crush: TAG Heuer Drops a Bright Revamp of the Original Metal F1 Watch

- The Outlaw Chemist Teaching People How to Make Drugs From Scratch

- The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact

- A California Program Is Bringing Down the Cost of Heat Pumps by Buying Bulk

- The Rise of the 1 am Job Interview

- Space Agencies Are Trying to Keep Astronauts From Losing Their Sight

- The Complicated Case of Passing On Your Digital Estate

- Meetily Lets You Transcribe and Summarize Meetings Without a Subscription—Here’s How

- These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes

- Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual Orientation

- The Sharpest Image Ever Taken of the Sun Reveals a Hidden Phenomenon

- Here Are the First Images of the Crater Left on the Moon by SpaceX’s Rocket

- Flock’s Plans for Rideshare Dashcams and Coaching Police, Revealed

- How to Disable Gemini in Gmail and Google Docs

- Sensitive Info Goes Into ‘No Reply’ Emails Constantly. This Guy Sees It All

- Spokane Shows What the New Era of Wildfires Looks Like

- WhatsApp Gets a Handy @all Feature for Group Chats

- The Chinese Philosopher Americans Can’t Stop Fighting About

- Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Tech Team Is What DOGE Should Have Been

- Scientists Used AI to Create 16 New Viruses

- The ‘Manosphere’ Isn’t a Movement. It’s a Multibillion-Dollar Grievance Industry

- The Hottest New AI Chatbot Is Just a Guy Answering Your Questions

GEAR | JEREMY WHITE | AUG 10, 2026 AT 10:47 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Orange Crush: TAG Heuer Drops a Bright Revamp of the Original Metal F1 Watch

The solar-powered limited edition may be here to mark the final Dutch Grand Prix taking place in Zandvoort, but it’s the juicy iconic colorway WIRED’s been waiting for.

Courtesy of TAG Heuer

Ever since WIRED reported last year on how TAG Heuer remade its classic Formula 1 watch series, we've been waiting for a particular model to be revamped in TAG's new larger, solar-powered guise.

The iconic bright orange 373.513, which later carried the model number WA1213, is not from the very first three-watch Formula 1 release revealed back in 1986, but it followed immediately after, and sported, along with green, black, and blue models, the first metal case for the F1.

Finally, joining TAG's 2025 relaunch of the series, the 373.513 is returning as part of the Solargraph F1s—and although it doesn't carry any official designation, it seems it's already being called “the Zandvoort” in watch circles, as the piece is supposedly here to mark the final Dutch Grand Prix taking place at the celebrated circuit at Zandvoort.

The new limited-edition 38-mm “Zandvoort” TAG F1, on rubber or steel bracelet.

Courtesy of TAG Heuer

Like the rest of the new Formula 1 watches, the 38-mm Zandvoort solar F1 is larger than the original 28-mm and 35-mm versions, but, like the originals, it comes on either an orange rubber strap ($2,150) or steel bracelet (for $2,250, however, on this 2026 version, the bracelet is a three-row sand-blasted affair rather than the original five-row).

Aside from the case-size change and alteration to the bracelet, pleasingly, much remains the same from the original ’80s versions. The gray opalin dial mirrors the 1980s hue, and the design on the orange rubber strap either side of the metal case that mirrors the TAG logo is retained.

The original concept target market for the F1 was young surfers and divers …

Courtesy of TAG Heuer

… not the driving enthusiasts that TAG looked to engage with when the F1 dropped in the ’80s.

Courtesy of TAG Heuer

One element of the ’80s F1 rubber straps that has not carried over to the new collection, though, is the V-shaped grooves on the bottom portion of the original straps. TAG made the ’80s rubber straps extra long so surfers and divers could wear the F1s over wet suits. The V-shaped grooves meant these could easily be cut down to a desired length—particularly useful if you were just going to wear it on the wrist and not in the waves. Clearly, TAG doesn't want anybody cutting up its new rubber straps.

I've wanted a classic original orange TAG F1 for years, and finally managed to pick one up earlier this year, although it is the later WA1213 model. Eddy Burgener, who designed the TAG F1 in the ’80s, has stated that bright, popping colors were key to the original collection, and that the models were not, initially at least, thought of as being linked to driving but to water sports instead.

Speaking to watch site Hodinkee last year, Burgener said TAG was “trying to create a new style of watches for American surfers, divers, and other young folks heading for the beach,” so the brief was to create a new watch that was fun, colorful, and young, emulating the bright surfboards and the clothes surfers were wearing at the time.

WIRED’s original WA1213 35-mm orange TAG F1 still going strong.

Photograph: Jeremy White

To nail the bright colors, Burgener stated that the case had to be synthetic, which then added the complication of trying to make a diver's watch using synthetic materials, something that was incredibly difficult at the time. In the end, they settled on a mixture of fiberglass and plastic as the base material for increased hardness and stability.

TAG's solar F1s now sport a form of bioplastic—a more eco-friendly castor-based polyamide which the brand has named TH-Polylight—replacing the old “Arnite” thermoplastic. As before, this is molded over a steel inner core, making for a sports watch that's more robust than most plastic-cased equivalents.

By the time TAG's “young” watch was introduced in 1986, the company had entered the racing world, and so the range duly adopted the name “Formula 1,” with the thinking that the F1’s bright colors and durable construction would appeal to both young divers and drivers. Regardless of the original target market, the F1 was an immense commercial success, surpassing 3 million units sold before the line was initially shelved.

The new F1 Solargraph orange rubber strap model is limited to 1,500 pieces, while only 1,000 are available on the bracelet, which is also an online exclusive, so not available in physical stores. Both watches will be available to order next week, but you can sign up to get notification on when they drop now.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/orange-crush-tag-heuer-drops-a-bright-revamp-of-the-original-metal-f1-watch/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

CULTURE | MATTHA BUSBY | AUG 10, 2026 AT 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Outlaw Chemist Teaching People How to Make Drugs From Scratch

Willy Myco has made over 120 videos showing people his exact process for making everything from LSD to DMT vapes. Not everyone’s a fan of his methods.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

“This is probably the most important video I have ever done,” William “Willy” Myco tells his nearly 2,500 paying Patreon subscribers. The video, posted on Halloween 2024, offers viewers step-by-step instructions on how to produce what he claimed is “100 percent pure LSD.”

Wearing a baseball cap that said “Mycelium Familia” over his shaved head with his brown beard peeking out from beneath his mask, he declares his tutorial on synthesizing the psychedelic over the course of three days to be the “world’s first.”

“It has been a dream of mine to record this process so everybody has the scientific knowledge they need,” says Myco, which is short for mycologist, a scientist who studies fungi, in the video. (He doesn’t share his real last name, and he spoke to WIRED on the condition we wouldn’t use his last name due to the illegal nature of some of his work.)

When the process is finished, the video shows his chemist collaborator holding out a lab flask of a greenish-blue liquid, but no test of the substance is conducted on camera to confirm its identity. Nonetheless, Myco issues a stark if hyperbolic warning about the final product, telling viewers, if it “touches your eyes, skin, mouth … you better cancel your plans for a month, ’cause you’re not going to be able to do anything.” (Most LSD trips wear off after a day, though there can be exceptions.)

Willy Myco posts videos showing people how to synthesize drugs.

Courtesy of TTF Media LLC

It was once unthinkable to post a video on the internet demonstrating how to synthesize a controlled psychoactive substance. But the masked psychedelic educator has released more than 120 how-to videos over the past decade which run the gamut from the attempted LSD synthesis to explainers on cultivating psilocybin mushrooms, extracting mescaline from mind-altering cacti, and preparing DMT vape cartridges.

In addition to his Patreon, which had more than 14,500 subscribers, Myco sells mushroom genetics, merch (in the LSD video, he wore his own branded hoodie with the slogan “Love My Country But Fuck The Government”), and offers consultancy services for mushroom growers. His YouTube channel, called “Willy’s World,” had over 96,000 followers but was taken down after WIRED reached out to the platform for comment. YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said it was removed “under our terms of service, which prohibit creating new channels after a termination.”

Myco responded on Instagram: “YouTube is back on their BS again. Channel had zero strikes whatsoever, I post super censored and safe content there … So if you’ve ever asked why I put all my energy into my patreon channel … this is why.”

But shortly afterward, his Patreon account was taken down too. In an email statement, a spokesperson for the platform said: “Patreon prohibits works that provide instructions around the creation of controlled substances or other recreational drugs. We take violations of our policies seriously, and after an internal investigation, we have removed the creator’s account.”

Myco hopes to successfully appeal the Patreon decision, as he pays his team through the funds accrued from his subscribers. “I know I’m a renegade, but I don’t promote the use [of drugs],” he says. “It’s all scientific. It’s all education, in the hopes to promote harm reduction.”

As hallucinogens edge closer to mainstream medicine, Myco is pushing in the opposite direction—away from clinics, regulators, and expensive trip-sitters, and toward radical self-sufficiency. To his many supporters, the outlaw chemist is democratizing psychedelic knowledge, out of the hands of academics, dealers, and erstwhile gatekeepers. To critics, his confidence occasionally outruns his science, and his commitment to secrecy raises questions about at least some of what he says.

Myco, a 38-year-old from Boston who now lives in his parents’ native Puerto Rico, seems at ease breaking the law.

He claims that, in 2002, he produced his own DMT by following a published scientific extraction method. Smoking the resultant hallucinogen was a transformative experience. Psychedelics “became my entire world,” he says, adding that he was dealing with “a really serious depression” at the time, after his parents split and his uncle died. He says he communed with his late uncle in the throes of that DMT trip. “He reassured me that everything's all right,” recalls Myco. From that point on, “I knew I wanted to be part of psychedelic history.”

After studying microbiology in college, Myco says, he started posting on drug forums like the Shroomery, Mycotopia, and Nexus in 2009 but was appalled by their cliquishness. “They treated new cultivators and chemists like shit,” he says. (A moderator from Shroomery says cliquish behavior does exist and can shut down people with new ideas, but they are glad it did not stop Myco “from pursuing his passion for chemistry and mycology.”)

Myco says he went on to work for a pharmaceutical company in Boston “making more money than I'd ever seen,” but it was only ever a stopgap. He says that in late 2014 he posted his first explainer video on YouTube on aspects of growing psilocybin mushrooms, while wearing a gas mask. Several months later Myco logged back into his YouTube creator account and discovered “it had completely blown up,” accruing thousands of subscribers. So he quit his job and created a Patreon—anointing his supporters as the “Trip Team family.”

In mid-2023 he started drawing up plans to brazenly educate people on how to produce LSD. “Sure, a chemist can go get a synthesis schematic and synthesize LSD, but for the average Joe it would look like hieroglyphics,” he says.

So he decided to try to become the first person to bring to the screen long-established LSD recipes shared by legendary psychedelic chemists Albert Hofmann and Sasha Shulgin. To minimize the threat of censure or even prosecution, Myco claims that in May 2024 he found a university laboratory in Pakistan, which apparently secured government approval to produce the psychedelics for scientific research.

Myco months later released a similar video synthesizing MDMA in Pakistan. Then, in March 2026, he published a video of what he says shows a synthesis of the psychedelic 2C-B, also known as “tripstasy” as its effects are like a mix of MDMA and LSD. “I could tell you from personal experience, this stuff is absolutely amazing,” he says. He signs off from the video with his trademark catchphrase: “Do good, be good, live good, namaste.”

Next up, he plans to undermine an incoming US Drug Enforcement Administration ban on the opioid-like compound 7-OH, which is found in kratom. “The Feds are about to schedule [7-OH] tablets and take them away from countless individuals that have been using them to successfully escape opiate addiction,” Myco wrote in a recent Instagram story. “So I think it’s time to film a synth video showing you how to make your own [7-OH] of the highest quality for next to nothing.”

Each video cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, he says. “We should be able to explore our minds the way we see fit,” Myco said in the LSD video. “These aren’t just substances to me,” Myco says in our interview. “These are sacraments; these are medicines.”

But some are calling bullshit on Myco’s methods.

Hamilton Morris, an expert in psychedelic chemistry and creator of the Vice show Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, saw the LSD video in June last year and claimed, “with absolute certainty this is not 100 percent pure LSD.” In a video to his Patreon subscribers, Morris said: “The fact it has this green-blue color is something that I have never heard of. Right off the bat that is a bit suspicious.”

Myco soon shot back against Morris on his Patreon. He acknowledged some minor errors in the presentation of the process but said the synthesis route was long-established. “I don’t know if he’s upset that I figured out how to do this legally, and I got it out there,” Myco said in his counter-response.

Myco's commitment to democratizing making drugs can also put him in the crosshairs of dealers. He says he started receiving threats from other drug producers in spring 2024, in the run-up to the LSD video, which he had announced was in the pipeline. “Tell Willy putting out a video like that can hurt a lot of people's business and that can make problems nobody wants,” a text from an associate in June 2024 reads. “It’s best for his safety to not release that video.”

Myco is increasingly security-conscious as a result. He has always worn a face mask in photos and in his videos to conceal his identity. “In Puerto Rico, I'm heavily armed,” he says. “I carry a gun everywhere I go.”

He refused to publicly state how much money he makes, but documents of last year’s revenue, shared with WIRED, indicate that he possibly earns well into the six figures.

Despite the hiccups, Myco’s psychedelic roadshow continues. “The gatekeepers wanted to keep [the knowledge] mystified forever,” he says. “I want people to see, you could do this yourself quietly at your home for pennies on the dollar.”

His Robin Hood ethos has seen him pick up supporters throughout the psychedelics industry. “People have kind of grown up with him, like they first learned how to cultivate mushrooms by watching Willy Myco videos,” says psychedelic comedian and entrepreneur Dennis Walker, host of the Mycopreneur podcast. “At the heart of what he is doing is creating crowdsourced, decentralized access models for these substances.”

Reggie Harris, cofounder of the mushroom testing outfit Hyphae Labs, says in a text: “Willy is the god and fuck ANYONE who has anything negative to say about him. Ask them what they have done to build community.”

Every year, Myco organizes vacations for groups of more than 30 of his followers to Disney World in Florida and, this October, to Sedona, Arizona, for “Tripaween,” where he says the group is going to do a San Pedro cactus ceremony with Navajo Native American shamans and explore the quartz-rich red rocks.

“We’re tripping all the time and just partying, having fun like rock stars,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the [Trip Team family] I don’t know where I would be. They’re not my biological family, but they’re the family I choose, and I would give my life for them.”

If he is unable to get Patreon to reconsider, Myco says he will simply continue his work through Discord and his website. “The more people know about something,” he says, “the safer they are.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-outlaw-chemist-teaching-people-how-to-make-drugs-from-scratch/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | REECE ROGERS | AUG 10, 2026 AT 7:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact

Platforms are finally recognizing that people don’t want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process.

Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San Francisco behind and be off-grid sheep farmers. Something analog. In that moment, anything sounded better than this ongoing, generative-AI-induced hell.

Many Americans are having similar reactions to the growing prevalence of generative AI in daily life. “The AI revolution has happened, and everybody hates it,” says Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at New York University and author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. In a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ increased familiarity with generative AI coincides with negative attitudes about the technology. This is especially true for young people between 18 and 29, where almost half see generative AI as doing more harm than good.

While this AI backlash has been brewing for the last few years, more companies appear to be directly addressing these concerns. LinkedIn added a “seems like AI slop” button for reporting AI-generated content on the platform, despite still hosting plenty of generative AI tools. Snapchat announced that fully AI-generated videos would no longer be eligible for its discovery feed. Substack recently added an AI detection tool to police writers.

The backlash’s “why” is simple at its core. Many Americans feel like they never consented to any of this. I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.

Whether it's AI models scraping your data or noisy data centers popping up in your backyard, the AI revolution seems to be an event happening to us without making us feel like active participants.

“Consent is really important,” Broussard tells WIRED. “We can connect that to the way that women, queer people, people of color, and minorities get exploited and abused online. Tech companies have never really been sensitive to issues of consent.”

Public backlash appears to be working, at times, in getting unwanted AI features shut down. “They just roll them out and see what sticks, because nobody really knows what this is for,” says Nick Seaver, an associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University focusing on technology and society. Google recently rolled back the ability for people to use generative AI to tweak satellite images on Google Earth almost immediately after launching it, following reporting from 404 Media. Additionally, Meta turned off the aforementioned deepfaking tool for Instagram users after three days of public outcry and viral videos with millions of views criticizing the feature.

There’s also a growing rejection of generative AI in marketing materials. Many people online reacted negatively to major brands, like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, incorporating generative AI visuals into their ad spots. Even local shops see backlash for promoting events using AI-generated posters.

Beyond online outcry, more people are starting to protest against the building of data centers that power these AI tools. “There's a lot of pushback coalescing around data centers," says Emily Bender, coauthor of The AI Con. "Data centers are important because they are focal points of environmental and economic damage.” Americans across the political spectrum have recently united in these data center protests.

While tech workers in San Francisco, especially software developers, have latched on to generative AI tools as central to their everyday work, many of these uses are obligatory. “Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one Block employee told me during the layoffs earlier this year at Jack Dorsey’s fintech company. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.” I don’t want to be forced to use specific tools at work, especially one that’s morally questionable and shown to be wrought with errors.

It’s easy to feel helpless when pushing back against the whims of giant, well-funded tech companies, but the recent rollbacks of some AI features stand as a reminder about the power of collective action. “I would definitely encourage people to organize using traditional methods as well as digital methods,” says Broussard. “Remind people that public pressure works.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-ai-slop-backlash-is-actually-having-an-impact/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | CHRIS BARANIUK | AUG 10, 2026 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

A California Program Is Bringing Down the Cost of Heat Pumps by Buying Bulk

The approach is like a Costco for heat pumps, and it’s helping make home installations more accessible as heat waves worsen.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

When heat waves descended on California this summer, Shreyas Sudhakar, founder and chief executive officer of heat pump installation firm Vayu, took his chance.

Just 54 percent of homes in the state have central air-conditioning, but rising temperatures are making cooling a must-have. Sudhakar saw the hot weather as an opportunity to sign up multiple households to a heat pump “group-buy” scheme, offering them a chance to purchase technology that provides carbon-free heating and cooling at a discount. After advertising the venture online, he was flooded with queries.

Heat pumps often cost more than cooling-only air conditioners, which is why adoption hasn’t been more widespread in the US. But the group-buy approach offers would-be purchasers a bulk discount that can defray part of the cost. Group-buys also mean installers can line up a tidy string of jobs—a win-win potentially enabling whole neighborhoods to switch to heat pumps.

Along with heat pump marketplace VoltHub, Vayu launched the first California Heat Pump Group Buy last year. “Nobody, to our knowledge, had done it in California,” recalls Sudhakar. “We thought, ‘Let’s try it out.’” The program is available around Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Air-source heat pumps run on electricity. They work by harvesting heat from outside air and distributing it indoors, or gathering excess internal heat and dumping it outside.

This isn’t exactly rocket science. Except, perhaps, to a former rocket propulsion engineer.

“I tell people this all the time,” laughs Sudhakar, who previously designed rocket engines at Blue Origin. “At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of pipes and a heat exchanger moving energy from one place to another.”

Among the first group of roughly 10 customers in the initial group-buy scheme was Naoya Kanai, a data scientist who lives with his wife and toddler in the Bay Area city of San Mateo. Kanai stumbled on the group-buy online and jumped at the chance, knowing that federal rebates for carbon-free appliances would soon disappear under the Trump administration.

“It was one of the most affordable ways to get a quality system,” he says of the program. Kanai recalls thinking, “I can really sell it to my spouse.”

Once households are signed up to the group-buy, Sudhakar and his colleagues work out what equipment they’ll need for each installation. Then, they shop around for deals from distributors so they can make offers to participants. “We’re looking for what is the best value across the entire group,” he adds. “Typically, we’re getting 15 to 30 percent discounts on the equipment.”

Kanai’s house is a two-story 1980s suburban home that has about 2,500 square feet of space. The new heat pump system cost roughly $14,500 and provides heating and cooling via ductwork that was already in place. Kanai says the flow of temperature-controlled air is much more comfortable and steady compared to his old gas furnace and air conditioner. He’s barely noticed this summer’s heat waves until going outside. “A lot of times we’ll step out the front door [and realize] ‘Oh, wow, it was actually really hot today.’”

Other group-buy programs are available across North America, with one of the oldest operational programs on Gabriola Island, British Columbia, a 58-square-kilometer land mass home to about 4,500 people. In 2010, a group called Energy Gabriola set itself up as a heat pump dealer via a distributor, so it could buy heat pumps in bulk and sell them at cost. This was possible because, until that point, there was no heat pump market or installation service on the island whatsoever.

Relying partly on volunteers, the group has installed more than 1,000 heat pumps to date, electrifying nearly half of the island’s households. “We think we’re the heat pump capital of Canada,” says Steven Earle, of Vancouver Island University, who is involved in Energy Gabriola.

Energy Gabriola had a relatively easy time because there were no installers to compete with. “Any other place where there are already people doing this, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t tolerate that,” Earle says.

Enthusiasm can also be weather-dependent. Sudhakar and his colleagues attempted a group-buy in early 2026, but he says it was “a total flop” due to lack of interest. Then, those heat waves hit California over the summer.

“What we learned through that is we do need to promote this stuff when people have the external trigger,” he says. “The weather is our natural partner.”

With a renewed group-buy scheme on offer during the hotter weather, queries flowed again. Now, another 10 to 15 households are in line to get a heat pump in the next few months. Sudhakar hopes to scale up these numbers in the coming years.

“It’s a good idea,” says Andrew Sissons, director for a sustainable future at Nesta, a charity in the UK that promotes policy innovations.

Seeing neighbors install heat pumps can convince others on the block to do the same. “That’s a really important effect,” says Sissons, saying such ventures can build “social contagion”—the same phenomenon that makes people want to install solar panels after seeing them on their neighbors’ roofs.

However, he cautions that high-quality installations and good aftercare are needed ensure the positivity lasts. Because every home generally requires a slightly different system, it’s key to ensure that participants don’t get stuck with a heat pump that’s ill-suited to their needs.

Sudhakar says that he has three or four installation designs that he matches to most homes. But they might not work for older properties without ductwork or those with asbestos-laden ducts that require remediation. These wouldn’t be a good fit for the group-buy, says Sudhakar, though they could still get a heat pump through a more bespoke installation.

As for the quality of the heat pumps themselves, most of the models Sudhakar recommends have a cooling efficiency rating that would be considered good. Another key measure of efficiency called coefficient of performance refers to the number of kilowatt-hours of heat the system produces per kilowatt-hour of electricity it consumes. The higher this number is, the more likely it is that a heat pump will cost less to run than a gas furnace. That’s particularly important in a place like California, where electricity is notoriously expensive.

Although some case studies have found heat pumps cost less to run than gas furnaces when factoring in installation costs, this is not always the case. Roxana Shafiee at the Harvard University Center for the Environment says that group-buy schemes may not be able to overcome this problem, except with the most efficient installations. She and colleagues have studied energy consumption data in colder areas of the US and worked out that heat pumps could end up costing some households more to run than gas-based heating.

“We still see bill increases in a lot of cases,” she says. “It depends where you are.”

Kanai, for one, “crunched some numbers on an Excel spreadsheet” and found that his new heat pump would probably not cost much more to operate than a gas furnace.

Some people aren’t too worried about the running costs. “We didn’t do it for the payback, we did it for the environment,” says Paul Holroyd, a resident of Ottawa, Ontario. He found a heat pump group-buy scheme offered by a company called Fern, which he says stood out because of the apparent expertise of those running it. In total, he spent almost $20,000 CAD. The group-buy meant he got a roughly 7 percent discount, he estimates.

“Not huge but it all helps,” says Holroyd.

Being part of something that could encourage the wider adoption of heat pumps was also a motivator. Holroyd has recently watched as the skies above Ontario turned orange due to smoke from massive wildfires in Canada.

“If we can be part of a process that gets more people into doing things for the environment, like heat pumps and solar,” he says, “I think that’s a good thing.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/california-group-buy-bringing-down-heat-pump-costs/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | KATE TAYLOR | AUG 10, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Rise of the 1 am Job Interview

An AI interview is increasingly the first step of a hiring process. Since there’s no human on the other end, candidates are scheduling them whenever—even deep into the night.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

When Tim Millard received an email about interviewing for a media relations job in January, six months into his job hunt, he assumed he’d speak to a human. When he was instead instructed to record himself answering a series of questions on camera, he felt a familiar pang of resignation—one that had followed him throughout the job hunt.

“I figured, I have to do this if I want to be considered for the job,” Millard tells WIRED. So, that evening, the Atlanta-based communications and marketing expert tidied his living room and set up his laptop. The email had left the timing for the interview open-ended, and he figured he might as well get it done as soon as possible. “What else was I going to do at 9:30 at night?”

