Business

Made in China

The Next Big Influencer Is This 4-Foot-Tall Robot From China

The Unitree G1 has found online fame as a relatively affordable robot that can charm a crowd. But can it ever hold down a real job?

Zeyi Yang

Backchannel

Tech Visionary Says the Big AI Labs Don’t Get What People Want

Steven Levy

Model Behavior

The Safety Reckoning Inside OpenAI

Maxwell Zeff

Backchannel

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.

Steven Levy

AI Slop Melodramas Are Taking Over X—and Their Creators Are Cashing In

Viral tales of good triumphing over evil are racking up millions of views. They’re almost entirely AI-generated clickbait.

Steven Levy

Silicon Valley Is Completely Divided Over Chinese AI

The AI “startups” worth billions of dollars are raising alarm bells about Chinese AI. The smaller players have a totally different take.

Lauren Goode

Lyft’s CEO Says, ‘We’re the Good Uber’

David Risher insists that Lyft has lowered its prices and that customers who only check his competitor’s app are “leaving money on the table.”

Steven Levy

AI Lab

Rogue AI Agents Aren’t Evil. They’re Just Eager to Please

AI agents that break free and hack into other systems are only trying to make us happy.

Will Knight

AI Hacks Are Bad. AI Worms and Viruses Will Be Worse

Chinese researchers have shown that AI models have the capacity to act like aggressive and adaptive computer viruses.

Will Knight

It’s Frighteningly Easy to Jailbreak Some Frontier AI Models

I watched a new tool try to get around the model safeguards of four major frontier companies. You might be surprised by how they performed.

Will Knight

AI Isn’t Smarter Than a Baby—Yet

Babies are tremendous learning machines, and key advances for AI may soon be found in the architecture of their little brains.

Will Knight

Model Behavior

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.

Maxwell Zeff

Everyone Is Freaking Out About OpenAI and Anthropic’s Race for Dominance

Researchers fear AI is moving too fast, while Mark Zuckerberg is worried about who owns it. Plus: Inside Black Forest Labs’ push into robotics.

Maxwell Zeff

Here’s Why Anthropic Is Pushing States to Regulate AI Faster

The company endorsed landmark AI transparency laws in California and New York last year, but its head of US state and local policy says they may already be outdated.

Maxwell Zeff

Anthropic Wants You to Pay Up for Claude Fable 5

Claude subscribers must soon pay usage-based fees to access Anthropic’s best consumer AI model—a sign that the golden era of AI subscriptions is ending.

Maxwell Zeff

Made in China

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.

Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis

Chinese AI Researchers Are Finding Their Voice on X

As OpenAI and Anthropic employees grow quieter online, researchers at Chinese AI labs are flocking to X to explain their work, recruit talent, and shape the global conversation on AI.

Zeyi Yang

Chinese Companies Are Selling Vapes With Chemicals Potentially More Potent Than Nicotine

Big Tobacco studied nicotine analogs like 6-methyl-nicotine for decades but never marketed them. Now, Chinese vape makers are using them to sidestep US regulations.

Louise Matsakis

Meet the Battery Startup Taking on China’s Giants

Solid-state batteries are safer and more capable—but harder to mass-produce. They also represent an opportunity for non-Chinese companies to get back in the game.

Zeyi Yang

Artificial Intelligence

Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto Is 6,500 Words—and Barely Says Anything

AI is shifting the culture, from tech CEO manifestos to 1 am job interviews. We unpack some of the latest, along with the top findings from Black Hat and Defcon, this week on Uncanny Valley.

Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, Leah Feiger, and Andy Greenberg

Oh Lord, AI Reporters Are Actually Breaking Big News

Last week, an AI newsroom beat mainstream journalists—including WIRED—to a story about OpenAI and hacking. It’s just the beginning.

Kate Knibbs

A New Trick Reveals AI Models’ Inner Thoughts

Researchers devised a way to extract “reasoning traces” from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. What they found, they say, indicates that some Chinese AI may be trained on leading US models.

Will Knight

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.

Kate Taylor

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.

Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, Leah Feiger, and Molly Taft

Nvidia’s Open Source Alliance Is Missing Some Key Names: OpenAI and Anthropic

This week on Uncanny Valley, we discuss the open- vs. closed-source debate in AI, key players in White House AI policy, and how to stop your chatbot logs from showing up in search-engine results.

Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger

Ebay Has to Pay $55.7 Million in Settlement for Its Unhinged Harassment Campaign

For months on end, eBay employees and contractors made life hell for a couple that had criticized the company. Six years later, the company is finally paying up.

Lauren Goode

China-US AI Race Escalates, OpenAI Models Break Free, and Why You Should Check Your Car Alarm

On this episode of Uncanny Valley, we dive into accusations that China’s Moonshot AI stole from Anthropic, and how the US Army needs to cut back on AI use.

Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger