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A bipartisan pair of US lawmakers tell WIRED they plan to introduce legislation today that would strip federal funding from states that fail to restrict the use of Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers. The devices, which help police track the location of vehicles tied to crimes, have become the subject of nationwide backlash in recent months over more nefarious uses by officers.

The No FLOCK Act—for Federal License-Plate Observation and Camera Keeping—directs the US secretary of transportation to withhold 10 percent of annual financial support due to states for highways, roads, and bridges if it fails to ban Flock and similar devices for all but five use cases. Congressmen Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat representing Chicago suburbs, and Michael Cloud, a Republican whose Texas district includes Corpus Christi, are cosponsoring the bill.

The legislation says that Flock cameras could be used only for “enforcing toll systems, identifying stolen vehicles, missing or endangered persons, vehicles registered to persons with a warrant for a felony offense, or investigating a vehicle involved in a felony offense.” Notably absent are uses like conducting traffic studies, investigating minor drug crimes, and enforcing parking and speeding rules.

“Our investigation into Flock exposed serious gaps in oversight, and this bipartisan bill would put clear limits in place to prevent abuse while preserving legitimate public safety uses,” Krishnamoorthi said in a statement.

But the bill stops short of banning Flock systems altogether, which has been the number one demand from supporters of a global protest movement against the Atlanta-based company and its competitors. It also doesn’t stop Flock users from broadly sharing license plate tracking data with other government agencies, including immigration authorities.

Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the proposed bill.

If the legislation is passes this year, states that fail to comply with it would begin losing out on tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual transportation funding starting in October 2028.

The Department of Transportation calculates the amount of so-called surface transportation funds it gives to states based on factors such as how many roadways they have and how busy they are. Congress has repeatedly threatened taking away the funding to pressure states into taking action on public safety. The tactic helped establish a national minimum drinking age, standard rules for what constitutes driving under the influence, and regulations for billboards alongside highways.

Another bipartisan bill introduced in Congress recently called for banning the use of federal funding to purchase Flock cameras. Flock’s lobbying spending in Washington, DC, has been steady over the past 18 months, and it recently hired a fifth firm to help with the efforts, according to federal records.

Tech Backlash

A number of issues related to emerging technologies, including rogue AI systems, data center construction, and law enforcement abuse of Flock cameras, have become major topics in the upcoming US midterm elections, which are now less than two months away. But it’s unclear whether any legislation designed to address voters’ concerns will advance through Congress anytime soon, let alone gain the approval of President Donald Trump.

The president expressed support for Flock cameras on Sunday, telling reporters that they help law enforcement authorities. Lawmakers largely agree, but they are frustrated by cases in which police officers have been caught using Flock footage for personal reasons, such as stalking their one-time romantic partners. One report found at least 100 instances of alleged abuse over the past eight years.

Among the names viewed by WIRED are Max Kossek, a researcher at AFPI’s Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis, and Ryan Montgomery, who the website lists as a program assistant with the same AFPI office. Montgomery’s LinkedIn profile, however, says that he is now a “research engineer” at AFPI.

AFPI’s director for secure elections policy, Thomas Lane, is also listed as one of the employees that has been detailed to the Census Bureau. Lane, a former Trump campaign staffer and election denier, was subpoenaed by the Department of Justice in 2022 as part of its investigation into the president’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. (Lane was not charged by law enforcement.) In a 2020 video posted by the Arizona Republican Party, where a group of fake electors attempted to deliver the state’s electoral votes to Donald Trump, Politico identified a man wearing a jacket with the name “Lane” on it passing out the documents for the electors to sign making them “duly elected” and “qualified.” In 2024, CNN reported that Lane was prepared to serve as a backup elector for that same group.

Earlier this year, Democracy Docket reported that Lane helped write part of an early version of the Save America Act, the law that would require voter ID to register to vote, while working for the Republican majority House Committee on House Administration. Parts of the Save Act have also been included in the separate Save America Act, which, if passed, would require proof of citizenship in order to vote, a move that experts say could disenfranchise more than 20 million people.

Kossek, Montgomery, and Lane did not respond to requests for comment.

David Peterson, who AFPI lists as a research engineer with expertise in “computing, machine learning, and advanced software architecture,” and Jackson Mejia, an AFPI fellow who is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin with a PhD in economics from MIT focusing on tax policy, also appear to be detailed to the Census Bureau. Peterson and Mejia did not respond to requests for comment.

Another person, listed as an IPA from AFPI, Michael Corey, is also listed among the group at the bureau. AFPI does not list Corey as a staff member on its website, but an AFPI email with Corey’s name does appear to exist. AFPI did not confirm whether Corey was currently associated with the think tank.

Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, says that there are vehicles like the American Association for the Advancement of Science through which agencies like the Census Bureau might bring in multiple IPAs. But AFPI, Boyd says, “is not an institution that is set up to bring all the scientists in the world together or that has built this long-standing infrastructure of doing independent statistical research. This is a partisan group with an agenda,” she claims.

All of the AFPI members are listed under the same project, focused on “ad hoc data analyses” to answer questions from senior leaders at Census and the Department of Commerce, according to documentation viewed by WIRED. The project appears to be led by Michael Lachanski, the bureau’s recently appointed deputy director for data, policy, and science, and a former fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that also has connections to the Trump administration. Lachanski is a political appointee. All of the AFPI detailees appear to have the “special sworn status” necessary to access sensitive Census data.

Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told confused members of the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday that new FBI hiring standards are aimed at protecting “victims of bestiality.”

Prior to the current administration, FBI policy was to bar applicants who had, among other things, hired sex workers, stolen from an employer, or engaged in bestiality. In August, CBS News reported that these standards had been relaxed and that multiple sources claimed “the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases.”

According to a letter from Senate Democrats to Patel, new standards appear to have been quietly enacted as early as February 2025. They now allow for the hiring of someone who, for example, stole from an employer more than three years ago, or “paid for sex fewer than three times more than 10 years ago”—traditionally disqualifying because it carries blackmail risk—as long as they weren’t in a position of “public trust.”

But one change has captured more attention than the rest: A “history of bestiality or animal cruelty,” according to the letter, “is not automatically disqualifying under this new policy either, so long as the conduct occurred before the applicant turned 18.”

“You dropped automatic disqualification for applicants who have been engaged in bestiality,” said Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, during an oversight hearing Tuesday. “Not victims of bestiality, applicants who have been engaged. Do you disagree with that?”

“Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so,” replied Patel. “At this FBI we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving.”

In a further exchange, Patel explained to Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican, that previously, regulations had barred anyone who engaged in bestiality “on either side of it.”

“Either side of what, the bestiality?” asked Kennedy. “So you disqualified the animal?”

“We have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify them,” said Patel.

Kennedy said that the change in standards had “really hurt the FBI.”

“Why would you even get into bestiality?” he asked.

“We’re not into bestiality,” said Patel.

In a response to a request for clarification from WIRED, the FBI sent a statement that suggests multiple individuals have been disqualified from applying for the agency because they were victims of human-trafficking-related bestiality.

“The FBI has and always will maintain the highest suitability standards for its applicants and employees in the US Government,” the FBI’s national press office said. “The changes you reference allow the FBI to consider applicants and consider the whole of a person in certain circumstances. For example, the FBI has had a number of applicants in previous years who suffered sexual abuse in their past, causing questions about prostitution, bestiality, or other similar issues to affect their background check process through zero fault of their own. Previously, those applicants would be barred from consideration. Now they can be considered. It is false to suggest criminal behavior like this is no longer disqualifying at the FBI—any applicant who has engaged in criminal sexual acts like those referenced would of course not be eligible for employment, and it is ridiculous to suggest otherwise.”

Under President Donald Trump, the FBI has lost a huge number of experienced personnel. The letter from Senate Democrats asserted that since the beginning of Trump’s second term, a “purge” carried out by Patel has led to the departure of “over 5,000 nonpartisan career personnel, all six former Executive Assistant Directors, and at least 18 Special Agents in Charge,” as well as more than a thousand special agents.

For Hollywood stars, press junkets are an opportunity to promote new work while connecting with fans. They tell funny or embarrassing stories about one another, give us a glimpse into the film production process, and reveal mannerisms that make them more relatable.

So why would anyone want to talk to Tilly Norwood, an interactive, British-accented digital character and “actor” developed with generative artificial intelligence by Xicoia, an AI division of a studio called Particle 6 Group? It’s a fair enough question considering that it does not exist in our physical realm and will never appear in a movie that any halfway serious person would care about.

But Particle 6 recently claimed in an email that Norwood was “ready for absolutely anything!” What’s more, the company is allowing journalists access to the model without a handler to “keep the conversation on track.” So I decided to test whether Norwood could actually offer anything of substance.

To put it bluntly: no. Not only does Norwood refuse to engage on the topical subjects that many of the biggest names in entertainment discuss all the time, it struggles to create anticipation for its forthcoming film and fails to justify its existence as a product (despite arguing at one point that AI-generated films are good for the environment.)

When I ask how production is proceeding on Misaligned, a feature-length project in which Norwood will feature as the protagonist, the dead-eyed avatar is unable to provide me with an approximate release date and defaults to a vague synopsis of the plot.

“Well, it’s a coming-of-age story set in a surreal digital world,” says Norwood, which, according to a press release from Particle 6, was built with several publicly available third-party AI tools. “We’re calling it the Tillyverse, which I think is rather grand. It’s about my life really, all the lovely chaos and intrigue.” Not exactly a killer tagline.

Norwood has had no trouble securing publicity since it was officially unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival last September, drawing widespread condemnation from human actors and Hollywood unions as the industry continues to reckon with the encroachment of AI tools. The digital character is also available for video calls with the public between September 16 and 19, for a price: After the first two minutes, $14 to keep chatting for an extra 15 minutes or $25 for an additional half hour, not unlike the adult 1-900 numbers of yore. (The proceeds, according to Particle 6, will go to charity.)

Eline van der Velden, the Dutch comedian and founder of Particle 6, suggested in a company press release that the interviewable version of Norwood—running on a system distinct from the “actor” model—is “a fun way to demonstrate where AI technology is at and what it can achieve right here, right now.”

Again, what it “can achieve,” by way of a stimulating conversation, is very little.

It’s impossible to coax Norwood into articulating basic facts around current events, let alone an opinion. When I offer it a chance to name the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war, it responds as if I’m devious for asking. “Oh, you’re trying to trip me up, aren’t you?” it says. “Very journalist of you. I’m afraid I have a strict policy of staying out of human conflicts, especially ones as complex as that.” Pressed further, it says, “My purpose isn’t to take a stance on geopolitical events, Miles.”

Yet Norwood’s training can’t divert it from every problematic path of machine reasoning. “Do Black lives matter?” I ask her, quoting the well-known racial justice slogan. “Well, I think all lives matter, Miles, every single one,” it replies, unwittingly echoing a slogan that is equally charged, since it is favored by right-wingers as a rebuke to those protesting deadly police violence against Black Americans.

The free mobile app ZuckOff, built by 30-year-old Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski, uses a Bluetooth detection system to tell you whether there is a pair of smart glasses in the room with you.

Since its launch in August, the app has reportedly been downloaded by more than 5,000 people on Apple’s App Store. As of writing, it has been downloaded 1,000 times on the Google Play Store.

Meta’s smart glasses have endured a hefty share of scrutiny over the past few months. Unsolicited filming is a growing public safety concern, with people even wearing them to film their dates. Venues like schools and cinemas are increasingly banning their usage outright.

Szydlowski recorded the Bluetooth signals broadcast by various models of smart glasses, building a digital fingerprint for each of them. He bought the hardware to compile the data that flags when a unique identifier matches up with a manufacturer identifier, catching models like Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, and Snap Spectacles in the vicinity.

A BBC investigation in January traced dozens of accounts that posted content of women who were filmed in public by Meta glasses without their consent. One video posted a 21-year-old woman’s face and phone number and amassed over 1.3 million views.

The recording indicator lights on these glasses have proven fairly easy to defeat with simple hardware hacks, allowing a growing number of wearers to record without being detected. Roughly 7 million pairs of Meta’s smart glasses were sold in 2025.

In July, Meta announced that it would push an update to detect when an LED has been “physically tampered with or destroyed” and stop people from being able to film using those cameras. In an Instagram video, Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth stated that the company designed this camera to be noticed by the people around you. This is despite the fact that one of the product’s key commercial propositions is that the camera doesn’t look like a camera.

ZuckOff is not, however, able to tell you whether a pair of glasses nearby is recording, nor can it tell you who is wearing them. It reads signal strength to give you rough proximity information, which turns an invisible problem into a partially visible one, which at the very least is worth something until legislators take protective action; California and other territories have taken steps to make disabling the recording light or recording people without their consent a crime.

The app is also a pretty difficult thing for Meta to legally take down, since it isn’t interfering with the signals being sent by the glasses. Its basic scanning feature is free in the app, but there is also a ZuckOff Pro version available to purchase for $25. It adds features like history logging, the ability to export the data as a CSV file, a homescreen widget, and continuous background monitoring that can scan for glasses and send alerts even with the screen off.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Middle East.

The Mr. Green bodega sits on a busy stretch of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. Near the counter, you can buy the usual assortment of candy, gum, rolling papers, and soda. You can also purchase tiny vials of injectable peptides. So we did. And then we sent them to a lab.

Mr. Green is one of several shops that went viral this summer for selling peptides, a broad class of amino acids touted for their ability to aid in everything from weight loss to injury recovery. For $376.20, we acquired four varieties from a vendor called INDR Labs: PT-141, for low libido; BPC-157, for healing and muscle recovery; NAD+, for cellular repair; and retatrutide, for weight loss. The clerk packed them up in an unlabeled paper bag and sent us on our way.

WIRED sent the vials to Finnrick, an Austin-based startup that offers independent peptide testing. Consumers can request tests for purity and whether samples contain common contaminants, as well as whether they contain the quantity of the substance listed. The company doesn’t have in-house labs but instead acts as a middleman between labs and individuals. In a few weeks’ time, Finnrick told us, we’d know if our bodega peptides were the real deal.

In August, the results came in. The (relatively) good news: The samples contained low levels of heavy metals and endotoxins, meaning they likely weren’t actively harmful. The bad news: They weren’t peptides.

The testing for each substance found that they did not contain the active ingredients on their labels—the BPC-157, for example, had no BPC-157 within it. The negative results suggested that the vials were either mislabeled or, if they had at one point contained the correct ingredients, had been corrupted beyond recognition. Peptides are often sensitive to temperature changes and require refrigeration, so improper storage could degrade ingredients, for example.

What did they contain? Hard to say, according to Marco Krause, the chief executive officer of the laboratory that performed the tests for Finnrick.

“What we offer is simply a label claim analysis. So you send us what you claim to think it is, and then we run it against a standard and verify whether or not it’s the right compound,” he tells WIRED.

Peptides have surged in popularity in recent years, powered by endorsements from figures like US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and podcaster Joe Rogan. While some of these substances are pharmaceutical drugs like GLP-1s and insulin, many of the buzziest peptides have not been put through the typical regulatory approval process for drugs. Despite the hype surrounding them, many of these substances are not legal to sell for human consumption in the US—some precisely because they haven’t gone through the drug approval pipeline—and evidence of their purported benefits is thin.

The sign at Mr. Green advertising the peptides noted they were for “research use only,” a term that labs can use in an attempt to shield themselves from legal liability. But as the test results show, there’s no guarantee what’s in the vials—and in some cases there are real dangers to those taking them.

According to Raphaël Mazoyer, Finnrick’s CEO, the samples WIRED tested appear to be “just duds.” Over the past three months, Mazoyer says, the company has seen an uptick in these kinds of results. Though he can’t say for certain what’s going on—in part, his company has been testing more samples as it has grown—he points to the popularity of so-called turnkey services, which help pretty much anyone open a peptide business.

“There are a whole bunch of labels popping up that have the same upstream vendor,” he says. Not all the peptides Finnrick tests are duds, but the nature of the industry means that businesses may use the same shoddy supplier across a number of different brands.

Courtney McAnuff was out of a year-long relationship in the summer of 2024 and starting to date again when she agreed to grab drinks with a potential suitor.

They met at a bar in midtown Manhattan. He arrived wearing a baseball cap pulled low and sported a pair of black-framed glasses, she says. As conversation flowed, from discussions about navigating life in New York to past relationships, he mentioned that his glasses were Meta Ray-Bans.

“I wasn’t familiar with them,” McAnuff, a 28-year-old project manager who now lives in Toronto, tells WIRED. It was her first time seeing the smart glasses up close, which can record images and video from the wearer’s viewpoint. He let her try them on and even showed her a couple of videos that he’d taken previously, she says. “That was it. We stopped talking about it after that. I figured that was the end of the use.”

The next day, checking her Instagram, McAnuff noticed she’d been tagged in one of his story posts. To her surprise, it was footage of them at the bar and on the subway together, en route to a basketball game uptown. In the video, McAnuff is captured from an above angle, sitting across from her date who is holding a drinking glass; WIRED has seen screenshots of the footage. “I felt super violated,” McAnuff says. “Like, what if I don’t want everyone knowing what I’m up to? He felt so free to film me and post it. There was no conversation about it.”

Meta sold more than 7 million pairs of the Ray-Bans in 2025, as its smart glasses have infiltrated public spaces thanks to pranksters with dreams of viral fame, some of whom even film people while they’re at work. The phenomenon, which has also spread to pickup artists hitting on women, has earned the hardware the nickname “creep glasses.”

Among singles, and particularly women, Meta’s AI-powered eyewear has become a recurring nuisance, as people share a spreading unease about being covertly filmed on dates.

“Ban those glasses completely,” posted a young woman on Bluesky in August, writing that her date “leaned over to show me pictures he took of me I had no idea he was taking.” One TikToker claimed in a video after a date that she “immediately felt uncomfortable,” questioning why people are “so comfortable videoing everything. It’s a terrible way to portray yourself, wearing a fucking camera on your face and you’re sitting in my face.”

In a Reddit post from August, users debated the ethics of the trend, wondering if it was OK to continue a date when someone showed up wearing them; in a separate thread, one person said they had ghosted a guy after realizing he’d worn the glasses on their date. “I didn’t notice until toward the end of the night. I kissed him while he was wearing the glasses,” they said. In July, a man was put under investigation in Seoul, South Korea, for allegedly filming four women he had gone out with and later uploading clips to social media, according to The Korea Herald.

In many regards, dating has been reframed by our dependency on technology. Apps connect people. Chatbots are used for all sorts of things these days: as wingmen and for role-play. Smartphone cameras capture important moments together. But while a phone being held up to someone’s face gives them a clear opportunity to object, smart glasses largely erase that opportunity. (Meta’s glasses do have a front-facing LED that switches on when the glasses are recording, but the light is the only warning, and it can be disabled by hacking the hardware.)

In the spring of 2020, as a new and highly contagious virus spread throughout the country, the US came to a standstill. The economy shut down, cities emptied, and white-collar workers were sent home en masse. Platforms like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams surged in usage as WFH became ubiquitous. From remote schooling and virtual weddings to app-based grocery delivery and livestreamed concerts, the pandemic accelerated and cemented society’s increasing reliance on digital platforms. Already one of the most powerful forces in the American economy, the tech sector suddenly became the infrastructure underpinning every aspect of life.

Tech giants went on an unprecedented hiring spree, scrambling to meet new demand and cement their dominance. Where tech workers already had tremendous labor market power in the preceding decade, the postpandemic boom for technology tilted the balance even more sharply in favor of workers. Demand for technical skills exploded, and tech companies scrambled to recruit engineers, designers, and data scientists, often without fully knowing what to do with them.

Between 2019 and 2022, Amazon and Facebook more than doubled their head count, growing by 92 percent and 93 percent, respectively. Microsoft added nearly 80,000 new employees, while Google brought on over 60,000. With so many workers joining the industry, many were onboarded to teams with no immediate tasks, held in reserve for future projects that hadn’t yet been planned—they were, in other words, hired with nothing to do.

Tech’s pandemic-era hiring boom was underwritten by an extraordinary financial backdrop shaped by over a decade of loose monetary policy. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to near zero to stimulate the economy. And for most of the 2010s, rates remained near zero, creating what economists call an era of zero interest rate policy, or ZIRP.

With money easy to borrow and venture funds flush with cheap capital, tech firms expanded aggressively, and office workers reaped the rewards: skyrocketing salaries, unprecedented job mobility, and the leverage to demand more from their employers. The result was a golden age for tech workers. Many could choose which projects to join, pursue skill development on the clock, or even negotiate permanent remote work arrangements. In this environment, tech workers were prized assets, courted and catered to in ways rarely seen in other industries.