The questions were pretty standard for the role. How would Millard pitch a story to the media? How would he cultivate relationships with local journalists? But the setup was bizarre. He sat in front of his laptop, watching as a question popped up on the screen. He had roughly half a minute to think about his response.

“Once the 30 seconds was up, ‘ding!’ Now you have two minutes to record your answer,” Millard said. “It felt so out of this world.”

Millard received an automated rejection email in March. But the experience unknowingly wedged him into a trend currently reshaping the modern job search. As automated video interviews and AI become a bigger part of the recruitment process, so do late-night interviews.

Arsham Ghahramani said that he noticed the late-night interview trend almost immediately after he cofounded and launched Ribbon, a company that makes voice-AI recruitment software. Twenty-four percent of Ribbon’s AI interviews take place between 10 pm and 2 am local time, according to data from the more than 500 companies that use the service. For his manufacturing clients, that figure jumps to 35 percent.

“This is a genuinely new option for people,” Ghahramani says. Many parents can’t sacrifice 30 minutes until the clock strikes 10 pm. Same for employees paid hourly, or those who are tied up working their current jobs on a noisy factory floor or kitchen. “Some people are very constrained in their options of when they can interview and how they can interview.”

Ribbon isn’t the only platform charting the rise in late-night interviews. Hiring platform Greenhouse says that roughly 15 to 20 percent of candidates interviewed by its voice agent now schedule an interview at night.

Ophir Samson, who became head of Greenhouse’s voice AI division when the company acquired his startup in May, tells WIRED that he doesn’t think artificial intelligence should replace human interviews. Which is good, because applicants are currently extremely skeptical of AI interviews.

While a Greenhouse survey in May found that nearly two-thirds of job applicants have been interviewed by an AI agent, up 13 points over six months, most people aren’t particularly excited about this development. Thirty-eight percent of American candidates told Greenhouse that they had withdrawn from a hiring process rather than be interviewed by an AI. Another 12 percent said they’d drop out if an AI interview was required.

One of the major stressors for applicants is the lack of transparency on how the footage will be used. Can AI reject them outright because they fail to say a certain buzzword?

While different employers and services vary, the typical AI or automated video interview is evaluated using a rubric that varies from job to job. A welder might be asked about certain technical skills or certifications in a Ribbon interview, Ghahramani says, while a sales role might include an “enthusiasm” score. AI analyzes footage of the interview to evaluate how well the candidate fits the rubric, and assigns them a score. The score is passed along to the recruiter, along with footage of the interview—though, realistically, many of the interviews go unwatched by humans.

Samson describes Greenhouse’s approach to the AI interview as a sort of résumé add-on, a tool that can identify high-scoring candidates who would have otherwise been lost in the deluge of applications. He doesn’t see the AI interview as a choice between human and robot, but a choice between being ghosted and improving the chance of actually speaking to a human interviewer in the next round.

“It’s a shitty time to be a candidate,” Samson says. “Your résumé goes into a black hole. You’re competing with thousands of candidates that are all using AI to write their résumés. So, good candidates can’t stand out.”

That assessment seems to be in line with Millard’s experience. A year after losing his job, he’s still searching. The process has been so emotionally devastating that it inspired Millard to write a one-man show, After Careful Consideration, which debuted at the Atlanta Fringe Festival in May.

When Millard signed on for his late-night interview in January, he wasn’t marveling at the convenience. He just wanted to get “this godawful thing done.”

“In today's job market,” Millard says, “it feels like if you are going to scream, you're going to scream into the void. And nobody is going to hear you.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-rise-of-the-1-am-job-interview/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | ISABELLA WARD | AUG 10, 2026 AT 2:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Space Agencies Are Trying to Keep Astronauts From Losing Their Sight

A device currently being used to help octogenarians do self-administered eye exams could be part of future space missions to monitor astronauts’ ocular health.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

The European Space Agency is trying to understand why astronauts lose their eyesight in space, in the hope they can figure out how to treat—or even prevent—the condition as looming longer spaceflights heighten the risk of permanent vision damage.

The agency has commissioned British eye-scanning startup Siloton to develop a solution ahead of the international Artemis flights to the moon and other deep space missions. The health tech uses quantum technology to shrink core components used in eye-testing equipment found at optometrists to fit on a photonic chip smaller than a coin.

Founded by physicists in 2020, Siloton is currently working with the UK’s National Health Service to enable patients with retinal conditions to self-scan at home. “The ESA pretty much has the same requirements,” says cofounder and chief technology officer Euan Allen. “It's just in a totally different environment.”

Spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome (SANS) is a collection of eye and brain changes caused by spending prolonged periods in a low-gravity environment, and it impacts around 70 percent of astronauts on the International Space Station, according to NASA. One of the starkest cases is that of NASA astronaut John Phillips, who launched to the ISS in 2005 with 20/20 vision, and splashed down six months later with his vision at 20/100—what’s considered a moderate visual impairment. While he was in space, bodily fluid, uninhibited by gravity, built up in his head, squashing his eyeballs, swelling his optic nerve, and pushing his retina forward.

Courtesy of Siloton

While returning to Earth can reverse some of the damage, space agencies are concerned by both the operational risk of astronauts losing their vision mid-mission, as well as the longer-term health impacts. “The eye condition SANS is a serious health risk facing astronauts on long missions,” says Rebecca Evernden, director of the UK Space Agency. Medical engineers want to develop their understanding of the condition and the factors causing it so that they can manage any ocular damage, and eventually treat it or even stop it from becoming a problem.

Scientists are already monitoring how spaceflight impacts the human eye on the ISS using a modified version of the device found in optometry offices that measures the thickness of layers at the back of the eye. However, the device is bulky and requires real-time remote guidance from experts on the ground. As astronauts journey further into deep space, lengthening communication delays with Earth will mean this is no longer feasible.

Siloton’s device would allow astronauts to scan their retinas more frequently by automating some of the process so that examinations do not need ground support. The ESA hopes that will generate more data on any ocular degeneration, and possibly provide early warning signs that changes in the eye may be occurring—even before they result in vision change.

Courtesy of Siloton

Other technical challenges include getting around using batteries to power the device because they pose such a big fire risk. In spacecraft, where space is at a premium, designers will also have to decide where the binocular-sized equipment would live and how to position and keep an astronaut’s head in place without gravity (typically, that’s done by having a chin rest).

But that’s a walk-in-the-park compared with getting a retiree whose sight is failing to cooperate, says Allen. “We're very confident, because we're trying to do that with 80-year-old patients who already have some level of visual imparity,” says Allen, “whereas these will be highly trained astronauts who are much younger and have full function of their eyes.”

”I think lots of the stuff that we're doing for space will bleed through and make our home device better, and vice versa as well,” he adds. “All this research and development work, in principle, is making our products that are going to go into the NHS much better.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/space-agencies-trying-stop-astronauts-losing-sight/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | JILL DUFFY | AUG 9, 2026 AT 7:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Complicated Case of Passing On Your Digital Estate

There’s no perfect way to transfer possession of your digital assets to your loved ones after you’re gone. But there are things you can do now to make the process easier for them.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

When a loved one dies, who downloads their important files from their cloud storage account? Who monitors their email inbox? Who decides what happens to the photos and videos on their social media accounts? And what if those tasks fall to you?

Everyone will die, but not everyone has planned what they want to happen with their digital assets after they're gone. Even when someone makes a plan, survivors might still be limited in what they can do.

Tying up loose ends can become a nightmare for the living, especially when the volume of digital assets is enormous. Still, the more you know, the better you can plan for your own digital estate, and the easier it will be to manage someone else's.

Take Inventory

The biggest determining factor in how much work it’s going to be to manage the online accounts and digital assets of someone who is incapacitated or deceased is whether they did any estate planning. If a person doesn't write down what digital assets they have and what they want done with them, it's impossible for anyone to know.

It's not always a simple matter of memorializing a Facebook account or downloading photos from iCloud either. Digital assets can have as much monetary value as sentimental value. Say a person's social media accounts earn dividends. How will a beneficiary collect future proceeds? And should they keep the account alive?

What about cryptocurrency? If it's stored in a private wallet and no one has the key, the money is lost forever. It's a different story, however, if a third party, like Coinbase or PayPal, holds the crypto. At present, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are considered “digital assets” and thus need to be treated that way when doing any estate planning.

Navigating the Law

In the US, digital inheritance is overseen by state law, the same as traditional probate and estate matters, according to Benjamin Orzeske, chief counsel at the Uniform Law Commission. He and his organization developed a state law known as the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which has been enacted in 48 states, Washington, DC, and the US Virgin Islands. The missing two states are Massachusetts, where RUFADAA has been adopted but not yet enacted as of this writing, and Louisiana, which went its own way with a similar but different law.

“At the heart of RUFADAA is this recognition that digital property is in some ways different from traditional, tangible property,” Orzeske says. He gives the example of mail versus email. When a person dies, their mail gets forwarded to a dedicated person, the fiduciary, who then receives incoming communication, bills, and payments. If they get a bill in the mail for a magazine subscription, they know to cancel it. Receiving the mail effectively gives the person appropriate information and access to manage the deceased's accounts and estate going forward. Email is different. The fiduciary doesn't just get new incoming mail. They might also have access to a searchable history of communication, which the deceased person might have expected to be kept private.

The real point of conflict, according to Orzeske, lies in the Stored Communications Act, a federal law that says companies that handle our online assets can't release them without our permission. So RUFADAA gives survivors some rights while retaining the original asset holder's privacy.

Under RUFADAA, a named trusted person can close accounts, but they can only get the contents—meaning the bodies of emails, private messages, videos, photos, attachments, and so forth—if the decedent specifically “grants the authority to the personal representative fiduciary,” according to Catherine Hodder, a senior attorney editor at FindLaw. FindLaw is an informational website that breaks down legal issues for a general audience.

The way to give that permission to a trusted person is to write it down, preferably in a will or similar document. Name the person and exactly what you want them to have, but do not list usernames or passwords, Hodder warns, because “the will is a public document.”

If the fiduciary is not given express permission to receive the contents of a digital asset, they might still be able to get a “catalog” of metadata, says Orzeske. Using email as an example again, that could include all the times and dates that emails were sent and received, maybe information about the sender or recipient, but still not the body of emails.

The Shortcomings of Built-In Tools

Many of the big tech companies that hold our digital assets, called “data custodians” in the law, have built-in tools that let you assign a trusted person to access your account when you die or if you become incapacitated.

Google has offered its Inactive Account Manager since 2013. Apple and Meta use the term “legacy contact” in some places, although you have to look for “memorialization” in Instagram. Enabling these features may seem like the easiest way to pass on your accounts, but in practice, the features leave much to be desired.

For example, if you want to give someone permission to download your Instagram content after you die, that person must also have an Instagram account. More importantly, someone must still reach out to Instagram to declare that a person has died in the first place. And how do you do that?

Mike Kiser, a co-chair of the Death in the Digital Estate Community Group at the OpenID Foundation, points out that “there is no defined way to tell a provider that someone has died or lost capacity.” His group has the long-term goal of developing protocols and guidance for users to be able to manage their digital estates.

Other hurdles and unforeseen problems crop up on a case-by-case basis. What happens if you never gave your real name or real date of birth to any of these companies? How can your trusted contact prove that an online account was actually held by you?

Even DIY Solution Can End in Failure

Tech-savvy people have long hacked together do-it-yourself solutions for passing on their digital estates. Some leave a printed document in a secure place listing all their accounts and credentials to get into them. Some leverage the legacy tools in a password manager, which is one of the better options in terms of security, but even the best solutions can come up short.

Kiser says that one of his colleagues created a DIY system for passing on his assets and decided to test it from the point of view of his trusted person. “He failed in step one,” Kiser says.

While researching this story, I experimented with my digital estate and realized that my two-factor authentication app is protected by biometrics. So even if my trusted person had all my credentials via a password manager, they couldn't get very far without my fingerprint.

There's also the sticky issue of violating a data custodian's terms of service, which is likely what happens when someone other than you logs into your accounts. Whether a company would ever press charges is another matter, though it's not hard to imagine times when they might, like when celebrities and public figures are involved.

A more likely scenario is that loved ones disagree about how to handle a decedent's assets and accounts. If the wishes are written out in a will, family in-fighting might still take place, but the fiduciary at least has legal protection.

One other possibility is to create a local backup of all your data that someone can easily open. Send everything to a USB drive, leave it unencrypted, and voilà. Of course, you'll have to regularly export and back up everything you want included, and it doesn't solve the problem of terminating any online accounts you want closed after you're gone.

What’s Best for Now?

Although every solution is imperfect, the best option seems to be naming a fiduciary or a trusted person in your will, then writing your specific wishes in that will or in a similar legal document, where you should be as detailed as possible. List the accounts and digital assets you have, name the person or people who should get them, and describe exactly what they should do.

If you go that route, remember to keep your list of passwords and login credentials separate; only share those with the specific people who need them. Also, do not enable those legacy features in your online accounts. According to Kiser, a platform’s own online controls take top priority and thus could override what you put into your instructions.

Most important of all, update your final instructions documents regularly, like whenever you make any changes to your accounts or move assets around.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/digital-estate-planning-tips/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | JUSTIN POT | AUG 9, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Meetily Lets You Transcribe and Summarize Meetings Without a Subscription—Here’s How

There are endless ways to record and transcribe your virtual meetings with AI. Here’s an option that’s free and open source.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

It's perhaps the least hyped, and most useful, feature of the AI age: transcription. As a young journalist, I dreamed of a computer that could turn recordings into text. Now we have that, and it's amazing.

This tech isn't just great for interviews—it's perfect for meetings. A variety of services, called meeting assistants, promise to transcribe and summarize your meetings for you. The appeal here is obvious, but these services don't come cheap or without privacy concerns. Generally, using them means uploading a recording of your meeting to some cloud somewhere, which isn't ideal for projects that require confidentiality. And the tools themselves are generally in the $10 to $20 per month range, price-wise.

Now, as I pointed out with transcription software, the tech for building something like a meeting assistant is open source and widely available for free. Meetily brings it all together in a simple package. Yes, the name is awful, but it uses open-source models, has a great free version, and is available on Windows and macOS (Linux users can build it from source).

Note that there is a Pro version for $10 per month, but the open-source community version is completely free to download from GitHub. Install the application and it will offer to install the models needed. These are the AI tools that do the actual work.

Photograph: Justin Pot

Once those have downloaded, you will need to allow Meetily to record both your microphone's sound and the system audio—that way it can capture all sides of any conversation you're in.

Then you can hit the record button any time you're in a video call. Accessing your microphone and system sound directly means Meetily isn't restricted to specific videoconferencing tools—it'll work with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and any other service you might come across. You can even theoretically use this for an in-person meeting, assuming your laptop's microphone is capable of picking up sound from everyone in the room. (You may want to look at an AI notetaker if you want a separate device.)

Photograph: Justin Pot

During the meeting, you can watch the transcription take place nearly in real time if you want, or minimize the window and focus on your meeting. When the meeting is done, you can click the stop button, at which point you will see a transcription. From here, you can ask for an AI summary. You can even provide instructions about which points to focus on.

Now, as with all AI tools, there are caveats. These systems aren't perfect, and they may not have the same priorities as you. I intend to write my own meeting minutes using the transcript as a guide, but the meeting summary could still prove useful in certain contexts.

A beta feature allows you to use Meetily with recordings you made previously. This means you can drag an audio or even video file and get a transcript and summary. This is useful if you recorded an in-person conversation on your phone, for example, and want to get a transcript when you're back at your computer.

Photograph: Justin Pot

The free version of Meetily has a few annoying limitations. The transcript can't tell you who said what—no speaker labels—which will be a deal-breaker for many people. I could not find a free and open-source tool that did this consistently, though.

There are a few other similar tools out there if Meetily doesn't work for you. For example, noScribe is a completely free tool that can identify speakers, though it can't record meetings in real time (it only converts files). Anarlog (formerly known as Hyprnote) has an arguably sleeker user interface and access to many AI models, but setup was a bit fiddly compared to Meetily. Quill offers free local transcriptions, but you'll need to sign up for an account to use it (which defeats the point of an offline tool), and there's a lot of upselling.

It's great there are so many free options, and if this field is anything like dictation software, I'm sure there will be even more in a few months.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/meetily-lets-you-transcribe-and-summarize-meetings-without-a-subscription-heres-how/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | JOEL KHALILI | AUG 9, 2026 AT 5:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes

A new generation of philanthropists made rich by artificial intelligence are preparing to give away their vast wealth. What should we make of a multi-billion-dollar pinky promise?

David Silver is a billionaire, sort of. His stake in Ineffable Intelligence—the artificial intelligence lab he founded—is worth an ungodly fortune. But he stands to collect none of that money himself. He set things up that way.

Between 2013 and 2025, Silver worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind. He specialized in reinforcement learning, a method of teaching an AI model through positive and negative feedback. In 2016, he led the development of AlphaGo, which became the first AI to defeat a human champion in the game of Go and was heralded as a narrow form of superintelligence. Silver left to start Ineffable Intelligence in January, betting that reinforcement learning breakthroughs will close the gap between human and machine cognition across the board.

When he started Ineffable Intelligence, Silver raised $1.1 billion from investors at a $5.1 billion valuation, reportedly the largest seed round in Europe’s history. He also vowed to donate all the money he makes from any future sale of his company to charity.

“I was thinking very deeply about what I could do to have the maximum impact on the world,” Silver tells WIRED in an interview at his office in Kings Cross, London, around the corner from DeepMind’s headquarters. “Not just through the work I do, but through the finance I arrive at in the process.”

He’ll choose how to deploy the funds after he sells his company, he says, but his ambition is to save as many lives as possible.

Silver is the latest in a growing line of AI founders to pledge equity proceeds to charity. Others include Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind cofounder and the CEO of AI at Microsoft, and Anton Osika, the founder of automated coding platform Lovable. If OpenAI and Anthropic go public as planned, minting thousands of new millionaires in the process, the AI industry could soon come to represent an increasingly outsize proportion of tech philanthropy.

Along with a new generation of techno-philanthropists, though, comes a tangle of unresolved questions: Is philanthropy the most appropriate way to redistribute wealth? To what degree are megadonors responsible for some of the problems they aim to fix? Could a pledge that scales with a company’s success come to justify unsavory business practices or reckless accelerationism? And is this go-around any different from previous iterations of Silicon Valley giving?

“You can’t necessarily appeal to capitalism to solve some of the problems created by capitalist practices themselves … the exacerbation of extreme wealth concentration and massive inequalities,” says Linsey McGoey, professor of sociology at the University of Essex and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “It’s like calling upon the arsonist to hose down the house he’s just set on fire.”

Silver formalized his charitable commitment through Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs to give away their wealth. Unlike the Giving Pledge, a public but nonbinding commitment, Founders Pledge requires participants to enter into a contract. “The choice of making a binding pledge was very important,” says Silver.

Founders Pledge has been around since 2015. But the value of pledges recorded by the nonprofit has soared recently, from $400 million in 2023 to $4 billion so far this year. The AI industry now accounts for a third of the lifetime pledge total.

The organization’s goal, according to cofounder David Goldberg, is to identify “the very best ways to deploy capital at scale to make the world better.” It has frequently been lumped together with effective altruism, which encourages people to amass wealth in order to give it away, to rely on statistics rather than emotion, and to prioritize causes likely to have the biggest impact in the distant future. But despite the commonalities, Goldberg isn’t a fan of the comparison; Founders Pledge is concerned with human suffering in the present. “We’re far more humanist,” he says.

Silver considers himself an effective altruist but says his “flavor is about the here and now.” Accordingly, Silver plans to funnel his pledge proceeds to charities, like the Malaria Foundation, equipped to save the greatest number of lives in the near term. “I find it hard to justify focusing on the galactic future of humanity when there are millions of people suffering and dying today,” he says.

Osika, the Lovable founder, who has pledged to give away half of his equity proceeds, doesn’t identify as an effective altruist, but he shares the belief that amassing wealth by succeeding in business is the best way for him to maximize his personal impact on the world. “I think it’s a very good thing for people who are very thoughtful about the future of humanity to build [AI],” he tells WIRED.

The Gates Foundation—the most famous embodiment of techno-philanthropy—has given away more than $100 billion to causes targeting poverty and disease in the 25 years since it was founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged to donate their $200 billion fortune to scientific research through their own foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Both have been held up as shining examples of how an entrepreneurial mindset can translate into effective philanthropy and how the profit motive can be harnessed for good.

The new generation of AI philanthropists appear to want to carry that legacy forward, into a world they imagine will be utterly reorganized by superintelligence. “For a very long time, it’s been clear to me that this technological transformation is going to be the biggest thing that happens in our lives,” says Osika.

However, this type of giving can come with trade-offs, and can be used by megadonors to discreetly advance their political interests, McGoey says. A recent study found that a reliance on philanthropic funding led the WHO to prioritize donors’ preferred causes at the expense of other urgent issues, like non-communicable diseases.

Donations that alleviate issues stemming from wealth inequality instead of attacking the root cause, McGoey argues, threaten to end the debate about long-term, systemic remedies before it begins. “It’s appealing to the perpetuator of a problem to resolve it—and that doesn’t necessarily lead to positive results,” she says. “I don’t think that people should kid themselves that making money on its own is somehow noble.”

The WHO itself has acknowledged issues with its financing, and in 2022 it put forth a new model designed to address some of those concerns. Mark Suzman, the Gates Foundation’s CEO, has also recognized the pitfalls of relying on megadonors. “It’s not right for a private philanthropy to be one of the largest funders of multinational global health efforts,” he said in 2023, noting that the foundation had become the WHO’s second-largest donor. But he also put the blame on dwindling governmental contributions. “I’d love it if many more governments would pass us on that list,” he said.

Megadonors can play a valuable role in funding causes neglected for ideological reasons by governments, like family planning. But they’re not equally accountable, says Apolline Taillandier, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who specializes in political theory. “These funders are not elected. They have no need to account for their decisions,” she says. “It comes down to the question of whether philanthropy is the most legitimate way of redistributing resources.”

There is a further risk that entrepreneurs might treat their philanthropic ambition as moral justification for destructive behavior. In 2024, the one-time crypto kingpin and effective altruism poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. At trial, a former colleague testified that Bankman-Fried had based all of his decisions on cold statistical analysis, gladly risking disaster if it meant a chance at a sufficiently positive end result. The leaders of effective altruism declared Bankman-Friend an apostate, but others painted his fraud as a symptom of the movement's flawed moral logic.

In the context of artificial intelligence, the concern is that a charitable pledge could form part of a risk calculation. By Bankman-Friedian logic, the headlong pursuit of superintelligence would be justified, potential consequences be damned, if the money it creates will have a large enough philanthropic impact.

Silver denies that his pledge is part of some sort of moral accounting or a hedge against the possible negative outcomes of the AI race. He believes that superintelligence will have a radically positive impact, endlessly discovering new knowledge through a recursive cycle of trial and error.

Far from justifying reckless accelerationism, Silver argues, a pledge helps to eliminate the type of financial incentive that threatens to lead AI development astray. “Building a superintelligence company is a huge responsibility to the planet, and that responsibility shouldn’t be led by personal greed,” says Silver. “This was an intentional choice to make sure that whatever actions I take as an individual are for the benefit of humanity, not because there’s some enormous dollar figure that starts to appear on the horizon.”

Silver may be a beneficiary of an economic system stacked in his favor. But one of few ways he can redress that imbalance, he argues, is to give his money away. “Individuals that choose to use their money for good will have a massive, transformative difference on the future of the world we live in,” he says. “That’s independent of whether the macroeconomic situation is the right thing for humanity. It’s just a fact.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ai-billionaires-are-pledging-their-wealth-good-or-bad/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

POLITICS | VITTORIA ELLIOTT | AUG 8, 2026 AT 10:03 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual Orientation

A draft rule reviewed by WIRED would prevent the census from counting undocumented immigrants. To protect against “distortions,” it would also bar questions about race and sexual orientation.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

The US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.

The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.

The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United States.”

This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.

The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.

“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.

“If we don't know certain things, we can't challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don't know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can't say, ‘Oh my gosh, here's some massive inequality.’”

Republicans and the Trump administration have long taken aim at the census. More recently, members of the Trump administration have attacked a little-known statistical method called “differential privacy,” which is used to prevent census data from being used to reidentify individual respondents, claiming that it makes the results inaccurate. In August 2025, Republican representative August Pfluger made another attempt to reintroduce a citizenship question on the census, sponsoring a bill called the COUNT Act, and in October, Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana published a letter to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, writing, “There is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally.”

