I’ve spent the past few days asking AI companies to convince me that the prospects for AI safety have not dimmed. Just a few years ago, it seemed that there was universal agreement among companies, legislators, and the general public that serious regulation and oversight of AI was not just necessary, but inevitable. People speculated about international bodies setting rules to insure that AI would be treated more seriously than other emerging technologies, and that could at least provide obstacles to its most dangerous implementations. Corporations vowed to prioritize safety over competition and profits. While doomers still spun dystopic scenarios,…
Move over Sora 2, there’s a hot new AI video model in town.In early February, ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.0, a major upgrade to its flagship video model, which had previously remained fairly obscure. Its powerful capabilities immediately shocked the AI ecosystem in China, even among audiences who had once been…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is still in the hot seat this week after his company signed a deal with the US military. OpenAI employees have criticized the move, which came after Anthropic’s roughly $200 million contract with the Pentagon imploded, and asked Altman to release more information about the agreement.…
Anthropic might have misgivings about giving the US military unfettered access to its AI models, but some startups are building advanced AI specifically for military applications.Smack Technologies, which announced a $32 million funding round this week, is developing models that it says will soon surpass Claude’s capabilities when it comes…
Before last week the name Alap Shah didn’t ring a bell for many people. The 45-year-old financial analyst and tech entrepreneur had spent the past two decades working in relative obscurity. Then last weekend he coauthored a blog with the research firm Citrini titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” It…
President Trump is adding a new 10 percent tariff on nearly all imports to the United States, following a Supreme Court ruling that overturned most of the levies imposed by the US government last year.In an executive order signed Friday evening, Trump outlined a few exceptions, including imports of critical…
Supercomputers can be measured in several ways, but the vital statistic is their ability to perform floating-point operations per second, or flops. Flopping as fast as possible is what makes you successful. At her peak, Sierra could hit 94.64 petaflops—94.64 quadrillion floating-point operations—per second. El Capitan, at 1.809 exaflops, is…
A former candidate in the 2026 race for governor of California and a popular YouTuber have been kicked off Kalshi’s platform for alleged violations related to insider trading, the popular prediction market revealed Wednesday.In a blog post detailing the cases, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, noted that the company’s…
When Anthropic last year became the first major AI company cleared by the US government for classified use—including military applications—the news didn’t make a major splash. But this week a second development hit like a cannonball: The Pentagon is reconsidering its relationship with the company, including a $200 million contract,…
Sharks are innocent. Or at least they’re not eating the internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, chomping, chewing, or otherwise attacking the underwater network of fiber-optic cables. The people who build and maintain the nearly 600 subsea…
The recent collision between Silicon Valley’s ethical ambitions and the Pentagon’s national security imperatives has sent shockwaves through the tech industry. When OpenAI secured a contract with the Pentagon just as Anthropic faced federal ousting for refusing to loosen its “constitutional” guardrails, it signaled the necessity of a specialized industrial…
Guys, before we go to break, there’s something very near and dear to my heart that WIRED wrote about this week. It’s something I love even more than biathlon. It is undersea internet cables.Leah Feiger: I love when you talk about this. I think that the first time you brought…
The most important AI governance meeting of 2026 was not in Davos. It was not in Mumbai. It happened in Paris, in a room most business leaders have never heard of, and what was said there should have landed on every board agenda going forward.While executives networked in Switzerland and…
Mega Cat Studios has announced that it’s creating a new entry in the Backyard Baseball series, which is due out on July 9 for PC and consoles.This was announced during IGN Fan Fest, and it’ll be the first new entry to land on consoles in 15 years (the last being…
“Lin cannot seriously dispute that the decision to allow opioid sales on Incognito was his own,” the prosecution’s filing reads. “And, Lin made that decision knowing full well that encouraging opioids is tantamount to welcoming fentanyl poisonings.”Yet portions of the defense’s memos related to Lin’s sentencing point to several specific…
Spotlight
Peter Thiel—the billionaire venture capitalist, PayPal, and Palantir cofounder, and outspoken commentator…
“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to…
Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company SpaceX is acquiring his AI startup…
TikTok is currently experiencing a widespread service outage in the US, causing…