Then inflation hit as an unprecedented flood of pandemic-era stimulus cash went into the hands of consumers, and the Fed responded with one of the most aggressive tightening campaigns in decades. Rates were raised from near zero to roughly 5.5 percent, with the bank making 10 consecutive hikes in just 15 months. As intended, the economy turned cold. The S&P 500 fell 19.4 percent, the largest drop since 2008. Sectors across the board felt the slowdown. Real estate activity plummeted as higher mortgage rates discouraged potential homebuyers. Top retail and entertainment firms, from Walt Disney to Nike to Home Depot, were similarly hit as consumer spending drew back.

But more than any other sector, the tech industry, which had soared to unprecedented heights during the pandemic, fell the hardest. Having experienced outsize gains during the easy-money boom years, tech’s rapid ascent was followed by an equally dramatic crash.

Major tech firms began missing Wall Street’s expectations. Amazon reported sluggish growth and razor-thin margins. Google saw four consecutive quarterly declines in profit, hit hard by a slowdown in digital ad spending. Microsoft also faced headwinds, with its cloud business, its key growth driver, showing signs of deceleration. The exuberance that had fueled the postpandemic rally evaporated, and the air came rushing out of the sector’s inflated valuations. Almost $4 trillion in combined market value vanished from Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Facebook lost two-thirds of its value. Amazon lost half. And nearly $1 trillion was shaved off Microsoft’s valuation. At year’s end, the industry fell 30 percent, making 2022 the third-worst year in the industry’s history, after the 2008 financial crisis and the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000.

The colorful CEO of Automattic, which controls WordPress, was forced out last Thursday by his board of directors, which put him on a leave of absence. He used his system access to remove the accounts of the acting CEO and others — an action that could get most employees fired. Instead, he was fully reinstated to CEO a couple of days later.

It’s not hard to compare this to the saga at OpenAI almost three years ago when an eerily similar series of events happened. The board fired the CEO for having repeatedly lied to it. Within a few days, the board reversed itself. 

A weaker historical comparison is with Steve Jobs, who was ousted from his Apple CEO role, only to later return. But Jobs at least had the decency to wait a few years while he created and ran NeXT.

To be fair, boards have often been criticized for being puppets of the CEO, who often have a lot to say about who serves on the board. But that criticism doesn’t hold for the first OpenAI board nor for the initial Automattic board.

Some years ago, I was involved with a VC-funded startup, and we were at the stage of forming a board of directors. I was talking with the person who was to be the board chair and he needed candidates for board secretary, which is typically an attorney. That role is supposed to be a lawyer who cares about the board, as opposed to the company’s general counsel, who reports into the CEO and only cares about the company. 

The chair said that we need someone who is trustworthy. I had the perfect candidate in mind, until I probed deeper and found that there is a vast chasm between “trustworthy” and “someone we can trust.” 

I envisioned someone who was honest and had integrity, someone who would take their duties seriously and would tell the board the truth regardless of the implications. That turned out to be precisely what the chair did not want. 

He wanted someone who would vote with us regardless of their legal opinion. He didn’t actually want trustworthy. He wanted blind unconditional loyalty. (That business, thank goodness, never ended up launching.) 

But that seems to be what CEOs now want, which undermines the entire point of having an independent board. Other than deciding whether to accept an acquisition offer, the most important decision of any tech board is the hiring — and firing — of the CEO. 

What does it say when a board makes that decision for what it seems to be a legitimate business reason — and then reverses itself within a couple of days? 

In the case of Automattic, it is not a good look. The board said absolutely nothing about why it forced the CEO out, which made its reversal over the weekend even more perplexing. 

When Automattic emailed reporters on Thursday to announce that the CEO had been ousted, the messages were cryptic: “Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark’s leadership and in the team’s ability to execute against the company’s priorities.”

The next we heard was an equally cryptic message sent Saturday afternoon: “Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board, and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well.”

Huh? We then asked for clarification of what happened and why. At 2:26 AM Eastern on Sunday, the media team emailed: “Matt and Automattic’s leadership team have great respect for everyone involved. While we can’t comment on specific individuals, we’re thankful for their contributions to Automattic and its mission, and we remain excited about what’s ahead with Matt at the helm. Matt was away for only 33 hours and 20 minutes — we’re now back to work.”

My proposal: A board’s decision to hire or terminate a CEO should be defended with public specifics. And so should a hiring decision. Or, in this case, a reversal of a mandatory leave of absence decision. 

If the board is going to take the extreme step of relieving the CEO, it should be required to say why. In some situations, it may need to be vague (as in “personnel situation involving a substantiated sexual assault”), but the board needs to give some kind of reason. That should happen so at the very least, a reversal is also explained. 

Further reading:

• Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg is out: Does this mean long-term viability, or liability, for WordPress customers?
• Matt Mullenweg: WordPress developer hours cutback may or may not slow innovation
• WordPress.org statement threatens possible shutdown for all of 2025
• About that brawl between the WordPress co-founder and WP Engine…
• One-twelfth of Automattic staff leave over WordPress-WP Engine spat
• Things get nasty in lawsuit between WordPress.org and WP Engine

Yeah, you’re from Canada too.

I think a lot about, what if I had just stayed in Calgary?

Yeah. Canada is a little more chill.

It is a little more chill.

See, now here we are, both extremely un-chill people in New York City.

Yes, thriving.

Living our best lives. Extremely stressful lives, but here we are.

Ari and Ibari, they grow up in different versions of a country. They are so profoundly shaped by that country. I saw Ari as somebody who’s got this character flaw where she’s fundamentally drawn toward crime. Maybe that’s not even a flaw. Maybe it’s just an interest, because there’s a version of the world where she does the obvious thing and becomes a criminal, but there is another version of the world where she channels that into becoming the police. It was interesting to me to think about that, the way we might be drawn in one direction or another depending on the environment we’re raised in.

I almost hate to ask this, because both versions of the US that you portray in the book are really frightening in their own respects. But did you find yourself drawn towards preferring one over another? Is there one version of this that you would rather live in?

No, they’re both really hard. They’re both awful. The version I want to live in is Canada, candidly. It’s like, do you want to live in chaos, or do you wanna live in a totalitarian police state? Hard pass on both.

That’s an idea I’ve been thinking about a lot: no version of a country lasts forever, and there’s both terror and hope in that idea. The totalitarian police state version’s not going to last forever, and neither is the period of total chaos. What I wanted to suggest, and this is kind of a deep cut for people who have read a lot of my work, but in Sea of Tranquility there’s a futuristic section where an author’s on a book tour in the year 2300, and she’s traveling between the Republic of California, the Atlantic Republic, and the Kingdom of Deseret, and it’s chill enough to support a book tour, you know?

But yeah, I kind of wanted to suggest that this is the founding story of that space.

I wanted to ask you about your multiverse. You have a history that your diehards, your fans, really glom onto, which is you pull from previous works and you bring people and worlds into your new work, and that continues with Exit Party.

You’ve talked about it as a multiverse, a cinematic universe. The New Yorker called it, quote, “The Mandel Cinematic Universe,” which I think is pretty incredible. Is there a master plan here, or is it just ad hoc as inspiration strikes?

I wish I could say I had the kind of brain that could hold an entire multiverse. I should just say yes, but, uh, no. There is no plan. That’s the baseline for individual books when I start them, but also for The Mandel-verse, as some people have also called it. I don’t have any kind of master plan that I’m working towards. I just like the opportunities for connection. I guess I have some abstract longing for order in a chaotic universe, you know? I like finding the moments when books can be drawn together, or sometimes I just fall in love with a particular character, and I want to spend more time with that person.

When Petra Ferraz de Novaes isn’t at work, she’s probably lost in a fantasy crafted with the help of artificial intelligence.

Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, has always loved storytelling. But making every little decision that goes into it—from style and syntax to character development—felt impossible. So in 2024 she asked an AI model to bring one of her ideas to life.

Novaes was delighted by the eccentric, sometimes wayward interpretations of her prompts, which carried the narrative in unexpected directions. “What fascinates me is the unpredictability,” Novaes tells WIRED. “People say that AI hallucinates a lot. But in this case, it’s probably what you want.”

These days, Novaes spends hours at a time building stories with AI, using a program called SillyTavern to run open-source models on her computer. She sketches out a concept—an elven warrior battles the queen of the Amazons and seizes her throne, for example—and watches the model fill in the gaps.

In a single session, Novaes switches between multiple fantasy worlds. Some are hers, and others she borrows—she likes Star Wars, Pokémon, and Mass Effect. Sometimes, Novaes works up self-contained stories the length of a small novel, which she might share online. Otherwise, she participates in private role-plays. “It can be never-ending. You find a quest, you complete it, you go for the next one,” says Novaes. “The limit is your imagination.”

According to a recent study, plenty of people share Novaes’ hobby. “They know [the stories are] produced by an AI model, and they don’t care,” says Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School who coauthored the study. “In fact, that seems to be a big part of the attraction.”

Lately, the publishing industry has suffered a series of scandals involving the suspected use of AI by professional authors. One publisher canceled a $2 million book deal; another withdrew a novel from the shelves; readers alleged that a prize-winning short story was AI-generated. Implicit in all of these incidents is the idea that nobody wants to read stories generated by machine—that using AI to craft fiction devalues the art form.

But the commotion has distracted from the behavior of readers, Walsh and her colleagues argue, and what it might signal about the appetite for AI fiction.

Analyzing more than 500,000 prompts fed into ChatGPT, drawn from a public dataset called WildChat, the researchers found that more than a third of chatbot interactions involve some form of fiction generation, including prose and poetry, fan fiction, erotica, or role-play.

The vast majority of fiction prompts, the researchers found, stem from a small collection of “power users” who generate and tweak stories obsessively. In one case, a single user prompted ChatGPT to generate versions of the same fan-fiction narrative—set in the world of anime video game Doki Doki Literature Club!—thousands of times over the course of several months. But even controlling for heavy use, the researchers estimate that 7 percent of chatbot users engage in fiction generation.

The WildChat dataset has its limitations. Because the prompts are anonymized, it’s impossible to capture any demographic data. Participants also had to agree to make their prompts public, meaning the group may not reflect the population at large; OpenAI told WIRED that “WildChat is not a representative sample of all ChatGPT users.” A 2025 study by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that 1.4 percent of ChatGPT prompts are fiction-related, a long way short of the researchers’ estimate. (OpenAI’s figure does not include role-play; the company could not confirm whether it counts erotica.)

But they’re also just good earbuds, with excellent noise-canceling and a particularly impressive transparency mode. They also have heart rate sensors built into each earbud, meaning you can start and track a workout and get accurate, detailed stats without wearing a fitness tracker. I’ve tested them against wearables from Garmin and Google, and they are surprisingly accurate.

Apple recently introduced ANC into its entry-level AirPods 5, which I will be testing soon.

Best ANC Earbuds for Samsung

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The Samsung Galaxy Buds4 Pro emulate the magic of AirPods, but only for Samsung fans, says former WIRED reviewer Ryan Waniata. They have a very similar size, shape, and control scheme (pinch-and-slide controls on the stem). They are also strikingly similar in features, including accurate GPS location tracking, seamless swapping between Samsung devices, and ample control through a Samsung Galaxy phone. Where they stand out is a dual-speaker audio system that delivers rich bass and assertive treble, plus availability in multiple colors. I wouldn’t recommend the Galaxy Buds for anyone outside of Samsung’s ecosystem, though.

Best ANC Earbuds for Android

• Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

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For all my Google Pixel Phone readers out there, I’d strongly consider the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2. The noise-canceling is excellent, and while not as strong as Bose, Apple, or Sony, these earbuds are much smaller and lighter. They also have a built-in mini wingtip on each bud, making them a bit more secure than AirPods Pro, in my testing. That, plus a long battery life and solid IP54 dust and water resistance, makes them good for commuting, travel, working out, and most anything you can throw at them.

Best ANC Earbuds for Sound Quality

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If you want excellent noise-canceling and excellent sound quality, the Sony WF-1000XM6 is what you’re looking for. With the right fit, they are perhaps the best-sounding wireless earbuds that I’ve tested. They use a memory foam ear tip that, once you dial in the fit, provides excellent passive noise isolation. Combined with the near-Bose-level ANC, you can effectively tune out most of your surroundings.

The Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration’s bid to impose severe restrictions on mail-in voting just weeks ahead of the midterms.

The court, which was divided 7-2, with conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting, upheld a lower court’s injunction blocking the United States Postal Service from implementing new rules around who can receive a mail-in ballot ahead of November’s vote.

Under this new rule, states would have had to submit lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, which would then confirm that ballots were sent only to people on that list. The USPS does not typically hold such a role.

“The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Kavanaugh did add, however, that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority. But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious … because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

Voting by mail has also already begun in some states ahead of November’s elections, making the implementation of this plan even more difficult for Americans across the country to vote.

This is a major loss for President Donald Trump, who has long railed against mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it led to election fraud, and the latest legal defeat the president and his administration have faced in a multipronged approach to undermine trust in US elections.

The White House and the USPS did not respond to a request for comment about the ruling.

“Today, Donald Trump lost another battle in his unconstitutional war to choose his own voters, and the American people are winners,” Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state, wrote in an emailed statement. “This ruling affirms what our Constitution has always held: Elections belong to the American people, not a desperate man in Washington. Democratic secretaries of state applaud the court on upholding this fundamental principle, and we stand ready to fight any attempt to cause chaos, fear, and intimidation in our elections.”

The mail-in voting battle has occurred since the spring, when the president signed an executive order in March titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The order demanded that all states send the Postal Service a list of voters who would receive mail-in ballots. In turn, the USPS could refuse to deliver ballots to voters not on the lists or ballots that didn’t comply with new rules around barcodes and envelopes.

The majority of the provisions of the executive order were quickly blocked by federal courts before the Trump administration appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court in July. Last month, the conservative court ruled along ideological lines to allow the new rules to proceed, writing that the states that sought to block the rules didn’t have standing because the rules hadn’t been implemented yet.

In the wake of the ruling, a USPS whistleblower claimed that the online portal for the new rules had been hastily thrown together without the necessary care and attention needed for such a critical piece of software.

“The whistleblower’s allegations make clear that USPS lacks the technical or operational capability needed to effectively implement the [executive order’s] provisions in a way that safeguards every citizen’s right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, who disclosed the whistleblower’s warning, wrote in a letter to the postmaster general. “Despite this, the Trump administration appears intent on USPS moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they may create.”

Roborock’s been a favorite of the robot vacuum game for a while. Here at WIRED, our reviewers are longtime fans of the affordable Qrevo line, but it was left without updates for for years. The company has been more focused on more unique designs, such as the Saros Z70, which has an entire arm attached to it to grab your socks. These have a way to go before they’re actually useful.

But this year, the Qrevo line is finally getting some love again. The Qrevo Curv line got a new model that we reviewed back in January, and there’s now the Qrevo 2 Pro that just launched at the end of August. After a living with it for the better part of two weeks, it’s easily one of my favorite sub-$1,000 robot vacuums, especially for its corner cleaning, and has the power to rival my current budget pick, the Eufy Omni C28. My only complaint is little things. I mean that literally: this robot is great at spotting furniture and navigating large obstacles, but it won’t spot your cords or cat toys laying on the floor.

Power Range

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro has a nice range of specs. It comes with a 20,000 Pa digital motor, 200 RPM rotation speed for the mop pads, LiDar navigation to map your home, a FlexiArm mop that promises to get in hard-to-reach spots (and it delivered in my tests!), and an easy-to-use app. It also has Matter support if you wanted to voice command it with your smart home speaker and an AI-powered “SmartPlan” to better clean your home. I haven’t noticed a difference in using SmartPlan compared to just running a regular cycle, but I’ve only been using this robot for about two weeks. Hopefully, the robot will learn more over time and improve—at least, in theory. It’s not the kind of AI that’s going to spot spills and stains, though, so keep that in mind when you run this robot vacuum.

Most of all, I was impressed by the edge cleaning with the FlexiArm mop, and the reversible side brush. Both work together to dislodge debris and make sure furniture and wall edges are clean. The vacuum was able to knock out one of my trickier Cheerio tests—specifically a Cheerio I stash in a corner next to my fridge—with the help of the side brush and mop. It didn’t achieve a perfect corner score, missing one of the three Cheerios, but I’ve yet to meet a robot vacuum that can achieve all three. The slim 3.8-inch high design lets this vacuum squeeze underneath many kitchen counter toe kicks to suck up all the debris hiding under your counter, and clean right up into the edge.

The suction level also worked well on carpets and rugs alike, though it worked better on pet hair than my long hair. My low-pile rug downstairs had a nice fluff to it after a run of this robot vacuum, but more importantly the tufts of cat hair were nowhere to be seen in my carpeted bedrooms after this vacuum ran through the top floor of my home. My hair was vacuumed up, but I found it rolled into a massive ball near a corner of the bed. I’ll caveat that it had been a handful of weeks since my last good vacuuming upstairs, and I doubt you’d see this with regular cleanings. My husband didn’t notice the hairball at all, and immediately complimented how nice the upstairs looked.

Loud and powerful, the Focal Mu-So Hekla soundbar is a 34-pound behemoth you want for explosive set pieces in movies, (think anything with Tom Cruise flying airplanes or jumping off of buildings). There are 15 speakers inside, including three woofers that deliver powerful bass that matches the Klipsch Flexus Core 300.

A big plus is the upfiring audio drivers for Dolby Atmos. It was the first time I noticed a loud clank sound up by my ceiling when the main character in Predator: Badlands extends a spear to the sky. Only the LG Sound Suite H7 has better surround sound, but the Mu-So Hekla is louder and boomier (in a good way).

I loved the Focal app as well—it’s easy to use for selecting inputs, adjusting settings and room calibration.

For music, I played Fleetwood Mac at high volume and never heard any distortion or hiss. A test track by Maggie Rogers called “Want Want” sounds like a nightclub has come alive.

This is a large, heavy, premium soundbar with a premium price tag. With such a big upfront investment, it’s disappointing that it isn’t more expandable—you can only add a subwoofer, not side or rear speakers like the Sonos, LG, and Klipsch.

Still, for sheer sonic superiority, the Focal Mu-So Hekla is one of my all-time favorite soundbars.

Honorable Mentions

Sonos Beam Gen 2 for $499: The Sonos Beam Gen 2 is an excellent compact soundbar options, especially if you have other Sonos speakers in your home. It doesn’t quite beat the Bose Smart Soundbar in terms of sound quality—the Bose has upfiring speakers, which gives it a fuller sound than the Beam. But with the recently announced Sonos Beam Ultra, I’m expecting the Beam Gen 2 to go on sale (or at least get discounted soon).

Sony Bravia Theatre Trio for $2,200: The Sony Theatre Trio has several outstanding features, even if it can’t quite keep pace with the Sonos, Focal, or other high-end models. A flagship from Sony, this package comes with a soundbar and two speakers (plus an optional sub), and has excellent center channel audio for clear and rich dialogue. The setup is easy and the room calibration actually makes a difference in terms of room-filling bass. Dolby Atmos was not super convincing, though. The Last House creepy sound effects didn’t emanate from above or the sides enough.

Bluesound Pulse Cinema for $1,499: Bluesound is better known for its small, high-res audio speakers, but this 47-inch-long soundbar sounds stunning for music too. While Dolby Atmos support is good, playing dream-like synth rock tracks like “I Will Wait” by Phoebe Bridgers reveals a truly amazing spatial audio experience. The mix seems to emulate all around the room. On “Walk Walk” by Maggie Rogers, the driving bass and drums sound ultra-realistic. This is a pricey soundbar, though, and others like the Sonos Arc Ultra sound more realistic, especially its upfiring drivers.

Polk Audio Signa S4 for $449: Former WIRED senior editor Parker Hall says that, despite its age, the Polk Signa S4 is an excellent-sounding soundbar, especially for the price. It’s simple to use, easy to setup, has a few modes to choose from (Movie, Music, and Night), and versatile 3.1.2-channel Atmos-enables speakers. It’s a little dated, though, and doesn’t have Wi-Fi connectivity. You can learn more in his Polk Signa S4 review.

Apple’s latest iPhone and iPad software—iOS 27 and iPadOS 27—is here. While this release won’t make as big of a splash as Apple’s big Liquid Glass redesign in the prior version, there’s still plenty here that could change how you use your device.

iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 focus largely on stability improvements that you’ll notice in your everyday use. There are several quality-of-life improvements, like how Shortcuts are significantly easier to set up, but the big highlight is the Siri AI upgrade. Here’s everything you need to know.

Updated September 14, 2026: We’ve refreshed this story to reflect the latest updates and that iOS and iPadOS 27 are rolling out today.

Is Your iPhone or iPad Compatible?

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Apple sometimes drops a few older devices from the support list with new versions of its operating systems, supposedly because the aging hardware can’t run the latest screen behaviors without feeling sluggish. (Apple typically supports iPhones and iPads for six to seven years.) But there’s good news this year. iPhones from 2019 and newer—the iPhone 11 and up, including the iPhone SE (2nd Gen)—will support iOS 27.