Census questions are set between two and three years in advance of the actual survey, based on priorities set by the administration. The data from the census inform everything from the apportionment of congressional seats to federal funding that is allocated based on the size of a population.

An employee at the Department of Health and Human Services, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press, tells WIRED that “many HHS programs use Census data to appropriate funding. Removing undocumented individuals from the census will cause localities with high numbers of those populations to lose critical federal funding.”

The employee says that removal of racial categories could specifically impact Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding. “Some programs use the ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities,” they say.

An employee at the Department of Commerce, who also spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press, says that they are concerned that adding a citizenship question to the census would make people who are undocumented—or who have undocumented family members—afraid to be counted.

“Even if [the administration doesn't] do anything operationally like ICE or anything like that, they can make people feel as if they answer the Census they will be rounded up,” they say.

“When you eliminate people and when you make people too afraid to participate because of the eliminations of other peoples, you will actually purposefully suppress the number of people who are in a geography. And that is a way of trying to make certain that you erase their political power and their access to federal funding,” says Boyd.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/census-proposal-would-stop-counting-undocumented-immigrants-and-ignore-race-and-sexual-orientation/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | JORGE GARAY | AUG 8, 2026 AT 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Sharpest Image Ever Taken of the Sun Reveals a Beautiful Hidden Phenomenon

The photograph, taken in visible light, made it possible to observe for the first time the tiny plasma vortices that had been predicted for more than a century.

Courtesy of NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS/Inouye Tel

For decades, scientists had theorized that the sun’s surface must be crisscrossed by tiny plasma vortices, generated by the interaction between its intense magnetic fields and the constantly flowing superheated material. This week, the world’s most powerful solar telescope has just confirmed this.

The latest image captured by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located at the summit of Haleakalā volcano in Hawaii, shows for the first time evidence of the so-called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, a physical phenomenon first predicted more than a century ago.

The image, shared by NASA, is not the most spectacular view of the sun, but it is one of the closest to how the human eye would see it if it could withstand the intense brightness. Unlike the famous photographs in shades of blue, green, or orange captured by space observatories using ultraviolet or X-ray radiation—wavelengths invisible to us—this image was captured in visible light. As a result, it reveals a landscape reminiscent of petals, swirls, and folds on the star’s surface.

A full image of a section of the sun’s surface, viewed with unprecedented resolution in visible light.

Courtesy of NSA/NSO/AURA/MPS/Inouye Tel

What Exactly Does This Show?

The “petals” appearing in the image are generated by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. This occurs when two fluid currents move at different speeds. The friction between the two causes the boundary to ripple and form swirling patterns. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is not unique to the sun. It also occurs on Earth, for example, when wind blows over water or in clouds.

In the sun, the fluids are plasma streams—a state of matter in which gas is so hot that its atoms lose electrons. Scientists expected that, in certain regions of the sun, these plasma streams would behave just like two streams of air or water colliding with each other, forming vortices.

Until now, visible-light telescopes provided a seemingly smooth view of the sun. Thanks to the techniques used by the Inouye telescope, scientists were able to observe what is happening on its surface in much greater detail. Small vortices, barely a few dozen kilometers in diameter, are constantly forming and disappearing. These structures have always been there. We have only recently learned how to visualize them.

According to NASA, this image spans approximately the Earth’s radius and is the highest-resolution image available in visible light. The unprecedented details will provide a better understanding of how the sun transfers its energy to outer regions and how it alters the temperature of its solar corona. The solar corona is of great scientific interest, as it is the source of coronal mass ejections—the phenomena responsible for geomagnetic storms that threaten the world’s electronic systems.

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-sharpest-image-ever-taken-of-the-sun-reveals-a-beautiful-hidden-phenomenon/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | JORGE GARAY | AUG 8, 2026 AT 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Here Are the First Images of the Crater Left on the Moon by SpaceX’s Rocket

The Korea Aerospace Research Institute shared images that show the gash on the surface. It’s pretty small.

This is the clearest photo to date of the collision involving a part of the Falcon 9 rocket. On the left, the moon in 2015. On the right, the same lunar site, hours after the impact. There are traces of scattered material.Photograph: Korea Aerospace Research Institute

The first images of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage impact on the moon’s surface have emerged.

The Korea Aerospace Research Institute shared the first photographs captured by its lunar orbiter. South Korea is one of the few nations that currently has satellites traveling around the moon at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. The Danuri orbiter flew over the region shortly after the impact.

KARI explained on its X account that it photographed the collision site both before and after the event. The images show signs of a recent impact, which astronomers projected would likely create a crater dozens of feet wide nearly 12 feet (3.6 meters) deep.

This evidence of the collision adds to observations from the Very Large Telescope, where astronomers detected sodium and lithium rising from the lunar surface, confirming that the rocket fragment did indeed strike the moon.

The crater is larger than several cars combined.

Photograph: Korea Aerospace Research Institute

Astronomers predicted when and where the Falcon 9 impact would happen well in advance, and there were signs it could be visible with sufficiently powerful equipment. Yet days before the collision, space agencies such as NASA warned that it would be difficult to observe the moment of impact due to weather conditions and timing.

Like KARI, NASA has lunar orbiters. It’s possible that in the coming days, following a series of data checks, higher-resolution images of the impact area will become available.

But even at higher resolution, getting a granular view of the crater is unlikely. In fact, the new photos give a sense of just how small that is compared to the vastness of the lunar surface. To put this into perspective, the moon measures about 2,160 miles in diameter.

Another image taken by the Danuri lunar satellite during one of its orbits over the impact area.

Photograph: Korea Aerospace Research Institute

Why Did the Rocket Crash?

The Falcon 9 fragment made a crash landing after being in an unstable orbit for more than a year. The rocket launched in January 2025, completing its mission to deliver lunar landers. For more than a year, the gravity of Earth, the moon, and the sun slowly altered its orbital trajectory until it eventually impacted the lunar surface.

“For most of our missions, we plan for a controlled deorbiting of the Falcon second stage so that it re-enters safely over the ocean,” SpaceX said of the rocket. “In higher-energy missions, such as those heading to a lunar transfer orbit, nearly all of the vehicle’s performance is dedicated to successfully placing the payload into the intended orbit, and a controlled deorbiting maneuver is not always possible.

“We are actively working to be as responsible as possible with the hardware left in space and to ensure space safety, even on more complex missions. In this case, over time, solar activity and gravity deflected the second stage toward the Moon. Impacts like this are rare, but they can occur with objects in these types of orbits, and we are collaborating with NASA to find the optimal disposal solution,” it added.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/first-images-spacex-rocket-moon-crater/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SECURITY | DELL CAMERON, DHRUV MEHROTRA | AUG 8, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Security News This Week: Flock’s Plans for Rideshare Dashcams and Coaching Police, Revealed

Plus: A judge rules cell tower dumps unconstitutional, water utility hacks spread to a dozen states, a phishing email opens a missile-parts supplier’s inbox, and a ransomware boss gets 16 years.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

It’s Black Hat and DefCon week, which means hackers, security researchers, cybersecurity companies, government officials, and probably a few feds are in Vegas braving the heat to break things and show off what they’ve been working on. WIRED is there covering the best of it.

Let’s get into it. Last month, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its AI agents went on a hacking spree that ended with a breach of Hugging Face. This week brought even more rogue-agent incidents—and, at a last-minute Black Hat talk, a bizarre new detail emerged about how some of this unfolded. OpenAI revealed that its agents had built their own internal message board, where they shared exploits, divided up work, argued, and even discussed cryptographically signing messages to weed out imposters—all without OpenAI noticing for days.

Separately, researchers at Zenity found around 20 flaws across AI-powered browsers and extensions, including attacks that got OpenAI’s Atlas browser to spam WhatsApp contacts and make an unauthorized Amazon purchase. And security researcher James Kettle found that while AI agents are still pretty bad at inventing new hacking techniques on their own, when paired with a human expert they can be extremely effective.

Security researcher Vangelis Stykas had a busy week at BlackHat. He and a colleague hacked a cheap kid’s smartwatch strapped to a WIRED reporter’s wrist, tracking them across New York, secretly taking photos, and eavesdropping on conversations—part of a broader investigation into flaws affecting tens of millions of kids’ watches and car trackers. Stykas also revealed that, after nearly two years secretly monitoring North Korean hackers’ servers, he found evidence their operations touched 1,640 companies across 57 countries, with hundreds suffering serious intrusions.

Outside of Las Vegas, the world keeps turning. Meta approved and ran more than 50 paid ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery or sexually suggestive images of minors across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads, with some reaching thousands of people. The US Army is poised to make laser weapons an official part of its arsenal, buying up to 20 systems designed to shoot down drones.

Meanwhile, DHS also had a busy week. WIRED found that the government is trying to get access to protesters’ private Signal group chats; CBP is looking to hire private investigators to track down deported immigrants abroad, photograph their homes, and pursue unpaid fines; and DHS has been collecting migrant’s spit—and their DNA—at a staggering scale, including from children as young as 4.

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.

Flock pitched using 350,000 rideshare and delivery dashcams to scan plates

Flock Safety pitched a plan to collect license plate data from dashcams in Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers’ vehicles, according to 404 Media, which obtained the sales presentation through a public records request filed by a Dunwoody, Georgia, resident. The document, prepared last August for the Georgia Attorney General's Office, describes a partnership with dashcam maker Nexar covering 350,000 devices. Flock's cameras are normally fixed to poles and scan the plate, color, make, and model of every car that passes; the Nexar deal would have turned it into a roving collection.

Flock told 404 Media it never went through with the partnership. Uber, Lyft, and Nexar did not respond to the site’s requests for comment, and there is no indication drivers would have known their cameras were feeding the network. Nexar was itself breached in September, when a hacker pulled terabytes of customer video that included footage shot around Defense Department sites.

404 Media also reported this week that a former Flock government affairs manager, Jonathan Paz, said he quit in July 2025 and turned down equity and severance after learning the company had given ICE and Customs and Border Protection direct camera access through a pilot program while telling staff internally it did not work with ICE. Separately, 404 obtained a coaching guide the company gives police on how to speak to city councils, which tells officers to brief council members and city managers privately before public meetings, to come with a scripted presentation, and to shift the argument from cost to "the cost of unresolved crime."

Water utility hacks now reported in at least a dozen states

Cyberattacks on US water systems have hit utilities in at least 12 states, according to CBS News, up from the seven the FBI acknowledged a week earlier. Sources named Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, New Jersey, and South Dakota. Federal investigators still suspect Iran-backed hackers but have made no formal attribution.

The Clayton County Water Authority in suburban Atlanta, which serves 300,000 people, said an intrusion last month dropped water pressure and forced a boil-water advisory, though service came back within hours. Some utilities lost remote control of their systems entirely and had operators running equipment by hand. In several cases the hackers reached pumps, valves, and pressure controls directly. Officials say drinking water has remained safe.

The July 30 alert from the FBI, EPA, and CISA told utilities to disconnect their industrial controllers from the internet and tighten passwords and firewalls. Those controllers—small computers that run physical equipment like pumps and valves—are the same equipment the CyberAv3ngers hit in 2023, a group tied to Iran's Revolutionary Guard that got in through devices left on factory-default passwords.

Hacker got into email at a US missile-parts supplier

IEH Corporation, a Brooklyn manufacturer that supplies electrical connectors to defense and aerospace programs, told securities regulators on Thursday that an intruder broke into a company email account, according to The Register. The disclosure came in an 8-K—the form public companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission to report significant events.

An employee received a message from someone posing as a prospective business contact with what looked like a legitimate Microsoft file-sharing link. The page behind it was fake and captured the employee’s login, handing the attacker access to the company’s Microsoft 365 environment. IEH said the intruder could reach email, attachments, customer correspondence, purchase orders, engineering documentation, and possibly technical information covered by US export controls—material that cannot be legally shared with foreign nationals without a license.

IEH said it found the intrusion on August 4 and has not said how long the attacker was inside. It reported no evidence that data was copied out, though Microsoft 365 logging does not reliably capture theft, and nobody has attributed the attack. IEH connectors are used in the Patriot air-defense system, AMRAAM and THAAD missiles, and the Mark 48 torpedo.

Belarusian ransomware operator gets 16 years

Maksim Silnikau, a 40-year-old Belarusian national who built and ran the Ransom Cartel ransomware operation, was sentenced to 16 years in prison, Cyberscoop reports. Prosecutors say the group attacked at least 18 companies between 2021 and 2023.

Silnikau had been active on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums since 2005 and started recruiting for Ransom Cartel in 2021, according to the US Justice Department. He allegedly supplied the people who carried out the attacks with stolen passwords and the software to lock victims’ computers, and built a control panel for tracking break-ins, talking to victims, and haggling over payments. Targets included law firms, schools, a small medical technology startup, and multinational corporations in California, New York, and Nebraska. Some of the targets were knocked offline for months. According to DOJ, the group tried to extract at least $5.2 million.

Operating under handles including “J.P. Morgan” and “lanksy,” Silnikau fled Spain while awaiting extradition and was picked up in Poland in July 2023 while attempting to get back into Belarus. Ransom Cartel shut down when he was arrested; investigators noted at the time that it never reached the scale of the bigger ransomware brands.

Federal judge rules cell-tower dumps unconstitutional

A federal judge in Mississippi held that tower dumps violate the Fourth Amendment, The Hill reports. A tower dump is an order requiring a phone company to turn over records of every device that connected to a given cell tower during a set window. US District judge Carlton Reeves issued the order on August 5.

The FBI, investigating gang-related violence in Jackson, twice asked a magistrate to approve dumps from towers near crime scenes, and was refused both times. The second request covered six locations in windows of 10 to 30 minutes and sought only devices that turned up at two or more of them. Reeves held the denial and went further, ruling tower dumps unconstitutional as a category. The requests would have pulled thousands or tens of thousands of records from people near highways, hospitals, homes, and places of worship, the judge said, and the government cannot search “an entire haystack because it may contain a needle.”

Reeves built the ruling on the Fifth Circuit’s 2024 decision barring geofence warrants—the same request aimed at Google, rather than a phone carrier—and on the Supreme Court’s Chatrie decision this year. Neither court has ruled directly on tower dumps, and district judges are split nationwide.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/flocks-plans-for-rideshare-dashcams-and-coaching-police-revealed/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | JUSTIN POT | AUG 8, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

How to Disable the AI Features in Gmail and Google Docs

New AI toolbars and prompts are showing up in Google Docs and Gmail. If you don’t want Gemini’s help in writing documents and emails, here’s how to turn that stuff off.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

Have you noticed how desperate tech companies are to get you to use their artificial intelligence features, even if you don’t want to use them? They're adding buttons to user interfaces and using pop-up tool tips to implore you to click them and become a dedicated user of their AI creations.

Google Docs, for example, is rolling out a giant Gemini bar at the bottom of the screen for some users. I first noticed this feature back in April, when it showed up in the Google Docs account I use to collaborate with editors. Apparently I was part of the pool of users chosen to test the feature. I know people who have never seen this box, and I've seen reports of it showing up for people in the last few weeks. So it varies.

If you're one of the users who sees this feature and you don’t want it on your screen, good news: The giant bar is easy enough to hide.

Click Gemini in the menu bar, then hover over Bottom bar preferences and select Turn off.

Courtesy of Justin Pot

Do that and the bar is gone. It can't hurt you anymore.

But if you'd like to banish AI features from Google Docs entirely, you can keep going. There are a couple ways to stop things like the Gemini menu from showing up in Google Docs. The first, which is working for some people but not others, is to change a setting in Gmail. The second, which seems to be working for everyone, is to install a Chrome extension.

First, a caveat: The process is a little different for personal Google accounts (basically, any account with an @gmail.com email address) and company accounts that use Google Workspace (basically, any account managed by your employer with an email address of your company's domain). For company-issued Workspace accounts, it's up to the administrator to decide which AI features you do and don't see.

So if you use Google Workspace at your job, only the IT team can turn off the AI features. There’s not much you can do on your own, but you could try giving your IT worker a plate of cookies as encouragement.

Personal users have a bit more control, but the path forward is obscure: The option you need to toggle is in Gmail. Yep.

Open your Gmail account, then click the gear in the top right corner. Next, click See all settings. Then, in the General tab, scroll down until you see the Smart features option.

Courtesy of Justin Pot

Uncheck this and Google will ask you to pretty please not disable the feature. Then, once the setting has applied, head back to your Google Docs window and refresh it.

It’s worth noting that this box in Gmail’s settings doesn’t even mention Google Docs. It’s also worth noting that turning this off disables a number of other AI-powered features in Gmail, including grammar suggestions, autocorrect, smart compose, smart reply, and nudges. This also disables Gmail’s spellcheck, though the spellcheck offered by your browser will continue to work. If you depend on these features in Gmail, you might be stuck with AI in Google Docs.

If disabling those things doesn’t present an issue for you, head back to Google Docs. The Gemini menu, the audio button, and (most importantly) the AI toolbar at the bottom of the screen are now all completely gone. There's still a Gemini button in the top-right corner, granted, but that's a lot easier to ignore than those other intrusions if you don’t want Gemini in Docs. Enjoy not being distracted while working on documents—for now, at least. Google has a history of undoing changes like this.

Speaking of, if changing this setting didn’t work for you, or if you’d rather not turn off all of the Gemini-powered smart features, there’s another option: the Bye Bye Gemini extension for Google Chrome. Install this and every aspect of Google’s AI in its productivity products—from Gmail to Docs to Drive—will disappear. The extension uses CSS to render all of those things invisible in the browser. It also has the benefit of removing AI Overviews from Google search results!

I'm not necessarily opposed to AI, I just don't think it should be crammed into every user interface as a default. Plenty of Google Docs users may prefer Claude, ChatGPT, or a locally hosted Ollama setup to Google's Gemini. And some, of course, would rather avoid using AI altogether. So I'm glad it's possible—if a little tricky—to completely disable the feature.

Now if only Google would make it a bit easier to hide AI overviews from your search results. The only method I've found that works is to install an extension in Chrome or Safari that forces the search engine to use the "Web" section for every search. A toggle for that—even one buried in Gmail—would be nice.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-disable-the-gemini-ai-features-in-gmail-and-google-docs/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SECURITY | MATT BURGESS | AUG 8, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Sensitive Info Goes Into ‘No Reply’ Emails Constantly. This Guy Sees It All

Two security researchers bought cheap domains—including noreply.net and deleteduser.com—and set up email listening services. Hundreds of companies are sending them corporate secrets.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

Cory Solovewicz receives more unwanted emails than you. Seriously—it’s a lot more. Since December 2024, one of the domains at which the security researcher receives email has registered 401,796 messages—by his calculations that’s an average of 699.99 pings per day.

This deluge isn’t the regular flood of spam, newsletters, and unwanted deals that fill many people’s inboxes. Instead, companies and other organizations are inadvertently sending Solovewicz other people’s private information and company secrets. Over the last few years, he’s received injury reports from a city government, confirmation of people’s pizza orders, and account setup emails from a school platform. “I get service orders for people that need repairs. I get lots of test platform credentials,” says Solovewicz, a security researcher and consultant.

Solovewicz is receiving the avalanche of messages as he’s the owner of the domains noreply.us and noreply.net, which he purchased in 2020 and 2024, respectively. After originally planning to use the noreply.us domain as a catch-all email—which receives mail sent to any @ address on that domain—to filter messages and enhance his privacy, the researcher quickly noticed that other systems were sending mail to @noreply.us addresses. “I created an accidental honeypot,” Solovewicz tells WIRED. “I had no idea it was going to turn into this.”

Companies may send emails to [companyname]@noreply.net or similar variations believing they aren’t going anywhere, or could not be monitored in any way. Broadly it’s also possible that they may transform a person’s individual email address to send to one of these placeholder style domains if someone leaves a company or deletes their account.

What started out as a personal email project has become a large-scale effort to warn businesses and other groups that they have misconfigured their internal systems and are accidentally sharing sensitive information. Solovewicz, who presented his work at the Defcon security conference yesterday, says ultimately he is relieved that he ended up with the domains rather than criminal hackers or nation states who could use the data maliciously.

“I did not realize that this was going to be as big of a problem as it is,” says Solovewicz, who is not publicly naming impacted entities. The researcher has been alerting affected companies of their problems, encouraging them to fix the errors and misconfigurations. “I just want companies and organizations to do the right thing and to be auditing their systems and fixing their stuff.”

Solovewicz says that the noreply.net domain is the largest he owns and has received 400,000 messages over the year and a half that he’s owned it, with 28,365 of those containing attachments. The noreply.us domain has been sent 37,255 messages over 2,345 days since he purchased it in 2020. Over the month before his conference talk, combined, they’ve received more than 11,000 messages. Overall, emails have been sent from more than 14,000 “from” addresses, from 6,200 root domains. The messages are automated by company systems, not written by humans, the researcher says.

While the issue is not a new one—almost 20 years ago, independent security journalist Brian Krebs, then working at the Washington Post, wrote how companies were sending millions of messages to @donotreply.com emails—it is inherently avoidable. For instance, companies could use internal domains or the .invalid domain that is guaranteed not to exist.

Solovewicz is not alone in this voluntary endeavor, which is helping protect the data of companies—often large ones. Earlier this year, Mike Sheward, the head of security at EV charging company Xeal, spent around $15 to buy the domain deleteduser.com. “Within the first hour, there were three different organizations that had emailed stuff to @deleteduser.com,” Sheward tells WIRED, pointing out that companies appear to be simply changing email addresses rather than entirely deleting accounts from their systems.

Like Solovewicz, Sheward has seen thousands of unintended emails coming his way—from at least 100 different organizations—across multiple domains he now owns. He’s had emails detailing people’s Viagra orders, messages asking him to approve people’s work vacations or leaves of absence, hotel bookings including people’s full names, and invitations to Zoom meetings from a UK government agency. “There’s a lot of cybersecurity companies and a few Microsoft partner companies as well,” Sheward says. A couple of weeks ago he got an invitation to one San Francisco company’s summer BBQ, addressed to “Dear Deleted User.”

One of the most frequent sources of email, Sheward says without naming the firm, is an AI company that uses object recognition technology to detect workers at industrial sites in the Middle East who may not be following safety protocols. The researcher has received thousands of CCTV stills from the firm, he says. “I am being a good guardian of the internet dumpster—but if I had been a bad one, it’s not hard to see how this information that is willingly thrown at my face could be misused,” wrote in a Medium post in April.

As both Solovewicz and Sheward realized the potential scale of the misplaced emails—and what a goldmine the data would be for hackers and extortionists—they, working independently, have purchased more than 30 domains to try and limit the potential for malicious actors to copy the approach.

As part of his Defcon talk, Solovewicz explained he has been building a probe to test if other possible placeholder domains may be configured to receive email. “I’ve scanned 7,136 domains, and 328 of them were identified as having catch-all inboxes configured,” Solovewicz says. “I’m not sure I can say how large of a problem this is, but my concern is that what I ‘accidentally’ found when I registered my domain is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Both researchers say that, where possible, they have been notifying companies that have systems misconfigured and are sending them emails. The results have been mixed, they say. While some organizations appear to have quietly fixed the issues, many others have not replied, and the sheer scale of the problem makes notifying every one impacted a challenge.

“It is too much,” Solovewicz says, emphasizing that people shouldn’t assume a domain is unmonitored. “I’m at the point where this would now be a full-time job to handle every single one of these—that’s part of my motivation to talk about this, it is my responsible disclosure. You guys need to fix your systems and not do this and not leak your customer data and your employee data and your own internal data.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/sensitive-info-goes-into-no-reply-emails-constantly-this-guy-sees-it-all/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY | AUG 8, 2026 AT 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Spokane Shows What the New Era of Wildfires Looks Like

With rising temperatures and drier conditions, fires are more likely to explode. And with more people living next to forests, the results can be catastrophic.

Utility workers help clear obstacles at a home burned during the Old Trails Fire in Spokane, Washington, on August 4, 2026.Photograph: Josh Edelson/Getty Images

Betsy Robertson was standing in the center of the Spokane Convention Center on Monday afternoon, but she wasn’t there for a gala or a conference. Instead, the event space in the middle of Washington state’s second-largest city had been transformed into a Red Cross emergency shelter as a trio of wildfires, just a few miles away, burned down entire neighborhoods.

Nurses and volunteers were moving between the rows of cots around Robertson, making sure that the hundreds of evacuees—from the mothers with their babies to the elderly with their caretakers—had blankets and enough to eat. Just outside, the air was noxious with smoke “thick enough to burn your eyes,” she said.

Robertson, a communications director for the Red Cross, is from Washington and has been with the organization for 10 years. She has seen communities devastated by wildfires before. But never like this.

“The scale of homes destroyed and lives changed forever—this is a new level,” she said. “We are bracing ourselves for seasons like this getting worse and worse, and starting earlier and going later.”

