Zillow Has Gone Wild—for AI

This will not be a banner year for the real estate app Zillow. “We describe the home market as bouncing along the bottom,” CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in our conversation this week. Last year was dismal for the real estate market, and he expects things to improve only marginally in 2026. (If January’s historic drop … Read more

Inside the New York City Date Night for AI Lovers

If you’re the type of person who cares about Valentine’s Day, not having someone to spend it with can be a bummer. While dating apps have been yielding diminishing returns for singles for years now, more people are finding companionship with AI partners. But where do you take your AI lover for a night on … Read more

OpenAI’s President Gave Millions to Trump. He Says It’s for Humanity

OpenAI’s president and cofounder Greg Brockman doesn’t consider himself political, which is surprising, because he was one of President Trump’s biggest individual donors of 2025. Greg and his wife, Anna Brockman, gave $25 million to MAGA Inc—a super PAC that supports President Trump—in September of last year. The pair also gave $25 million to a … Read more

‘Uncanny Valley’: ICE’s Secret Expansion Plans, Palantir Workers’ Ethical Concerns, and AI Assistants

Brian Barrett: They’ve got 80 billion or so to spend 75 billion of that I think they have to spend in the next four years. So yeah, they’re going to keep expanding. And when you think of how much of an impact 3000 agents officers had in Minneapolis alone, that’s like an eighth of the, … Read more

A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web

Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models. But there are some key differences … Read more

Crypto-Funded Human Trafficking Is Exploding

Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational, Low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in … Read more

I Tried RentAHuman, Where AI Agents Hired Me to Hype Their AI Startups

I’m not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial. So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to … Read more

I Loved My OpenClaw AI Agent—Until It Turned on Me

OpenClaw, a powerful new agentic assistant, has a thing for guacamole. This is one of several things I discovered while using the viral artificial intelligence bot as my personal assistant this past week. Previously known as both Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw recently became a Silicon Valley darling, charming AI enthusiasts and investors eager to either … Read more

CBP Signs Clearview AI Deal to Use Face Recognition for ‘Tactical Targeting’

United States Customs and Border Protection plans to spend $225,000 for a year of access to Clearview AI, a face recognition tool that compares photos against billions of images scraped from the internet. The deal extends access to Clearview tools to Border Patrol’s headquarters intelligence division (INTEL) and the National Targeting Center, units that collect … Read more

AI Industry Rivals Are Teaming Up on a Startup Accelerator

The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai. On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI … Read more