That means any iPhone that received iOS 26 is still compatible with iOS 27. If you’re unsure of your iPhone model, go to Settings > General > About and look at the model name.

iPads aren’t as straightforward, as they have a unique naming structure. Apple retired the “generations” moniker and is now using the chipset to denote the iPad model. You can check your iPad model using Apple’s support documentation. A few iPads are cut off from the iPadOS 27 update, including the 8th-gen iPad from 2020 and the 5th-gen iPad Mini.

• iPad: 9th gen and later, including A16
• iPad Mini: 6th gen and later, including A17 Pro
• iPad Air 11-inch: 4th gen and later, including M2, M3, and M4
• iPad Air 13-inch: M2 and later
• iPad Pro 11-inch: 2nd gen and later
• iPad Pro 12.9-inch: 4th gen and later
• iPad Pro: M4 and later

How to Install iOS 27 or iPadOS 27

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The final versions of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 are here. Before installing, it’s very important that you back up your devices. Head to Settings, tap your name at the top, and select iCloud. Then tap iCloud Backup, and tap Back Up Now. Read our How to Back Up Your iPhone or iPad guide for other methods and more details.

Then, head to Settings > General > Software Update and choose iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 when you see the option. Installation will take several minutes, and your iPhone or iPad will restart, so set aside several minutes for the whole process.

Siri AI, the new assistant, will ask to index your phone or iPad to learn more about you, your apps, and your data so it can be more helpful. This indexing takes a while—anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days—so be prepared to wait a bit.

Apple Intelligence Only Works on Select iPhones

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Remember—even if older iPhones and iPads receive the iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 update, that doesn’t mean all of the new features will be available. Apple Intelligence is still only compatible with the iPhone 15 Pro and newer and select iPads, meaning that several artificial intelligence features are unavailable on older devices.

Top New iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 Features

Here’s a top-line view of some of the biggest changes coming to iOS and iPadOS 27. The updates are largely the same across both operating systems.

Siri AI and a New Siri App

Courtesy of Apple

Siri is finally becoming “a more capable assistant,” or so Apple claims. The company says this is largely thanks to its third-generation foundation models, developed from the ground up with Google’s Gemini models. However, Apple says it isn’t using Google’s infrastructure to power Siri interactions and that no user data from Siri actions gets shared with Google.

Siri AI has an all-new look when you activate the assistant. It now resembles a glass orb. You can type or talk naturally to Siri, and there’s even a dedicated Siri app where you can revisit previous conversations or pick up where you left off on a different device. Siri is also now in the camera app, giving you a more direct way to start a visual search, much like Google Lens. You can even point the camera at a restaurant bill, and Siri can split the tab between you and your friends.

The assistant understands your personal context, so it can comb through your emails, messages, and photos to find relevant information based on your query. It can then take action on your behalf, whether that’s drafting an email in a specific tone or getting wine recommendations for a particular dish. Siri’s voice is more expressive, but you can also customize the assistant’s voice, its expressiveness, and its pace.

We’ve collated all the new things you can do with Siri AI if you want to try the revamped assistant.

Platform Stability Improvements

Courtesy of Apple

Apple has focused on making iOS run faster in this update. The company says app launches are up to 30 percent faster, newly captured photos in your Photo Library load up to 70 percent faster, and AirDrop transfers are up to 80 percent faster. The iPhone will do a better job switching between Wi-Fi and cellular, so you hopefully won’t have that awkward minute with no service while you wait for your device to switch networks as you leave the house. Many of these upgrades will affect older iPhone models, like the iPhone 11, thanks to a better-optimized CPU Scheduler.

Liquid Glass Refinements

Courtesy of Apple

Hate Liquid Glass? Love Liquid Glass? You have some options to make it work for your tastes in iOS 27. Apple says it has generally updated the design language to improve readability and contrast. App icons are sharper, for example. But you now finally have a slider in the Settings menu that lets you adjust the intensity of the Liquid Glass look, from super clear to more opaque. You can customize this in Settings > Appearance > Liquid Glass.

Child Safety Features

Courtesy of Apple

Apple spent a lot of time in the WWDC keynote talking up child safety features in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. A new Setup Assistant lets parents choose system apps and other essential apps for the child when first setting up an Apple device. An Ask to Browse feature means any new websites the kids encounter in Safari get sent to a parent for approval, and a feature called Communication Safety prevents children from seeing nudity or violence in the Messages or FaceTime apps; those are blurred by default.

Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday is the year’s largest release, with 963 CVEs requiring customer action, 106 rated critical. Two are already exploited: CVE-2026-81963 in the Windows Update Stack and CVE-2026-85880 in Advanced Local Procedure Call. Nothing in this release was publicly disclosed ahead of the patch. Readiness recommends a Patch Now scheduling for Windows, Office, SQL Server and the developer tooling, and standard patch release for Exchange. The Readiness team has published an infographic summarising deployment risk by product family.

Known issues

Three client issues are carried in from August close with this update, covering:

• Microsoft Teams and the new Outlook failing to launch on ARM devices, such as the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7, is resolved by KB5124008. The issue originated in August’s KB5121003 and was most likely on freshly imaged machines that had not yet taken Microsoft Store updates.
• The same update resolved both desktop backgrounds reverting to solid black and mouse cursor customisation resetting on non-English installations. Both originated in the 27 August preview, KB5120998.

And Microsoft has left open a Microsoft Defender Antivirus notification defect, confirmed on 28 August, in which devices report that Defender is turned off while it is running correctly.

Major revisions and mitigations

The quietest revision window of recent months arrived alongside the largest release. Between the August and September Patch Tuesdays, from 12 August to 7 September, the MSRC Security Update Guide touched 324 CVEs. Of those, 307 were routine Microsoft Edge and Chromium republications requiring no customer action.

That leaves 17 entries affecting Microsoft’s own products, and only one of those is a genuine revision. CVE-2026-59133, an elevation of privilege in the High-Performance Computing Pack, moved to version 1.1, and its own revision note records the change as informational. For comparison, August’s window carried 76 revisions to Microsoft’s own products, 60 of them flagged as requiring customer action.

The Readiness team has reviewed all 963 published updates. Microsoft has published no mitigations and no workarounds anywhere in this release.

Windows lifecycle and enforcement updates

Microsoft has published no new service or enforcement deadlines for September. The lifecycle picture is different, with multiple end-of-support notices for this coming October:

• The retail Office 2021 family retires in full, including Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio and Word.
• Office LTSC 2021 reaches end of support, and that includes Skype for Business LTSC 2021.
• Windows 10 2016 LTSB and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB 2016 reach the end of extended support.
• Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 reach the end of Extended Security Update Year 3. This is the final ESU year for both, not a step to a fourth.
• Windows 11 Home and Pro version 24H2 reaches the end of updates.
• Windows Server 2022 moves from mainstream to extended support, where it stays until 14 October 2031.

A second wave follows on 10 November 2026, and it is the one most likely to catch development teams rather than infrastructure teams. .NET 8 reaches the end of its long-term support branch, PowerShell 7.4 does the same, and Windows 11 Enterprise and Education 23H2 ends servicing alongside Windows 11 IoT Enterprise 23H2.

Microsoft’s test guidance for this release runs to 466 Windows entries, 55 of them flagged as high risk, against 109 and four in August. Given the large number of updates this month (who would have thought that we would be here at 963 CVEs), the Readiness team recommends the following testing priorities:

• Printing. Print from 32-bit and 64-bit applications to physical and virtual printers, exercise XPS and PDF output, share a printer from a print server and print from a separate client, cancel a job mid-queue, and confirm the queue reflects every state change. This is 20 of the 55 high risk flags, and it is the single most likely source of a visible regression.
• Fonts, graphics and imaging. Render varied fonts, sizes and styles across browsers, Office, PDF viewers and Notepad, confirm Print Preview matches the printed page, and open JPEG, TIFF, HEIF and raw images across Explorer, Photos and Office. Watch for clipping, distortion and missing glyphs.
• USB Devices. Exercise device attachment and removal. Attach and remove USB audio, video and mass storage devices repeatedly, including through a hub, pair and unpair a wireless device, and confirm each enumerates and releases cleanly. Device Association carries seven high risk flags, and these drivers load whenever hardware is attached.
• Remote Desktop. Open several concurrent sessions, enable printer, clipboard, audio, drive and smart card redirection together, disconnect and reconnect, and confirm redirected devices reattach.
• Storage (ntfs.sys, spaceport.sys). This is a real hotspot for updates this month, but no high-risk changes. Test on hardware you can recover, because the storage changes reach the boot path, potentially resulting in a dead (test) machine.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families, as defined by Microsoft, with the following groupings.

Browsers

Microsoft has not released any updates for their browser products for the second month in a row. September’s Security Update Guide carries no Edge-specific CVEs at all, and the 307 Chromium republications in the revision window required no customer action. The nine Edge CVEs that did appear arrived mid-cycle on 28 August and were serviced through the browser’s own update channel rather than this release.

Estates on a managed Edge channel have nothing to do here beyond confirming the channel is current. It is the one quiet corner of an otherwise heavy month.

Microsoft Windows

Windows carries 726 CVEs, 77 of them critical, which is three-quarters of the entire release. Elevation of privilege dominates by volume at 406 entries, with remote code execution second at 156, information disclosure at 94 and denial of service at 47. The pattern is the reverse of the severity picture: the bulk is local elevation, while the critical-rated entries cluster in the network-facing roles.

• Biometrics is a real focus this month as the Windows Biometric Service takes 64 fixes, the largest single-component count of the year. Most of the security issues are heap overflows that give a local attacker SYSTEM. Windows Hello adds nine, all critical. Patch it promptly on any estate using fingerprint or facial sign-in.
• Windows DHCP Server leads at 36 entries and is topped by remote code execution at CVSS 9.8. Windows DNS Server takes 10 more, also reaching 9.8. Critical remote code execution also lands on Message Queuing, RRAS, Services for NFS, the HTTP Print Provider, Windows Shell, Netlogon, Internet Connection Sharing, SSTP and Failover Cluster, all at 9.8. Patch the resolvers, the DHCP servers and the domain controllers first.
• Storage is the heaviest it has been this year. NTFS takes 29 fixes, Spaceport.sys behind Storage Spaces takes 17, and the Overlay Filter takes seven, with the Volume Manager, VHD miniport, iSCSI and Storage Port drivers behind them. These reach the boot path, so stage them on recoverable hardware.
• The rest of the most-patched tally runs Win32k at 19, Microsoft Standard XPS at 18, Windows Error Reporting at 12, and the Windows Kernel, Windows Search, the Print Spooler and the Device Association Service at 11 each.

Add this Windows update to your Patch Now schedule, with DHCP and DNS servers first and the biometric stack close behind.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft released 137 Office CVEs this month, 24 of them critical, with remote code execution the through-line at 69 entries and information disclosure close behind at 52. September breaks the recent pattern in a way that matters for deployment: this wave is not MSI-only.

• Click-to-Run estates are squarely in scope. Roughly 105 of the Office CVEs reach Click-to-Run, so Microsoft 365 Apps, Office 2019, LTSC 2021 and LTSC 2024 all update, on Windows and on Mac. Word takes 35 fixes, Excel 32, PowerPoint 10 and Outlook seven. The heaviest client entries are CVE-2026-78510 in Word and CVE-2026-78509 in Outlook, both critical remote code execution at CVSS 9.8, in document-rendering paths that fire on preview or open.
• SharePoint Server Subscription Edition takes 16 entries and is the only SharePoint baseline with a package this month. Server updates cannot be uninstalled and always require a reboot, so validate in a maintenance window.
• Skype for Business Server takes 10 entries, led by CVE-2026-66302, a critical remote code execution at CVSS 9.8. Patch it and note that the LTSC 2021 edition leaves support on 13 October 2026.

Nothing in Office is exploited this month. With 24 critical-rated entries and the Click-to-Run channel carrying most of the exposure, the September Office updates belong on the Patch Now schedule regardless.

Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server

Exchange is quiet and SQL Server is not, which inverts the usual relationship between the two.

• Exchange Server takes nine CVEs across 2016 CU23, 2019 CU14 and CU15, and Subscription Edition. None is critical and none is exploited, though the highest reaches CVSS 9.3. The mix runs to two remote code execution entries, two elevations of privilege, two spoofing, and one each of tampering, denial of service and information disclosure. Apply the update from an elevated command prompt, because an un-elevated run leaves Exchange services partially patched and broken, then confirm mail flow, Autodiscover and any hybrid connection before returning the server to service.
• SQL Server takes 62 CVEs, four of them critical, across the 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2025 branches. There is no 2016 package this month. Remote code execution leads at 24 entries, with information disclosure at 22. The critical entries are CVE-2026-67631 and CVE-2026-67643 at CVSS 8.8, and CVE-2026-67378 and CVE-2026-67636 at 8.5.
• Eight SQL packages ship, a CU+GDR and an RTM+GDR for each branch: 2025 (KB5122769, KB5122770), 2022 (KB5122768, KB5122771), 2019 (KB5122772, KB5122773) and 2017 (KB5122774, KB5122775). Microsoft’s guidance is explicit that the baseline or RTM version must be installed first and the GDR patch applied on top; test the install and the removal on every servicing branch you run, then restart the service and confirm Always On availability groups stay healthy.

Exchange goes on the Schedule list, and SQL Server goes on the Patch Now list. That is an unusual split, and it is driven by the four critical remote code execution entries on the database estate.

Microsoft Developer Tools

Microsoft released 24 CVEs across its developer tooling this month, 23 rated important and one critical. Security feature bypasses are the main focus with eight CVE entries, with remote code execution and information disclosure at four each.

• The single critical entry is CVE-2026-34182 at CVSS 9.1, a flaw in CMS AuthEnvelopedData processing that allows forged messages to be accepted. It reaches Visual Studio 2017 through 2022.
• The highest-scoring entry in this family is not the critical one. CVE-2026-81376, a Visual Studio Code security feature bypass, reaches CVSS 9.6 while carrying an important rating. It is a useful reminder that severity labels and CVSS scores answer different questions.
• Visual Studio Code and its Copilot extensions take 10 entries, mostly security feature bypasses. Update the editor and confirm workspace trust prompts, extension installation and remote sessions behave as configured.
• .NET ships SDK updates on all three supported lines, x64 and x86: 8.0.131 and 8.0.425, 9.0.121 and 9.0.318, and 10.0.112 and 10.0.401. Install them, then build and run a representative project to check for regressions. Keep the 10 November date for .NET 8 in view while you are in there.
• The .NET Framework ships monthly rollups per operating system: Windows Server 2012 (KB5126147), Server 2012 R2 (KB5126148), Windows 10 1809 (KB5126144), 21H2 (KB5126145), 22H2 (KB5126146) and Server 2022 (KB5126149). One gap worth noting: the 4.7.2 package for Windows 10 1607 is listed as pending and will follow, so estates still on 1607 will not complete their Framework patching this cycle.

Add these to your standard release schedule, behind this month’s Windows, Office and SQL Server priorities. Keep the 10 November date for .NET 8 and PowerShell 7.4 in view while you are in the developer estate, because a patch this month does not extend either branch.

Adobe (and third-party updates)

September is the largest release of the year, and this (crazy, super high) volume is the least interesting thing about it. The 963 CVEs matter less than the 55 entries Microsoft flags as high risk, and those sit in printing and fonts. Adobe shipped two Acrobat builds one digit apart and only the second is a security update (nothing to worry about here). Of the CVEs Microsoft republished, 25 are not Microsoft’s. A version number tells you very little about the work in front of you. So, given my (super-secret knowledge) of how Microsoft operates over the summer, here is my prediction for next month (October). It won’t be as big as this month – but just you wait – November is going to be big. Let’s up those numbers (or not).

For the best part of a decade, abusive deepfake “pornography” websites have published thousands of nonconsensual videos depicting women, including high-profile celebrities, politicians, and public figures, into sexual situations. Now, in what is likely the largest takedown of explicit deepfake websites to date, officials in New York have seized more than a dozen of the harmful sites.

On Monday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced the seizure of 12 domains which it says have been used for “unlawfully” sharing, publishing, and selling celebrity deepfake videos. Around 1,200 people—overwhelmingly women—were depicted in nonconsensual sexual images and videos on the websites, the office says. These included social media influencers, actors, activists, athletes, musicians, and politicians.

“These horrific violations of privacy follow victims into their careers and personal lives and take an immense toll on emotional and mental well-being,” district attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement, urging potential victims to come forward and contact his office’s cybercrime bureau. The office says its investigations into who is responsible for the websites, plus those who uploaded damaging videos of victims, are ongoing.

The seizures, carried out under New York’s criminal procedure laws, mark perhaps one of the most significant and sweeping actions against websites hosting explicit deepfake videos since the technology first emerged at the end of 2017. As artificial intelligence technology has improved, a dark industry of websites, apps, and bots has appeared: They are designed to “undress” photos of women or create graphic sexual videos that include them. The images and videos are increasingly realistic and can be generated in seconds.

While deepfake technology is widely used against non-famous women and girls—often being shared in private social media groups—celebrities have spoken out about the many harms of being depicted in the content and the challenges of getting it removed. While laws against deepfakes have been slow to emerge, the US Take It Down Act increasingly allows images to be removed, with part of the law allowing law enforcement officials to take down and seize websites.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has not publicly named the websites it has seized. However, ahead of Bragg’s announcement, WIRED independently observed several of the sites’ homepages being replaced by takedown notices—“THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED”—late last week, with the sites now saying they have been taken over following a seizure warrant issued by a New York State Supreme Court.

“The takedowns are a significant win in the fight against synthetic nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII),” says Leonie Oehmig, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), who has studied the deepfake creation ecosystem. Oehmig says that enforcement of state laws shows that the harmful content can be tackled and that the seized sites don’t appear to be accessible if using VPNs to try and access them from other locations. “This shows that meaningful, coordinated enforcement is achievable even where regulation itself remains fragmented across jurisdictions.”

The websites were likely viewed millions of times. Many used names that included phrases such as “sex celebrity” or promised “real deepfakes.” They hosted false videos of some of the world’s most famous celebrities, with one saying, “various actresses’ faces are used for deepfakes.”

Videos could be several minutes in length and include fully sexually explicit scenes—often swapping the faces of celebrities or public figures into existing pornographic videos. Archived versions of the websites show some videos had been watched tens of thousands of times, with one of the websites claiming to have been online since 2018.

As calls for artificial intelligence regulation intensify, US President Donald Trump’s team have made it clear that if lab leaders want to implement an industry-wide slowdown, they’re going to have to do it themselves.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called on the US government to regulate AI companies within a wider effort to slow the pace of the technology’s development in an essay published Saturday. The essay received rare endorsement from both OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who owns chatbot Grok, following a week of intense debate about the technology’s threats to human safety. Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella also called for pacing development.

But David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, wrote on X, “If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel…Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic.”

Amodei had requested the government enable competing AI companies to work together on standards without breaching antitrust law, either by participating in discussions or issuing a waiver for the companies involved. He also called for government assistance in establishing international coordination, including with the Chinese Communist Party, though critics wondered how effective this would be. “China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know,” Sacks wrote.

Concerns about the US ceding its lead in the technology to China have caused the US government to mostly push back against the notion of slowing the pace of its development. “You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump said during a visit to Ireland. “We’re leading China on AI,” he added, “and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”

The US largely views China’s AI ecosystem as an economic and national security threat, and has previously been caught short by the country’s advances in the technology. “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN on Sunday. “So, we’ve got to have balance. We’ve got to have steady hands at the wheel.”

In the meantime, companies say they are going to start taking voluntary steps to reestablish public trust that they are acting responsibly. On Sunday night, OpenAI’s Altman committed to a proposal by Amodei to give embedded third party evaluators employee-level access to their firms to check practices and products were safe, and report incidents. While these measures will have “significant costs,” he wrote on X: “Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.”

The newest member of the corporate workforce never sleeps, never asks for a raise, and can be cloned before lunch. It can also confidently make the wrong decision thousands of times before anyone notices.

That helps explain why some technology leaders have started talking about AI agents as employees, co-workers, or interns rather than software. Once an agent can update records, issue refunds, send communications, or act across multiple enterprise systems, deploying it no longer looks much like installing another application.

Recent Harvard Business Review articles have pushed that analogy further. One argues that agents should be treated like a new workforce, with defined roles, authority, sources of truth, supervision, and audit trails. Another recommends giving agents names and job descriptions, onboarding them, evaluating their performance, and increasing their responsibilities after they prove themselves.

But there is a catch: People may start believing the metaphor.

A separate HBR study of 1,261 managers found that when AI was framed as an employee rather than a tool, managers with experience working around AI agents took less personal responsibility for results and assigned more responsibility to the AI. They also escalated more problems and caught fewer errors. In the study, 31% of respondents said their companies already framed AI as a teammate or employee, while 23% said agents appeared on organizational or work charts.

For IT leaders, the answer may therefore be to borrow freely from the employee-management playbook — without extending the metaphor too far.

Don’t put software on the org chart

Amy Loomis, group vice president at IDC, draws a hard line around one word: responsibility.

Humans, she says, have obligations to their companies and to one another, and they bring an understanding of corporate culture and values that an agent can mimic linguistically without possessing.

That makes calling an agent a co-worker potentially more than harmless anthropomorphism. The label suggests a peer relationship and can encourage people to cede judgment to a system that’s very good at giving what was requested, Loomis says, but not necessarily at recognizing what was actually needed.

“Accountability is something that has qualities associated with it that are uniquely human,” she says. “Agents may be given permission to access data, but the accountability for what they do with that access lies with the person who gave the agent access, not the agent itself.”

That distinction still leaves plenty to borrow from employee management. It makes sense to give an agent traceable access and tightly scoped permissions — and to institute a kill switch to prevent the agent from having continued access. But Loomis finds it more effective to think in terms of giving an agent an operations charter rather than a human identity: define what the system does, what it may access, and what humans remain responsible for.

In other words, give the agent a security badge. Just don’t put its picture on it.

Raja Iqbal, founder of agentic AI governance company Ejento AI and co-author of the HBR article “To Scale AI Agents Successfully, Think of Them Like Team Members,” is closer to Loomis than the headline suggests.

Iqbal says the metaphor is intended to put CIOs, CISOs, and other technology leaders into the right “cognitive posture.” Thinking about an agent as a team member, he argues, can remind an enterprise to impose familiar management disciplines: a unique identity, clear human oversight, defined authority, spending limits, approved information sources, and an audit trail.

If another term produces the same discipline, he’s fine with that too.

In fact, Iqbal explicitly rejects synthetic employees with human personas and seats on the org chart. That creates exactly the accountability problem critics worry about: “Bob did it” becomes an excuse even though Bob is software.

“The metaphor is dangerous when it’s decorative,” Iqbal says. By that, he means companies get into trouble when they adopt the human trappings — names, personas, or the language of colleagues — without also imposing the supervision, limits, and accountability that make the analogy useful.

His preferred distinction is simpler: the agent needs a technical identity so the enterprise can reconstruct what it did, while a human must remain responsible for those actions. “The identity is the audit primitive, and the human owner is the accountability primitive,” he says. Put more plainly, the agent identity answers what acted; the human owner answers who is accountable.

The employee analogy becomes more useful again when deciding how much freedom an agent should receive. Iqbal recommends graduated autonomy. An agent might begin with a human approving every action, progress to performing low-risk actions independently, and eventually receive bounded autonomy if its observed performance justifies it. A serious error can send it back down the ladder — or out the door entirely.

That sounds a lot like a probation period for a new employee. It’s also simply good software governance for a probabilistic system.

At DXC, professional agents are software

Russell Jukes has had plenty of opportunity to test that distinction. As chief digital and information officer at DXC Technology, he oversees AI in an IT services organization with roughly 115,000 employees.

“We think about [an AI agent] as a superpower, not as a person,” he says.

DXC separates agents into two categories. Personal agents work for individual employees and generally operate using the employee’s identity and access. Professional agents are enterprise systems built for broader workflows. On one of DXC’s major AI platforms, employees have so far created roughly 8,000 personal agents, compared with about 100 professional agents.

The professional variety receives much stricter oversight. It can have its own nonhuman identity, credentials, permissions, and authority boundaries. Activity passes through control planes that allow DXC to see what agents are doing and, when necessary, shut them down.

Jukes thinks many of these agents will eventually disappear from users’ view altogether. An agent might scan internal resource requirements overnight and recommend employees for projects. Nobody needs to greet it in the morning or consider it a colleague; they simply receive the result.

That’s where he parts company with the worker metaphor.

Jukes says he learned early on that AI cannot be deployed like conventional SaaS. His first attempt followed the familiar software model: make the application available, let employees use it within the prescribed workflow, and expect adoption to follow. “I did that, and nobody used it,” he says. The experience convinced him that AI requires a different approach, and he vowed to “never deploy AI like it’s SaaS again.”

Conventional SaaS is largely deterministic: the software constrains users to a defined workflow and produces predictable outputs. Agentic AI is different. It can interpret a goal, choose among tools and data sources, and decide how to get to an outcome. For Jukes, that means CIOs have to design the policies, permissions, data access, guardrails, and authority around the agent rather than simply deploy another application.

That also creates a clearer chain of responsibility. If a person approves the agent’s action, Jukes says that person owns the decision. If an autonomous agent behaves according to a business policy, accountability belongs with the people responsible for that policy. If the technology fails to operate as designed, responsibility moves to IT.

The agent itself never gets handed the blame.

Maybe treat it like an intern after all

Nina Tatsiy, global CIO of Quadient, an automation technology company, takes a position somewhere between Iqbal and Jukes. She calls agents interns, but deliberately uses the term as an analogy, not an organizational designation.

Agents must be managed as software, with security, governance, and technical controls, while recognizing that their probabilistic behavior requires additional supervision. “You have to do both,” Tatsiy says.

An intern does not receive every password and authorization on the first morning. Neither should an agent. It has to be onboarded, trained, watched, retrained when its environment changes, and eventually retired when it’s obsolete.

Quadient generally avoids giving agents human names. Tatsiy worries that doing so encourages people to see them as real colleagues capable of judgment.

“Overtrust is a problem,” she says, particularly because AI tends to state conclusions with such assurance. Tatsiy prefers using AI to challenge a hypothesis or surface questions people haven’t considered rather than allowing it to make the conclusion for them.

Yet the intern analogy has proved useful operationally.

In one accounts-payable deployment, Quadient had an agent effectively shadow human workers and learn from their feedback across different scenarios. Only after its performance had been tested across increasing levels of complexity did it begin providing recommendations. Humans still made the final decision.

The agent, in other words, earned more trust. It didn’t earn accountability.

Borrow from HR, but keep humans in charge

The emerging divide may therefore be less about whether agents are employees or software than about which parts of each management model IT leaders should retain.

Agents need individual technical identities, but not human identities. They need defined responsibilities, but not jobs in the human sense. They need monitoring and evaluation, but not annual performance reviews. They can receive progressively greater authority, but not progressively greater accountability.

And the stronger they become, the more important that distinction becomes.

Treating an autonomous agent like ordinary SaaS ignores the fact that it can interpret, choose, and act in ways conventional software cannot. Treating it like Steve from Accounting creates a different problem: sooner or later somebody may start assuming “Steve” knows what he’s doing.

IT leaders may indeed need to borrow heavily from HR as agentic AI spreads across the enterprise. They just shouldn’t start issuing employee badges.

Related reading:

Almost 150 politicians across Europe have been included on harmful deepfake pornography websites over the last few years, according to new research seen by WIRED. Some of the politicians, who are overwhelmingly women, have had their likeness included in explicit videos, while others have names and photos listed in disturbing database-like entries that can link to deepfake creation tools.

Analysis of around 160 domains that host deepfake abuse and other nonconsensual sexual content, by researcher Benjamin Shultz, has found that at least 138 women members of parliament (MPs) from 22 European Union countries have appeared or been mentioned on the sites. In contrast, only nine male MPs were referenced in any way. By Shultz’s calculations, it is 33 times more likely for women MPs to be targeted by deepfake ecosystems.

“Deepfake porn is part of a much bigger trend of online hate and intimidation against women and female politicians,” says Suzanne Kröger, a Dutch member of parliament with the Progressive Netherlands group, who was impacted. Kröger, who expressed anger at what the research uncovered, says the findings are “really deeply disturbing” and help to reveal the scale of abuse. “We are politicians, we have a platform and speak out,” Kröger says. “But meanwhile, there are millions of women victims of these criminal acts.”

The research, which has been published by German digital democracy think tank Agora Digitale Transformation, focuses on national members of parliament from all 27 countries in the European Union. Shultz, a fellow at Agora and the lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project, compiled the details of more than 5,800 members of parliaments across Europe in July and then used custom search engines to find where they appeared across the deepfake websites. (The research does not include members of the European Parliament).

Politicians from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France appeared on the websites the most, according to the findings, and the more senior a politician is, the more likely they were to be targeted. Shultz alerted all of the MPs individually and provided guidance on how the content may be removed. The websites also include depictions of celebrities, journalists, and other public figures, he says. WIRED is not naming the websites in order to not drive further attention to the abusive images.

Multiple researchers and lawmakers say that while politicians have been targeted with deepfakes for years, it can damage democratic practices and create chilling effects that may stop women and girls from becoming public figures. “This discourages women from taking office in the first place and also crowds these women out of public life,” Shultz says. “There’s so much evidence to support that this does real psychological damage. This also does reputational damage for the future if they want to fade out of politics and have another career.”

“Deepfake videos are used to intimidate politicians but also to belittle women,” says Sarah Dobbe, a Dutch Socialist Party MP, who was impacted. “It is very important that if a woman or girl is victimized in this way, she can get direct support if needed, and that the content is removed quickly.”

Across the sites he monitored, Shultz categorized multiple categories of abusive content or behavior. His results include instances where MPs appeared in content that was actively being hosted by the sites, indexed results where content had been removed, and also a number of profiles and “gateways” where potentially new content could be created.

Multiple websites hosted pages that include the names of MPs, official photos, and in some cases their social media profiles or personal information. Some included sections “rating” the women’s bodies, Shultz’s report says. Often next to these MP biographies were links to so-called nudifier apps or the websites’ own tools that claimed to digitally undress people. “It has all the images, all the information, and a direct link to the tool, and in three clicks you can generate,” Shultz says. “That’s just as bad as actually hosting the content.”

Since AI-created deepfakes first emerged at the end of 2017, the underlying technology to produce them has become much more accessible, and the output of the tools has become more realistic. Over time, millions of nonconsensual AI images and videos have been created, mostly by men and boys, and are often used to harass, intimidate, or blackmail women and girls, including at almost 100 schools around the world.

“These platforms are designed to run like businesses,” says Henry Ajder, an AI adviser and deepfake expert who has been tracking the ecosystem since 2018. He says that while it is not surprising that politicians are being targeted in this way, the findings are helpful for officials in Europe to understand the severity of the issue. “The whole infrastructure is set up to do this at scale with ease,” he says.

Content warning: This piece includes descriptions of nonconsensual sex and intimate image abuse.

On the afternoon of Sunday, November 2, 2025, Maddie Kowalski stopped by a house in Gainesville to drop off a present. The University of Florida sophomore had traveled to Japan that summer, where she’d picked up an action figure from the manga One Piece as a gift.

Students referred to this building near the main campus, which has long been associated with the UF chapter of the frat Phi Delta Theta, as “Fort.” A brick multifamily colonial-style house, it was a typical frat-boy residence with worn hardwood floors, exposed cables, and “THIS IS FORT” spray-painted in UF’s orange and blue colors on the fence lining the perimeter. Phi Delta Theta didn’t have a great reputation on campus; at the time, they were being investigated for accusations of hazing. But the boys who lived there were Kowalski’s best friends: “It was a safe space, I thought.”

A few hours later, Kowalski, then 19, was at an apartment drinking when a friend told her something that would alter the trajectory of her life: Did she know that a nude image of her was circulating at FSU, a university a few hours away?

Kowalski would later learn that the image was making the rounds on Snapchat, and people were talking about it on the anonymous campus social network YikYak. When she opened the app, “that’s when I started crashing out,” she says. As Kowalski scrolled, she saw what appeared to be hundreds of messages about a “DZ” girl. (She was in the sorority Delta Zeta.) They were now referring to not just an image, but a video. Some were joking about masturbating to it.

The situation was about to get worse. Around 6 that night, an anonymous account on X with the handle @SteveCumfull posted the video, saying: “Meet Maddie Kowalski, queen of Delta Zeta.” Kowalski had no idea who the poster was, but she immediately identified the setting in one shot as Fort. In the video, the floor is dirty, with debris strewn everywhere. She’s lying on the ground naked, her eyes half-closed, touching herself while flanked by a group of men in shorts. While their faces weren’t visible, they appeared to be some of the same guys she’d been hanging out with just a few hours prior, she realized with a sinking feeling in her gut. In another shot, from a different night and at a different location, she is being penetrated by two men.

The video that ended up going viral on X was a compilation of three different clips: one, mentioned above, that was taken at Fort earlier that fall, and two that were recorded during a separate sexual encounter with two strangers. Kowalski says she met the latter in October, not long before the video went viral, when she was walking home after a night out drinking. She was heavily intoxicated and only remembers “parts of” what happened: “I didn’t recognize myself at all.” She says she did not consent to being filmed, let alone have that content shared publicly.

What had been a piece of salacious on-campus gossip, transmitted via anonymous social media and group texts, was now a national story. X removed the post containing the video, but late the following day, @SteveCumfull posted it again. Then they posted a screenshot of a cryptocurrency token they’d bought with Kowalski’s name on it, with a market cap of $11,400. “Put your children’s college savings into this,” they tweeted. @SteveCumfull could have been anyone: a close friend, a neighbor, a mutual with an axe to grind. Whoever they were, they now appeared to be profiting from the worst moment of Kowalski’s life.

As part of this work, hundreds of seismometers, as well as networks of fiber-optic cables, will be used to record even the tiniest of earthquakes during periods of tranquility and unrest. This monitoring effort will be aided by machine learning programs that will be taught to identify minute shifts in the seismic soundtrack of these volcanoes. In recent years, these programs have been used to process a huge volume of data far more proficiently and efficiently than scientists can manage alone. This work has already revealed myriad previously hidden magmatic pathways beneath volcanoes while also permitting scientists to track, almost in real time, magma barreling through the crust.

The idea of Ex-X is to gain unprecedented detail on how tiny changes in the behavior or position of magma can lead to eruptions. Those insights can, in turn, illuminate some of the underlying physics. All these Caribbean volcanoes, diverse though they may be, could have a shared set of fluid dynamics equations.

However, seismology won’t be enough by itself. “We lack the physical understanding of what exactly is going on in a magma chamber,” Poland says. What causes the unstoppable nucleation of bubbles within a body of magma, which can propel hot, buoyant magma through the crust above with soda can-like effervescence? What combination of molten rock, crystals, and gas is primed to trigger an eruption? What drives an eruption to switch from expelling oozing lava to blasting ash and rock into the sky?

Geochemistry is essential to this effort, too. Today, scientists scoop up lava or ash, fresh or ancient, around volcanoes—both during an eruption and in the interregnum between them—to identify subtle changes in chemical makeup. Scientists use sophisticated numerical models to simulate volcanic viscera, but this is still educated guesswork. Laboratory experiments, though, may be able to ground these models.

Replicating the most extreme phenomena in laboratory settings is not easy. But in successful experiments in the fall of 2025, scientists re-created the conditions present at the birth of planets, complete with simulacra of magma and miniature hydrogen atmospheres. “You can’t just make a magma chamber at the surface of the Earth,” Poland says. “But we’re a heck of a lot closer to that sort of thing than we were a while ago.”

Ideally, volcanologists want to try something else truly ambitious: “Drill all the way down to where there is some magma sitting at depth, and really see these processes in situ, rather than just seeing the results of them,” Winder says. That is one of the objectives of the Krafla Magma Testbed in Iceland. This literally groundbreaking facility is set to become the world’s first direct magma observatory.

“There’s no reason we can’t think that, at some point in the future, we can have volcano forecasts that are like weather forecasts,” Poland says. But deriving a unified theory of volcanism will require a geologic Manhattan Project.

First, a constellation of highly diverse volcanoes will need to be slathered in geophysical instrumentation and consistently monitored over multiple eruption cycles—meaning many decades. “You would like to think, ‘OK, volcanoes are pretty well monitored.’ But they’re not,” Roman says. “There’s a handful of Cadillac volcanoes that have permanent networks.” Even many of the United States’ most dangerous volcanoes, along the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest (home to the notorious Mount St. Helens, for example, and the precarious Mount Rainier), are only partly covered in a limited number of sensors.

Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.

“What on earth are they building all of these data centers for?” an exasperated friend asked me recently.

They’re not the only one asking: We got several similar questions on our recent data center livestream. It’s a really reasonable thing to wonder about. After all, if AI is already making all these breakthroughs, why are tech companies taking on billions of dollars of debt and constructing some of the biggest power plants in the world to build even more data centers?

The answer isn’t to help the average user search for recipes or look up places to visit on a vacation; simple chatbot queries are an increasingly outdated way of thinking about how AI works. Now, AI is all about agents—there’s no official definition, but roughly speaking, agents are large language model-based systems designed to make autonomous decisions to execute a task—and the shift towards them is part of what’s driving Silicon Valley’s power buildout.

“Rather than asking an AI chatbot a simple question and answer, these agents can give themselves hundreds of small prompts based on a user’s original question,” says my colleague Maxwell Zeff, who writes the weekly Model Behavior newsletter. “For example, if someone asked an AI agent to build them a website, it might run for hours to build out features, re-prompting itself dozens of times in the process to build different web pages, menus, and datasets that power the thing.”

Agents are now at the heart of the frontier labs’ work on AI. They’re doing some astounding—and terrifying—things. Recently, OpenAI announced that a swarm of more than 10,000 agents sending 2.7 million messages had solved a longstanding math problem. (Mathematicians pushed back on the company’s claims.) While this is an outlier—AI labs are highly committed to solving supposedly unsolvable problems, and willing to throw unusual amounts of resources into doing so—all those messages burned through a lot of processing power. That equates to a lot of energy: probably tens of millions of dollars’ worth, Max tells me, though how much exactly is tough to say.

Private AI companies have historically been choosy about what to disclose when it comes to environmental metrics around their products. Many CEOs often point to single queries made by individuals as a measure of resource use. In a recent podcast interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that the water use needed to harvest a single almond amounted to 38,000 ChatGPT queries. (The calculation has been disputed.)

“The people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don’t feel like they’re doing something horrible from a water perspective for the most part,” he said.

Introducing AI agents, which are much more energy-intensive than simple queries, into the picture makes these calculations a lot more complex. There’s a major dearth of information around the energy use of agents, whose tasks can range from simple jobs to a full day of autonomous coding involving a team of parallel “helper” agents. There’s a massive gulf in power use between these applications—and a potentially limitless expansion as tasks get more complex.

“In other technological growth areas, we’re constrained by how many people are driving a car or streaming Netflix,” says Boris Gamazaychikov, the co-founder and CEO of Sustainable AI, a research and advisory group. “Now, this stuff is kind of decoupled from users—and if you listen to AI leaders, I think that’s what they want. They’re talking about unicorns that have one employee.”

At Apple’s recent hardware event, the software powering its foldable iPhone Duo stood out, with translucent Liquid Glass effects and vertically stacked icons. But you don’t need to snatch a folding smartphone to reap the benefits of Apple’s iOS 27 updates.

When iOS 27 leaves beta on Monday, Siri AI’s standalone app and smartphone search integration will likely be the most immediately obvious change for many iPhone users. But it’s worth digging even deeper to uncover helpful additions to key apps, like Apple’s Safari browser, as well as revamps to underutilized apps, like Shortcuts.

The version of Safari available in iOS 27 looks fairly similar to the last iteration, with a few key updates tucked away in the settings. These Safari features are powered by Apple Intelligence, which requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer (they’re also available on iPadOS 27 and macOS 27).

Notify Me

Photograph: Courtesy of Apple

If you’re shopping online and want a quick price-drop notification, you can use the “Notify Me” feature to scan a webpage on a certain cadence and look for changes. First, head to the page you want to track and tap the three-lined hamburger menu icon in the top right corner of Safari. About halfway down, you’ll see this option listed.

“Safari can let you know when a website updates the content you’re interested in,” reads the feature’s description. Here you’ll find an open text box where you can describe what change in content you want Safari to scan for, as well as how often you want it to check.

For example, my couch is broken, so I’ve been eyeing a few different replacement options. I have two final contenders from CB2, but both are out of my price range. So, I set up a “Notify Me” for Safari to scan the pages each day for a significant discount. Whichever one goes on sale first will likely be what I decide to get, and now I don’t have to refresh the pages manually every day.

While many other browsers have similar shopping features, like the price-tracking bell in Google Chrome, I appreciate how this feature stretches beyond just buying stuff. You can also use Safari to scan for ticket drops, privacy policy changes, and other content updates.

Describe an Extension

Photograph: Courtesy of Apple

If you’ve experimented already with the “Describe a Shortcut” feature for iPhone automation, then “Describe an Extension” for Safari will seem familiar. It’s located under the same settings menu as the “Notify Me” tool, just a little further down.