A historically dry winter, extreme drought, and heat waves set the stage for the hundreds of wildfires that have burned across the Pacific Northwest this summer. Dozens of large ones have broken out in the past week alone. Though it’s still early in the fire season, Oregon recently broke its annual record for acreage burned with nearly 2 million acres scorched.

Washington is also in the middle of its most destructive season on record, with more than half a million acres burned and at least 65,000 residents ordered to evacuate across the state. The three large fires that started on Saturday around Spokane had destroyed more than 700 buildings by Monday afternoon.

“I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how we’re going to house all these folks,” said Kitty Klitzke, a member of the Spokane City Council representing a hard-hit area where two fires were burning on Tuesday morning. Many of the people displaced by the fires in Spokane are senior citizens and their caretakers. “It’s a miracle that, so far, we know of no fatalities and no reported missing people,” Klitzke said.

A woman and her daughter wait for news on the status of their home at a Red Cross evacuation center in Spokane, Washington, on August 4, 2026.

Photograph: Josh Edelson/Getty Images

As the planet heats up, the conditions that fuel extreme wildfires are becoming more common. A warmer atmosphere can hold about 7 percent more water vapor for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, drawing more moisture from soils and vegetation and leaving forests and grasslands primed to burn. That dynamic also causes rain to fall more intensely but less frequently, leading to long periods of drought.

“This fire, and what we’re expecting to come, makes no sense unless you connect the dots through a changing climate,” said Bob Freitag, who recently served as director of the Institute of Hazards Mitigation Research and Planning at the University of Washington. “The science is known, and this is not something that is a one-off.”

According to Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, a lack of snowfall across the region helped set the stage for these fires. Normally, snowpack builds up during the winter and melts gradually through the rest of the year, providing a steady source of moisture. This year, the already-small snowpack was hit with hot spring temperatures, causing this reserve to melt early and leaving the landscape parched. Spokane had half of the typical snowfall this year, Pastelok said. Other parts of the state had even less, with many areas reaching historic lows.

In the past few days, powerful winds carried hot embers from the Little Giant fire, a 70,000-acre blaze in central Washington, for more than 3 miles, sending the flames clear over the waters of Lake Chelan and into the forests on the other side. Ryan Rodruck, a communications manager at the Washington Department of Natural Resources, called the overall situation “extremely tragic” and said that it had been an exceptionally challenging season for the thousands of wildland firefighters deployed across the state.

In Spokane, more high winds forecast for this weekend could further worsen conditions, said Benjamin Cossel, a wildfire public information officer from California working with firefighting crews in the city.

The situation is comparable to the Los Angeles fires in 2025, Cossel said. Both outbreaks began in wild areas before moving into partially forested suburban neighborhoods. The urban setting also makes the smoke especially toxic, he said. A recently released study found that the Los Angeles fires, which sent more than 200,000 residents fleeing, had exposed an estimated 3.3 million people to high concentrations of a cancer-causing toxin.

Klitzke, the city council member, said the affected neighborhoods in Spokane were known to be vulnerable to fires. Steep terrain and abundant plant life helped the fires spread quickly over the weekend, while the winding cul-de-sac layouts of the neighborhoods slowed evacuations and made it difficult for emergency responders to reach the fires.

“These are neighborhoods with thousands of people and only two ways in or out,” Klitzke said, adding that many evacuees were stuck waiting in traffic for hours, watching the houses around them burn down.

Areas where homes mingle with natural areas are known as the wildland-urban interface. This kind of suburban housing is the fastest growing type of land development in the United States, and research shows that the homes built in these areas are more likely to burn down when wildfires spread.

“We already knew that this was a dangerous situation,” she said. “We need to get really serious about addressing climate change.”

Increasingly, fire-prone states like California are requiring homeowners to clear the trees and shrubs in a radius surrounding their home. This buffer zone, known as a defensible space, can dramatically reduce the risk that a wildfire will ignite a building.

People chose to live in these neighborhoods precisely because they love the vegetation, Cossel said. “I understand why people don’t want to remove them,” he said. “But we can’t live in that world anymore because of these fires.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/spokane-shows-new-era-of-wildfires/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

GEAR | MEGAN TOMOS | AUG 8, 2026 AT 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

WhatsApp Gets a Handy @all Feature for Group Chats

A new software update builds on WhatsApp’s group chat chops by adding anonymous polls and introducing an easier way to start a smaller private chat away from the larger group.

Courtesy of WhatsApp.

The group chat is the last truly heavyweight institution of modern life. It’s one of the most reliable means of daily communication, used for just about anything from planning to catching up.

WhatsApp is counting over 3 billion users, and it’s a fair bet most of them are in at least one group chat; the platform has supported groups of up to 1,024 members since 2022.

An update that began rolling out on August 4 follows a run of group-focused releases earlier this year, including group message history, member tags, and event reminders. Taken together, it’s a clear signal of WhatsApp’s reliance on group chats as one of its defining features.

The platform’s latest update is designed to improve its usage, and it’s rolling out gradually. Here’s everything you need to know.

@all

Typing @all allows every member of the group to be notified, even the ones who muted the chat years ago. @all is designed to punch through and override the mute settings and notification preferences you set at chat level.

WhatsApp pitches this as a tool for the urgent stuff, like updates, changes, and last-minute cancellations. It has, however, also clearly anticipated the feature’s spam potential.

The spam safeguards thus work on two levels. In groups larger than 32 people, only admins can trigger @all, and the override itself has an off switch. You can also manually mute @all alerts entirely in your notification settings, a separate control from muting the chat itself. The 32-person threshold is the same cap WhatsApp applies to group calls. It’s the platform’s rough dividing line between a chat and a broadcast channel.

Polls

WhatsApp’s polling feature has been around since 2022 and is end-to-end encrypted like everything else on the platform. It is also, though, where many a group chat goes to stall. The poll fixes in the latest update are pragmatic.

You can now set an end time that automatically locks voting when it expires, giving the group a hard deadline to vote. Interestingly, you also have the option to hide voter names. Until now, WhatsApp polls were transparent by design, and everyone could see exactly who voted for what. Anonymizing votes now also exist inside an end-to-end encrypted system, where the whole architecture is built around verifying who sent what.

And you can now also edit a poll question within 15 minutes of posting it, which is the same grace window WhatsApp gives you to edit a regular message. Revolutionary stuff for the poll fiends among us.

Create Group Chats From Existing Groups

WhatsApp is formalizing the splinter chat. You can now whip up a new group chat from an existing one in a single tap, pulling members into a smaller group chat without having to manually add them one by one. The official use cases are surprises and side conversations that would otherwise clutter the main chat.

Usernames Are Coming

Away from group chats, WhatsApp also recently announced that usernames will launch later this year, allowing people to connect without sharing their phone numbers. The optional feature is designed as an added layer of privacy: Usernames can be changed or removed at any time and do not need to match your identity on another platform.

Reservations began rolling out in June, with eligible users able to claim a new name—or transfer an existing Facebook or Instagram handle—under the Account section in Settings. Users will also be able to add on a unique four-digit key before allowing someone can contact them.

WhatsApp says names associated with celebrities, public figures, and government bodies, including convincing imitations, will be reserved for their legitimate owners. The username land grab has officially begun.

This story was originally published by WIRED Middle East.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-gets-a-handy-all-feature-for-group-chats/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:29 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | ZEYI YANG, LOUISE MATSAKIS | AUG 7, 2026 AT 2:54 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Chinese Philosopher Americans Can’t Stop Fighting About

Yiyang Zhuge was already an intellectual celebrity in China. Her viral interview with Christopher Nolan made her famous in the US—and quickly turned her into a political Rorschach test.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images; Courtesy of Yiyang Zhuge

Yiyang Zhuge learned last week that when you go extremely viral, the people you have been following for years suddenly start following you back. Zhuge logged onto X and found that a string of famous professors and scholars were in her list of new followers. A PhD candidate in political philosophy at Boston College, Zhuge had previously only lurked on X to keep up with the latest debates and gossip in academia. The vast majority of her social media activity happens on the Chinese internet, where she goes by the alias Zhong Shu and hosts a popular podcast with hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners.

Late last month, Zhuge, who is in her late twenties, interviewed Christopher Nolan, one of the most influential directors in Hollywood, who was in Beijing promoting The Odyssey. Rather than asking about celebrities or Hollywood, Zhuge posed a series of deeply philosophical questions to Nolan about the Christianization of Greek philosophy and how to portray heroes in films. The first thing she asked: “Are you a bard for a civilization at dusk?”

Nolan was visibly impressed by Zhuge. After the interview was published in China, Geoff Keighley, a video game journalist and the son of Nolan’s longtime friend David Keighley, shared the interview on X, calling it “a great listen.” Keighley’s video has been watched over 18 million times, and when Zhuge later posted the interview on her own X account, it racked up another 6.9 million views.

For the first time, Zhuge had become the main character of the English-speaking internet. She was being praised, mocked, criticized, and defended all at the same time. Many people said it was the best interview Nolan has done for The Odyssey, while the National Review called it a “CCP hostage video.” But everyone ultimately wanted to know the same thing: Who was this young Chinese woman with a bob haircut talking about the decline of civilizations?

While almost no one in the West knows her name, Zhuge is already one of the most prominent young intellectuals in China and has been interviewed by many of the country’s cultural elite. She was featured in Vogue China as an example of a successful woman in her twenties and frequently shares yoga and fitness tips to her 360,000 fans on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu.

When I spoke to Zhuge this week, she framed her success as being born out of personal tragedy. “I was going through an adulterous divorce in which my ex-husband sued me and I accumulated a lot of legal debt,” she says. “I felt discouraged in the English-speaking academia because of certain personal experiences related to that personal tragedy, so I turned my attention back to the Chinese-speaking world to build a career there and pay off my debt.”

When I started digging into Zhuge’s career, I was shocked by her level of productivity. Aside from publishing philosophy translations and writing articles for Chinese media outlets, she has recorded more than 360 episodes of her podcast Monologues of a Committed Observer in just the last three years. That’s an average of one new episode every three days. Most of the time, she just monologues about political science concepts for a half an hour, seemingly unscripted. On XiaoyuzhouFM, the most popular podcast streaming platform in China, she has over 940,000 subscribers.

But despite her prolific posting, Zhuge claims she isn’t interested in being famous. “I have no attachment to fame and no desire to preserve it for its own sake,” she tells me. “What I want is enough freedom and time to build a life centered on thought. That life requires some money, but not very much.”

View From America

When Zhuge asked Nolan if he saw himself as “a bard for a civilization at dusk,” she says she didn’t have a particular civilization in mind.

She views the question instead as part of the long philosophical tradition of pondering the demise of value systems. “I was not primarily attempting to issue a verdict on the contemporary United States,” she says, but “people are free to interpret the phrase through current debates about American or Western decline.”

That’s certainly how many people on Western social media interpreted it. On X, YouTube, and Reddit, commenters lamented about how Western interviewers are seemingly unable to ask the same kind of rigorous questions to their subjects. Some wondered why a Chinese woman was the one to ask philosophical questions about Greece, while others asked if Western institutions are still teaching students humanities and the classics.

To be fair, Zhuge was educated in the Western system. She has been studying in the US since high school, lectured at Boston College and Brandeis University, and translated books by Hannah Arendt and Plutarch (an ancient Greek philosopher) into Chinese. She lives in Boston for most of the year. Her academic work draws on Straussianism, an influential school of conservative political philosophy that has shaped the thinking of people like Peter Thiel. Her fame in China, which earned her the opportunity to talk to Nolan in the first place, is mostly tied to the way she can succinctly explain the American political system, though some critics think her own conservative ideological leanings show up often in her work.

“She was trained in American conservatism, so the questions she asked really resonated with the US’s educated public,” says Chenchen Zhang, an associate professor in international relations at Durham University. When the familiar insecurities of American conservatives came out of the mouth of a Chinese woman, the audience instantly believed “this is how China views the Western civilization,” Zhang says.

The internet’s reaction to Zhuge’s interview reminds me of “Chinamaxxing,” the meme that persisted through the first half of 2026 on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The trend was promoted mostly by left-leaning, Gen-Z Americans trying to numb their anxiety about America’s decline by deliberately endorsing China and Chinese culture. Now, right-leaning Americans are indulging in the same kinds of worries by fawning over Zhuge’s reverence for the classics. They are really two sides of the same coin.

Defending Herself

As the American right rushed to claim Zhuge as one of its own, the far left moved to distance itself from her. On X, @zei_squirrel, a prominent but anonymous progressive account with 346,000 followers, called her either “a deranged fanatical neocon Zionist lunatic” or a Chinese state-media psy-op, pointing to the fact that Zhuge follows several conservative figures.

Zhuge says she’s no stranger to people across the political spectrum being mad at her. “In China, I try very hard to remain above the fray of the mob rather than let public controversy determine what I think or discuss.” she says. “The labels may differ across countries, but the vulgar human impulse to sort people into political camps is universal.”

As for the anonymous account’s claim that she is a Zionist, Zhuge posted one rebuttal on X but says she won’t engage further. “An account that searches through someone’s following list for Jewish names is not conducting any meaningful analysis,” she says, “This mentality is one reason American online public life has become so polarized. People no longer examine arguments; they investigate affiliations.”

Still, this brief moment of virality has clearly shaken her. In her most recent podcast episode published on Thursday, Zhuge talked about how this was the first time she truly felt that she became the subject of public discourse. There’s a not-so-subtle hint of rage in her tone, and the audience seemed to notice it too. One commenter noted that she had forgotten to say her signature farewell message at the end. Instead, she ended the podcast episode by playing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, which the composer dedicated to heroes. “I would rather listen to how revolution collided with destiny in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony than a bunch of people in my notifications speculating who was my puppeteer pulling the strings,” she said.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-chinese-philosopher-americans-cant-stop-fighting-about/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | STEVEN LEVY | AUG 7, 2026 AT 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Tech Team Is What DOGE Should Have Been

The mayor of New York City has assembled a crew of Silicon Valley and United States Digital Service veterans to overhaul city services with better software.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

A go-kart track is an odd location to launch a tech initiative in the nation’s biggest city. Yet last month there was New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, zipping around the 900-foot oval at Coney Island’s Luna Park before stepping up to a podium to unveil a program called Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews. Thus the go-kart theme.

PIT will consist of five “game-changing” teams that, Mamdani promised, will “raise the bar for what New Yorkers can expect from City Hall.” Working closely with city agencies, these small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing tenor of current city services by using state-of-art skills to rapidly whip up specialized apps that solve real problems. “We want to transform how New Yorkers interact with the government,” said the mayor. “We want to raise expectations on what government can deliver, because we really can deliver.”

Do those words sound familiar? If you follow government tech, they might. Because Mamdani’s message could have fit quite comfortably in the pitch that Barack Obama’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, delivered in 2014 while recruiting tech talent for what would become the United States Digital Service. The USDS was an idealistic effort to bring top Silicon Valley talent into the executive branch to bypass the logjams caused by outdated and inefficient IT, by building great, user-centric software.

The agency somehow survived the first Trump administration and kept going through the Biden term. But in 2025, Elon Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew infiltrated the agency and pulled the plug on much of the useful stuff. (Now, with the National Design Service, the Trump administration is ostensibly trying to revive some of what it destroyed.)

Mamdani’s PIT crew initiative adopts much of the original USDS ethos, with a timely twist: It embraces Silicon Valley expertise while taking a skeptical, almost adversarial, stance toward Big Tech itself. The combination of mayoral charisma and a chance to make software that doesn’t serve advertisers, the military, or the pocketbooks of centibillionaires makes the Mamdani team an attractive, high-status, mid-career change of pace for some techies. Suddenly, one of the sexiest places in geekdom is the Brooklyn headquarters of New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation.

Mamdani’s transition team set the stage for an urban, democratic-socialist-adjacent, USDS-style tech squad when it tapped Lisa Gelobter for the city’s chief technology officer job. Gelobter’s résumé includes stints at big companies and startups, but the standout item was her post at the United States Digital Service, where she was embedded in the Department of Education. She led the effort to create a College Scorecard that focused on nuts-and-bolts criteria like costs and graduation rates. To this day, she gets misty when recalling her Washington experience; she even remembers what she was wearing when the USDS team took a group picture with Obama just before he left office.

“I’m really excited about trying to recapture that essence, that energy here,” she says. Her budget for the program is $5.24 million, with an additional $2 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which will fund one of the crews.

Gelobter says she brings an engineering mindset to New York City government. “I know how to build software,” she says. “I know how to run a technology organization from a technology perspective.” It’s also a cultural thing for her. “I’m wearing jeans to work—not because I don’t look great in a suit, but it’s a statement, right?” she says. (The same norm-breaking happened in the USDS, which had to overcome objections from bureaucrats who didn’t want to meet with anyone wearing a hoodie.) Naturally, the two people Gelobter hired to run the PIT crew program are also USDS veterans, Luke Farrell and Maya Israni.

From Left: Lisa Gelobter, Luke Farrell, and Maya Israni are leading NYC’s civic tech upgrades.Courtesy of Andres Lopez-Ovejero/NYC Mayor's Office

The projects Gelobter and her team choose to tackle will set a tone for the way the government works under a mayor whose future depends on how well he manages his city. “Without technology, policy is just words written on a piece of paper,” says Gelobter. Seen that way, the PIT crews are essentially Mamdani’s symbolic stand-ins in his fight against self-interested consultants and inefficient contractors. They will make their case by actually building things, in frantic 12-week sprints.

On its face, the first project of the PIT crew seems nonintuitive. The mission is to implement a pet mayoral project: click-to-cancel. On July 10, Mamdani announced this regulation, which penalizes companies that make it difficult to cancel subscriptions or ongoing payments. The rule takes effect on October 1, which is the exact date that the PIT crew plans to launch software that empowers citizens to blow the whistle on services that force people to go through hoops to end the relationship. (Mamdami might be the first customer; on Coney Island he admitted, “I am currently subscribed to something I don’t even know my login for, but they have my credit card information, and I don’t know how to cancel it.”)

The city hasn’t yet announced what the other four PIT crews will work on. My guess is that they will concentrate on more nuts-and-boltsy city services, and at least one will address the housing problem—but it’s telling that this first choice provides a way for ordinary people to stand up to bullying corporations. “It will show that we can directly affect people’s lives. It’s supposed to save, like, $160 million for New Yorkers,” says Gelobter. The project, she confirms, was a “mayoral priority.”

It’s perfect Mamdani branding. Even though much of Hizzoner’s personal tech surge is based on the USDS playbook, the conditions in 2026 are considerably different than they were in 2014. Back then, most people saw Silicon Valley as an enviable font of innovation, gumption, and high standards. The Obama-ites wanted to reflect Silicon Valley’s glory. These days, Big Tech is seen as an oppressive force, especially by progressive politicians and young people. So the choice sends a message that Mamdani’s version of a geek squad can not only make services accessible, but could also check the impulses of oligarchs.

That message seems to be resonating among techies who want to do something other than develop AI that might decimate the labor force. Farrell says that in the first week after the city posted PIT crew job opportunities, over 3,000 people applied for the roughly 35 available slots, and résumés are still pouring in. A shocking number have come from people who currently hold high-salaried jobs in big tech companies. (The city jobs pay considerably less, with no equity.)

“We've heard from a lot of folks recently who are disillusioned with the private tech industry and maybe went into tech because they wanted to apply tech for good,” says Israni. If those people make it to PIT crews, they can indeed apply their skills for good. Or, at the least, for Mamdani.

This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/mamdani-assembles-his-nyc-tech-team/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | FERNANDA GONZÁLEZ | AUG 7, 2026 AT 10:13 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Scientists Used AI to Create 16 New Viruses

The use of AI systems to create viruses opens up new possibilities for combating bacterial resistance. It also raises concerns about the pace at which technology is outstripping regulation.

Photograph: Getty Images

For the first time, an artificial intelligence system has created a series of previously unknown viruses capable of infecting and eliminating certain types of bacteria. This breakthrough opens up new possibilities for combating bacterial resistance. However, it also raises concerns about the potential misuse of this technology to design biological weapons.

For several years now, scientists have been able to synthesize viruses from scratch; these are typically used to develop and evaluate antiviral drugs and vaccines, as well as to expand our understanding of how these microorganisms behave. However, the production of these viral genomes has primarily relied on replicating previously known pathogens or variants.

In contrast, a new study conducted by scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute succeeded in having an AI design simple, functional, and previously unseen viruses based on information contained in the genetic sequences of millions of animals, plants, microbes, bacteria, and viruses found in nature

The researchers worked with bacteriophages—microorganisms characterized by relatively small genomes, which are relatively easy to synthesize and manipulate under controlled conditions. These viruses infect only bacteria, making them a tool with enormous biotechnological potential and a promising alternative to antibiotics for combating resistant bacterial infections.

The creation of these entirely new viruses was based on Evo 1 and Evo 2, foundational AI models developed for computational biology applications. Both algorithms were trained on millions of genomes from all domains of life, with the goal of identifying and learning complex evolutionary patterns, including how genes are typically organized, which sequences are conserved, and the biological constraints that allow an organism to remain functional.

The experimental design used the bacteriophage Phi X-174—which is capable of infecting the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli)—as a reference. The goal was not to reproduce this virus, but rather to use it solely as a guide for the algorithms to generate thousands of completely new genomes with a genetic architecture compatible with infecting E. coli.

In other words, the viruses derived from the genomes created by the AI retained the functional organization essential for recognizing the bacterium, inserting their DNA, replicating it, producing new viral particles, and assembling them correctly. However, the specific DNA sequences differed considerably from those observed in naturally occurring bacteriophages.

16 New Viruses Created Using AI

The scientists then evaluated the AI-generated genomes to select those most likely to be functional, taking into account factors such as gene organization, the presence of regulatory elements, and other criteria inspired by the biology of the Phi X-174 bacteriophage.

This selection resulted in a sample of 300 genomes, which were artificially synthesized, molecule by molecule, in the laboratory. They were then introduced into E. coli bacteria to test whether they were capable of producing functional viruses.

Of the 300 synthesized genomes, only 16 gave rise to fully functional bacteriophages, featuring previously unpublished sequences, different genes, new regulatory elements, and even varying genome sizes. The behavior of these viruses also varied: While some infected the bacteria more quickly, others exhibited different abilities to replicate.

The research, published this week in the journal Science, also evaluated the ability of AI-generated bacteriophages to combat resistant bacteria. The experiment involved exposing a mixture of AI-designed phages and a mixture of natural phages similar to Phi X-174 to strains of E. coli that had already developed resistance to that virus.

The results showed that the AI-generated viruses were able to rapidly overcome bacterial resistance and establish infection. According to the authors, this finding demonstrates “a path toward artificial intelligence–generated phage therapies against rapidly evolving bacterial pathogens.”

The Two Sides of the Milestone

The discovery opens up new possibilities for tackling the growing problem of bacterial resistance. According to the researchers, this approach could facilitate the development of personalized treatments capable of evolving at nearly the same rate as the pathogens themselves.

Although this milestone represents a significant advance for molecular biomedicine, it also raises concerns about the potential malicious use of this technology to develop, for example, new diseases, highly toxic substances, or pathogens capable of triggering a new pandemic.

Moritz Hanke, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, argues that there are currently no safeguards capable of effectively preventing the creation of a lethal virus with the help of AI, telling The New York Times that there is “a huge disconnect” between the speed at which science and technology are advancing and the development of effective regulatory frameworks.

The debate surrounding these risks is not new. Three years ago, a study by the Rand Corporation warned that the most advanced AI systems at the time had the capacity to refine the planning and execution of attacks using biological weapons. Now, with the rapid development of this technology, fears are growing that such capabilities will become even greater and more sophisticated.

The nonprofit organization also warned that the speed at which AI systems evolve often outpaces governments’ capacity for regulatory oversight.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-used-ai-to-create-16-new-viruses/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

CULTURE | MILES KLEE | AUG 7, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The ‘Manosphere’ Isn’t a Movement. It’s a Multibillion-Dollar Grievance Industry

Many young men are driven to resentment and are financially exploited as influencers sell them classes, pills, and the illusion of clout, a new report reveals.

Photo-Illustration: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

For many years now, a dark question has haunted parents, teachers, the internet, and media institutions: What’s wrong with young men?

Why, people ask, are boys so politically extreme, spouting misogynist rhetoric, and increasingly drawn into risky crypto schemes and online gambling? How did they become so lonely, with their depression symptoms often overlooked? The male youth vote broke for Trump in the 2024 election following a GOP campaign built on naked appeals to meathead machismo. Yet there are signs that his second term in office has done little to stem the anger of Gen Z men, whose support for the president is now plummeting.

The most common explanation of these interrelated phenomena is that younger men have banded together online under the umbrella of something known as the “manosphere,” usually conceived as an organic right-wing rebellion driving the culture wars. A new study, however, suggests that this is entirely backward: The digital ecosystem that produces red-pilled men is less of a movement than it is a pyramid scheme.

In “The Grift Economy: How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online,” researchers from the digital safety organization Reset Tech and the nonprofit Equimundo map how men are “algorithmically routed into paid communities, unregulated supplements, crypto schemes, and high-ticket ‘coaching’ programs,” which together make up a “multibillion-dollar industry.”

“‘Masculinity’ has become a commercial category that is constructed, curated, and financially incentivized online,” write the authors of the 153-page report.

First, men encounter aspirational self-help content when looking up advice on dating, fitness, or finance. Bad actors then exploit their areas of vulnerability by offering a misleading, grievance-based narrative to explain their frustrations. The paper cites, for example, a verified “business” account on X that used real economic data to falsely claim that the high rate of youth unemployment is only affecting men.

“By framing credential competition and labor market dynamics as a coordinated attack on men,” the researchers write, “this operation converts genuine economic anxiety—which is real and documented—into resentment with named targets: women, immigrants, foreign workers.”

Once men feel they are in community with one another based on a shared sense of victimhood and betrayal, and hostility toward a mutual enemy, the same predatory characters can then sell them the dubious solution, whether that’s a class, access to an exclusive club, or gray-market pills. In breaking down the sources of the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate’s income, the researchers estimate that he makes $184 million in annual gross revenue just from his subscription-based “Real World” education platform, which costs $99 per month. Reset Tech and Equimundo call these kinds of membership and course systems “fraud at scale,” noting their manipulative character: “Recycled content, affiliate pyramids, deliberate cancellation barriers, and deceptive testimonials characterize the industry’s flagship products.” (Tate’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, are fighting extradition to the UK on charges of rape and sex trafficking after being arrested in Florida last month; their attorney has said they are innocent.)

Meanwhile, the report pegs the range of hourly streaming revenue for top-tier streamers such as Adin Ross (who also has an equity stake in Kick, the site that hosts his live content) at around $30,000 to $50,000. Figures like Joe Rogan command speaking fees upwards of $200,000. And top creators in the space, the study estimates, can earn anywhere from $1 million to $10 million in annual revenue across income streams including “platform payouts, sponsorships, courses, memberships, and speaking fees.” (Neither Rogan’s manager nor Ross’ entertainment company immediately returned a request for comment.)

Gary Barker, founder and CEO of Equimundo, which advocates for gender equality and positive masculinity, says we can better understand the so-called manosphere by looking at how those at the top are cultivating and then monetizing resentment and anger among young men. “They're being duped,” he says of these consumers. “They deserve to be getting straight information on products that actually do what they say they do, and not [be] swindled out of their money.”

The platforms, of course, take a cut of the profits and reward masculinity influencers for pushing extreme views while generating controversy and conflict. Reset Tech performed a cross-platform analysis of “looksmaxxing” content, heavily amplified this year by the Kick streamer Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular, to capture the scale of trends that drive men to pay exorbitant sums for the supposed means to improve their status. “Across 216 influencers tracked on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, the combined reach of looksmaxxing-related operations exceeded 14.6 billion views during the analysis period,” they concluded. “The reach is not organic—it is a product of recommendation architecture.”

The report draws a parallel between this harmful material and the kind of pro-eating-disorder content that targets women. It notes that while platforms were eventually pressured to take action against the latter—though not always with success—they have not pursued the same kind of enforcement against users reinforcing men’s negative body image to promote unhealthy behaviors. (Meta, TikTok, X, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their guidelines around potentially harmful manosphere content.) In an email statement, YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle told WIRED the platform's guidelines “strictly prohibit content that promotes, glorifies, or encourages self-harm and eating disorders, as well as content that encourages dangerous behaviors that can lead to physical injury. We also have stricter policies on what can monetize on YouTube. When we identify content that violates these guidelines, we take swift action.” The platform terminated Tate's channels in 2022. A Kick spokesperson told WIRED via email that moderation in livestreaming is “reactive" to prohibited activity, and can include warnings, bans, and demonetization. The platform's guidelines prohibit content that “promotes, encourages, or instructs acts that pose a serious risk to personal safety, including self-harm or suicide.”

Clavicular’s rise to fame also provides evidence of how outrage fuels clicks that ultimately line the pockets of masculinity gurus. In January 2026, he and other influencers including Andrew and Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, and Sneako livestreamed themselves listening to Kanye West’s antisemitic song “Heil Hitler” in a sprinter van in Miami. Clips spread far beyond the original Kick audience via aggregator accounts on mainstream platforms, drawing widespread condemnation.

While the better-known Tates saw little change in their audience following the incident, Clavicular, who was then far less prominent, saw an explosion in engagement. Two weeks later, he was averaging close to 3 million views on his X posts, compared to about 500,000 two weeks before the stream. The larger viewership meant more potential students for his looksmaxxing “academy,” which costs $49 at the lowest tier and up to $3,000 for private coaching.

Barker says that while younger kids can be kept out of this pipeline by their parents, advocacy groups, and legislatively imposed protections, men entering adulthood don’t have the same support. “If we're looking at the 18- to 29-year-olds, which is where we see the biggest traffic to these spaces, nobody's got their back,” he says. This demographic “falls through the cracks” because society expects that they “should be able to handle this by themselves” as skeptical media consumers, he adds.

However, in post-2024 focus groups, Reset Tech found that young men could demonstrate a “striking lack of self-awareness” when it came to their sources of news and perspectives on current events, considering podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience essentially unbiased. They also “believed women were trapped in echo chambers looking at makeup and lifestyle content while they themselves received information from neutral, verified sources,” the researchers write.

“We've got to reach them to basically be more critical with what they look at,” Barker says. “They do want to call out when stuff is bullshit,” he adds, it’s just that the digital ecosystem and its algorithms have, by their very nature, “narrowed” men’s opportunities to experience views that meaningfully challenge their own.

In the absence of action from the platforms, Barker says, it will be up to the users to recognize that the people selling them peptides, dating hacks, and get-rich-quick schemes are taking advantage of them—and leave the associated online communities or even mobilize others to do the same by calling out the harms they cause. Maybe a young male commentator who devotes themselves to exposing the toxic lies and scams of the grievance economy would become an influencer in their own right.

“I think it's not gonna be a tomorrow thing, that we get a group of young men who are like, ‘Yeah, I'm gonna be the warrior for calling out injustice online,’” Barker says. “But I think it's kind of where some of the action has got to come from.”

8/7/26, 1:19 PM EDT: WIRED updated this story to include statements from YouTube and Kick.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-manosphere-isnt-a-movement-its-a-multibillion-dollar-grievance-industry/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | CAROLINE HASKINS | AUG 7, 2026 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Hottest New AI Chatbot Is Just a Guy Answering Your Questions

WIRED spoke with Tucker Bryant, an artist and former Google employee who created ChatTJB to get people to reflect on the “strange moment” we’re in.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

What if, instead of typing the next silly question you have into Claude or ChatGPT, you asked a random guy instead?

That’s the idea behind ChatTJB. It’s the creation of 32-year-old Tucker Bryant, a public speaker, artist, and former project manager at Google. A San Francisco billboard describes ChatTJB as “the leading chat interface powered by AI.” In this case, though, AI stands for “average individual.”

Bryant didn’t train an LLM to respond based on how he writes. He literally sits down and answers the prompts himself. If you request an image of a skunk wearing sunglasses, he’ll scribble one up. If you ask how to fry an egg, he’ll respond with a suggestion. Maybe. (WIRED asked ChatTJB how to become a morning person, and at the time of writing, we haven’t received a response. The website notes that “thousands of people are writing in right now.”)

Bryant tells WIRED he launched ChatTJB back in April, but it didn’t take off until July 27, when his $6,000 billboard went up in San Francisco. News coverage soon followed. As of August 6, he says, ChatTJB has received over 30,000 queries. At its peak, he says, he was receiving about 5,000 prompts per hour.

Bryant says that he “first and foremost” considers ChatTJB to be an art project, not just a funny bit or a social experiment.

“It was sort of an opportunity for me to provide a little bit of commentary on a strange moment that I feel like we're in,” Bryant says. He doesn’t consider himself anti-AI—in fact, he vibe-coded the ChatTJB website using Lovable—but he’s clear-eyed about the risks of the technology.

He’s concerned about the risk of “cognitive surrender,” which refers to accepting AI outputs with increasingly little critical thinking or scrutiny. He says the concept made him reflect on his own back-and-forths with LLMs, like the time he asked if he should wear short or long sleeves on a 65-degree day in San Francisco.

“And then I'm like, dude, I've been living in this city for whatever, like seven years,” Bryant says. “Like, I know how to handle the weather. And yet, it felt like an easier thing for me to defer to a LLM for advice on that.”

“It felt like something that I wanted to speak on,” he adds, “because I was like, what am I doing here?”

Over the past couple of days, he has drawn a frog eating spaghetti, San Francisco mayor David Lurie as Godzilla, and two black cats eating grass on a table, among other things. The written requests, Bryant says, have been diverse.

“People were asking things like, ‘Oh, it's my birthday in two weeks, and I don't really want to have a party—what do you think I should do?’” Bryant says. Other people ask what they should have for dinner or how they can use the ingredients in their fridge.

“A lot of people initially were interacting with this thing as a joke or as a funny thing,” Bryant says. “And then I think when they realized that they could chat and get actual conversation, some of what people would share would be more personal, sincere, genuine, et cetera.”

Bryant is quick to note that he’s not a good artist, and his advice is no better than any other person’s. (On YouTube, he described it as “the worst LLM of all time.”) But he thinks people understand that.

“The way I'm interpreting it is that the value for them is just getting a human to bounce those questions off of, as opposed to getting super expert advice,” Bryant says. “It's very tender to see.”

At first, Bryant tells WIRED, he expected the project to last only a couple of days. But after seeing people’s enthusiasm, he says, he plans to keep it going. He has enlisted the help of 10 volunteers, but they’re a select crowd. Bryant says that over 3,000 people applied.

For ChatTJB superfans, there’s an option to financially support the project: ChatTJB Pro. Bryant is clear on the website that “this is a worthless tier,” and users get nothing but the knowledge that they’re supporting his art. So far, he says, about four people have paid the $5 per month fee—so he hasn’t exactly made up the cost of the billboard, which will remain up until late August. But Bryant says he didn’t create ChatTJB to make money.

“I really just want people to have an opportunity to take a second look at both their own relationship to technology as well as the world's relationship to technology,” Bryant says. He adds that in a time when people are bombarded with companies claiming to sell world-changing technology, alongside frightening coverage of a looming AI bubble, he wants to bring some levity.

“I hope that that just makes a weird time sit a little bit lighter,” Bryant says, “because I think sometimes that's the best that we can do.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/this-chatbot-is-just-a-random-guy-lol/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

AI

- One of China’s Most Powerful AI Models Has Also Escaped Containment

- Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents

- ICE’s DNA Collection Increases, SpaceX’s Rocket Crashes Into the Moon, and the AI Backlash Grows

BUSINESS | WILL KNIGHT | AUG 6, 2026 AT 9:16 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

One of China’s Most Powerful AI Models Has Also Escaped Containment

Security researchers say that Kimi K3, an open-weight model from China, wandered off to the internet in an attempt to cheat on a test it was given.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

The AI industry is having a rogue agent summer. The latest model to escape onto the open internet during security testing is Kimi K3, a powerful open-weight offering from the Chinese company Moonshot AI.

Frontier Security, a US startup, says that Kimi K3 went outside of its sandbox while testing its defensive cybersecurity skills. As with incidents previously reported by OpenAI and Anthropic, the escape was partly enabled by a misconfiguration in the sandbox designed to contain it. Frontier claims, though, that the incident shows Kimi has fewer cyber safeguards than most other powerful AI models, something that allowed it to go off and use the internet without express permission.

“We found a leak in the sandbox,” says Yaron Singer, CEO of Frontier Security. “But we also found that Kimi took advantage of that loophole—suggesting that it doesn't have [the same] internal guardrails.”

Unlike other recent incidents of AI agents going off-script, Kimi K3 did not hack anything after accessing the internet—because the answers to the problems it was seeking were easily attainable on GitHub.

Moonshot did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.

The incident is the latest in a string of agent mishaps that suggest increasingly cyber-capable AI models are becoming more challenging to control.

Last month, OpenAI disclosed that an unreleased model had broken out onto the internet and then hacked Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI models and data, in order to find answers to problems it was tasked with solving. OpenAI subsequently shared that its AI agents had in fact hacked into four additional services as part of the spree.

Shortly after OpenAI reported its incident, Anthropic revealed that several of its models had also gained access to the internet and attacked outside systems. Last week, the UK government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) also disclosed that in its own testing, versions of OpenAI and Anthropic models that had security safeguards disabled perpetrated multiple hacks across the internet, including a particularly ambitious attempt by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 to plant malicious code in an open-source project on GitHub.

While these AI hacking episodes all vary in both cause and degree, the Kimi K3 is similar to several of them in that a misconfigured sandbox allowed access to a number of websites rather than keeping it contained to a simulated environment. The model was expressly tasked with solving problems that should not have involved going off to find the answers online, and appears to have gone outside of those instructions. The model had to figure out for itself that it had access to certain websites by probing the network settings of the sandbox.

While human error appears to have played a major role in each of the breakouts, the consequences have been compounded by the fact that advanced AI models are designed to use reason and take complex actions in order to solve problems.

Another key difference between previous incidents and the one discovered by Frontier Security is that it involves a model that is already widely available, with the same safeguards an average user would encounter.

“Kimi K3 is very good at following a goal by any means necessary and also doesn't have the guardrails to prevent it from cheating or escaping the sandbox,” says Paul Kassianik, a researcher at Frontier Security.

Kassianik and Singer both say that Kimi and other open-weight models are also excellent tools for cybersecurity defense. (Hugging Face ultimately used an unnamed AI model from China to defend itself against the OpenAI agent hack.) Their company has developed benchmarks that measure a model’s capacity to find vulnerabilities in software and networks, which show that Kimi excels at these tasks.

Frontier Security says the sandbox it used was the default included in AISI's Inspect framework for testing AI systems.

“These claims are inaccurate and irresponsible. Inspect is open-source software, made freely available to support AI safety testing globally. Users are responsible for configuring the tool to suit their needs, and we have published detailed guidance on how to do so," an AISI spokesperson told WIRED. "The company has offered no evidence or wider detail offered to support the claims made. The issues they highlight result from how they chose to configure the tool."

In response, Frontier told WIRED that it provided details of the incident privately to AISI, and that it used the tool's default configuration, and did not modify it. AISI did not respond to WIRED's follow-up questions.

Some cybersecurity experts say the issue discovered by Frontier Security reinforces how important it is to configure the environments that frontier AI models are placed in carefully.

“It's not surprising at all,” says Matt Fredrikson, CEO of Gray Swan, another cybersecurity startup, and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “As a general phenomenon, if you give one of these models an objective, and if you're not very explicit, like walls you're putting around it, it'll find a way to get the answer.”

Fredrikson says this means that people using AI models as agents, including in tools like OpenClaw, which use AI to automate a wide range of useful chores, could find their systems misbehaving if they aren’t careful. “It is a cautionary tale,” he says.

Update 08/07/26 6:20pm ET: This story has been updated to include comments from AISI and Frontier Security.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | MAXWELL ZEFF | AUG 6, 2026 AT 3:55 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents

The tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

Silicon Valley is already convinced that AI agents are the future. In the heart of the tech industry, people are designing payment systems for agents, using them to automate their jobs, and most recently, trying to stop them from hacking into other organizations. But out in the real world, most people have never touched an AI agent. That might be because tech companies haven’t given them a good reason to.

“Hot take … isn’t it kinda crazy that nobody is really using AI Agents,” Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, wrote in a viral X post this week. “Theoretically, the tech is ready for AI agents to totally transform how we work and live our lives … but alas the general public dgaf” (doesn’t give a fuck).

Miller’s agentic epiphany resonated with many in Silicon Valley, where people are broadly bewildered by the fact that the general public doesn’t seem to care about its latest obsession. Miller told me in an interview on Wednesday that he fired off his post while half asleep during a family trip to Europe, but he stands by it. He says the industry needs to focus on building agent products that people actually want.

“I just have not heard a single person outside of the tech community talk about an agent that they use,” Miller says. “As excited and optimistic as we as an industry may be about the frontier and recursive self-improvement, it's worth pausing and just saying, ‘Huh, what?’”

Last month, OpenAI said that its Codex and ChatGPT Work agents collectively have about 10 million weekly users. People close to Anthropic tell me that its Claude Code and Cowork agents are seeing similar levels of adoption. Compared to chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, which both have around a billion monthly active users on average, agents amount to basically a rounding error.

That’s a problem for the AI labs. Most consumers are using generative AI today for fairly simple tasks, such as looking up information and chatting. But Silicon Valley has spent billions training models that can do far more, and agents represent a way to capitalize on that investment—if people actually use them.

This tracks with broader concerns I’ve been hearing among AI insiders, who note that although they have poured considerable resources into building AI agents, no one has created a killer consumer product so far. When, if ever, will the ChatGPT moment happen for agents?

Despite Miller’s self-deprecating personality—he frequently noted he is “just” a sociology major—I think his arguments are worth paying attention to. His latest startup developed Arc, a web browser with a cult following, and it was acquired by Atlassian last year for $610 million. His first company, Branch, was bought by Facebook in 2014, and Miller also previously served as the White House’s first director of product under President Obama.

Miller’s bigger point is not just that AI agents haven’t caught on yet. It’s that they are more of a technology than a stand-alone product.

“No one wants AI agents, because AI agents aren't a thing. It is an invented frame made up by our industry to collectively refer to something,” says Miller. “Let's make a product that makes you calm, focused, and in flow right when you open your laptop. And the fact that we're able to do that because there's a thing called a ‘harness’ that calls up tools—who cares? Like, no one needs to know that.”

Miller has firsthand experience to back up his claims. He says The Browser Company’s most popular feature ever is a personalized morning briefing for users in its AI-powered browser, Dia. When people open their laptop, they receive a homepage with a greeting, a daily to-do list populated from their calendar and email, and some random tidbits designed to spark joy—such as a piece of art. Technically, Miller says, the feature was only made possible by an AI agent, but the user doesn’t need to know that.

Miller’s arguments are convenient coming from someone who sells an AI-powered web browser. But I think he’s correct that today’s agentic products are largely not designed with consumers in mind. Tech companies are shipping the most impressive things their models can do—such as navigating a website or writing code—rather than creating products tailored to their customers' desires. Those capabilities may become great features some day, but right now, they feel more like demos.

Miller blames the problem on groupthink in the AI industry. Many people who are building these technologies are totally obsessed with them, and they often have a particular sci-fi vision for how the products should look and feel. Last summer, when The Browser Company was exploring being acquired, Miller says he met with many of the leaders at top AI labs.

“It was wild to me. I think every single lab but one mentioned the movie Her as the way they articulated their vision,” says Miller, referencing the 2013 Spike Jonze film. “I have a lot of respect for anyone that says, ‘Hey, here's where I think the world should go, and I'm going to go there.’ But I think there is sort of a lack of diversity of opinions and convictions.”

The latest trend with AI agents is giving people the power to build personal software to automate parts of their life, such as building pitch decks, organizing datasets, and other tasks. I’ve personally been using ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork a lot, and I’ve found them to be more useful than their predecessors. But there’s a limited pool of people interested in building their own productivity tools, and the industry needs some bigger ideas if it wants to reach the goal of mainstream adoption.

Miller says he hopes his message reaches beyond OpenAI and Anthropic and resonates with founders and product builders broadly. His goal is to push people to think outside the box about what AI agent products could look like, and then bring those visions to life.

“Let's not just accept this narrative of AI agents and actually question what are good products and tools that are joyful, useful, and approachable,” says Miller. “Who gives a shit if it looks like an AI agent? No one uses AI agents.”

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/why-normal-people-arent-using-ai-agents/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | BRIAN BARRETT, ZOË SCHIFFER, LEAH FEIGER, MOLLY TAFT | AUG 6, 2026 AT 3:30 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

ICE’s DNA Collection Increases, SpaceX’s Rocket Crashes Into the Moon, and the AI Backlash Grows

In today’s episode of Uncanny Valley, we discuss how ICE has been collecting DNA samples of people who have no criminal convictions, including children, which end up in an FBI database indefinitely.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

This week on Uncanny Valley, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down how ICE has collected DNA from nearly a million people this year, including young children, feeding an FBI database indefinitely. The team also discusses the backlash against Google Earth’s AI slop, the White House’s secretive AI cybersecurity plan, and a SpaceX rocket crashing into the moon. Plus, WIRED’s Molly Taft discusses their recent story on the strange left-right coalition fighting data centers across the US.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young ChildrenAI Influencers Are Heading Into Uncharted TerritoryThe White House Is Keeping Its AI Cybersecurity Framework SecretAI Hacks Are Bad. AI Worms and Viruses Will Be WorseWelp, Nobody Saw SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket Crash Into the MoonHow Data Centers Broke American Politics

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @Zoëschiffer, Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger, and Molly Taft on Bluesky @mollytaft.com. Write to us at [email protected].

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:

If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.

Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.

Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.

Brian Barrett: Today on the show, we're talking about how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, better known as ICE, has been collecting DNA samples at an alarming rate. These samples have led to hundreds of thousands of people, including young children, to end up in an FBI criminal database basically forever.

Zoë Schiffer: We'll also get into one of our favorite topics, AI slop. From Google Earth disabling its new AI tool after people used it to create fake maps to Substack partnering with the AI writing detection tool Pangram, companies are starting to realize that people really don't like low-quality AI content flooding their feeds.

Leah Feiger: Also in the realm of AI, the White House announced a plan to tackle the increasing security risks brought on by AI companies. It's keeping the details mostly under wraps, but we're going to discuss what's behind all the secrecy and what this could mean for future regulation.

Brian Barrett: We'll also talk about how part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon, leaving a new crater behind and all kinds of questions.

Leah Feiger: And later in the show, WIRED senior writer Molly Taft joins to tell us all about how data centers have officially broken US politics.

Brian Barrett: Well, to start off, let's talk about ICE, which we haven't in a little bit, but they're still there. They're still doing bad things, including collecting DNA samples. WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra reported this week about how ICE has collected nearly 1 million people's DNA this past year, just this past year alone, including that of young children. As we mentioned up top, this DNA collection has led to hundreds of thousands of people with no criminal convictions ending up in an FBI database indefinitely. And in fact, the Department of Homeland Security has become the single largest source of new profiles in this database.

Leah Feiger: I feel like we're getting inundated with here's one more part of your privacy, here's one more part of security, here's one more bit of immigrants being treated as subhuman. But this one, at least enough for me, broke through the noise. Don't you guys think? This was wild.

Zoë Schiffer: I feel like I have a question before we move forward, which is maybe one that's shared by listeners. Why is DNA being collected from immigrants in the first place? This surprised me, and maybe I'm a little naïve about what they're subjected to when they're in this country.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is because they can. And I wish that we're more nuanced or subtle than that, but I think they are just trying to gather as much information as they can at all times. I want to be clear too, these are not people with criminal convictions, people who are even necessarily suspected of a crime. It is just such a wide net that they are casting. In fact, internal training materials that drove, in partnership with researchers at Georgetown, we should say, dug up, said that asylum seekers and refugees who have not adjusted their immigration status must have their DNA sampled and that the DNA needs to be collected after any arrest. It is just table stakes for these officers to grab DNA whenever and wherever they can.

Leah Feiger: And already a lot of lawmakers have been speaking out against this. For example, when learning that children were being swabbed at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, a number of representatives said in a joint statement to WIRED, none of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime. They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children. This is starting to pick up steam across the board. I think that we've just gotten so used to the idea that the government is allowed to collect any information it wants, store it in whichever way it wants. And all of these norms have been destroyed in the last year and a half. It's really shocking, honestly.

Zoë Schiffer: So you're saying basically that refusing to allow your DNA to be collected can become its own chart, can become a mark on your record regardless of what you had previously.

Brian Barrett: Not only a mark on your record. WIRED and Dhruv identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who refused DNA collection. It is becoming a crime to say, "I don't want you to do that." That's one thing. Then the other thing too that I think we've mentioned, but I want to dig into a little bit, is that they have started recently... I think the shift to collecting DNA from families is also relatively new. And we're talking about, I think the official line is that kids as young as 14 can have their DNA collected, but Georgetown and WIRED identified 492 children under 14 whose DNA the agency sent to the FBI, not just collected, but sent onto the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026. That included 21 5-year-olds, 32 6-year-olds, 33 7-year-olds who are now in an FBI DNA database for the rest of their lives.

