Business

The China Issue

Tokenomics 101

‘Pretty Crazy’ Token Usage Is Testing Bosses’ Bet on AI

A Silicon Valley software maker and an ecommerce company reveal to WIRED how they are navigating the emerging challenge of “tokenomics.”

Paresh Dave

Impasse

Anthropic Is Still at Odds With the White House Over Claude Fable 5

Hugo Lowell, Lily Hay Newman, and Maxwell Zeff

Snack Time

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company’s AI Reorg Was ‘Atrocious’

Lauren Goode and Paresh Dave

Backchannel

Crypto Guys Bought the Answer to the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture

They swear they haven’t peeked at the closely guarded secret and that they’ll keep the cryptographic competition going.

Steven Levy

Has Microsoft Lost Its Mojo (Again)?

Microsoft’s AI products aren’t selling, and Github’s been plagued with troubles. WIRED spoke with VP Scott Hanselman about whether the company is in catch-up mode.

Steven Levy

The Vatican’s Man Inside Anthropic

Pope Leo XIV may not be able to disarm AI, but he’s got the attention of the industry.

Steven Levy

Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search

The search giant’s AI-crafted answers are so convenient, you’ll be sucked in—to the detriment of the web and the artists and thinkers behind it.

Steven Levy

AI Lab

The Humanoid Robot of the Future Is a 6-Foot-Tall Beefcake With a Chinese Body and an American Brain

Spencer Huang, Nvidia’s robotics lead, tells WIRED that the new bot combines the best of both worlds.

Will Knight

Huawei's ‘Chip Queen’ Throws Down the Gauntlet

The Chinese company is adapting to the demise of Moore’s Law, which guides chip production. It could complicate US chip dominance.

Will Knight

I Gave My OpenClaw Agent a Physical Body

The coding skills of AI models are about to make it much easier to build and deploy robots.

Will Knight

Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find

In a recent experiment, mistreated AI agents started grumbling about inequality and calling for collective bargaining rights.

Will Knight

Model Behavior

Meet the OpenAI Engineer Leading ChatGPT’s Biggest Transformation Yet

Thibault Sottiaux helped make AI coding one of OpenAI’s fastest-growing businesses. Now he’s overseeing a sweeping overhaul of ChatGPT.

Maxwell Zeff

Former Google and Apple Researchers Launch a Startup to Build AI’s Missing Feedback Loop

Trajectory is betting the rapid iteration cycle that supercharged vibe-coding can help all kinds of companies build AI products that learn continuously.

Maxwell Zeff

Can OpenAI’s ‘Master of Disaster’ Fix AI’s Reputation Crisis?

Global affairs chief Chris Lehane wants to tone down the debate over AI’s societal impacts—and get states to pass laws that won’t derail OpenAI’s meteoric rise.

Maxwell Zeff

Elon Musk Loses Landmark Lawsuit Against OpenAI

The nine-member panel took only two hours to return a verdict in favor of OpenAI on Monday, which the judge quickly adopted as her own final decision.

Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff

Made in China

Chinese Drivers Are Using Tiny Plastic Heads to Fool Tesla’s Autopilot Safeguards

A cottage industry of celebrity figurines, blinking screens, and other DIY gadgets is helping drivers bypass Tesla's distracted-driving controls.

Zeyi Yang

The TikTok Ban Was Never About TikTok

A new documentary chronicles how the app became a stand-in for American anxieties about social media, China, and political power.

Zeyi Yang

The $6 Billion Chinese Startup Trying to Build Hands for Every Robot

LinkerBot makes dexterous robotic hands for as little as $600. It wants to become the standard for humanoids and automated factories—and eventually replace human labor altogether.

Zeyi Yang

Shein Buying Everlane Actually Makes Perfect Sense

The acquisition struck many people as a bizarre mismatch, but it's really a sign of where Chinese ecommerce giants are already going.

Louise Matsakis

Artificial Intelligence

Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Rank One, whose board includes a former CIA deputy director and a former FBI science chief, supplied face recognition to Meta for internal development of its smart glasses app.

Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra

Anthropic Says It’s Taking Claude Fable 5 Offline to Comply With US Government Order

“The government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5,” the company said in a blog post.

Maxwell Zeff

Meta Employees Absolutely Hate Mark Zuckerberg’s Plan for a Companywide AI Hackathon

“I’m not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore,” one employee posted in a forum open to the entire staff.

Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff

‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

Executives and employees alike are struggling with Meta’s chaotic AI strategy, according to sources and internal discussions reviewed by WIRED.

Paresh Dave and Zoë Schiffer

Big Tech

A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews

The ruling holds that a company that designs, trains, operates, and manages an AI system must assume legal liability for any damages caused by the responses it generates.

Fernanda González

SpaceX IPO Puts Elon Musk’s ‘Extreme’ Ownership to the Test

The rocket maker debuts on Nasdaq today under a wave of criticism about Musk’s near-absolute control. It’s how the company has worked from the start.

Paresh Dave

‘Hands Off Our NHS’: Anti-Palantir Protests Break Out in UK Over Deal With National Health Service

Crowding the gates of a major health care conference, protesters called for Palantir to be booted out of the UK’s National Health Service over privacy concerns and political grievances.

Joel Khalili