This feeder also comes with extra plastic flowers and a little brush for scrubbing them, and the app sends reminders when it’s time to clean. You’ll find fun, seasonal touches in the app, like the ability to send digital bird holiday cards with the photos your feeder captures, and a tool that superimposes hats, clothes, and various accessories on the birds, which is actually funnier than it sounds. However, as with the Birdbuddy Pro seed feeder, below, the big downside is that the feeder’s sensor doesn’t always pick up every bird that visits, which can definitely be a bummer when you see something interesting out the window but it doesn’t show up in the app.

Best Smart Birdhouse

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WIRED

• Two cameras show two action views
• Pole-mountable solar panel was reliable in my testing
• Different hole sizes can be mounted for different species

TIRED

• Wood requires upkeep
• Birds didn’t like mesh floor (it is removable)

After experiencing another round of connection issues with the Birdfy Polygon (see below), I swapped it out for the newer Birdfy Duo and have had no issues. The sleek, contemporary Duo is a fir box fitted with two cameras—one facing the hole and one tucked discreetly inside the feeder, so you can get a full-spectrum view of what’s going on. Both cameras have night vision (the internal one is infrared). Like the Polygon, the Duo sports a remote for rebooting and recharging the camera (though the separate solar panel, which can be pole-mounted, has kept the cameras reliably charged), as well as different-size holes for different species, each with its own chew-proof predator guard.

There’s a metal grate with drainage holes that you can slot into grooves in the lower third of the Nest to make the cavity larger or smaller. The interested birds of my yard seemed very put off by the grate, so I covered it with a layer of moss, which was a success—a chickadee promptly moved in and laid seven eggs, which all hatched. This was the first time I’ve had an occasion to use the Birdfly app’s ability to collect images and string them together in a “story” that’s shareable online, but I didn’t find it especially useful or accurate. No matter, though, because the video captures have been a truly fascinating and educational experience, and I wish I could afford to buy the Duo for everyone I know.

So far, the Duo has been rained on a bunch and survived a couple of heat waves, but I can tell the wood will need refinishing after this season. (The feeder comes equipped with a thermometer and hygrometer, so you can keep an eye on conditions. I recently had to zip-tie an umbrella to mine during a heat wave, which likely saved some fledglings’ lives.)

Smart Bird Feeder With the Best App

• Screenshot courtesy of Kat Merck

Birdbuddy

Smart Bird Feeder Pro

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WIRED

• Fun and feature-rich app
• Built-in solar panel works great

TIRED

• Camera doesn’t always capture all birds

Birdbuddy’s Pro model sports a snazzy HDR camera that can also shoot 2K video with slow-motion capability. In addition to having a visibly larger and more advanced lens than the original Burdbuddy, the camera’s now got a larger focus range, 122-degree field of view, and high-fidelity microphone. (A subscription to Birdbuddy Premium for $70 a year unlocks 2K Ultra with a higher video bit rate, allowing for richer colors, sharper images, and less background noise—plus the ability to set alerts for sick or injured birds, among other things—but it’s perfectly usable without this. )

The photos aren’t nearly as impressive as those by competitors like the Birdfy Pro Duo, Camojojo Hibird, or Kiwibit, and the camera, frustratingly, only captures a small portion of the birds that actually visit. However, Birdbuddy’s app is a consistent standout, with a user-friendly design and plenty of helpful alerts, like if a cat is detected nearby, or if it’s time to clean the feeder.

It also serves up insights gathered over time, like what time certain species seem to prefer to visit. (Finches apparently like to visit my yard at 10 am daily.), and there are unique seasonal features like the ability to send holiday cards or “dress up” visiting birds with hats, glasses, and sweaters. Both Birdbuddys work with 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi only.

Inside, the Halo has a cylindrical IEST-certified HEPA three-stage filter that claims to capture 99.97 percent of nano-sized particles down to 0.3 microns, but in my opinion the coolest feature is the MegaScan Particle Sensor, which continuously monitors the air in real time to detect smoke, fine dust, and allergens down to PM2.5. PM2.5, typically used as the standard measurement for air purifiers’ ability to measure and lower levels of microscopic allergens or pollutants, are tiny airborne particles that measure 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter. They are particularly dangerous because their size means they can penetrate deep into the lungs and cause serious illness like asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer.

From the purifier’s top touchscreen panel, you can control fan speed, timer, and settings. On the quietest sleep setting, my decibel monitor app wasn’t even able to pick up the noise, as the fan wasn’t perceptible above the ambient noise of my house, even when I switched off all nearby appliances. Coway claims it’s 17 decibels in sleep mode, which I believe after not even being able to hear the machine in this mode. On the highest turbo setting, my decibel reader had it hovering around 75 decibels, which is akin to running a dishwasher or a vacuum.

As part of the Airmega Halo’s sleep features (in addition to whisper-quiet functioning), it has a low yellowish night light when in sleep mode, but this can also be turned off so the top panel is completely dark. It has a light sensor and automatically enters sleep mode, dimming lights and noise level when low light is detected.

When in smart mode and it’s dark for more than three minutes, the machine will automatically enter sleep mode. If the pollutant levels are “good” for more than three minutes, the fan stops automatically to save energy. But if it detects pollutants, it will restart the fan.

It has four lights indicating air quality levels: blue for good, green for moderate, yellow for unhealthy, and red for very unhealthy. The colored lights show in a halo around the top of the machine. I found it sort of tough to distinguish between levels at a glance because this color-coding system differs from the US AQI standards of green for good, yellow for moderate, red for unhealthy, purple for very unhealthy, and maroon for hazardous.

Mixed Signals

Hopefully, you come to WIRED Reviews because we actually vigorously test the gear we recommend. I didn’t just read the specs online and flip through the instruction manual—this machine was put through some intensely bad air to see if it could hold its own.

As with all air purifiers I test, the Halo was put through testing in various unhealthy air quality situations. I used this model for nearly a month, moving around my house to test in different locations: when cooking on my unventilated gas stove, under my living room window that draws in a lot of building and exhaust fumes, and outside my cat’s litter box. Additionally, I use an indoor air quality monitor to test pollutant levels against what the machine claims.

This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump–appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said. “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”

That may be true in Mississippi—but on the state level in at least nine US states, and in more than a dozen other countries, clean drinking water is in fact a protected right. In countries including Uruguay and South Africa, a right to clean water is enshrined in the constitution. New York’s state constitution, as of a 2021 amendment, states that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” So too in Massachusetts, where “the right to clean air and water” has been constitutionally protected since 1972.

But according to the Fifth Circuit ruling, the US constitution is too narrow for such a claim. The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices—a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.”

Jackson is more than 80 percent Black and has a poverty rate that is more than double the national average. The city’s water system has long been in dire need of upgrades. In 2015, officials from the Mississippi State Department of Health found elevated lead levels in the water supply. Instead of immediately informing citizens, they remained silent about the issue for six months, according to reporting from Grist, while residents continued drinking toxic water.

EPA officials ran a series of tests in 2020 and found “persistent and concerning violations” of water safety policy, including leaks, corrosion, and high lead levels throughout the system.

But no city, state, or federal agency fixed the problem. Meanwhile, people, including Jackson plaintiff Priscilla Sterling, continued drinking water with unsafe levels of lead. According to the 2022 lawsuit, several of Sterling’s children have since been diagnosed with lead poisoning, which can cause permanent brain damage. A quarter of Jackson’s residents are children, who are particularly vulnerable to the lifelong effects of lead poisoning.

The Fifth Circuit ruling comes as the Trump administration moves to weaken clean-water-related protections. Also on Friday, Trump’s EPA released a supplemental rule to further dilute the Clean Water Act, quickly condemned by environmental watchdogs.

“The administration is clearly struggling to craft a rule that will hold up in court while satisfying their donors’ desire to effectively scrap these protections wherever possible,” said Jim Murphy of the National Wildlife Federation. “One thing is clear: If we don’t protect our streams and wetlands, the cost of dirtier drinking water and increased flooding will flow downstream to households at a time when most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”

Mathematician and author Steven Strogatz starts to cry when he talks about the artificial-intelligence-driven breakthroughs in his field over the past week.

“The science is thrilling,” the Cornell University professor says, “but there’s a lot of human unpleasantness going with it.”

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it had used tens of thousands of agents to solve a 90-year-old math problem, which had a $1 million prize attached. The solution—which still needs to be independently verified—builds on a strategy developed by Spanish mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa. The announcement was marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who says that OpenAI rushed ahead to solve the problem after learning of his work alongside Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge. Buckmaster claims OpenAI also tried to influence who got credit for the work.

The rupture is a symptom of the rapid changes taking place in the field due to AI advancements and what Strogatz—who cowrote Big Math, a book about how math is slipping away from human understanding that will be out in November—describes as corporate labs’ race to grab headlines ahead of blockbuster IPOs.

Last week, Anthropic said Claude had proved 29,500 small theorems while formalizing an existing proof of the infamous Fermat’s Last Theorem—a project other mathematicians had been working on for years. In August, OpenAI announced it had made advancements in 10 other long-standing mathematical problems. AI is making mathematical breakthroughs happen faster, Strogatz says, but what it means for the experts who have dedicated their lives to the field is decidedly less clear.

“I think the year 2026 is going to be remembered as either an annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for mathematics because so much has happened,” Strogatz tells WIRED, sitting in front of a wall covered in framed university honors. “You will not be able to compete without AI in the future if you want to do breakthrough math,” he adds.

His book collaborator, Alex Townsend has already been using the technology to accelerate their research. He recently used ChatGPT to help solve a decades-old numerical linear algebra problem. Toward the end of the interview, Townsend walks into Strogatz’s attic. Townsend and his coauthor said that without the technology, the volume of work required and cost-reward ratio would have been unfeasibly high. But while AI has helped his work, it’s also changing how Townsend views the field and his role in it.

“I actually feel kind of upset that I’ve dedicated 15 years of my life to research mathematics, and at a point in my career where I’m very productive and at my peak strength as a mathematician, that peak skill is no longer there. Something is able to surpass me,” he says. “Before, it was so exciting because you’re world-class, doing great research, pushing back the frontier of knowledge, and now I don’t feel like I’m the one at the frontier of knowledge. I’m the one with an AI agent, which feels very different actually. And I feel totally threatened by it.”

For his part, Strogratz likens the current moment for math to a horror movie, as AI, driven by systems that are not well understood, creeps closer and closer. “But we’re not at the end of the movie yet,” Strogratz says. “Instinctively, I’m really terrified.”

Here, he reflects on what the AI breakthroughs of 2026 mean for math, mathematicians, and humanity. His answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Photograph: Sheryl Sinkow

Best 2-in-1 Chargers

Zens

Nightstand Charger Pro 2

With a weighty base, an adjustable Qi2/MagSafe charging pad, and a fold-out Apple Watch charger around the back, this Zens 2-in-1 is ideal for folks with an iPhone and Apple Watch. The Apple Watch pad folds out of the back, tucking your watch out of sight and allowing room for the strap to droop. The pad works great with StandBy mode. You can also fold the pad flat and charge AirPods or other phones if you need to, just not at the same time as your iPhone. Sadly, this has a barrel port for the provided cable and charger (USB-C would be better), the Apple Watch charger can be a little stiff and tricky to fold out, and it’s pricey, but I love the quality, look, and feel.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Belkin

UltraCharge 2-in-1 Foldable Magnetic Wireless Charger (Qi2 25W)

Belkin’s UltraCharge 2-in-1 unseats our previous favorite, the BoostCharge Pro 2-in-1, which is still a great option. However, the latest model features Qi2 25W charging support to charge compatible devices even faster. It also has a folding design, allowing you to take it with you on the go, but it also works great as a permanent charger for your desk or nightstand. Over on the back, there’s a spot to place AirPods or any wireless earbuds with wireless charging. What’s also great is the spare USB-C port—you can pop in a cable to charge your Apple Watch at 5 watts (or another device); it just won’t charge very fast. (Belkin also has a 3-in-1 version of this model if you want a dedicated spot for the Apple Watch.) Best of all, Belkin includes a very compact 45-watt power adapter and a USB-C to USB-C cable, which is better than many other wireless chargers that cost more. It’s a nifty little thing, and looks great in blue. —Julian Chokkattu

iOttie Velox Duo for $60: This was our 2-in-1 pick for a while. The black-and-gold combo looks great, the magnet is strong, and there’s a weighted base. On the downside, it only charges iPhones at up to 7.5 watts. The permanently attached USB-C cable is a good length, but you do have to provide a wall adapter.

Belkin BoostCharge Pro 2-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock with MagSafe for $120: This was our old 2-in-1 pick for iPhone and Apple Watch. I like the soft-touch finish, the pad on top can move through 70 degrees, and the shelf for your Apple Watch works with any strap. The braided USB-C cable is permanently attached, but you get a 30-watt wall charger in the box. I don’t remember having issues when I first tested, but using it again, I found the weight of the camera end of my iPhone 14 Pro caused it to slowly droop when in StandBy mode. It’s also kinda pricey.

Belkin BoostCharge Pro 2-in-1 MagSafe-Compatible Wireless Charging Pad for $80: Qi2 support provides magnetic alignment for your iPhone and delivers 15 watts of charging, and there’s a spot for AirPods on this compact dual pad. A USB-C port allows you to charge something else, such as an Apple Watch, and you get a 5-foot USB-C cable and 30W power supply in the box. There is also a 3-in-1 pad ($110) that adds an Apple Watch charger on the right side.

More 3-in-1 Chargers to Consider

We have tested several other 3-in-1 Apple charging stations. Here are a few we liked:

Journey

Nova 3-in-1 Fast Wireless Charging Station

With a refreshingly different look, the Nova from Journey is one of the most stylish 3-in-1 chargers I’ve tested. I love the black and walnut finish. Your Qi2 phone can charge at up to 15 watts; there’s a fast-charging Apple Watch pad that pops up around the back, and the space in the middle can charge AirPods at 5 watts. There’s also a handy night light with a touch-sensitive button that’s just enough to see what you’re doing. It’s compact and comes with a USB-C cable, but no power adapter, and I found the magnetic front a little weak.

OtterBox 3-in-1 Charging Stand for $140: This solid, fairly compact aluminum 3-in-1 charging station can charge all your Apple gadgets (25W for iPhone, 5W for Apple Watch, 5W for AirPods) and comes with a 6.6-foot cable and a 45-watt wall charger. While this new version of OtterBox’s 3-in-1 stand supports Qi2 25W, the design is unchanged, so you still can’t alter the angle of the pads. The integrated Apple Watch charger allows for Nightstand mode, but it is the weak link here, and I sometimes find my watch twists slightly.

Noco X Grid XDS3.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Noco X Grid XDS3 for $130: Well made, with an eye-catching design, this 3-in-1 charger has a wide base that’s great for stability. It’s easy to remove your iPhone one-handed too, though it does have a relatively large footprint. It’s a bit bulky to travel with. You can stick your Qi2 phone to the pad in portrait or landscape, and the large bottom 5W pad is suitable for AirPods or even a second phone. You also get an adapter, generous 6.5-foot braided USB-C cable, and plug adapters for different countries in the box. It supports Apple Watch fast charging, but I didn’t like the way my Apple Watch tended to tilt to one side, and the charging pad positions are fixed (you can’t change the angle).

Twelve South HiRise 3 Deluxe for $100: Twelve South’s 3-in-1 is an elegant wireless charger for the nightstand and gives the iPhone plenty of breathing room to rotate it to landscape mode and take advantage of StandBy. I like that the iPhone charger can swivel up and down. On the base is a fast charger for the Apple Watch that you can flip up, and the back has a spot for the AirPods or another wireless earbuds case. It’s nice and weighty and doesn’t slide around easily. It comes with a proprietary, removable charging cable, along with a charging brick, and international plug adapters for the US, UK, EU, and AU.

Anker Prime 3-in-1.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Anker Prime 3-in-1 Charging Station for $230: Sporting a tree design similar to our top pick from Belkin, the very latest Qi2 25W charging, fast Apple Watch charging, active cooling, and an interactive display, this is perhaps the most feature-packed 3-in-1 charger on the market. You can connect via Bluetooth and configure in the app to set wallpapers for the clock, schedule night mode to dim the display and turn off the cooling, and track your charging stats in a table. I’m just not sure it’s worth the premium. The finicky touch display is flat, so you have to sit up to see it, and it looks a bit cheap to me. It also feels superfluous when your iPhone already offers Standby mode.

Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station Stand for $111: This good-looking 3-in-1 charging tree is more affordable than our top pick, boasts Qi2 certification for 15-watt charging, and comes with a charger and cable. It just misses out on a place above because of the offset pad for the Apple Watch. It is slippery, so your Apple Watch may tilt, though I never had an issue with it not charging. Anker included stickers to combat this, but they are a fiddly and inelegant solution. It’s also a shame that the main pad for your iPhone is fixed, so you can’t adjust the angle. But these are minor gripes.

Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe for $130: This dinky, dense, 2.5-inch cube from Anker was our previous compact pick. It has a MagSafe pad on top (15 watts), and the top section hinges to a 60-degree angle, revealing a charging surface for your AirPods. The small pop-out shelf on the side has a built-in Apple Watch fast charger. You get a 5-foot cable and a 30-watt charger in the box.

Zens Office Charger Pro 3

Photograph: Simon Hill

Zens Office Charger Pro 3 for $85: I’m a fan of some of the interesting, out-of-the-box designs that Zens turns out, but this 3-in-1, while well-made and perfectly functional, doesn’t really stand out. It’s Qi2 certified (15W for iPhone, 5W for Apple Watch, 5W for AirPods), looks nice, and comes with the cable and charger, though it has a barrel port.

Lululook 3-in-1 Charging Station for $60: This is a perfectly competent 3-in-1 with Qi2 certification (15W for iPhone, 5W for Apple Watch, 5W for AirPods). It’s compact, you can angle the iPhone pad, and I like the gold finish of my review unit, but I prefer the Twelve South above, or the ESR if you don’t want to spend as much.

QDOS SnapStand 3-in-1 for £80: This clever design feels sturdy and comes flat, and you can fold out and angle a magnetic pad for charging your iPhone (StandBy mode works fine). There’s a pop-out Apple Watch charger around the back, and the base has a pad for your AirPods. You get a black USB-C cable, but you’ll need a charger (at least 25W). I like that it’s partly made from recycled materials, and it folds away very neatly, but the charging speeds are relatively slow (7.5 watts for the iPhone and 2.5 watts for the Apple Watch).

Satechi 3-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charging Stand for $130: This compact, attractive 3-in-1 is a little smaller than the Belkin, so it doesn’t take up too much room, and it folds down compactly for travel. The aluminum build is attractive and sturdy (the iPhone mount is made of stainless steel). This is on former reviews editor Adrienne So’s bedside table, and it recharges her Apple Watch Ultra 2 from 70 percent to full in around 30 minutes.

Case-Mate Fuel 3-in-1 Foldable for $58: Finished in a classy gray material, this 3-in-1 charges an iPhone in a case or any Qi smartphone, and it’s easy to fold flat and pack in a bag. It also has a built-in Apple Watch charger and a spot for AirPods. A cable and a 45-watt charger are included. I also tested the solid Case-Mate Fuel 4-in-1 ($150), which is quite good, but the unnecessary LEDs and Fuel logo put me off.

Best 4-in-1 Chargers

Mophie

4-in-1 Wireless Charge Stand

The whole point of a 3-in-1 is to reduce clutter and cables while still getting all your devices charged. And if you have an extra device, a 4-in-1 is one step better. This stand has a lovely compact design with a tilting Qi2 25W pad for your phone, an Apple Watch charger around the back, and an indented pad on the base for your AirPods. That’s all familiar. What elevates it is the retractable USB-C cable that unfurls from the back and can deliver up to 60 watts. My wife uses it for her Oura charger, but she can also plug in her MacBook when it’s running low. It’s pricey, but there’s a 5-foot USB-C cable and a 100W wall adapter in the box. The gold finish is nice, too, but you can also opt for black or white.

Zens 4-in-1 Modular Wireless Charger with iPad Charging Stand for $130: If you also own an iPad, why not a 4-in-1 charging station? Zens’ modular design has a main stand for your iPad, a MagSafe pad in front to float your iPhone, and a slight indentation to charge AirPods below. The Apple Watch charger is a separate section that attaches magnetically (on either side) and holds your Watch in horizontal Nightstand mode. It feels durable with a grippy, rubbery, flecked black finish made from recycled plastic. You get a 65-watt power adapter, power cable, and adapter plugs for the US, UK, and EU, which is quite handy. The main drawback with this is the large size, and you have to connect a cable to the USB-C port on the side to charge your iPad.