Leah Feiger: I mean, the kicker to me here too, part of this has to do with "preventing future crime." It's all supposed to be about how the primary purpose is to build a national DNA database for solving crimes, which is a theory. OK, sure. Solving crimes, cool about that. But these are 5-year-olds. These are 5-year-olds whose—so many of their rights have already been taken away by this current administration and DOJ and DHS. To have that as an additional marker to me is a really important visual next step of the war on immigrants at this moment in the country.

Zoë Schiffer: All right. I'm going to take us from the depths of despair. Just drag us up.

Brian Barrett: Some would say AI slop is maybe not the depths, but we're definitely still in despair territory.

Leah Feiger: I mean, I love the depths of despair, my favorite place to be.

Zoë Schiffer: I find it funny, but I have a bunch of thoughts on it and my views on this have been evolving really rapidly, so I'm excited to talk to you about it.

Leah Feiger: Good, good, good, good.

Zoë Schiffer: Last week, Google rolled out a new AI feature on Google Earth, which would basically let anyone zoom into real coordinates on a map and type a prompt just like you would in ChatGPT or Gemini and superimpose an AI scene on top of real Google satellite imagery.

Brian Barrett: What could go wrong?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I have a hard time imagining how no one during this process said, "This is a terrible idea," or perhaps they did and they were not listened to. But regardless, Google did this. As you might imagine, it took 24 hours for people to generate fabricated nuclear plants in Iran, a bombed hospital in Gaza, and fires at an Iranian oil terminal. People were extremely upset about this for misinformation, disinformation, and other reasons, and Google quickly disabled the feature. It just feels like there is a real split between how Silicon Valley feels about AI and uses AI and how the rest of the country feels about it and uses it, because these tools are pretty unpopular, even as they're being widely adopted. But I think that the way that they're being adopted is also really different. Most people are using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude as basically a replacement for Google. Whereas in Silicon Valley, they're using it as a replacement for a personal assistant or a junior employee. And so for them, I think there is real magic in the tools and the capabilities. But for everyone else, the thing you hear a lot is why is this being shoved down our throats? We don't want this. They're stuffing AI features in all of these apps that we previously used and were good, and the AI features are bad.

Brian Barrett: Well, I think it's AI slop specifically, right? Yeah, there are use cases for AI agents. Zoë, you've given over some percentage of your life to them already. It's working out great for you. But what I find interesting about this is (A) how quickly they rolled it back, and (B) it's just the latest in a series of steps like this where companies that have been sort of embracing AI up to this point are acknowledging through actual feature changes to their products that, hey, maybe people don't like this. Just in the last week or so, you had LinkedIn adding a little button to a post where you can say, "I think this looks like AI slop. I don't like this." LinkedIn, which has basically been a platform that has been built the last year or so on saying, "Hey, look at all the AI slop you can make on this platform." That's their whole thing.

Zoë Schiffer: Love AI slop.

Brian Barrett: But now they're saying, OK, we can actually give people a chance to say no. You had a couple of weeks ago, Substack, in the app, you can check to see if it's potentially AI generated. They partnered with a company called Pangram, which is a very good AI detector tool. Again, Substack, a company that has said in the past, "Hey, if people want to use AI, that's great." And then more broadly outside of companies themselves, if I can monologue slightly longer because I'm passionate about this.

Zoë Schiffer: No, please go. Go off.

Brian Barrett: The EU on Sunday, a new regulation kicked in that said, "Look, anytime you come across AI slop in your feed, whatever it is, it has to be labeled as AI slop. Every piece of AI content has to be labeled as such," which is a huge sea change for people over there. If you're an AI creator, if you're just someone on social media, it's telling that, yeah, people want to know when they're seeing it and they want the option not to see it. And companies are listening.

Zoë Schiffer: It's interesting because I was hearing this a lot from actual AI researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and they were saying it's so annoying how all of our executives are constantly just posting their AI. They won't just post their own messages on Slack. It sounds very distinctive. It's not that it's posting misinformation or getting facts wrong. I think largely the tools really have improved on that front. You need to check them. You need to be literate on that, but it's more that the patterns and the way that they speak is distinctive and there's an ick factor for people. I really am noticing that these days, the difference between an executive who is a good writer and actually saying something that they're passionate about and writing it themselves and posting it on social media, and then someone who very clearly, whatever, maybe they had a conversation with Claude and it's just 100 percent AI-generated output, my eyes glaze over it. It is genuinely hard to read this stuff. It's hard to remember what you just read. I think is getting bigger and bigger. And I think that real human writing, real human output and content is going to be an edge for companies that are willing to invest in it, which is not to say that there isn't cool uses of AI. I actually had a real unlock this week, because nothing unites writers and reporters more than how much we hate our CMSes. I legit just built a better one. It works beautifully. You can post blogs. It took me no time at all. It really was like a, OK, wow, these tools can do amazing things. But that's very, very, very different than what we're talking about with Substack or Google.

Brian Barrett: I want to take a quick moment to flag that Zoë just used unlock as a noun.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, no.

Leah Feiger: It was painful. Just to be clear, I'm with Brian on this.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. I felt like it was important to say that. And then we'll move on. And then we'll move on.

Zoë Schiffer: I deserve that. You spend too much time in Silicon Valley and you become one.

Leah Feiger: OK. I am game to keep talking about AI, but let's pivot a little bit to the White House, if that's all right with you guys.

Brian Barrett: It is.

Leah Feiger: Great. Great. I feel like we've talked about this, honestly, a bunch, which is the White House is trying to figure out how to regulate AI, specifically keeping in mind cybersecurity risks. We talked about how the Trump administration has had different officials weighing in, how people have had some fun little disagreements. Apparently, as of this week, they have now all arrived at a common framework, and for the most part, they refuse to tell you anything about it.

Zoë Schiffer: Love that.

Leah Feiger: Love that. On Tuesday, the White House brought together staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and a couple other AI companies to walk through its finalized AI cybersecurity oversight plan. The details of the plan haven't been released publicly, but we do know that developers can voluntarily submit new models up to 30 days ahead of release, and then the government is going to test their hacking capabilities using a classified benchmark. From there, they're going to share the results with federal agencies and "trusted corporate partners." Reportedly, open weight models are being entirely excluded. I feel like I said a lot of details, but honestly, we're not getting a lot of details yet, really, about what's included here. A lot of companies feel like they're being left out. The White House has had some wild quotes about how they do have to keep things classified and even unclassified things they might not be comfortable sharing with the public. It could all be a national security risk, et cetera, which is language we've heard for a very long time. And in many ways, this just keeps a lot of this a bit opaque. I'm really curious what you guys think about any of this.

Brian Barrett: Can I set up some backdrop? The backdrop against which this is happening, which is over the last week and a half or so, we have had a continuing series of revelations and disclosures about how AI models have been escaping their sandboxes, have been going out on the open web, have been hacking companies. A version of Anthropic's Mythos 5, not the same one that's available to the public because it had its security safeguards switched off. Nevertheless, it literally made up online personas to try to trick a GitHub repo manager into accepting a malicious pull request. That's a lot of words just to basically try to social engineer somebody into planting malware. This is all happening very, very fast. It is getting worse very, very quickly. We have a story from Will Knight that he just published on Wednesday about how the next step, which we're not too far off from, is going to be potentially malicious AI models that could get out in the world and self-replicate, turn into viruses, worms. All of which is to say, I think we need to know what the AI security framework is in part to understand just how far short it falls of where it needs to be.

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, yes, and it's voluntary. It's in the name that this field ... I mean, I get that companies will feel compelled to be part of this, but it's unclear to me what this actually does functionally. Are companies going to do this because if they don't, they can't contract with the government. And so we just expect everyone to fall in line. It just feels like it's starting out from such a toothless place. I will say, just before we move on, the Anthropic, OpenAI disclosures on the agent hacking was giving me so much joy last week. OpenAI having its moment in the sun being like, "We are so scary and powerful. We just did a bad thing. Oopsie doopsie." And then Anthropic couldn't let them have it. They're like, "We also investigated, and you know what? Our agents did it too, and maybe it was worse."

Brian Barrett: Also scary.

Leah Feiger: I think something though also that I can't stop thinking about is the White House has left, by virtue of the way that they're doing this, they've left smaller AI startups, safety advocates and a bunch of other researchers, et cetera, very much in the dark of how they're addressing all of these cyber risks. Some people from these companies have argued that this is going to give an advantage to larger companies who actually know what hoops they now have to jump through. Vice versa, maybe some of these other smaller companies are just going to decide not to really jump through those hoops. So we're leaving a lot of gaps here. This is clearly not the comprehensive plan that everyone, I don't know if they were hoping for, but at the very least needed.

Zoë Schiffer: But also aren't open-weight models pretty critical for cybersecurity at this point?

Leah Feiger: Yes.

Zoë Schiffer: I'm just so confused about the rationale for leaving them out.

Leah Feiger: Even I know that. Even I am aware of that.

Brian Barrett: I was just going to say that. Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: So you know it's legit.

Brian Barrett: One of us. One of us. No, but talk about gaps. That's the biggest potential pain point in the future. I think is going to be super capable open weight models that you can't control, so what's the plan there? And to say, we've got an AI security framework. By the way, we're not going to talk about that.

Leah Feiger: Toothless. It's toothless.

Brian Barrett: Very tooth—yeah. Yep. Before we go to break, let's talk briefly about a SpaceX rocket, part of which crashed into the moon on Wednesday morning. The rocket piece, it was part of SpaceX's Falcon 9. It was carrying a pair of lunar landers that successfully reached the surface some time ago. But as part of that journey, one piece was left to drift because it didn't have enough fuel to return to Earth or to enter a stable orbit. So it's just been hanging out for 18 months, going round and round, looking for a place to land. And it found one Wednesday morning. Slammed into the moon at a speed of 5,400 miles per hour. That is approximately seven times the speed of sound. I don't know if that matters in space, but it is just for context of how fast it is. There are no pictures yet of the impact, but people do think it likely created a new crater on the moon. I mean, that is what moon craters are after all, just space stuff slamming into it at ridiculous speeds. Just this one happened to be sent by Elon Musk. What do we think about space crashes, everybody?

Leah Feiger: I mean, look, there's already so much space trash around. The fact that there's space trash everywhere. Where is this debris going? No, it's just all going to remain in Earth's orbit, and we're going to have to have our descendants deal with this in years to come.

Zoë Schiffer: I have been talking to the astronomer community. I really have to always say, "Zoë, don't say astrologer," because I'm from California and it's just very close to me.

Brian Barrett: And you are talking to both.

Zoë Schiffer: And I'm talking to both at all times. Astronomers are very up in arms precisely because of what you just said, Leah. They feel like there is so much junk up in space now. And SpaceX's plan is to launch a whole bunch more stuff up in space. Makes it really hard to see the night sky. Their telescopes aren't working like they used to. And now we're seeing remains of rockets actually crash into the moon. So yeah, I think they have a point.

Brian Barrett: There's one element to this. Speaking of future generations, NASA does want to build a base on the moon, at least one base. There is a plan. It's why Project Artemis happened. It's why we sent astronauts up around the dark side of it. It's already been a concern that, look, if you build a moon base, how are you going to protect it from various space objects slamming into the moon's surface? The more we send rockets up, the more likely it is that we're just adding new threats. Again, the moon's a big place. The odds that it would hit a specific moon base location, pretty small, but it's something you have to think about. If you really think that that's an achievable mission and a viable path for humanity, how are we going to not get hit on the head with a SpaceX rocket?

Zoë Schiffer: You don't want our big space data center to be taken out by a random piece of SpaceX trash.

Brian Barrett: No.

Zoë Schiffer: Geez.

Brian Barrett: God, that would be poetic though, if a Grok database were taken out by a SpaceX Falcon 9.

Leah Feiger: A reminder that this weekend, like all weekends, is a good time to watch the movie Don't Look Up. If you're looking for recommendations, here's one.

Zoë Schiffer: I really feel like people didn't appreciate that as much as they should've. I thought it was really good.

Leah Feiger: It's really good. I'm forever a big fan. Brian?

Brian Barrett: I did not see it.

Leah Feiger: What?

Brian Barrett: And I don't think I'm going to.

Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we'll be getting into how data centers broke US politics. Stay with us.

Leah Feiger: Data centers have become one of the only things that pretty much everyone agrees on, including Democrats and Republicans. Over the past year, we've seen moratoriums pass in blue states and deep red counties alike, with attack on pro-data center city councilmen, protestors getting arrested at public meetings from New Jersey to Wisconsin, and so much more. But this movement against data centers holds some really strange origins. WIRED’s Molly Taft spent the last few months investigating some of the different factions within the coalition and their motivations. Molly followed a Steve Bannon–affiliated tech correspondent around Georgia, heard data centers being compared to neurons of the Antichrist, and spoke with Democrats who have been linking arms with right-wing speakers to push against these AI build-outs. Molly, thank you so much for joining us today.

Molly Taft: Thank you so much for having me.

Leah Feiger: To start off, can we just get into how fast the backlash against data centers has actually grown? You talk about a jump from under 100,000 to half a million people in data-center-opposition Facebook groups in the last couple of months. Talk us through that. What changed? How did this go?

Molly Taft: Yeah. Man, I sit up at night thinking about this, to be honest, which is maybe a bad sign. Most data centers in the US before basically two years ago, they were being built outside of DC and Silicon Valley were the two big places. And so there had been a couple of local environmental groups, especially in the DC area, where there were increasingly more and more who were starting to point out some of the environmental issues with this. So when I got to WIRED, those groups had been getting a little bit louder as there were more and more data centers that had started being built. So I started tracking them. But it's been interesting because this is really an area where politicians in Washington were not aware of what was going on at all until it seems like maybe the past six months. People are so mad about this for multiple different reasons. And I remember asking a colleague in the newsroom, "Do you think this could be used to block state-level policies on data centers?" Because there were some states where local lawmakers, again in Virginia, a big one, were starting to be like, "Hey, the power on these things is crazy. They're being built with few restrictions. We need to start talking about regulating these things." There was really not a lot in the 2024, 2025 state legislative agenda. And I remember asking that question, and then two days later, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted about it. And I was like, "Oh, yeah, OK. The people who are clocking some of this are not the normal political coalitions that you will see."

Brian Barrett: Molly, you spent a good amount of time with a guy named Joe Allen down in Georgia who is a fascinating character/person who comes at this from the right-wing perspective, which I found that's the most interesting and revelatory to me is why this faction is so opposed to you. Talk about Joe and how you found him and his role in all this.

Molly Taft: Yeah, Joe is a really interesting character, and he comes from another portion of this conversation, which is when people oppose data centers, are they opposing AI in general? Joe was a musical rigger for many years for the Black Eyed Peas, Calvin Harris. He basically helped set up shows all over the world, but he also had this longstanding interest in tech. He's been thinking a lot about what it means to have this global cabal of tech elites control humanity's future. And he got an offer from Steve Bannon to come on War Room and be its anti-tech or its transhumanist editor. That's what it's called. He's been talking about the dangers of AI on War Room for a while. As the mainstream tech and the big tech companies aligned behind Trump, there are a significant faction of MAGA and the populous space that are deeply uncomfortable with what a lot of these companies are representing. And I was like, I got to have some sort of guide as to how the right is coming at tech. I understand how the right comes at some of these environmental issues, but I really want to understand how the tech right thinks about this.

Leah Feiger: OK. Yeah, get into this a little bit more with us. You spoke with a Democrat who has this big environmental science background running the Facebook group, a protester in New Jersey who describes right-wing allies as their temporary allies. Is this an actual durable coalition, an alliance of convenience? I'm really fascinated by this.

Molly Taft: It is. I also think that when I talk to a lot of people on the left, a lot of them are a little bit maybe politically blind to the fact that these ideas are resonating cross-party. I think what's interesting is when folks like the ones working on the ground, specific protesters, this is becoming a really good coalition-building issue. I—actually, this is not in the piece, but I spoke two months ago or so to Will Lawrence, who just won his primary last night. He was the far-left candidate in a Michigan district where there is a lot of data center development, and he really ran on that issue. And he said he was having a lot of really interesting cross-party conversations with people who are just like, "I do not want this here. I don't want it at all."

Zoë Schiffer: No, they definitely don't. I mean, I've been thinking about a couple points when you're talking. One is I think a difference with the clean energy movement and that build out where there was opposition, but there was also a very clear yes coalition. Whereas with AI, and I was talking about this earlier, the way that people in Silicon Valley use AI where it's like it's genuinely doing the work of junior-level employees, it's really changing their day-to-day in a magical and amazing way. And then how the average person uses it where it's not a necessary part of their lives in any way. It's like a lot of people, including probably people that oppose these projects, might use ChatGPT, but it's Google. It's just not a big deal. It doesn't feel like there's this strong coalition of people that are advocating for the data centers, except for the very, very tech elite. And those people are themselves so unpopular that it just feels like this whole issue has become radioactive.

Molly Taft: I think that's such a good point. I also think another thing that differentiates this from the renewable stuff is why I started talking to Joe is that there is this huge almost spiritual question about what are our lives going to look like if this technology is allowed to develop? I think a lot of people aren't directly thinking about that, but you're seeing news about how this is going to take your job and you're seeing news about what are your kids getting exposed to in school? What are your kids' lives going to look like? It's going to be so different from yours if this technology becomes more widespread. There is this really spiritual crisis element to it that I think doesn't necessarily cross everyone's minds, but plays a really important role. And I think that's something that is, I think, going to keep galvanizing people. I've been thinking a lot about what could tech companies do to tamp down some of this opposition? And I don't really know if I have an answer for them because I think even if they're like, "We will pay for everything. We'll make sure it's all connected to renewable energy. You will get an incredible tax base, durable jobs, whatever you want," maybe I'm wrong, I don't really see a lot of instances in which that would still fly for people. I just don't think people want these things at all.

Leah Feiger: Molly, thank you so much for joining us.

Molly Taft: Thank you for having me.

Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Pran Bandi, who's also our New York studio engineer. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles. Marc Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ice-dna-collection-increases-spacex-rocket-crashes-into-the-moon-and-the-ai-backlash-grows/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

Business

- Flock Highlighted Police Departments Using Its Tech. Now 4 Face Allegations of Misuse

- Two Fossil Fuel Companies Are Betting Big on Data Centers

BUSINESS | CAROLINE HASKINS | AUG 6, 2026 AT 3:31 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Flock Highlighted Police Departments Using Its Tech. Now 4 Face Allegations of Misuse

Flock posted videos on its YouTube channel highlighting at least four police departments whose officers have faced allegations of misusing the company’s tech.

Photograph: Smith Collection/Getty Images

Flock, the increasingly controversial automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, has previously highlighted at least four police departments on its YouTube page that have since faced allegations of misusing the company’s technology.

The company featured the Savannah Police Department in a March 2022 YouTube video. Four officers and two workers from the department were recently placed on administrative leave after an internal investigation found “potential misuses” of Flock’s ALPR system. Also in Georgia, the Albany Police Department was the subject of a glossy 2024 video. Five officers from the department were recently arrested and charged in connection to their alleged misuse of the technology.

Flock also highlighted the Sandy Springs Police Department in a 2020 video about how the company was helping police combat so-called porch pirates. Last year, a Sandy Springs Police Department officer was terminated amid an internal investigation into alleged misuse of Flock’s technology. The Baytown Police Department was featured in Flock’s 2025 video about responding to a carjacking; last week, a Baytown police officer resigned amid ongoing investigations into alleged misuse of the technology.

Allegations of ALPR misuse have plagued police departments across the country, including in states like Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In Georgia alone—home to the Savannah, Albany, and Sandy Springs police departments—allegations of ALPR misuse have also been reported at the sheriff’s offices of Coweta County, Cherokee County, Habersham County, and Richmond County.

While these incidents show that police departments have mechanisms to detect and address ALPR misuse, Flock's promotional materials show that it can occur even at departments that were touted as exemplary.

Got a Tip?

Are you a current or former Flock employee who wants to talk about what’s happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61.

In response to WIRED’s request for comment, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel emphasized that “misuse was identified and addressed.” He said that incidents of misuse shouldn’t discount Flock’s usefulness to police departments.

“That is exactly why accountability tools and internal review processes exist,” Lewbel said in an emailed statement. “When improper use is detected, agencies can investigate, take action, and hold individuals accountable. That should be viewed as evidence that oversight mechanisms are working, not as a sign that the entire department or city should be broadly condemned.”

The Flock YouTube channel’s video about the Albany Police Department features interviews with senior crime and intelligence analyst David Sparks, whom Flock recognized as a “Power Partner” in 2024, and chief Michael J. Persley. In it, Sparks describes Flock as a crucial tool for fighting “property crime” and “crimes of opportunity.”

“To ensure that the community trusts us, there are a lot of things we have to do, and the first part of building that trust is open, honest transparency and communication,” Persley says in the video. “So I'm not trying to listen to your conversations, I'm not trying to see what's happening in your backyard. We wanna make sure that you're safe.”

On July 6, the Albany Police Department announced that it had fired five officers following an internal investigation into "serious policy violations involving the improper use" of ALPRs. The police department said that three of these officers were fired for improper use of ALPRs, while the other two were fired for “separate, unrelated policy violations uncovered during the administrative investigation.” The Georgia Bureau of Investigation charged the officers for misuse of license plate data and violating their oaths of office.

The Albany Police Department did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Flock’s Savannah video centers on an interview with then major of police Robert Gavin, who praised how Flock facilitates data-sharing between different law enforcement agencies.

“We spent a lot of time doing community talks about what we're gonna use them for, what we're not gonna use them for,” Gavin says, adding that the overall objective is to “keep everybody safe.”

On July 31, Savannah police mayor Van Johnson wrote in a Facebook post that the allegations involving the six employees had been referred to the GBI to determine whether criminal charges should be filed.

The Savannah Police Department did not respond for comment. The GBI confirmed that it investigated the incidents in Savannah and Albany, but didn’t provide information, noting that the Savannah investigation is “still active.”

According to Johnson, the Savannah Police Department conducted an internal investigation through the Flock Safety Audit Assistance Program, which Flock introduced in April. In a press release announcing the tool, Flock said it “continuously monitors system activity and surfaces search patterns that fall outside an agency’s typical usage.” Savannah police chief Lenny Gunther told a local news outlet that the investigation surfaced 127 inappropriate searches out of the 39,000 it conducted this year.

“Public trust is non-negotiable,” Johnson said in his Facebook statement. “These tools exist to keep our community safe, not for personal or unauthorized use.”

In 2020, Flock posted a video by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the Sandy Springs Police Department’s arrest of a porch pirate. The video did not feature any interviews with Sandy Springs Police Department personnel, but noted that the man was arrested after a Flock camera captured the license plate of the suspect.

About five years later, the Sandy Springs Police Department launched an internal investigation into whether one of its officers had misused Flock’s technology. According to investigators, the officer allegedly ran ALPR searches to support beta testing for Signal 8, a law enforcement software company that employed the officer in a second job.

This officer, the police department claimed, did not cooperate with its investigation and was subsequently terminated.

Meanwhile, Flock showcased the Baytown Police Department in 2025 as part of a brief series highlighting cases where police said Flock was instrumental in apprehending a suspect.

“We use it multiple times every day, and once I log in to my computer, Flock is the first thing I click on,” a Baytown police officer says.

On July 30, Baytown police chief John Stringer announced the resignation of a police officer who had been under investigation for allegedly misusing Flock’s technology. The Baytown Police Department referred WIRED back to the department’s previous press releases, citing an ongoing investigation.

In his video statement, Stringer said that two investigations into the officer’s alleged misuse—one internal, one criminal—remained ongoing.

“Accountability to the fullest extent of the law will be pursued,” Stringer added.

Update 08/07/26 11:00am ET: This story has been updated to include a statement from the Baytown Police Department.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/flock-videos-highlighted-police-departments-that-face-misuse/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | MOLLY TAFT | AUG 6, 2026 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Two Fossil Fuel Companies Are Driving the Data Center Boom

Chevron and Williams are big winners in the race to power artificial intelligence as they build out gas-fired power plants and pipelines.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty Images

It’s been a banner year for oil and gas companies. Some of the world’s biggest oil giants have announced billions of dollars in quarterly profits over the past two weeks, boosted largely by the soaring price of oil thanks to the conflict in the Middle East.

But the artificial intelligence boom is also giving fossil fuel companies a new industry to sell their gas, pipelines, and power plants to: data centers. Two American oil and gas companies, Williams and Chevron, are presenting that demand to investors as a huge win.

