Google DeepMind Unionization Talks Are Off to a Rocky Start

Negotiations between Google DeepMind and its London-based employees stumbled over the possibility of unionization this week, after initial talks left union representatives feeling they had wasted their time, WIRED has learned. In May, DeepMind employees asked Google to recognize the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives. The company later denied that … Read more

Can Cursor Remain a Platform for OpenAI and Anthropic’s Models Inside SpaceX?

When SpaceX announced last month that it had agreed to acquire the popular AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, investors believed the deal would be a boon for both companies. Cursor would benefit from getting the computing resources of a major AI lab, which it could use to train its own models. In turn, … Read more

Meta Is Charging a Subscription for Smart Glasses Features. Welcome to the New Era of Consumer Tech

Chris Harrison, director of the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University, doesn’t think the new subscription is to help pay for Meta’s AI spending. “The industry has made tremendous strides, even in the last six months, but certainly in the last 18 months, improving token generation efficiency—running these models much more efficiently,” Harrison says. … Read more

Goose, a New Gay Dating App, Appears to Be a Psyop

The Instagram Close Friends Story for @miles.sumrall shows an affable-looking guy with curly dark hair and an expertly groomed mustache beaming as he floats on the water. “You’re receiving this because you’re exactly the type of person we’re building this for,” the caption reads, accompanied by a code for an invite to a “members only … Read more

You Can Now Sound the Alarm on AI Behaving Badly

Writing AI Lab each week means I occasionally encounter AI models that behave badly and bizarrely. Usually, there’s nothing to be done about it, save for sharing those tales with you. But that could change soon. A group of AI researchers has set up a crowdsourced websiteFlaw Reporting for AI (FLARE-AI), for reporting and tracking … Read more

Anthropic Added a New Security Measure to Get Back Into the Trump Administration’s Good Graces

The Trump administration lifted export controls on Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 AI model after the company agreed to extend an existing guardrail to prevent users from trying to access certain restricted capabilities, according to two people familiar with the matter. The safeguard means any users trying to unlock those capabilities will be notified that their … Read more

Claude Helped a Hacker Find a Way to Issue Tickets to Almost Every US Music Festival

As a security researcher who specializes in finding web vulnerabilities, he decided to poke around Front Gate’s web domain for bugs. He quickly found what looked like a SQL injection vulnerability—a common flaw that allows a hacker to input commands into a text field on a website, causing them to run on the site’s backend … Read more

The Trump Administration Is Lifting Its Export Controls on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable AI Models

The Trump administration is lifting export controls on Anthropic’s two most powerful AI models after the company reached a deal with the Commerce Department. The news was communicated in a letter sent by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown viewed by WIRED. The department is lifting restrictions on both the Fable 5 … Read more

Bernie Sanders Saw This Coming

What about if we wipe out manufacturing jobs in America? You think that’s a good idea? No, Bernie, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Should your kid get hooked up with an AI bot? No, Bernie, that’s dangerous. I’m scared about that. What about having your privacy completely invaded? Is that a good idea? … Read more

Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs

Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project. The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active … Read more