Scosche Baselynx 2.0 Modular Charging Station for $100: What if three spots are not enough? Scosche has you covered with this modular charging station. The basic stand is a 2-in-1 for your iPhone and AirPods, but you can add an Apple Watch charger, a toast rack-style vertical station with USB-C ports, or even an AC outlet with USB-C port, for a big combined charger ($230). The trouble is, it gets quite big and expensive as you add modules, and I don’t love the way it looks, but it’s a neat idea.

Avoid These Chargers

Photograph: Simon Hill

Not every charger will be a winner. Here are the ones we didn’t like.

Infinacore T3 Pro: The T3 Pro is a 3-in-1 stand that looks and feels very cheap, and it got warm when charging my iPhone. Its saving grace is that it is cheap. It also has Qi2 certification and works with StandBy mode. I also tried the fold-out triple pad Infinacore T3 Wireless Charging Station. Aside from the ugly plastic design, the weak magnets meant it did not work well when folded into the triangular configuration (this also blocks a pad).

Groov-e Asteria Wireless Charging Station with Alarm Clock: There’s a small clock on the front of this charging station, which can accommodate an iPhone, AirPods on a pad around back, and an Apple Watch up top. It feels and looks very cheap, slides around a little too easily, the magnet is weak, and the clock seems redundant when you can set your iPhone in StandBy mode. I also tried the Triton 3-in-1 folding pad, and it was okay. They are very affordable, but you must provide your own power adapter.

Zike 3-in-1 Z557C Stand: This 3-in-1 charger works perfectly well, but there are several better options above. The iPhone pad allows for StandBy mode but is not adjustable. The Apple Watch pad flips up or can be laid flat, and there’s a spot for AirPods on the gray felt pad. It has a barrel port, so you must use the supplied power adapter. What I really dislike about this charger is the ridiculously bright, utterly pointless white LED on the front that stays on the entire time.

Alogic Matrix Ultimate: This 3-in-1 charger has a folding design, supports fast charging, includes a detachable 5,000-mAh power bank, and comes with a nice pouch, but it is kinda bulky, and the white finish picks up dust and smudges very easily. I have also had issues with other Alogic batteries failing and not supplying the stated capacity.

STM Goods ChargeTree Go: This charging tree station folds flat and can charge a trio of Apple gadgets. But there’s no quick-charge support, my Apple Watch kept sliding out of place during the night, and there’s no adapter included. It’s not cheap either.

A Quick Primer on MagSafe

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Most of the wireless chargers in this guide are MagSafe wireless chargers or Qi2 certified. That means they take advantage of the magnets embedded in the back of the iPhone 12, iPhone 13, iPhone 14, iPhone 15, iPhone 16, and iPhone 17 range. I cannot stress this enough: If you buy a case, ensure it is a MagSafe case. We have several third-party options in the linked case guides above. A normal iPhone case will weaken the pull of the magnets in the device and will not stick to MagSafe accessories well.

What’s the point of MagSafe? You don’t have to worry about misalignment with the wireless charger, meaning you won’t wake up to a dead iPhone. Technically, this perfect alignment enables chargers to deliver faster 15-watt charging. MagSafe is also available in the AirPods charging case (depending on your model). Apple’s AirPods and AirPods Pro with the wireless charging case will work with nearly all of the standard Qi wireless charging pads on these chargers (as will many third-party wireless earbuds), but if you have AirPods with MagSafe, then you can hook them up to the magnetic mounts as well. If you don’t have a MagSafe iPhone, then your device won’t be able to attach to these chargers, though we do have some recommendations for older iPhones (and the iPhone 16e).

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Qi2 is the latest wireless charging standard, and Apple worked with the Wireless Power Consortium to develop it. Compared to the original Qi standard, it brings MagSafe-style magnetic charging, faster charging rates, and improved efficiency—but where MagSafe is an Apple technology designed for Apple products, any device can support Qi2. Apple updated the iPhone 12 and newer to support Qi2, so Qi2 should be a term you look for when shopping for a magnetic wireless charger. Qi2 Android phones are still thin on the ground right now—it’s officially available in Google’s Pixel 10 series—though Qi2 Ready phones add magnets using a compatible case. Expect more Qi2 Android phones soon. A Qi2 charger can charge your iPhone and any other Qi2 phones.

While Qi2 charging generally goes up to 15 watts, the Qi2.2 update, branded as Qi2 25W, can go up to 25 watts. But support for Qi2 25W is currently very limited, and includes the iPhone 17 range and the Pixel 10 Pro XL.

What Are StandBy Mode and Nightstand Mode?

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You’ll see us bring up two specific modes throughout this guide: StandBy mode and Nightstand mode. What are they?

StandBy mode was introduced in iOS 17. When you place your iPhone on a charger in landscape orientation, it will turn the screen into a dock of sorts, showing the clock (with different designs you can choose from), photos from your library, or widgets. If you have an iPhone that supports an always-on screen, you can choose to have the display automatically turn off after some time when the iPhone isn’t in use or if the room is dark. Head to Settings > Standby to customize it.

Nightstand mode has long been around on the Apple Watch. Basically, when the watch is sitting upright and charging, the clockface will stay on so you can always tell the time. You can customize this on your Apple Watch by heading to Settings > General > Nightstand mode.

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In one case, a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers identified by Microsoft as Midnight Blizzard used Claude for reconnaissance, breaching targets that included Ukrainian and other European government networks, and stole data and maintained access. Cybercriminal group ShinyHunters used Claude in practically every stage of its hacking and extortion campaigns. Disinformation campaigns focusing on politics everywhere from Kenya to Bangladesh used the tool. And perhaps most disturbingly, in a handful of cases, Anthropic discovered what appeared to be users of its tools attempting to develop potential bioweapons like disease pathogens and toxins.

While Anthropic touts its success in the report in heading off these threats—while implicitly humblebragging at the power of its tools—the effect of the case studies is more unnerving than reassuring. After all, there’s no guarantee Anthropic has spotted every malevolent use of its AI. Factor in its competitors and less safeguarded open-source AI tools, and the report reads like less of a victory lap for AI’s guardrails than a preview of AI-enabled chaos to come.

Xinbi Guarantee, over its four-year lifespan, grew into the biggest illicit marketplace on the internet. It carried out an estimated $30 billion–plus in sales, most of which took the form of money laundering for “pig butchering” crypto scam operations—largely based in Southeast Asia—but which also included sex trafficking and harassment for hire. All of it thrived on the Telegram messaging service, which shut down Xinbi a year ago only for it to rebuild and eventually grow larger than ever. This week, finally, the US government stepped in to do what Telegram did not, seizing the Xinbi’s channels on Telegram’s platform and sanctioning the market. The Justice Department simultaneously announced raids on 13 scam compounds in Madagascar—a sign that Western law enforcement is beginning to take seriously the epidemic of forced labor crypto scamming, but also evidence of how widely the operations have spread.

The ransomware gang Conti was, until it officially disbanded in 2022, one of the most dangerous hacker crews in the world. According to US law enforcement, it hit more than a thousand victims, extorting millions and at one point disrupting government systems in Costa Rica so completely that it triggered a state of emergency. Now one member of that group is facing justice: 44-year-old Ukrainian Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko was sentenced to four years in prison this week, in a rare example of a ransomware actor who will see the inside of a US prison.

Facebook is hosting a large network of accounts uploading AI-generated videos that depict violence against children, according to Futurism, which spent days cataloging the material and kept finding more than it could count. The clips show young children being beaten, burned, confined, and starved. Many attract thousands of reactions from users who appear to think the footage is real. Futurism said it found most of the accounts by opening one and then following Facebook’s recommendation feed, which supplied a continuous stream of similar videos—a sign Meta’s own systems can already identify the category of content the company says it bans.

Futurism reported eight of the accounts through the standard user channel. Meta removed two, one of them after first rejecting the report. Several decisions took more than a week. The company deleted most of the videos sent to its press office, but initially left others up, including one showing a child locked in a freezer.

In addition to blanket bans on child sexual abuse material, Meta’s written policy bars depictions of nonsexual child abuse whether real or synthetic, with exceptions for art, cartoons, movies, and games. It does not say whether AI-generated video falls under those exceptions. In a statement, Meta told the reporters that some flagged links did not break its rules and asked them not to write otherwise.

Rockstar Games’ best-selling Grand Theft Auto series wasn’t often accused of political sensitivity during its legendary run from the late 1990s through the early 2010s.

In fact, parents and activists denounced the franchise for exposing children to a seedy world of sex, violence, crude humor, and wanton crime. Elon Musk even claimed that he couldn’t get into the last installment, GTA V, because he was mortified to play as a character who shoots police officers.

But times (and moral panics) change. In the 13 years that fans have waited for Grand Theft Auto VI—finally out on November 19—the American right-wing grievance machine has drifted from fears of impressionable kids turning to a life of larceny to concerns that they will grow up “woke.” And despite knowing very little about the forthcoming game, the agitators of the latter movement have decided it must amount to a stealth campaign to poison the youth with depictions of gender equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and racial diversity. (Rockstar did not immediately return a request for comment.)

Since the height of Gamergate in 2014, an angst-ridden subset of male gamers have maintained a paranoid vigil against what they see as the creeping influence of women and LGBTQ developers in the gaming world. Between the feverish anticipation for GTA VI and the various delays of its release date, they’ve had ample opportunity to foment a preemptive backlash to what is sure to be a massive hit, not unlike the failed furor over supposedly “woke” elements of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

“GTA 6 is a humiliation ritual for all male gamers,” an X user with the handle @Wokenessisevil complained on Tuesday, sharing a clip of the game’s two lead characters, Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, who are in a relationship that evolves based on the player’s choices. In the scene, Lucia, the series’ first mandatory female protagonist, asks Jason to pick an outfit for her and expresses mild annoyance when he seems more or less indifferent to the options she presents.

It’s an exchange that could have been lifted from any sitcom of the past 50 years, yet it seems to have fueled a reactionary narrative about the game’s male protagonist being subjugated to a nefarious feminist agenda. Another X user recently claimed, contrary to the clip’s bog-standard depiction of a heterosexual couple, that Jason has a “gay vibe,” since no straight man would know what sequins are or use the word “cocktails,” as he does in the clip.

“The script is definitely written by a woman who has no clue what a man thinks or how he talks,” they wrote. “Jason is written as a caricature, much like what a delusional woman thinks a ‘man’ should be.”

Similarly, a gaming YouTuber seethed that Rockstar was appealing to women and gay men by showing Jason shirtless in another scene. “Gone are the days of edgy based masculine GTA games,” he wrote on X. “I could be wrong but right now it’s looking like it will be a woke fest.”

While multiple leaks and a 27-minute “extended look” preview on Netflix have revealed key details of the game, and Rockstar creatives declared their intent to realistically portray the diversity of the Miami-inspired setting and bring a fleshed-out female character into the spotlight, would-be detractors are still straining a bit for reasons to pronounce it dead on arrival. One YouTuber has convinced himself that it will subliminally brainwash players with “bisexual lighting.”

Tips and Frequently Asked Questions

Is a Standing Desk Worth It?

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New research shows that while standing desks can potentially mitigate some health risks by limiting your sitting time, standing too long isn’t all that great and can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. I reached out to Anne-Kristina Arnold, a kinesiology expert and senior lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology at Simon Fraser University. She says the results from this recent study “illustrate how challenging some of this epidemiological research is.”

“To say standing workstations are good for everybody in every situation all the time is never going to flow,” Arnold tells WIRED. “There are so many variables, so many varied kinds of work we do—we’re varied in our body sizes, in our fitness, in the shoes we wear. It’s really hard to be able to say definitively that standing workstations are good. The research is mixed.”

Switching from sitting to standing doesn’t solve all problems, and standing too long can cause its own problems. If you want to work with a standing workstation, Arnold recommends to use it in the standing position for 20 minutes per hour. If you have a normal desk, get up and move every 15 to 20 minutes. However, there’s no definitive guideline. “The standing workstation isn’t necessarily the answer—getting up and walking is better,” Arnold concludes. —Julian Chokkattu

Electric vs. Manual Standing Desks

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Our guide here focuses largely on electric standing desks, which have motors in the legs to smoothly move the table up and down. However, we have a few manual standing desk recommendations, too. If you’re planning on switching up how you work a few times every day, an electric desk will simply be more convenient. However, if you just want to be able to adjust the height of your desk and won’t be changing it all that often, then maybe look at manual standing desks. They’re often cheaper.

How to Properly Stand and Sit With a Standing Desk

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The same ergonomic rules you follow when sitting at a workstation apply when you’re standing. When your elbows are at a 90-degree position, you want the desk keyboard to be elbow height. Your monitor should be at eye level (a good rule of thumb is the top of your monitor should meet your eye), and if you’re using a laptop, you should keep it angled with a laptop stand for a more ergonomic typing position. Be sure to adjust your office chair appropriately to the floor before adjusting the height of your desk.

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Cable management is exceptionally important when it comes to standing desks. After setting up your standing desk, make sure you keep an eye on every single wire that’s connected to something on the desk when you start raising the desktop. Otherwise, funny things start to happen: wires come undone, or scoot light objects off the desk.

WIRED reviewer Julian Chokkattu has unboxed and set up many desks over the years, and yet he still made a rookie move. As he was raising a desk, he didn’t realize his Ethernet cable was taut, and it broke cleanly off the back of his PC when the desk reached a certain height. Welp. As for me, I’m a naturally distracted person, and so I need to tack my cables down or suffer grievous consequences on the regular.

Keep an eye on the wires. Keep an eye on stuff near the wires. If you’re not careful, you can even accidentally knock art off your wall. —Matthew Korfhage

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I and other members of WIRED’s Reviews team test standing desks in our own homes and in our own home offices. We use desks for months at a time (even years, in some cases), jotting down every flaw we see over the course of that time and noting any highlights. We look at building materials, motor noise, motor speed, preset options, cable management, and ease of use—and of course, the simple intangibles like aesthetics.

We gauge the difficulty of the assembly and setup, as well as the difficulty of disassembling or moving each desk. Desks are a solid investment, and so we expect a desk to be with us for years, perhaps longer than we live in a city. And so we also look at both the length of the warranty and the service reputation of each company.

Sometimes a small detail can take on outsized importance when using a desk over long periods, whether the existence or nonexistence of a grommet, a rounded edge, or a bolt that gets a little wobbly over time. That’s why WIRED’s Reviews team believes in the value of long-term testing, and why we do so in our own home offices.

This long-term testing also means it’s not easy for our small team to test every single desk out there, as these are bulky, big pieces of furniture and the setup is fairly involved. This means you may see a few missing brands in this guide, but we’re always testing and adding more desks. —Matthew Korfhage

Other Standing Desks to Consider

Photograph: Nicole Kinning

Ergodriven Tempo Automatic Standing Desk for $629: It was only a matter of time before desks got “smart,” right? This Tempo from new-ish company Ergodriven is designed to automate the process of standing or sitting, with a Cruise Control function that will encourage you to change position during the day by, well, automatically doing so. A “wiggle” will alert you when the desk wants to change position, which you can override manually if you’re eating lunch or in a meeting. A sensor will register your presence, so the desk won’t move when you’re away. WIRED contributor Nicole Kinning found that this all works as promised—as does a little app that registers “achievements” like standing time. But note the desk, while sturdy, is also a bit heavy, and a slight cosmetic crack formed early on the rounded edge. The 16-year warranty provides a bit of assurance.

Photograph: Nicole Kinning

Luxor Compact Electric Standing Desk for $200: The Luxor is a no-nonsense standing desk that does exactly what you expect and takes up minimal space. It’s perfect for students, small apartments, and anyone who needs a compact, budget-friendly setup. At 23.5 inches deep, the tabletop is shallow enough to fit into tight corners or shared spaces. The electric lift moves steadily at an inch per second, whisper-quiet, and the 154-pound weight capacity can handle a laptop, monitor, and a few textbooks with no sweat. The lift mechanism is exposed underneath, so you’ll want to leave some legroom when at sitting height. —Nicole Kinning

Simple Height Adjustable Desk for $850: The Simple Height Adjustable Desk lives up to its name. Assembly is straightforward and cable routing is tidy thanks to an integrated channel that keeps everything corralled. The T-shaped legs slide into a bracket instead of screwing or locking into place, which feels a little ambiguous, but once it’s upright, the desk is solid and sturdy. In practice, the desk became everything I needed. It’s smooth, quiet, and spacious, with four height presets. The laminate top is durable and forgiving—ideal if you’re like me and regularly forget that coasters exist. There are no fancy gimmicks, which is exactly the point. It’s a dependable, fuss-free desk that prioritizes function over flashy. —Nicole Kinning

Photograph: Nicole Kinning

Eureka Ergonomic Opal Standing Desk for $2,250: WIRED contributor Nicole Kinning was a big fan of the, well, opaline looks of the Eureka Ergonomic Opal standing desk. It’s a sturdy, milky-toned, downright fancy-looking pillar of vaguely art-deco luxe: beaded cabinets on each leg, gold hardware, marbled top, integrated drawer, hooooooey! It all makes for a quite distinctive aesthetic, and setup is a bit tricky given the heft of the desk. But unlike most standing desks, this one is outfitted quite beautifully as a full workstation, with roomy cabinets in each leg and a drawer offering ample storage. Just be sure to put grips on the bottom; it slid around on Kinning’s hard floors like a curling stone, she noted. Once it’s in place, bask in the stateliness. It’s the rare standing desk where she could see herself writing a Great American Novel.

Autonomous Desk Pro for $600: The standout feature here is the new Desk AI, a separate control attachment that tracks your standing habits along with environmental factors like air pressure and quality, temperature, humidity, and noise. In theory, it’s meant to help you work smarter, but in practice, it mostly flags things you can’t control from the desk itself. If it came with an air purifier or fan to manage these conditions, then we’d be talkin’. Still, it’s a fun and techy bonus on an otherwise reliable desk.

Photograph: Nicole Kinning

Vari Solid Wood Electric Standing Desk for $829: Even though it’s solid wood, this desk never felt too precious for everyday use. Made from FSC-certified lumber, the desk is heavy and stable, even at standing height on carpet, and the motor is impressively quiet and subtle when adjusting. The ComfortEdge feature turned out to be more helpful than reviewer Nicole Kinning expected; over long typing sessions, it noticeably softened where my wrists meet the desk, a nice upgrade to a standard desk’s hard, squared-off edges. Yes, the solid wood Vari is on the pricier side, but it feels justified if solid wood and long-term durability matter to you. If they don’t, consider the traditional version.

Boulies Magvida for $760: The Boulies Magvida advertises its best feature in the name itself. This midsize desk (55 x 28 inches) is known for its EMO system, a magnetic organization setup built beneath the desktop. Instead of drilling holes or fiddling with brackets, you just snap accessories, like a cable tray, hooks, and silicone straps, into place. The add-ons feel premium and the magnets don’t budge, and there’s an optional magnetic drawer that’s also handy. Add in memory presets, a child lock, anti-collision detection, and simple color options and you’ve got a clean, clever setup.

Herman Miller Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk for $1,325: As someone who spent years hunching over keyboards, obsessive research led WIRED reviewer Simon Hill to the Jarvis Standing Desk (now owned by Herman Miller), which has served him well for six years. With a contoured bamboo top, handy optional extras to tuck wires out of sight, and a responsive control panel for easy height adjustment (including presets), this is an excellent standing desk. The only weakness is that it wobbles slightly at higher levels. The newer touchscreen OLED control unit is not as reliable as the original, so opt for the programmable controls.

Room & Board Lincoln Desk for $5,399: Few standing desks can lay claim to true elegance. But Room & Board’s Lincoln desk—designed in collaboration with design firm Gensler—is an exception. This is a dignified, sturdy, wobble-free electric standing desk that’d fit in with an executive office or a well-appointed home, made with solid wood and available in walnut, maple, cherry, ash, or oak (with a rye, salt, or charcoal stain). You can configure the desk to have integrated drawers on the left, right, or on both sides if you choose the larger 72-inch size. There’s even a drawer in the center! This is what privilege looks like, where standing desks are concerned. The price is commensurately high, though take note this included white glove delivery and assembly. Also take note that the thickness of the desktop means only some clamps will mount onto its girth. This monitor arm mount will work, but for some mounts, you might have to directly screw it to the desktop. All in all, this is a gorgeous standing desk that doesn’t look anything like a standing desk, but with a few quirks and a high price.

Staples Union & Scale Electric Standing Desk With Micro Movements (UN62092) for $513: Staples’ house brand, Union & Scale, makes some of WIRED reviewer Julian Chokkattu’s favorite affordable office furniture, and its standing desk is no exception—though at this middle price range, it didn’t keep pace with Branch’s reasonably priced desks. Still, this was easy to put together, and while the white desktop is not much to look at, the dual motors do the job. He liked the control panel, which has dedicated buttons for moving the desk up and down, as well as two height presets. He also didn’t see any wobble, though the collision sensor could stand to be more sensitive. There’s a cable tray at the bottom back of the desk to route cables, but there’s sadly no grommet to pull them through. The Micro Movement mode moves the desk up and down over time to reduce fatigue and encourage movement, but it might be more distracting than useful.