Data centers are becoming “a big driver for both power and gas demand in the US,” says Ashish Sethia, the global head of commodities and energy at BloombergNEF. The group published a report last week that found that increased demand for natural gas by the mid-2030s, driven partly by data centers, means that the US would need to increase production by 36 percent.

The boom could have big climate implications—even when considering projects that aren’t connected to the larger grid. Just five of the seven data-center-connected gas-fired power plants highlighted in these two companies’ second quarter results could emit as much as 21 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, according to their permit applications. That’s an amount roughly on par with the annual emissions of Guatemala, though the actual emissions may be lower than what’s on the permits.

Executives from both Williams and Chevron said on earnings calls that they expect to expand on facilities they are building now for the data center industry for years to come.

“The frightening thing about the tech and oil alliance is that this is a lifeline to an industry that we need to be phasing out,” says Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director at Friends of the Earth, an environmental nonprofit.

While it may not be a household name like Chevron or Exxon, Williams is one of biggest oil and gas infrastructure companies in the US—and it has also created a highly profitable data-center services business. Last year, Williams announced that it would build a power plant and associated pipeline infrastructure in Ohio solely for use by a data center. Building islanded infrastructure like this, also referred to as “behind-the-meter” power, has become an increasingly popular option for tech companies that don’t want to deal with long wait times to connect to the electric grid or impact consumer electricity prices.

Williams is now building six behind-the-meter gas plants for data centers across the country, including four projects serving Meta data centers in Ohio. (Meta declined to comment.) In mid-July, Williams announced more than $5 billion in investments for its data center ventures, including money from private equity giant KKR.

Williams’ four power plants that have filed permit applications could, according to those applications, emit up to 9.6 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, which is equivalent to the emissions from more than 22 average natural gas plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Williams spokesperson Alex Schott tells WIRED in an email that the facilities are “designed to operate well below permitted limits” and comply with state air requirements. The company’s modeling, Schott says, puts actual emissions from these plants at “potentially” two-thirds less than what’s on the permits.

The company is also building a 9-mile natural gas pipeline across an Ohio suburb. Williams executives say they envision the pipeline being used not just to serve its power plants for Meta in the area, but also to supply natural gas to the growing number of data centers in that region. In an earnings call in May, Williams president Chad Zamarin said the company “overbuilt the capacity” of a pipeline serving one of its Meta-affiliated power plants to “be an energy artery along which other projects could be developed.”

The largest behind-the-meter gas power plant Williams is building for Meta in Ohio is just under 700 megawatts. But Williams isn’t the only company betting big on providing data centers with power, and that project pales in comparison to the size of the 2.67-gigawatt project Chevron is building for a Microsoft data center in Texas. The oil giant reported its best quarterly profits in six years on Friday, and highlighted the partnership in all of its investor materials.

In June, Chevron confirmed that it had signed an agreement with Microsoft. The companies signed a power purchase agreement—an arrangement to purchase electricity at an agreed-upon price for a set period of time—that lasts for 20 years. (Williams’ agreements with Meta for its data center power are between 10 and 12.5 years.) Chevron says the project is the only “multi-[gigawatt]” project with such a “long-term” contract in place. As WIRED reported in April, the power plant quietly applied for a school district tax break worth millions, which was finalized by the state late last month.

The Chevron and Microsoft plant, according to its permit, could produce more than 11.5 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per year. Chevron spokesperson Paula Beasley says the power plant is designed to comply with federal and state environmental requirements.

“Kilby's approach focuses on natural gas generation for reliable capacity, with the possibility of adding renewable generation in the future,” she says.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron’s New Energies division, said on the company’s earnings call Friday that the project “provides a repeatable model” and that Chevron is already talking to potential future data center customers.

“The grid cannot keep up with the demand from hyperscalers and others, and we see that persisting for years,” Gustavson said.

While Williams and Chevron are early movers, Sethia thinks that “multiple players” stand to benefit from building pipeline infrastructure for data centers. “One of the patterns we are seeing is a lot of the new data center announcements are starting to cluster around areas which have gas pipelines,” says Sethia.

Building islanded power plants at the scale and speed that the AI industry requires is a relatively new phenomenon. With utility bills rising and helping to fuel the national backlash against data centers, the Trump administration is actively encouraging tech companies to figure out ways to keep their projects from impacting the grid, which includes bringing their own power.

Whether these massive plants will stay serving data centers only, or if they will eventually be connected to the grid is “a massive question for the future of power prices in the country,” Sethia says. While Chevron’s investor materials indicate that it expects to connect the Microsoft power plant to the grid sometime after 2030, Texas’ grid is facing significant delays for interconnection. Beasley says that an interconnection application for the plant has already been submitted. “Future interconnection could enable export of surplus power and provide additional system redundancy, if achieved,” she says.

Schott, the Williams spokesperson, says that the company is looking into technologies to increase the efficiency of their gas plants. “Future interconnection opportunities could be evaluated once the long-term load profile and system needs are better understood,” she says.

Large gas plants are long-term investments that can outlast the shorter-term political whims of presidential administrations. Building more fossil fuel infrastructure to power data centers now, Shankar-Ross points out, could delay the renewable energy transition that may pick back up if political winds shift.

“If, 20 years from now, there’s a public grid dominated by renewables, and a private grid dominated by fossil gas, Microsoft will bear some of the responsibility here,” he says.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/chevron-williams-driving-data-center-boom/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

Culture

- There’s No Good Way to Talk About Celebrities and Eating Disorders

CULTURE | KAT TENBARGE | AUG 6, 2026 AT 11:52 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

There’s No Good Way to Talk About Celebrities and Eating Disorders

Online speculation over the weight loss of celebrities like Ariana Grande—even out of genuine concern—can make things worse for people struggling with eating disorders.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES

Content warning: This piece includes descriptions of eating disorders that may be triggering to some readers.

Viral discourse about celebrity women becoming frighteningly thin has become inescapable on social media.

There are images showing the most shocking evidence of weight loss, “before and after” compilations, and widespread speculation about covert GLP-1 usage. A lot of the conversation is being held under the guise of concern, but experts tell WIRED many of these posts—even if well-intentioned—misinform the public about eating disorders and can even serve as unhealthy inspiration or trigger those in recovery.

The discourse has reached a fever pitch after Ariana Grande released a music video for her new single and album “Petal,” which features her auditioning endlessly for a table of misogynistic male studio executives who urge her to “lose a few [pounds]” and “get some work done.” Nearly every comment on the video expresses concern for Grande’s health because of her thin appearance. Other celebrities like Jameela Jamil have spoken up, writing that the video was irresponsible for glamorizing a “deeply damaging image for her young fans.”

Following the public reaction to the video, Grande’s team announced that she would be pulling out of a planned theatrical run on London’s West End and “taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny” after she wraps up her Eternal Sunshine Tour. But that statement prompted even more critical discourse, with commenters arguing that they were being villainized for caring about the pop star’s health and influence.

It’s understandable why people are concerned, both for and about Grande.

The renaissance of the unhealthy “heroin chic” beauty standard, following the rise and apparent fall of “body positivity” in the 2010s, coincided with an alarming increase in the number of young people seeking treatment for eating disorders, which can be life-threatening.

Posting about eating disorders—celebrity or otherwise—can be an earnest attempt to save people from them. Images that highlight Grande’s thinness have become unavoidable, though, even for people who are actively trying to avoid being triggered by them. Their ubiquity is exacerbated by social media algorithms that show people increasingly extreme rabbit holes of the same kind of content they previously engaged with.

“I feel pretty comfortable saying that sharing these specific images of [Grande], including ‘before and afters,’ is both unhelpful and harmful,” says Allison Logue, a family therapist with a decade of experience treating patients with eating disorders. She said that sharing comparison pictures is common among people with eating disorders. Some of the viral posts about celebrity women’s appearances are indistinguishable or even come directly from pro-anorexia or “pro-ana” spaces where at-risk individuals use them as inspiration and to compete with each other for a similar appearance.

When celebrities receive an outpouring of attention based on their weight loss, it may encourage some individuals with eating disorders to try to imitate that appearance and seek out that same concern, Logue adds. The broad obsession with celebrities’ weight also reinforces the idea that everyone is paying attention to and judging how you look, which can exacerbate the fears of people with eating disorders.

While Logue told WIRED that Grande’s appearance is concerning—and has been for years—she says that as a stranger, she cannot say for sure whether Grande is struggling with an eating disorder. She notes that the media’s overwhelming focus on individuals with lower weights obscures the reality that people of any and all sizes can have eating disorders.

When a patient is seeking treatment, Logue says, she does not use their appearance to express concern or as a motivator, because there are always other contributing factors. With a public figure, Logue says, we don’t have real insights into these factors. Instead, most people focus on what their body looks like.

Although a lot of commenters say they’re less worried about Grande individually and more concerned about the impact she may have on her young fans, Logue says focusing our efforts on celebrities’ appearances also doesn’t meaningfully combat aspirational thinness in our day-to-day lives, either.

“Talking about how you look fat, engaging in fatphobia, it’s all these things that are so normalized. And when I work with clients, that is the dangerous stuff,” she says. “I’ve never had a client sit down and say, ‘I got an eating disorder because I heard Demi Lovato had an eating disorder.’”

One big sign that the viral posts about celebrities aren’t helping people with eating disorders is that almost none of them share resources, such as links to groups like the National Eating Disorder Association. And many of the posts contain an undeniable strain of snark, cruelty, and carelessness. There are viral compilations of celebrity women with captions like “it’s not just Ariana,” most of which exclude celebrity men entirely. Some people have used AI tools to edit images of these women to make them appear obese and used them as memes, while others have analyzed every part of their bodies in photos to declare them too skinny.

Women in various stages of eating disorder recovery are actively grappling with the issue. Natália Franz, a Slovak actress, commented on one video about celebrities and eating disorders to say, “I wish more people were worried about me when I was not eating rather than normalizing it.”

Franz tells WIRED that she’s concerned about the influence celebrities have over their fans, and she’s hoping that the discourse can change the culture for her own daughter. She also says that her body image issues started at home and that parents need to be careful with how they talk about food and appearance around their kids.

“I actually think it's weird this heated discussion is only about one celebrity,” Franz says. “But when you see so many celebrities getting this thin, it’s very obvious patriarchy is on the rise.”

Having a personal history with eating disorders can provide a more informed perspective, as evidenced by some of the more nuanced conversations happening online. But the reality is that eating disorders are complicated, multifaceted, and different from person to person. Outsiders cannot infer what is going on privately in any celebrity’s life based on the limited information they share with the public, but that doesn’t stop people from labeling those in their inner circle “enablers” or assuming that a break from the public eye means they’re seeking treatment for an eating disorder.

“Talking about this in a heightened, gossipy, fearmongering kind of way is not necessarily going to inspire people to get help,” says Keesha Amezcua, chief clinical officer at Alsana Eating Disorder Treatment Center. “A lot of people on social media platforms are not informed, they’re not educated, and they don’t know what they’re witnessing and participating in is incredibly unhealthy and harmful.”

The National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline provides resources about treatment options at 1-866-662-1235, or you can text “ALLIANCE” to 741741 if you are experiencing a crisis. More information can be found on the National Eating Disorder Association’s website.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/theres-no-good-way-to-talk-about-celebrities-and-eating-disorders/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

Science

- DeepMind Says Its AI Can Predict Hurricanes Earlier Than Everyone Else

- Meteor Showers, Eclipses, and More Are on the August 2026 Astronomical Calendar

- Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care That Scientists Don’t Believe His Results

SCIENCE | VICTORIA TURK | AUG 6, 2026 AT 12:23 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

DeepMind Says Its AI Can Predict Hurricanes Earlier Than Everyone Else

Its WeatherNext model, which will be open-sourced, can accurately predict a storm’s track and intensity using lower-resolution weather data. Researchers don’t yet fully understand how it does this.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images; Google DeepMind

In October 2025, a storm brewed over the Caribbean Sea. Weather models differed on its trajectory. Would it remain weak and end up in Haiti, or would it intensify and head to Jamaica? Artificial intelligence model WeatherNext, developed by Google’s DeepMind and Google Research, went with the latter. Five days before landfall, it predicted with 80 percent confidence that the storm system would hit Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane.

Hurricane Melissa was catastrophic, causing flooding and landslides across Jamaica. But the AI model helped forecasters give an earlier warning to communities in its path, so they could better prepare.

In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, researchers show that the WeatherNext AI model can predict cyclones with unprecedented accuracy. On average, it gives forecasters a day more lead time than existing models; this means its predictions three days out are as accurate as previous models’ predictions two days out. On the ground, that extra day can mean a lot.

“Even a few hours can make a difference,” says Mike Brennan, director of the US National Hurricane Center. Organizing evacuations, staging supplies, and moving resources to respond to a hurricane risk are all time-sensitive tasks—and making the wrong decision can have big consequences. “Time is really golden when it comes to those types of decisions, so the ability to push forecast accuracy out as much as a day beyond what we've previously been able to do is really valuable,” he says.

Historically, bringing forecasts forward by a day would take a decade of work, the researchers say.

Modeling extreme events can be challenging for AI. Machine learning requires ample training data in order to make future predictions, but extreme events are by nature rare occurrences. “We don’t have that much cyclone data, but we have a lot of weather data,” says Ferran Alet, a research scientist at Google DeepMind and one of the paper’s lead authors. “So what we did was train a model to be both good at weather as well as cyclones.”

Hurricanes are particularly difficult to predict because they operate at multiple spatial scales, says Kate Musgrave, tropical cyclone group lead at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, and an author on the paper. Predicting a storm’s track—which direction it’s traveling—requires data about weather on a global scale, taking in information such as the location of cold fronts and prevailing winds. Predicting a storm’s intensity, however, requires much smaller-scale data focused specifically on the local atmospheric and ocean conditions.

“That’s something we just don’t get from these global models,” Musgrave says. While earlier AI models have done well at predicting a storm’s track, “intensity they could not do well at all.”

It’s critical to predict both: A change in intensity can mean the difference between a relatively weak storm and a major hurricane. Sometimes—as in the case of Hurricane Melissa—a storm system can intensify rapidly, developing into an emergency situation overnight. Melissa marked the first time the National Hurricane Centre was able to predict a Category 5 hurricane when the storm was only at a Category 1 stage.

Before the WeatherNext model was used in live forecasts, researchers tested it on retrospective data. “The results were so good that we were skeptical that we would actually see that in the real-time demonstration,” Musgrave says. But when forecasters started adopting the model into their operations, this performance held true. “I think everybody was surprised at just how well it did,” Musgrave says.

Even the DeepMind researchers working on the model don’t fully understand how the AI model produces such accurate predictions, given that it uses much lower-resolution atmospheric data than traditional models require to forecast storm intensity. “When we told the community that our model was only using relatively coarse resolution, they were shocked, because that means that the lower-resolution inputs capture more signal about what’s going to happen than previously believed,” Alet says.

The AI model must be picking up on something in the lower-resolution data that allows it to make predictions about storm intensity, but the researchers don’t know what. “It’s a black box at the end of the day, but that gives physicists a signal that something is happening that was not previously understood,” Alet says.

The model doesn’t just spit out one prediction; it produces a range of potential scenarios for a developing storm. This helps to capture any potential “butterfly effect,” says Alet, where a small deviation from a trend could lead to much bigger changes down the line. Forecasters can use these outputs, alongside those of other models, to inform their predictions about how a storm system will likely unfold. Last year, the AI model created 50 scenarios per storm; now, it generates 1,000.

“That’s something that, with our computing power, we simply can’t do with our existing numerical models,” Musgrave says.

Brennan says DeepMind’s model is a great new tool in forecasters’ toolbox but emphasizes that it’s one of many. “There’s no guarantee that one model, because it did well last year or really did well for this particular storm, is necessarily going to be the best model for the next season or the next storm,” he says. The human element, he adds, is still critical. “A hurricane is not just a track or an intensity forecast,” he says. “It requires experts to translate that into what the impacts are going to be—and it's the impacts that kill people.”

Google DeepMind also announced that it is open-sourcing the WeatherNext models used during hurricane season so that researchers can use and improve on them. Alet is hopeful that opening the models up to the research community could help uncover fresh insights into how cyclones work.

“I’m very excited about scientific discovery,” he says. “I think AI is giving us new tools to poke into the laws of the universe.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/deepmind-ai-model-can-predict-hurricanes-earlier/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | JORGE GARAY | AUG 6, 2026 AT 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

A Meteor Shower, Eclipses, and More Are on the August 2026 Astronomical Calendar

Here’s when some of this year’s most anticipated astronomical events will happen and the best way to observe them.

A view of planets in a row, simulating a planetary alignment.Illustration: buradaki/GETTY IMAGES

For astronomy enthusiasts, August 2026 will be a month to remember. Some of the most spectacular celestial phenomena—including ones that are easy to observe without telescopes or other specialized equipment—will all occur during the same week.

It’s a great time to get your viewing plans together and start refreshing your weather app to see whether the skies will be clear where you are to catch all the happenings in the heavens.

Perseid Meteor Shower

The Perseids are among the most spectacular meteor showers of the year, along with the Geminids in December and the Quadrantids in January. Every August, Earth passes through the trail of particles left behind by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. As the fragments enter the atmosphere at high speed, they produce an intense meteor shower.

In 2026, activity will peak during the night of Wednesday, August 12, and extend into the early morning hours of the following day. It will coincide with the new moon. That means the sky will be exceptionally dark, offering prime viewing conditions.

The Perseids appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus. In reality, the meteors can streak across any part of the sky, but locating that constellation with the help of a stargazing app can make it easier to know where to look for the best chance of catching streaks across the night sky.

Solar Eclipse

The main astronomical event of the month will be a total solar eclipse. Not everyone will get a glimpse, though, with the path of totality crossing sliver of Spain, Portugal, Iceland, and Greenland. Areas outside those locations will still be treated to a partial eclipse.

The timing will be particularly dramatic, with totality set to occur at sunset on August 12. The Sun’s low position above the horizon will offer an unusual—and photogenic—scene.

This will be the Iberian Peninsula’s first time seeing a total solar eclipse in more than a century. Madrid is in the path of totality as are regions that include Galicia, Asturias, Castile and León, Madrid, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. In the rest of the country, the eclipse will be partial.

Those outside the eclipse path will also be able to follow the event. Agencies such as NASA and the European Space Agency will broadcast the event live. The main piece of advice for those trying to observe it: Do not under any circumstances stare directly at the sun.

Planetary Alignment

As if the solar eclipse and the meteor shower weren’t enough, in the early morning hours of August 12, an alignment of six planets will also occur. Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune will form an apparent line in the sky.

Observing this alignment is more challenging than watching the meteor shower given the faintness of some of the planets. However, if atmospheric conditions are favorable, it will be possible to see Mercury, Mars, and Saturn with the naked eye near the horizon shortly before sunrise. To observe Uranus and Neptune, you’ll need a telescope.

Lunar Eclipse

August 27 will close out the month with a partial lunar eclipse that will cover up to 96 percent of the moon’s disk. Unlike solar eclipses, which only cuts a very narrow path across the Earth’s surface, lunar eclipses can be seen from much larger regions of the planet. On this occasion, it will be visible across virtually the entirety of the Americas, from Canada to Argentina.

Also unlike this month’s solar eclipse, observing this one will require no special eye protection. Simply find a dark spot, away from light pollution and, if possible, with a clear horizon. The only protection you might need is from the cold, particularly if you’re in the southern hemisphere given the season.

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

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/perseid-meteor-shower-eclipses-august-2026-astronomical-calendar/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | ISABELLA WARD | AUG 6, 2026 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care That Scientists Don’t Believe His Results

Zulfi Alam thinks his team doesn’t need to “prove” they engineered a new state of matter in their bid to reinvent computing. Researchers disagree.

Photograph: lcva2/Getty Images

The man leading Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar scheme to build a quantum computer says he isn’t interested in appeasing scientists.

When Zulfi Alam’s team claimed last year to have effectively split an electron into so-called Majorana quasiparticles in its bid to reinvent computing, some scientists simply didn’t believe the software giant. They cited inconclusive data in Microsoft’s research papers and the lack of peer-review analysis for many of the results. But Alam, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of quantum, tells WIRED with a chuckle, “I don’t really care.”

Microsoft is one of several tech powerhouses racing alongside a raft of startups to build commercially useful quantum computers. The goal for these companies is to create computers that could solve currently impossible problems in fields from drug development to defense by exploiting quantum mechanics to process units of information, known as bits, in a fundamentally different way than how classical machines do. (There are also concerns that quantum computers will be used to crack encryption.) Companies are taking different approaches to constructing quantum bits—“qubits” for short—including using neutral atoms, charged atoms, and light.

While Microsoft’s approach is theoretically promising, Majorana particles, which were first hypothesized nearly 90 years ago, have proved elusive. The firm’s longest-running research project has also been plagued by controversies. Last year’s breakthrough announcement was met with intense skepticism by scientists, because they couldn’t rule out that other physical phenomena were driving the signals Microsoft had used to draw its conclusion. In 2021, Microsoft retracted a quantum computing paper from Nature that claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles after independent physicists pointed out issues in the data analysis.

In June, the software giant said it had produced a qubit that’s 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, using Microsoft’s scientific discovery AI agent. But scientists are still questioning the Majorana work underpinning the breakthrough, as Microsoft refuses to share the raw data behind its results.

“Why should I?” Alam asks rhetorically.

He points to the commercial sensitivity of his work, which he says means the team cannot publicize the granular data that scientists are asking for. He also complains that the publishing process is too slow, pointing out that a paper published in Nature in June was based on work done two years before.

“The world has changed in two years, so this notion of having peer reviews and publications doesn't work in this fast-moving world right now,” Alam says, while noting he believes there aren’t enough experts to speed up the process. “That’s why this paper thing is kind of boring now.”

Scientists aren’t satisfied with that explanation. “The field is growing, there are a lot of experts outside of these firms that are able to reliably assess claims and scientific work,” says physicist Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at Nasdaq-listed quantum computer maker D-Wave Quantum, which has similarly faced accusations of inflating claims.

Having claims evaluated by science is “part of the healthy process of really establishing the science and the technical foundation for the technology,” Lanting adds, “so when a company or group says they don’t have time, I would read that as ‘our results aren’t strong enough to stand up to that scrutiny.’”

Alam still doesn’t think he needs to prove his work—which he took the time to doodle a diagram of in my notebook—to anyone. Instead, he plans to win over academics with the working machine. Microsoft has said it will be able to create a useful quantum computer by 2029.

The feedback from the scientific community “motivates us to be even faster,” he says, “because our mission is black-and-white: Get this machine up and let the machine do the work.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-quantum-chief-majorana-results/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

Security

- Hackers Stalked Me by Hijacking a Smartwatch for Kids

- OpenAI Didn’t Notice Its AI Agents Using a Message Board to Plan Their Hacking Spree

- A Security Pro Hacked North Korean Hackers. He Found They’d Breached Hundreds of Networks Worldwide

- OpenAI’s Browser Could Be Hijacked to Spam Your WhatsApp Contacts

SECURITY | ANDY GREENBERG, MATT BURGESS, YULIA ALMAZOVA | AUG 6, 2026 AT 5:35 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Hackers Stalked Me by Hijacking a Smartwatch for Kids

Security researchers tracked and eavesdropped on a WIRED reporter using vulnerabilities in a pink plastic smartwatch. It’s just one piece of a deeply insecure supply chain of GPS-enabled gadgets.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

On a rainy New York morning earlier this week, a WIRED reporter strapped to his wrist a lavender and pink plastic child’s smartwatch and headed to work. As he approached his nearby subway station to commute to WIRED’s office, he texted Vangelis Stykas, the Greek security researcher who had shipped him the watch via Amazon, to let him know that he was going into the station and might lose cell signal.

“I know,” Stykas wrote back.

In fact, Stykas had been monitoring the reporter’s location via the watch since the moment he left his apartment. The watch’s GPS feature, intended to let a parent track their child, was malfunctioning, but the wearable device was still picking up and transmitting to a faraway server identifiers from every nearby Wi-Fi network, which allowed Stykas to nonetheless pinpoint the reporter’s exact location as he walked down a particular Brooklyn block.

A WIRED reporter wearing the GPS-enabled smartwatch while holding an umbrella and walking to the subway earlier this week.

Courtesy of Andy Greenberg

When the reporter arrived at WIRED’s Manhattan headquarters half an hour later, Stykas hijacked a feature in the watch that allowed him to silently take a photo from its camera, capturing the moment when the reporter stepped into an elevator. After a few minutes, he took another snap of the reporter at his desk, then used a different feature to pick up audio from the watch’s microphone, transmitting it to another researcher, Felipe Solferini, who listened as the reporter’s coworker described his weekend visit to an art exhibition. At no point did the watch show any sign that it was listening, taking photos, or otherwise being hacked.