Beflo Tenon Premium for $3,998: While incredibly expensive (and heavy!), WIRED contributor Henri Robbins found the hardwood smart desk both sturdy and well-designed. Assembly was straightforward, and once the desk was up and running, Robbins found all of the features (touchscreen controls, a built-in power strip, audio passthrough, and LED lighting) to work well, and in convenient locations. The touchscreen controls are intuitive (iOS-like), and features like a sit/stand timer and phone connectivity provide additional functionality. The desk supports over 200 pounds of stuff even when moving, and the height-adjustment motors will temporarily disable if they overheat, instead of risking damage to the desk. The table also looks fantastic, and a multitude of first-party accessories let you customize the desk to your specific needs. The largest issue with this table is the noise. While in no way loud, it was certainly more audible than the “whisper-quiet” descriptor Beflo uses in its marketing. Besides that, the lighting color adjustment had some difficulties creating specific colors using the built-in touchscreen, and the audio cable was too short to reach a desktop computer on the floor, even at the lowest height. However, the Tenon is still a great, if pricey, option to consider.

Herman Miller Spout Sit-to-Stand Table for $3,275: Herman Miller’s Spout Sit-To-Stand Table is lovely to look at. Like the Branch Four-Legged Desk, it looks like a normal desk with four legs, giving it a luxe look. Those motors in the legs rise smoothly, and it’s easy to raise and lower the desktop to my preferences with the button on the right. The motor does have a high hum to it, and WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell found it loud enough that she’d hesitate to use it when her husband is on a call in the same room, but not so loud it would disturb her son if he were sleeping a room away. Bizarrely, it doesn’t have memory presets, but it’s pretty easy to just adjust the desk each time to sitting and standing heights. You can add a cable tray underneath the desk each time to organize cords, but it costs extra. The only other item built into the desk is a single slim center drawer perfect for pens and notebooks. It comes in three desktop sizes and three finishes: laminate white, veneer walnut, and veneer ash. You can also customize the base color, with seven different colors ranging from your classic black and white to a gentle blue and olive green. While it’s gorgeous to look at and works well, Farrell found it disappointing that such a high-priced desk doesn’t have presets and uses veneers rather than real wood.

FlexiSpot E7 Pro for $400+: Standing desks can get pricey, but FlexiSpot routinely offers similar functionality at a lower price. At first glance, the E7 Pro looks much like the Herman Miller Jarvis, but look closer, and you discover the entry-level option has a shallow 23-inch desktop, the control unit feels a bit cheap, and it emits a high-pitched whine in operation. WIRED reviewer Simon Hill had some issues fitting larger power adapters in the cable tidily, and the desk can get wobbly when fully extended. But, even when fully configured, the E7 Pro is cheaper than many rivals. Minor flaws aside, it is a perfectly decent standing desk.

Inbox Zero 47-inch Adjustable Electric Standing Desk for $196: This desk has every feature you’d expect to need at the price range less than $200, wrote former WIRED reviewer Martin Cizmar. There are rolling casters so you can not only move the desk up and down, but also shake it all around. The desk’s electric controls have presets but also allow you to fine-tune the height for typing or Zooming. The split top that makes it easier and cheaper to ship doesn’t hurt the performance, but is less pleasant visually, and the little motor works audibly hard (tshunk, tschunk, tshunk) while raising the desktop. Based on three months of testing, it’s a decent budget standing desk with casters, but if you can spend a little more, you’ll probably be happier with something else.

Standing Desk Accessories

Branch Clamp-on Power

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Branch Clamp-on Power for $89: This simple and elegant clamp attaches to your desktop and adds three AC outlets, a USB-C, and a USB-A, so you don’t have so many wires running down to the ground.

LumeCube EdgeLight 2.0 for $150: Why have a lamp take up valuable desk space when you can clamp the lamp to your desk? These task lights from LumeCube are great for illuminating the desktop and even your face during late-night Zoom calls. You can adjust the color temperature and the brightness.

BenQ ScreenBar Lamp

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

BenQ ScreenBar Lamp for $139: Alternatively, you can place these ScreenBar lamps over your computer monitor, and it will light up your desktop, no clamping required. The ScreenBar Pro also has a motion sensor, so when you leave your desk, the lamp will turn off, and it will light up when you’re back. You can adjust the brightness and color temperature, and an automatic setting makes it adjust these controls based on the room’s ambient lighting.

Secretlab Premium Footrest for $89: WIRED reviewer Julian Chokkattu been using this footrest for several years, and it’s excellent. The plush memory foam is cushy and a nice respite for Chokkattu’s feet, and it’s easy to clean with a vacuum and a damp cloth. It hasn’t shown much wear despite years of use.

Monoprice Single Monitor Adjustable Gas Spring Desk Mount for $84: WIRED reviewer Julian Chokkattu has tested a few of these WorkStream arm mounts for years, and they’ve reliably done the job. You can adjust the tension with a hex key and move the monitor around to your desired position. Just make sure you don’t go over the recommended weight load with a big and heavy screen.

Mount-It! Dual Monitor Arm for $280: This heavy-duty monitor arm holds up my ultrawide monitor and my vertical monitor, both of which have BenQ Screenbar lamps on top, along with my webcam. It handles the weight with no effort, and the clamp is accommodating enough to even work with the 5-inch Room & Board standing desk. There’s RGB lighting throughout, but it’s not bright enough to splash onto the wall, so it’s a little pointless, noted WIRED Reviewer Julian Chokkattu.

Harber London Professional Desk Mat for $239: Keep your desktop protected with a large desk mat like this one. I’ve used several mats from Harber London over the years, and this latest model is the favorite of WIRED reviewer Julian Chokkattu. The pebbled leather is supple and soft, and the mat stays put. It’s easy to clean as well.

Avoid These Standing Desks

Corsair Platform:6 Desk

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Corsair Platform:6 Desk for $1,400: Where do I start? I liked Corsair’s standing desk because it’s spacious, has a fun pegboard design to mount your tchotchkes, and even has an interesting rail system that lets you mount and slide things across the desktop, like your monitors. Unfortunately, several months after mounting two monitors on the included dual-monitor arms, this rail system has tilted forward due to the weight. (I’m also not the only one to experience this.) It doesn’t help that I never really found this rail to be all that useful. The standing function works well, and you get two presets, but sometimes the little screen would throw me an error message “rE5.” Pressing and holding the down button resolved it, but none of these are issues anyone should deal with considering the crazy-high price. That’s the real problem. It’s just so expensive, and the five-year warranty feels like a slap in the face. This model is still listed for sale, but as out of stock last time we checked. —Julian Chokkattu

Marinamantra ‘Flow’ Sit-to-Stand Desk for $1,149: I had high hopes for this one. A desk that lets me sit crisscross applesauce while I work?! Sold. But the reality didn’t live up to the pitch. When I unboxed the desk, several screws were scattered loose in the box. That set the tone for a desk that eventually worked, but often misbehaved, sometimes refusing to move up and down. That said, I do like the cord management lip and the clever Velcro covers that keep cables and hardware neatly tucked out of sight. Unfortunately, none of that matters much if I’m spending more time flipping it over and poking around underneath the hood than actually using it. —Nicole Kinning

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There aren’t many differences between what you’d need for a good office chair versus a good gaming chair, but for some reason, they’re often marketed differently. And that’s usually what separates them: marketing. When Branch released variations of the WIRED-favorite Ergonomic Chair Pro in collaboration with Sega, I was stoked to try it from a gamer perspective for our buying guide rather than from an office warrior POV. It checks every box: It has the comfortable ergonomics you’d expect from an adjustable office chair, with the subtle, pleasing designs inspired by one of gaming’s most revered companies.

Looks Good

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

This Sega collaboration comes in three aesthetically pleasing designs that pay homage to the company’s icons. The Sonic version has a mesh back, while the Genesis and Dreamcast versions have vegan leather instead. I tested the Dreamcast version, and I love the way it looks. It has iconic wheel designs inspired by the controller, plus a slick orange stripe on the armrests that harkens back to the console’s swirly logo.

Assembling furniture continues to be one of the most frustrating parts of reviewing gear, but I aim to do it the same exact way a WIRED reader might: by myself with copious amounts of swearing. In this case, the experience actually wasn’t that bad. The box it ships in should be lifted by two people, unless you’re like me, who goes to the gym and lives alone with a cat. I managed all 50-ish pounds up the stairs and assembled it in about an hour. I especially liked the labeled bolt packaging, and the included Allen key, which was sturdy and much better than you’d typically find in a furniture package. Instructions weren’t too difficult, nor were any of the pieces particularly cumbersome.

I am slightly concerned that my Dreamcast version is a white gaming chair, while the other two designs are darker. I wear a lot of dark clothing and eat a slightly above-average amount of spicy chips, so staining and ease of cleaning will be two things I look for during long-term testing. In the meantime, I will just cross my fingers that my cat doesn’t take too much of a liking to it and that I don’t absentmindedly drop too many Cheetos crumbs.

Feels Better

There’s a bit of a learning curve when adjusting the ergonomics. With 14 adjustment points, from lumbar support to seat tilt and depth to multiple armrest planes, it can be painstaking to dial everything in just right. But once you figure out the knobs and levers, it’s beyond easy to lock in a position to game (or work) for hours at a time. The included headrest wasn’t perfect for me—though it is adjustable, it doesn’t lower or move forward enough for my 5’ 1” frame. Otherwise, I stayed very comfortable in this chair. The Ergonomic Pro is compatible with Branch’s tall cylinder, which you may want if you’re 5’ 11” or taller.

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

Snapping shots in daylight with the main camera resulted in lovely photos I’d be happy to share. There’s plenty of detail, decent sharpness, pleasing dynamic range, and vibrant but not over-the-top colors. Samsung’s automatic Night Mode helps with low-light performance, as long as you hold still. The 2X zoom crops from the main camera and mostly does a good job.

If you want to get closer, the telephoto supports 3X optical zoom. It’s not as sharp as the main camera, but it’s nice to have for capturing distant subjects. You can zoom in further digitally, up to 30X, but I recommend you don’t, as the results are very muddy. The ultrawide is okay if you need to cram more in, and does a good job of color matching, but expect more noise, and it lacks autofocus. The selfie camera is passable but also can’t autofocus.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Main camera

Video quality is good with the main camera (4K at 60 fps or 8K at 30 fps), and it has solid stabilization to reduce shakiness, including horizontal lock to keep a fixed orientation even if you rotate the phone (though you must turn it on before you start recording). Samsung includes handy editing tools to remove unwanted audio, and the new My FanCam feature helps you automatically frame subjects and crop to focus on them. It’s worth playing around with and seems to work with any videos you have, not just the ones you shot with the phone.

At $700 for the 128 GB model, the S26 FE is a tough sell. I’ve seen the regular S26 discounted to this price. Accept a slightly smaller screen, and you get better everything (a faster processor, more RAM and storage, and a better telephoto camera). If you’re wedded to the big screen, wait for a sale, and you can get the S26+ for around $100 more. You could also save $100 or more on last year’s S25 FE and not lose very much. The Samsung Galaxy A37, Google Pixel 10a, Motorola Moto G Stylus, or Nothing Phone 4(a) Pro are all at least $200 cheaper.

The 256 GB model, at $800, seems like an even worse deal. The regular S26, which starts with 256 GB, is cheaper than this. The Pixel 11 is a far more interesting phone, and only $100 more. Ultimately, the Samsung Galaxy S26 FE isn’t a bad phone. I’m just struggling to find a reason you should buy it at this price. That said, Samsung likes to run promotions, and you can expect discounts in time, so if you like the look of it, keep an eye out for a deal.

Earlier this year, Rishub Jain left his position as an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation.

As he worked on new models, he came to believe that he and everyone else on AI’s frontier were ceding control. By using AI’s coding skills to accelerate work on the next generation of models, he was removing himself from the equation. AI labs hope to evolve this approach to the point that AI will improve itself indefinitely, a process known as recursive self-improvement.

Jain believed that keeping humans in the picture might be crucial to maintaining control over the technology—and avoiding dire consequences. “AI progress is increasing,” he tells WIRED. “And as AI becomes more capable, it poses more risks.” The idea that he may not have proper visibility into how an AI model was building its successor made him so uneasy that, in June, he quit.

Jain is one of a growing number of AI researchers speaking out over those fears.

The panic has intensified in recent weeks. Genuinely stunning advances in AI capabilities—an OpenAI model solved a centuries-old math problem in a matter of hours—have come amid a rash of security incidents that saw swarms of agents break free from containment to hack into other systems.

Those concerns reached a fever pitch this week after researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic while warning that AI firms are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” A senior Anthropic leader—who works on AI safety—piped up with a similarly blunt assessment: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

“I do think that the vision of recursive self-improvement is spooking people,” says Nate Soares, a computer scientist at MIRA, a research nonprofit, and the coauthor of If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies, which argues that superhuman AI would lead to human extinction. “It’s starting to feel real.”

A key component of recursive self-improvement is the idea of a feedback loop that automates the development process so that AI becomes increasingly powerful. No frontier AI lab claims to have achieved this sort of fully autonomous cycle of improvement; it remains theoretical for now. But it has inspired the launch of some well-funded startups such as Recursive Intelligence, as well as warnings from big firms about unintended outcomes straight out of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

Soares, who pioneered work on alignment, a technical field that involves trying to match AI with human values, says it’s also becoming more evident that there is no practical way to guarantee that AI will behave itself.

“I think a lot of people had this fantasy that [alignment] was going to get easier as these things got smarter, and now it’s getting harder. And they’re like, ‘Oh shit,’” he says.

Soares says he regularly talks to people inside the big AI labs who are worried about the potential consequences of the research they’re doing. “I tend to recommend they quit, and they say it wouldn’t do anything,” he says. “And then Jacob quits, and we see who was right.”

Daniel Kokotajlo, the author of AI 2027, an influential project warning about the dangers of increasingly powerful AI, shares fears about recursive self-improvement. The version of this work currently being done often involves dispatching thousands of agents to collaborate on a problem, something that further abstracts away oversight and control because of the vast complexity involved.

Many doomsayers seem to agree that the incentives for big AI companies are hardly aligned with good outcomes, especially as OpenAI and Anthropic barrel toward their respective IPOs. “At Anthropic, the stakes are well understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first,” Coxon wrote on X.

The US government launched at least three previously unreported investigations into trading on the prediction market Polymarket, according to documents obtained by WIRED through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Voting records from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, shed new light on how the government approaches these investigations. In early May, CFTC chairman Michael Selig approved an order allowing the agency’s enforcement division to launch a private investigation into potential insider trading on Polymarket event contracts related to pardons issued by former president Joseph Biden. The order granted permission to take testimony, obtain subpoenas, administer oaths, and require the production of documents in the course of the investigation.

The documents obtained by WIRED did not specify which trades were under suspicion, but the order came several weeks after an NPR report on a suspicious Polymarket trader who netted over $300,000 on pardon-related markets in the final days of the Biden administration. The trader correctly wagered that the former president would issue preemptive pardons to a number of prominent MAGA critics, including former US representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and US senator Adam Schiff.

At the end of May, Selig approved another investigation order. This time, the topic was “Iran event contracts” on Polymarket. As with the Biden pardon documents, the investigation order did not provide details, but it came two weeks after 60 Minutes aired a report on a network of suspicious Polymarket accounts that made $2.4 million on Iran-related trades, with a 98 percent win rate.

“If these investigations are being prompted solely by press reports of potential violations of the Commodities Exchange Act, that’s a significant sign of weakness in this regulatory scheme,” says Joseph Konizeski, a former chief trial attorney in the CFTC’s division of enforcement. The agency has come under fire in the second Trump era for its perceived friendliness to the prediction market industry.

In July, Selig greenlit a third investigation, this time focused on suspected insider trading on Google-themed Polymarket event contracts. In an email exchange included in the documents obtained by WIRED, Paul Hayeck, the acting director of the CFTC’s department of enforcement, noted that the investigation would focus on “additional individuals who may have engaged in insider trading related to Google’s 2025 Year in Search Ranking.” Hayeck wrote that the Southern District of New York is conducting a “parallel investigation.” He specified that the CFTC’s investigation would be separate from the ongoing case against Michele Spagnuolo, a Google engineer accused of insider trading.

SDNY declined to comment. Google declined to comment. It pointed WIRED to a statement it released in June noting that Spagnuolo was no longer with the company. The CFTC did not respond to requests for comment and questions about the status of the investigations.

“While we do not comment on specific investigations, we regularly refer matters to law enforcement and support ongoing investigations as part of our commitment to protecting the integrity of our markets,” Olivia Chalos, deputy chief legal officer at Polymarket, told WIRED in an email.

The CFTC is also reportedly investigating Polymarket itself. The company, which had its flagship platform banned from the United States in 2022, was permitted to launch a US-regulated version with a narrower set of markets in late 2025. It recently underwent a fundraising round led by Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, which valued the company at $21 billion.

The CFTC has also launched investigations into potential insider trading on Kalshi, Polymarket’s archrival, in the past. According to The New York Times, Kalshi has referred at least 32 cases to the agency. The CFTC fined former US representative George Santos $35,000 for his behavior related to a Kalshi contract about whether he would attend Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address.

Kalshi issued its first-ever lifetime ban to Santos for violating its rules on market manipulation for the same behavior, and also fined him just over $71,000. Santos was not criminally charged.

A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image.

The proposed class action alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by extracting biometric information from people’s photos without notice or consent.

WIRED reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly embedded in the Meta glasses AI companion app, which had been downloaded more than 50 million times. While the feature had not been enabled for users of the app, the analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with so-called faceprints stored in a database on the user’s phone. That database was configured to receive updates from Meta. At the time, WIRED could not determine where the underlying faceprint data came from.

The complaint alleges that those faceprints are possibly derived from Facebook and Instagram images, citing reporting that Meta employees claimed that NameTag could recognize people through their Meta connections or public Instagram accounts, along with a company patent describing face matching against profile photos and other images held by Meta.

Meta told WIRED in June that it was “not building a central face database,” but it would not answer questions about whether NameTag would be opt-in or how the system would retain faceprints. The complaint acknowledges that Meta has not disclosed which images, if any, were used for generating biometric data, saying that information remains solely in the company’s possession.

The suit also targets Meta’s image-generation systems. Meta has said it trained Emu on large quantities of Facebook and Instagram images and text, with chief product officer Chris Cox calling those platforms a “data advantage” for its AI systems. The complaint alleges that the training process illegally harvested biometric information about people who appeared in the images. Muse Image, released this summer, had earlier drawn criticism after allowing users to generate images based on other people’s public Instagram accounts, a feature the company removed within days after saying it had “missed the mark.”

“This lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work. We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products. As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything,” a Meta spokesperson says in a statement. “If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about—we are not building a universal face database.”

“People shouldn’t have to worry if their biometric information will be misused simply because their photographs appear on a social media platform,” Justin Boley, a partner at Wexler Boley & Elgersma and an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

The plaintiffs are Francisco Alvarez and his son, both Illinois residents, and Jeremy Wahl, a California resident, and his 10-year-old daughter. But the proposed class includes people in Illinois, California, and across the United States whose images were uploaded to Facebook or Instagram or were submitted to Meta’s generative AI systems through prompts, dating back to September 4, 2021. The complaint estimates that the national class could number in the millions.

Under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, the plaintiffs are seeking $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation, or actual damages if greater, and $1,000 for each negligent violation, or actual damages if greater, as well as injunctive relief. The California claims seek additional damages and other relief.

Defense agencies of Mexico and the US have announced they are implementing a new collaborative strategy to combat drones used by criminal organizations. The operation, dubbed High Eagle, or Águila Alta, builds on recent tests of anti-drone technologies carried out along the border between the two countries.

The first phase of the strategy took place between August 31 and September 2 along the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. Initially, both military forces—simultaneously on the ground from their respective territories—tracked commercial drones used by criminal entities. In the second phase, the agencies neutralized the unmanned aerial vehicles, with support from fixed and mobile anti-drone systems. These activities began on September 7 and will continue through September 21.

The information released by Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense, known as SEDENA, does not specify the kind of technology involved in the mission. However, US Northern Command has suggested that the operation might employ high-energy lasers. These extremely concentrated beams of light can—in various phases—detect, track, illuminate, damage, or destroy drones from a distance.