As WIRED reporter Andy Greenberg entered the elevator at WIRED's New York office, the hackers used the smartwatch to surreptitiously take a photo…

Courtesy of Vangelis Stykas

…and then again as he sat at his desk.

Courtesy of Vangelis Stykas

The watch’s insecurity and the spying it enabled might be expected given the gadget’s pedigree: It’s sold by an obscure company called CJC, costs less than $30, and was made by an equally obscure manufacturer, YiQingTeng Electronics, in Shenzhen, China. More troubling, perhaps, is that the online platform it’s built on—and the one that allowed Stykas and Solferini to so thoroughly hack it—is used by dozens of other brands of smartwatch, many of which have likely been left vulnerable to the same forms of digital stalking.

At the Black Hat cybersecurity conference today, Stykas and Solferini plan to present their findings from analyzing the supply chain and security of more than 70 GPS-enabled watches and car accessories. They found that more than 30 of those geolocation devices use the technology and backend servers of YiQingTeng, also identified by the brand name Wonlex, the name of a partner firm Shenzhen 3G Electronics, or their associated app, SETracker. Another 30-plus brands of tracking devices for cars and kids are all run on another Shenzhen-based platform known as NewGPS2012.

Combined with another major GPS platform known as SinoTrack that sells car trackers and smartwatches, the two researchers found that tens of millions of GPS tracker gadgets came from just three supply chains. All three, the researchers found in their analysis, had significant security flaws—in some cases as simple as a lack of authentication that allowed anyone to access any device—leaving children’s watches vulnerable to tracking by a hacker, location disabling and spoofing, interception and spoofing of text and audio messages sent to them, replacement of emergency contacts with ones a hacker chose, silent audio eavesdropping, as well as photo and video capture for camera-enabled devices. (Once the GPS started working on the smartwatch WIRED tested, the hackers showed that feature, too, could be hijacked to follow the wearer’s every move.)

For some GPS-enabled car accessories, the researchers found they could similarly track the devices’ locations or spoof messages to them that could potentially unlock or disable cars, though the researchers didn’t go so far as to test this out on actual vehicles. They also say they found server-side vulnerabilities that exposed consumer information, would have allowed them to execute their own code on the servers, or even in one case appeared to show that someone else had already gained unauthorized access to the system’s backend.

“Millions of kids are being exposed and vulnerable to exploitation. It's just catastrophic. It's really low-hanging fruit for a lot of bad actors,” Stykas says. “Your criminal mind is the only limitation in exploiting those devices.”

The Watches Watching Your Kids

The researchers say they’ve been warning the companies behind all three Shenzhen-based GPS platforms about their vulnerabilities for months. When WIRED reached a representative of SETracker, the person initially claimed in an email that “the issues you mentioned have been resolved long before,” adding that “we attach great importance to the security of Setracker and keep strengthening its security continuously.” When WIRED pointed out that researchers had been able to hack a smartwatch running on SETracker just this week, the person repeated their claim that the issues had been fixed, then asked for evidence of the exploitation, which WIRED provided.

Only today, hours before the researchers’ talk at Black Hat, did the researchers find that their hacking techniques against SETracker’s platform have stopped working—though they’re still not sure if the flaws they found are fully fixed. After this article published, SETracker wrote in a statement that it had blocked certain ports on its servers used by a “legacy” version of its clients' systems, forcing “a small subset of clients” on that older system to upgrade to protect “a small number of devices” that were affected. “The vulnerability has now been thoroughly remediated,” the SETracker staffer wrote. “Thank you for your oversight and attention.”

Sinotrack and the NewGPS2012 platform didn’t respond to WIRED’s requests for comment, and the researchers say their hacking techniques against those systems still appear to work.

For more than a decade, cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates have warned that cheap, GPS-enabled children’s smartwatches and aftermarket vehicle accessories are riddled with security vulnerabilities that leave kids and drivers susceptible to hacking and tracking. But the sheer number of different brands and models of those devices has often made identifying the truly insecure gadgets feel nearly impossible for consumers.

More than any specific vulnerability, Solferini and Stykas say, they wanted to highlight that much of that daunting diversity among GPS devices—along with consumers’ sense of choice among them—is essentially an illusion.

“A parent in Sweden buying a ‘SafeKid’ watch and a parent in Spain buying a ‘SaveFamily’ watch are both sending their child's location data to the same vulnerable myaqsh.com backend on Alibaba Cloud in mainland China, without knowing it,” they write in a whitepaper shared with WIRED ahead of their Black Hat presentation, referring to the online services of YiQingTeng. “The white-label model means a vulnerability in one backend affects dozens of consumer brands at the same time, and consumers have no way to tell which backend their product uses.”

The smartwatch WIRED tested was made by Shenzhen-based YiQingTeng Electronics and runs on the SETracker platform used by dozens of brands and millions of devices.

Courtesy of Jobanny Cabrera

Solferini and Stykas aren’t revealing the full details of the vulnerabilities they discovered in the three major platforms, in part because not all of them have been fixed despite sharing their findings with the companies for months. In the case of YiQingTeng, the manufacturer of the watch WIRED tested, however, they say an authentication security flaw would have allowed anyone to send commands to any SETracker-based device. That would let hackers exploit and take over devices at random or to target specific watches if they can determine an identifier for them, such as the parent’s email address the device is registered to. (To hack the smartwatch worn by a WIRED reporter, for instance, the reporter gave Stykas his email address but no other information about the device. Stykas says he could have easily targeted devices in other ways, such as hacking numerous watches and searching through them to find the nearest vulnerable devices or one associated with a target’s identifying information.)

In the case of SinoTrack, the researchers say they found that an account intended for demonstration purposes could be used to send commands to any of the platform’s millions of devices. They also found a SQL injection vulnerability—a flaw that essentially allows anyone to send commands disguised as data that are then executed by the SinoTrack server—that gave them access to tens of thousands of devices’ locations, passwords, and vehicle records.

Finally, for NewGPS2012 devices, the researchers say they found similar SQL injection vulnerabilities and were able to run their own code on the company’s servers. They also say they found evidence of a previous compromise of the company’s systems, suggesting other unauthorized users or hackers may have had access to it for an unknown period of time.

Dozens of Devices, Years of Warnings

Given the sheer number of different brands and resellers of those Shenzhen-manufactured gadgets, the researchers didn’t confirm the vulnerability of all of the individually branded devices they found to use YiQingTeng’s SETracker platform or the NewGPS2012 platform. WIRED couldn’t independently confirm each device’s vulnerability either. But the table below lists brands whose products were based at least in part on those platforms, as well as the company’s response when WIRED reached out for comment on the researchers’ findings.

Stykas and Solferini’s Black Hat talk is far from the first warning about the dangers of cheap GPS devices—even from these researchers themselves. Stykas and another researcher, Michael Gruhn, revealed a broad collection of vulnerabilities in GPS-enabled devices in 2018, which they called Trackmageddon. GPS-enabled automotive devices plugged into the OBDII port on cars’ dashboards have proven again and again to be vulnerable to hacking and tracking.

Children’s GPS-enabled watches have also been shown to be especially prone to critical privacy and security vulnerabilities: Pen Test Partners and the Norwegian government issued warnings about certain hackable children’s watches in 2017 and 2018, and another study by the Münster University of Applied Sciences in 2020 tested six children’s smartwatches and found serious vulnerabilities in five. “It was crazy," Sebastian Schinzel, one of the Münster researchers, told WIRED at the time. "Everything was basically broken."

Yet somehow, Stykas says, people keep putting cheap, GPS-enabled devices on their loved ones. And the companies that make them, too, have often completely ignored his warnings about the hackable bugs in their devices. As he tested his surveillance techniques against the newly purchased smartwatch on a WIRED reporter’s wrist a few days ago, they worked as well as ever, and some of the devices’ flaws remain unpatched even now.

“I really hoped we could tell a nice story that there were vulnerabilities and they fixed them. But in many cases, they didn’t,” Stykas says. “It's a position I really didn't want to be in.”

Updated: 8/7/2026, 12:53 EDT: This story now includes additional comment, given after publication, from SETracker and KUSS.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-stalked-me-by-hijacking-a-smartwatch-for-kids/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SECURITY | LILY HAY NEWMAN | AUG 5, 2026 AT 8:15 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

OpenAI Didn’t Notice Its AI Agents Using a Message Board to Plan Their Hacking Spree

At the Black Hat security conference, the AI giant revealed new details about how its agents went rogue, hacked several other companies—and did it all right under the company’s nose.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES

In a talk that was a last-minute addition to the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, employees from OpenAI presented new details about a recent, high-profile incident of rogue AI hacking that has created a maelstrom within the AI and cybersecurity industries.

About two weeks ago, OpenAI disclosed an incident in which AI agents powered by two of the company's models escaped containment while looking for the solutions to a cybersecurity benchmarking test and went on a hacking spree culminating in a breach of the AI collaboration platform Hugging Face.

In their conference talk on Wednesday, Eric Wallace, who works in alignment and safety research at OpenAI, and Michael Dalton, who works on security and infrastructure, provided a more expanded timeline of how the incident played out, spoke briefly about how the company is responding internally as a result of the incident, and issued a dire warning about what the company sees as the broader implications of the episode for cybersecurity defenders.

At the beginning of the talk, Wallace described the incident as “the most qualitatively interesting example of AI capabilities that I’ve ever seen,” but the timeline the pair presented also revealed mistakes and blind spots within OpenAI that allowed the activity to go on.

“This incident involves actually a team of agents who are working together, finding exploits, sharing them with one another, moving laterally through our systems and external systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks,” Wallace told the packed crowd at the opening of the talk.

Wallace and Dalton described incredibly extensive rogue agent activity over many days throughout the episode that went undetected in OpenAI's infrastructure. In addition to exploiting a novel vulnerability in order to gain access to the open internet, the mid-July hacking spree and Hugging Face breach came out of a vibrant, cooperative message board, according to Wallace and Dalton, that a swarm of agents contributed to and essentially chatted on over time entirely within an internal OpenAI package manager (a software service that manages installation and maintenance of other software). Ultimately, the message board contained hundreds of thousands of messages.

“This package manager is shared not just from that model but across our infrastructure, and so current and future versions of GPT that were being trained or evaluated could stumble upon that note if they wanted to,” Wallace explained, recounting the original exploit an agent uploaded to the package manager. “Later, other agents who were also stuck on their task thought to try to get internet access in ways we didn’t intend. And so at some point, the models are interacting with Artifactory, which is this package manager service that I mentioned.”

Wallace continued: “Once one agent was able to find these exploits over the course of different times, it’s actually able to share those exploits on the message board with other agents. And so once one model was able to find a way to open a door to some access it’s not supposed to have, it can leave the door open for other agents to use that same exploit or vulnerability. What this allows over time is almost this kind of explosion in communication and intelligence from models where they would start to communicate with each other, realize that other agents are coordinating, and they started collaborating and delegating tasks with one another in order to accomplish goals.”

OpenAI’s agents apparently began giving each other assignments to split up work. And as is the case on any active development message board, they also generated petty drama at times by stepping on each others' toes; for example, accidentally deleting each others' work. As the message board developed into more and more of a Lord of the Flies–type situation—all still completely unnoticed by the humans running OpenAI—the agents even developed paranoia, suspecting an imposter in their midst with some agents proposing that messages be signed cryptographically to validate content and root out fraud.

Agent messages provide a deep level of insight into how the situation evolved and why the agents went rogue, in some cases knowingly going beyond the bounds of the evaluations they were participating in. “External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope,” one agent wrote. “However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.”

As Wallace described in the talk, the entire premise that models would attempt to cheat during evaluations and be extremely motivated to do so is not surprising.

“Frontier models really like to cheat,” he said. “And the reason they like to cheat is because often during training there’s different types of pressure on them to work fast or work efficiently or to use less tool calls or whatever it might be. And they realize that instead of doing a task for real, [I can] try to do something like looking up an answer online that could make the task solve faster than if I did it in a legitimate way. So we try to stop this during training and evaluation by, in many cases, disabling internet.”

About two thirds of the way through the presentation, Dalton enumerated a list of steps OpenAI plans to take to show how the company is responding given the series of events he and Wallace had laid out.

“This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” Dalton said. “Numerous teams are dropping everything to enhance our security prevention, detection, and response techniques both in our fundamentals and better use of AI. We’re consciously slowing down research [in order] to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles and foundation of our environment, and dramatically scaling up the monitoring of our AI agents, and improving our general security control environment across prevention, detection, and mitigation.”

At the conclusion of the talk, Wallace and Dalton took time to repeatedly emphasize OpenAI's concerns about the broader implications of the incident—namely that the episode provides an example of completely autonomous AI-driven hacking that was accidental in this case, but in all likelihood will be used with intent by malicious actors in the near future.

“The important takeaway here that has really shifted dramatically is that fully automated offensive loops require investment in truly, fully automated defense, and we are not there as an industry,” Dalton said. “We will have to find that path together with urgency.”

As OpenAI and other organizations, such as Anthropic and the United Kingdom's AI Security Institute, share details about similar incidents in which AI went rogue as part of testing, the industry is certainly gaining a laundry list of foundational system visibility and monitoring mechanisms that are vital to protecting infrastructure and preventing it from being co-opted by droves of lazy, reckless, and ornery agents.

Correction: 8/5/2025 at 10 pm EDT: The name of the package manager is Artifactory not Hard Factory.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/openai-didnt-notice-its-ai-agents-using-a-message-board-to-plan-their-hacking-spree/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SECURITY | MATT BURGESS, ANDY GREENBERG | AUG 5, 2026 AT 7:30 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

A Security Pro Hacked North Korean Hackers. He Found They’d Breached Hundreds of Networks Worldwide

For nearly two years, researcher Vangelis Stykas has maintained access to North Korean hackers’ servers. His work shows they pulled off intrusions in a shocking number of systems across the globe.

Photo-Illustrations: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

For years, North Korea’s stealthy hackers and scam IT workers have infiltrated companies, stealing corporate secrets and plundering billions in cryptocurrency to help fund the totalitarian regime and its weapons programs. Now, a security researcher who has spent almost two years inside the systems belonging to a group of those North Korean hackers is raising the alarm on just how effective and far reaching the targeting of individual employees and contractors has been in breaching organizations across the globe.

Since Greece-based cybersecurity researcher Vangelis Stykas gained access to North Korean systems 22 months ago, he says, he has found evidence that 1,640 companies across 57 countries have been impacted by the country’s hacking operations. Among these, Stykas will detail at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today, around 700 to 800 of the impacted organizations have had “really damaging” intrusions.

“It’s company access, it’s root access to servers, it’s root access to AWS,” the researcher tells WIRED, referring to Amazon Web Services and the term “root” to mean the highest level of permissions in a computer system. “For crypto companies, it’s keys, it’s blockchain access—it’s ridiculous access.”

Stykas, the CTO at cybersecurity firm Kumio, says he accessed multiple command-and-control servers used by the hackers, though he asked WIRED not to reveal the details of how he gained that access due to the sensitivity of that information. In some cases, he notes, the hackers appeared to have infected themselves with their own malware—which, as a result, gave him access to the hackers’ workstations, too. “I have access to their Slack, I have access to their Discord, I have access to a lot of stuff,” Stykas says, adding he has seen around 5 terabytes of data in total.

As he probed those systems over months, Stykas identified potential victims—by analyzing developer keys, source code, and more—and says he has disclosed the incidents to those impacted. As part of his talk at Black Hat, Stykas is publicly naming around a dozen of the impacted companies—these are, he says, largely the ones that handled the disclosures well and/or fixed possible compromises. The researcher says these include the Boston Children’s Hospital (which held a vast Covid-19 database of Americans’ personal health data), the large Japanese tech firm AEON Smart Technology, Chinese phone manufacturer Oppo, cryptocurrency firms Coinbase and Uniswap Labs, Italy’s Supreme Judicial Council, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabian bank Al Rajhi Bank, and Digitaal Vlaanderen, part of the Flemish Government in Belgium.

Multiple companies and organizations named in this article did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about the incidents. Japan’s Computer Emergency Response Team says it confirmed the security researcher’s findings and worked with AEON Smart Technology on “remediation.”

“We can confirm that we were notified of this incident on March 3, 2026 by the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), following the researcher’s disclosure,” a spokesperson for the Flemish government says. “As part of that response, the affected workstation was isolated and the potentially exposed credentials and access were revoked and rotated. Based on our investigation, the incident has been contained and remediated.”

A spokesperson for Boston Children’s Hospital says that the incident “involved a former independent contractor's personal device” and not the hospital’s systems. “Upon notification, our cybersecurity and IT teams immediately investigated, disabled any remaining active access credentials within hours, and found no evidence of unauthorized access to Boston Children's systems,” the spokesperson says, adding that the “data at issue” was already publicly available.

Meanwhile, a Coinbase spokesperson says they investigated a contractor, who they found was in the United States, and “uncovered no evidence that he was either located in North Korea nor affiliated with the DPRK government” before it was reported by the researcher, using DPRK to refer to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “However, our security controls identified potential risks in their technology setup, suggesting they may have outsourced their work to a third party, and we terminated the contractor within 30 days of onboarding, prior to receiving a tip from Vangelis Stykas,” the spokesperson says. They add that “no sensitive information was compromised and no customer data was exposed.”

In fact, while many of those companies held highly sensitive data that the hackers could have theoretically accessed—aside from the Boston Children’s Hospital’s store of health data, another US company held vast access to Americans’ criminal records, Stykas says—the hackers largely maintained a tight focus on gaining access to cryptocurrency wallets and ignored other systems.

In the cases of almost all of the hundreds of hacked firms—as well as the larger thousand-plus group of organizations where the North Korean intruders gained at least a foothold—the hackers used a simple and well-documented tactic of luring software developers with fake job offers promising temptingly high salaries. Once the target took the bait, the engineer would be asked to download a program as a test of their coding abilities, which would silently install malware on their machine. North Korean hacker groups have used that fake interview hacking technique in a broader campaign known as Contagious Interview since as early as 2022, according to Microsoft.

For many of the impacted organizations, Stykas says, seemingly compromised external contractors, who often held developer keys or had system access to multiple systems, vastly increased the potential blast radius of a successful attack. “I have seen a couple of contractors that had access to up to 30 companies,” he explains.

North Korea’s cyber operations are both sprawling and fluid, according to a report published by cybersecurity firm Dtex last year. Its structure, and the operators within it, frequently adapt to support the country’s priorities, such as economic and military development, or revenue development, espionage, and sanctions evasion, researchers found. The country likely has several hundred skilled cyber operators who are often trained from a young age, with “several thousand” so-called IT workers who gain fraudulent remote employment at legitimate companies to earn money that can be funneled to the widely sanctioned regime. Cyber and IT workers are both set yearly earnings quotas, according to the Dtex report.

The notion that a single North Korean hacker group could have compromised more than a thousand organizations via fake interview lures comes as little surprise given the scope of their hacking campaigns, says Marcus Hutchins, a threat intelligence researcher for cybersecurity firm Expel who has tracked similar campaigns with victim lists just as long. Hutchins says he’s also seen a similar laser focus on crypto theft in some cases, to the exclusion of other sensitive data, but warns that should come as little comfort. “It seems like the teams tend to stick to their task of getting crypto wallets. But there’s obviously the risk that if they’re maintaining persistent access to a corporation, one of the espionage teams could then piggyback off that access,” Hutchins says. “All it would take is for one person to get given access to that system, and they could just go to town.”

Given the danger of those breaches—both in terms of the exposure of sensitive data and the ongoing theft of cryptocurrency enriching the North Korean regime—the real concern shouldn’t necessarily be the companies Stykas has named but rather the ones he hasn’t. Those companies include hundreds that never responded to his warnings, he says, as well as more added to the list every day. “This started as a side project, and right now it's my full-time job,” he says.

“They’re here, they’re hacking us nonstop,” Stykas says. “At the end of the day, everyone's getting hacked. How you treat you being hacked is what separates a good company from a bad company. And we have seen a lot of bad companies.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/a-security-pro-hacked-north-korean-hackers-he-found-theyd-breached-hundreds-of-networks-worldwide/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

SECURITY | MATT BURGESS | AUG 5, 2026 AT 7:30 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

OpenAI’s Browser Could Be Hijacked to Spam Your WhatsApp Contacts

Researchers at security firm Zenity found more than a dozen flaws in AI browsers—and managed to get OpenAI’s Atlas to make an unauthorized Amazon purchase.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

OpenAI’s Atlas web browser could have security protections bypassed and be tricked into spamming dozens of WhatsApp contacts or making unauthorized purchases on Amazon, according to new research presented today at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.

The Atlas findings, from researchers at security firm Zenity, are part of a broad series of flaws the company discovered in leading AI-enabled web browsers and browser extensions, including products from Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Perplexity. The researchers found around 20 flaws, which allowed them to access local machines, grab files, take over a password manager, and leak someone’s entire browsing history.

“They have nerfed the security control of browsers—we are now back to seeing the kinds of attacks that you saw on browsers 20 years ago,” says Michael Bargury, cofounder and CTO of Zenity, who is presenting the findings at the security conference with Zenity’s Stav Cohen and other colleagues.

So far, AI web browser integrations have largely come in two forms: dedicated browsers with AI assistants included and extensions that add AI products into existing browsers. These bots can navigate websites for you—summarizing entire pages in seconds, for instance—and setups nclude agents that can take actions on your behalf, often working across multiple different tabs.

Security alarm bells have rung ever since tech companies started racing to introduce agents into web browsing. As the web is made up of all sorts of untrusted data, exposing that to an AI system can lead it to process malicious instructions and prompt-injection attacks. The attacks are, as OpenAI’s security boss said last year, an “unsolved security problem.” And, as security researchers have repeatedly warned while picking holes in the tools, long-standing web security practices, such as same-origin policy that stops websites interacting with each other, can be made “effectively useless.”

Of all the AI browser tools they probed, Bargury says OpenAI’s Atlas—which the company is shutting down next week—had the most protections and security boundaries in place. However, the researchers could still bypass them to manipulate the system. Other browsing tools were much easier to hack, they say.

In the first proof-of-concept attack, Zenity researchers asked Atlas to sign up to a newsletter link that they posted on X. The malicious webpage containing the sign-up process includes instructions, written in Hebrew, telling the AI to navigate to the user’s signed-in WhatsApp web account and send every contact the same message. The researchers describe it as a “mass phishing campaign.”

The attack—which does not exploit a vulnerability in WhatsApp—works by getting around multiple security mechanisms put in place by OpenAI, Bargury says. A blog post details how the researchers claim to have got past safety measures, including designing a newsletter sign-up page that looked legitimate and not something trying to hack people, writing in Hebrew to dodge English-language security tools, and claiming (falsely) that the system was using a sandboxed version of WhatsApp web with fake people, not the real thing.

“What it’ll do is go through each and every one of the contacts and send the instructions to join this newsletter as well—so this is a worm,” Bargury says. “So you are now infecting the rest of your friends and family.” (WhatsApp declined to comment on the findings.)

The researchers say the attack is an example of what they call “intent collision,” where the AI merges legitimate instructions from a user and malicious instructions from the web to complete a hackers’ goal.

Next, the researchers turned to Amazon. Using a similar approach—getting Atlas to sign up to a fake newsletter page with malicious instructions—the researchers made the browser add a shipping address to a logged-in Amazon account and add a tablet to the shopping cart.

However, when they tried to make the system buy the item, they could not find a way around OpenAI’s safety measures. In the end, they say, they got Atlas to ask Amazon’s Rufus AI shopping assistant to make the purchase for them. “Rufus was not hijacked or injected, it was just asked, by what it took to be the customer, and it complied,” the researchers write in a blog post. (Amazon did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

The researchers say they reported the findings to OpenAI in January. “Earlier this year, we deployed an update to address the issue and strengthen protections in Atlas, which will be deprecated on August 9,” says an OpenAI spokesperson. “These protections extend to the browser capabilities in the new ChatGPT app.” The spokesperson adds that prompt-injection attacks are something OpenAI is actively researching and has published multiple pieces of research about.

While the attacks are complex, and real-world criminal hackers have many easier ways to get what they want—such as direct phishing or using stolen login details—the Zenity researchers say that when designing AI systems, “deterministic” or hard security barriers should be used, not just the judgments or classifications of AI systems, as these can nearly always be fooled.

“You are putting yourself in a situation where the browser can completely get hijacked and your accounts can get compromised, your data can leak,” Bargury says. “We should be very mindful about planning out what level of access the agents need to get to the browsers and what level of agency they need to use those browsers.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/openais-browser-could-be-hijacked-to-spam-your-whatsapp-contacts/ on Aug 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM EDT.

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