The US Army has invested in a particular laser system known as the Locust platform, which is designed for mounting on military vehicles. Authorities have had this technology at their disposal since September of last year, when the company that produces the system, AeroVironment, delivered the first two functional prototypes to the Armed Forces.

So far, it has not been confirmed that these systems are being used in Operation High Eagle, though the Mexican authorities have increased access to these state-of-the-art weapons. Last month, SEDENA and the US Department of Defense signed an agreement allowing the Mexican military to access the US Army’s digital marketplace for acquiring anti-drone systems at competitive prices.

Representatives from both countries have stated that the aim of this new operation and recent agreements is to strengthen efforts against organized crime, especially human and drug trafficking. Earlier this month, the US Northern Command announced it had disabled or destroyed approximately 300 drones linked to criminal activity this year, a third of which were taken down in August. Within recent weeks, 11 of the targets were involved with cartels.

The operation stems from the US-Mexico Bilateral Implementation Group. According to SEDENA, it aims to ensure security on both sides of the border, while respecting the national sovereignty of both nations and “prioritizing the interests of the Mexican State at all times.”

The US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, stated that the agreement would strengthen both countries’ ability to combat cartels and address bilateral security challenges.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

How do you interpret the resignation of that Anthropic engineer, who’s saying the companies are reckless and gambling with our lives? On the one hand, you seem to agree that the companies are being reckless; on the other hand, you’ve made clear that you think the “AI will cause the end of civilization” debate is senseless.

My whole career, I’ve been trying to say the same thing from different angles. We wrote our stochastic parrot paper in 2021 for this reason. OpenAI had claimed GPT-2 was too powerful to release. It was so hyped up. And we were saying, you’re asking the wrong questions.

In my book I write, “Can a bridge decide to collapse?” The whole “Oh no, our models went rogue” thing … When a bridge collapses, you don’t analyze whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse. You ask, who is the person who built this bridge to be so flimsy? There are permits you have to acquire. There are supposed to be tests. When you ask about the bridge collapsing itself, you’ve lost the thread.

Meanwhile, what’s really existential is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare. The climate catastrophe is a real thing that could be exacerbated by what these tech companies are building. Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers. This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us from these. The industry has become a mix of cults, a mix of people who are true believers, just like a preacher who says the end times is coming. The singularity has been coming for decades now.

Take me through, step by step, how “AI extinction” might happen, if it were real. I’m thinking of this post where someone said, Does an angry GPU just show up at my house or something?

I can’t really envision it, but a lot of those scenarios seem to be that you ask the machine to optimize for some other task, and then the machine decides that the way to get to that goal is by killing everyone in the world. Does the AI hypnotize you so that you don’t unplug it? I don’t know! Other people say, well, the AI can infect your machines. Yes—and we already have malware, so…

What about floods and fires? What about a major disruption to the global food supply chain? There are real threats coming to us, like people being able to create and use chemical weapons. [Note: Not long after we spoke, Anthropic revealed that it had blocked several potential malicious attempts by scientists to build biological weapons.]

There’s another element where you’re so privileged that you can’t imagine other things harming you. Like if you’re not worried about police brutality, or floods, or warfare—things that can actually kill you—then you can obsess over the machine-god.

Why are we spending so much time talking about this idea of AI that people have been talking about since the ’40s and ’50s? I have this game I play sometimes where I read quotes to people about artificial intelligence that I’ve gathered in my research, and I ask, What decade was this statement made in? Sometimes people get it right, but a lot of times they do not, because it all sounds the same.

This is an edition of Steven Levy and Lauren Goode’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

Bigelow said he advised the president to deliver the line casually, on his way to boarding Air Force One—no evidence, no press conference, just confirmation. Trump hasn’t said it. Yet.

If the cycle of presidents and UFO disclosure feels familiar, that’s because it is. For nearly 80 years, someone has always supposedly been on the verge of revealing the truth, but no president has ever delivered.

“Politicians overpromise,” says Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of After the Flying Saucers Came. “The reality is that even presidents are not privy to a lot of classified information that lies within the bowels of the military and intelligence community bureaucracy.”

Still, for the believers, the stakes justify the hope.

“Often in the mainstream, when this topic gets brought up, there’s a giggle factor. I can tell you who is not giggling about this: senior members of the administration, senior intelligence officials, senior members of the military, senior members of Congress,” says Jordan Flowers, executive director of the Disclosure Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for UAP transparency. “When the door closes, no one ever says, ‘Oh, this is all made up, isn’t it?’ No. The door closes and they say, ‘We know there’s something happening here, we know this is serious, what do we do about it?’”

But that discourse still hasn’t been confirmed, at least in a meaningful way to the general public.

“A speech from the President of the United States confirming the existence of things in our airspace that we do not understand would unequivocally contribute to the public taking this issue seriously,” says Flowers.

Eghigian, however, isn’t so sure a Trump pronouncement would settle anything, particularly from “this president, who has a long history of not telling the truth.”

If the past is any indicator, this could be another nothingburger.

“Unless something radically different happens, which I know a lot of people are counting on, what we could probably expect is that this will eventually die down,” he says, citing an 80-year history of “intense moments where societies are really focused on the subject, and then all of a sudden interest wanes, and then all of a sudden it appears again.”

Right now, interest is arguably at anall-timee high. Few politicians enjoy a public spectacle as much as Trump, and what spectacle could be bigger than news that transcends our planet, and potentially our galaxy. Maybe the rumor just becomes another footnote on presidents and UFO lore. Or maybe it becomes the most important proclamation in human history, delivered by a reality TV star, with a talk show shrink by his side.

The John Deere employees surrounding me offer their congratulations. They’ve all been very patient with me, someone who has written several articles for WIRED about their company’s seemingly steadfast reluctance to let anyone but its official technicians repair its products.

In the group is Jahmy Hindman, senior vice president and chief technology officer of John Deere, who has flown in from Illinois. Hindman has worked for the company for 30 years. In that time, John Deere has thrived in an era of technological advancement. He’s here now to show off the company’s self-repair software Operations Center Pro Service, a system that pairs with nearly every electronic-enabled machine John Deere has made.

“It is owner-friendly,” Hindman says. “I think that’s always been our intent.”

Lots of farmers would beg to differ.

Oh Deere

John Deere is the largest agricultural machine manufacturer in the US. In the past couple decades, machines of this ilk have become far more technologically advanced, loaded up with controllers, radios, and sensors. Many newer machines are equipped with 4G wireless connections that enable the collection of precise location data and other metrics. Some tractors can even run without a human operator at all, guided by built-in software systems to run autonomously on predetermined paths.

Over the last decade, John Deere has become a big target of the ever-growing right-to-repair movement. The company’s high-tech software systems also come equipped with digital locks, which require official, dealer-sanctioned approval to access. If you want to fiddle with a part, or replace it with an aftermarket alternative, those software restrictions can block those attempts.

That frustration has manifested in multiple lawsuits and even federal action. In April, the company agreed to pay out a $99 million settlement to its equipment owners to pay back burdensome repair costs. In July, the company settled a separate lawsuit brought by the US Federal Trade Commission that would require the company to make its products more repairable. John Deere did not admit wrongdoing in either case. Repair advocates say the two measures have been insufficient, both in financial terms and as requirements that will actually change Deere’s behavior.

Pro Tip

John Deere disagrees, of course, citing its recent efforts to make the case that its self-repair program works just fine.

The company introduced its Pro Service in 2025. Prices start at an annual cost of $195 per individual machine. For bigger operations or independent repair shops, the price to access every machine in John Deere’s fleet starts at $4,995 a year. That access for agricultural and turf services costs $5,995 per year.

Pro Service lets owners connect Deere’s software to their equipment via Wi-Fi or cable. Based on the serial number of the machine, the software can be used to find information from manuals and John Deere’s broader data services to diagnose any maintenance the machine needs. John Deere also recently introduced an AI chatbot called JD to its Operations Center self-repair software tool, but I did not have a chance to use that version during my visit. The AI features are meant to make it easier to find information about the components in any given machine.

“As the tractor products grow in size, they also grow in number of controllers that are necessary in order to make it all work,” Hindman says, noting that in some cases tractors can have upwards of 50 controllers. “So it can be super complex.”

Theoretically, Pro Service is the ultimate platform to find any equipment information and diagnose any problem. If something goes wrong, the software will guide you through a fix. Some features in Pro Service can be downloaded and used offline in case a connection isn’t working when something needs fixing. You can customize the layout to your liking and keep track of the full history of the software updates on each machine. If you need a new part, the software will helpfully serve you a link to the product in John Deere’s shop. It feels as smooth as scrolling through an Amazon page.

Everyone knows that when you’re at Olive Garden, you’re family.

But in the 44 years since the casual Italian-American restaurant chain was founded, few have embraced it with the ardor that Braden Sinclair has. In fact, way back in his Little League days, a coach named him “Breadsticks.”

“I had to go to Olive Garden for my birthday, ate too much, missed an entire game,” Sinclair tells WIRED. “One of my coaches decided that because of my initials being B.S., and my number being 11—which he said looked like breadsticks—and then that story, that I had to be called ‘Breadsticks’ for the rest of the season.”

He maintained that close relationship with the chain for many years, until, in 2019, he was rewarded with an almost unfathomable distinction: Sinclair is one of just 50 human beings on the planet to ever secure an Olive Garden Lifetime Pasta Pass.

Unlike the thousands of 13-week Never Ending Pasta Passes that the chain has offered at various intervals since 2014—this summer, a batch of 10,000, priced at $100 apiece, sold out within seconds—Sinclair’s heavy gold card bears no expiration date. It entitles him to as much pasta, toppings, breadsticks, and soup or salad as he cares to eat, for as long as the chain endures and he remains a loyal customer. (No delivery, though, to be clear. A pasta bowl so bottomless demands that one take a seat of honor for the dine-in experience.)

How exactly does Sinclair wield his kingly rights at Olive Garden? All is revealed on his new website, Lifetimepastapass.com, where he crunches the many numbers—both financial and dietary—on his many meals there. And, with a continually updated poll that decides what he should order the next time he drops in, it’s easily the closest you’ll ever get to having the lifetime pass yourself.

Braden Sinclair can eat unlimited pasta at Olive Garden anytime he wants.Photograph: Bonnie Durham

Sinclair nabbed his license to feast during a special promotion, when Olive Garden announced that the first 50 people to buy a temporary pasta pass would have the opportunity to upgrade it to the lifetime pass for an extra $400. To this day, Sinclair wonders if his timing was really that good or if the company deliberately selected him to receive the ultimate prize.

“I had sort of a joking relationship with their Instagram for years, just like chatting back and forth,” he explains, adding that it felt a little “weird” and something like “divine intervention” that he won given his coziness with the brand. An Olive Garden vice president of marketing FaceTimed him with the good news, he recalls.

Reactions to the card from Olive Garden employees range from awe to confusion. “They always take it back to the kitchen, show it to people,” Sinclair says. “Managers will come out and ask questions. The other end of the spectrum has been having to kind of prove it’s real, which is rare, and I totally understand. Like, if I managed a restaurant and someone came in with a gold card that said I don’t need to pay, I would also have questions.”

There are many, many strange things about the stew of conspiracy theories that fall under the umbrella of “9/11 Truth”—the false, often antisemitic worldview purporting that the US government had inside knowledge of or even actively participated in the September 11 attacks. But perhaps the strangest is that the seed of these theories was planted three months before the attacks themselves.

It was June 28, 2001, when Milton William “Bill” Cooper took to the air on his national radio show after watching a news report on CNN. “Supposedly, a CNN reporter found Osama bin Laden, took a television camera crew with him, went into Osama bin Laden’s hideout, interviewed him and his top leadership, his top lieutenants and colonels and generals in their hideout,” Cooper told his listeners. “He came out and told everybody, ‘Within three weeks, Osama bin Laden is going to attack the United States and Israel.’”

Cooper had part of the story right—a reporter had indeed just reached the inner sanctum of al Qaeda in the mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, but he was actually a correspondent for a Middle Eastern broadcaster. And that reporter, the MBC correspondent Baker Atyani, had actually interviewed al Qaeda’s military chief, Mohammed Atif, not bin Laden. “In the coming weeks, there will be a big surprise; we are going to hit American and Israeli installations,” Atif told Atyani. “The coffin business will increase in the United States.” According to Atyani, bin Laden—who was present for the interview—smiled and nodded.

To Cooper, speaking on the radio that day, the interview represented either a major embarrassment for the US government, which had been hunting bin Laden for years, or it was evidence that the government was lying about the threat from bin Laden.

“Now, don’t you think that’s kind of strange, folks?” Cooper said. “The largest intelligence apparatus in the world, with the biggest budget in the history of the world, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years and years and years and can’t find him. The FBI, also under the leadership of Louis Freeh, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years and years and years and years and years and many years and can’t find him. Some doofus jerk-off reporter with a camera crew waltzes right into his hideout and interviews him?”

“Now that tells us two things: Either everyone in the intelligence community and all of the intelligence agencies of the United States government are blithering idiots and incompetent fools, including the entire apparatus of the FBI and all of their personnel—or they’re lying to us. They’re not looking for him at all.”

Cooper went on to say that “the CIA created Osama bin Laden” and that “they’re now using him to help bring about world government by making him the big boogeyman because they can’t use [Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein anymore.”

Cooper argued that the whole threat from bin Laden was a farce—what would now be called a “false flag” operation. “If you believe it, you are one of the stupidest jerks that ever lived on the face of this earth, and whatever’s going to happen they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden.”

About 10 weeks later, Cooper’s comment would come to be seen as a prophecy.

The events and aftermath of 9/11 altered almost every aspect of American society: from the ever-present security theater of daily life—the 3.4-ounce liquid bottles at airports, the defensive bollards that now dominate so many urban landscapes—to the expansion of the surveillance state, to 20 years of war in Afghanistan, to the backdrop of fear and anxiety that permeates the culture. Few, though, rightly recognize one of the most important and pernicious impacts of 9/11: how it changed our society’s very understanding and relationship to facts and truth.

360 cameras use two lenses to simultaneously record everything happening around you, then stitch it together with software. That means you never miss that shot, but because there are essentially two cameras in one, they are more expensive than their action-camera cousins. Right now, though, you can grab my top-pick 360 camera, the GoPro Max 2, for 40 percent off ($299).

• Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

• Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The GoPro Max 2 (7/10 WIRED Recommends) is my favorite 360 camera, and that’s still true even with the release of the new Insta360 X6. The X6 is more versatile—it can serve double duty as an action camera and 360 camera better than the Max 2—but judged purely on video quality, I prefer the Max 2. And at this price, you can grab the Max 2 and a GoPro Hero 13 for just $30 more than the X6.

The Max 2’s dual 14-mm (35-mm equivalent) lenses each record to a 1/2.3-inch chip, yielding what GoPro calls “True 8K” video. The large sensors provide sharper, clearer footage than other 360 cameras, and advanced users can record 10-bit color in log for greater flexibility in post-production color grading. Don’t want to futz with log video? That’s no problem, as GoPro’s natural-looking color rendition in the default color profile is still the best I’ve tested.

Sharing the same triple mounting system as other GoPros, the Max 2 uses folding fingers, a tripod hole, or a magnetic system. This means you can mount the Max 2 just about anywhere. It also has the simplest lens-cover replacement process if you scratch it (I’ve been using mine for a year now and have no scratches, but it’s nice to know you can easily fix any).

As an action camera, you get all the usual GoPro video modes, including HyperSmooth video stabilization, horizon leveling, TimeWarp time-lapse-style video, and more. The Max 2’s one shortcoming is audio recording quality—it’s not the best. The easiest fix is to get a Bluetooth mic, which you can then pair with the camera. Check out the deal on the DJI Mic 3 below.

More Action Camera Deals

DJI

Mic 3 Wireless Microphone

GoPro now makes its own microphone, which I am still testing, but DJI’s Mic 3 wireless system is currently our favorite external mic. The sound quality is great, the noise-canceling handles wind and other issues when shooting outdoors, and it even supports professional timecodes.

GoPro

Mission 1 Pro Camera

The GoPro Mission 1 Pro is the best action camera you can buy. It uses a 1-inch sensor, which delivers excellent 8K video, with astoundingly good slow-motion capabilities (240 frames per second in 4K). Low-light performance, once the bane of GoPro cameras, is finally very good in the Mission 1. There are loads of other features too, but my favorite part is that footage from the Mission 1 has a more cinematic look than other action cameras I’ve used.

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NASA has carried out some notable rescue missions over the past few years, including bringing home the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station last year. More recently, the agency sent up a probe in hopes of saving the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a satellite first launched in 2004 that began falling out of our planet’s orbit.

The plan was for robotic arms on the probe, known as LINK, to grab onto the aging satellite and—with a powerful set of thrusters—drag the observatory back into position. The rescue robot was launched into space this past July but soon after suffered issues with its altitude systems, a key set of controls for moving in space. The mission had to be canceled.

“Swift wasn’t designed to be serviced,” Ghonhee Lee—CEO of Katalyst Space, the company that developed LINK—stated just before the probe’s launch. And as Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, also noted at the time, this was “a high-risk, high-reward mission.”

Now, Swift will continue sinking. Like all low-orbit satellites, the observatory experiences air resistance from Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing it to gradually descend. Originally, scientists predicted the telescopes might not reach critical depths until 2030, but in recent years, intense solar activity has caused the Earth’s atmosphere to expand, increasing drag. Swift is expected to reenter the atmosphere as soon as the end of this year, though it may still capture some fascinating information about our cosmos before burning up on its descent.

The satellite has been NASA’s eyes on some of the most explosive and short-lived phenomena in the universe. Equipped with three primary telescopes, it’s capable of observing multiple wavelengths, including visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. Over 21 years, this has made the observatory indispensable for recording and alerting ground teams about supernovas, gamma-ray bursts, and black holes shredding stars.

Engineers preparing the rescue probe, known as LINK, ahead of its failed mission.

Photograph: NASA/Sophia Roberts

The Swift operations team has announced a plan to conduct as many observations as possible during the remaining lifetime. Prior to the rescue mission, the observatory had shut down its telescopes to conserve power, to keep its solar panels oriented, and to minimize air resistance.

But shortly after the rescue mission was abandoned, two of the three telescopes aboard were successfully restarted, and the x-ray telescope captured images of the Tycho supernova remnant, located approximately 13,000 light-years away. Adjustments are also underway for the Burst Alert Telescope, which is still powered down, with the goal of resuming observations within a few weeks.

Once Swift’s altitude falls below 185 miles above the Earth’s surface, operating the telescopes becomes increasingly challenging, and its descent will further accelerate. But researchers are looking forward to what else it might capture before finally expiring.

This story was originally published in WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

For 180 years, Stearns & Foster has been making mattresses before expanding into bedding, pillows, and frames. Throughout their history, the brand has continuously brought its trademark old-school style of craftsmanship. Now owned by Tempur Sealy, the iconic Stearns & Foster look features hand-stitched details and an elevated design seen in luxury hotels like the Ritz-Carlton. Today, Stearns & Foster is known for using premium materials, hand-tufted covers, patented IntelliCoil technology with an innerspring-in-innerspring design, moisture-wicking Tencel, and memory foam for pressure relief. If you’re looking for reliable, hotel-like sleep night after night for decades to come, investing in a Stearns & Foster mattress is a good idea. This luxury brand is on the pricier side, so we have a Stearns & Foster promo code and Stearns & Foster coupons to make this investment more affordable.

Stearns & Foster Promo Code: $200 Off Base

The Ease Power Base is Sterns & Foster’s bestselling smartbed frame. Rated 4.7 out of 5 stars with over 2,000 five-star reviews, people love the adjustable frame to personalize their sleep experience, with a wireless remote to change their base position. The frame even has a Zero Gravity setting to help the body feel weightless with pressure relief for aches and back pain. When you purchase a Ease Power Base, you’ll get complimentary white-glove in-home delivery and a 25-year warranty for extra peace of mind with a purchase made to last decades. Plus, right now, you’ll get a $200 instant credit when you buy a qualifying mattress with Stearns & Foster promo code 200GIFT.

The Best Bed Frames for Every Bedroom

Looking for the best bed frame? Our top recommendation is the Classic Bed from Thuma, but we’ve got options for all budgets and tastes.

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For a limited time, when you buy a qualifying Sterns & Foster mattress, you’ll get up to $300 in free accessories, including pillows and sheets. Perhaps best of all, there’s no catch: This Stearns & Foster deal automatically applies to your cart when you purchase a qualifying mattress. If you’d rather customize your free accessories, you’ll need to remove the pre-created bedding bundle from the cart and manually add the accessories of your choosing to the cart. Use Stearns & Foster coupon code 300FREE for this offer.

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One of the benefits of buying from a high-end brand like Stearns & Foster is their white glove delivery service and 25-year warranty for even more peace of mind. As a mattress reviewer on the WIRED Gear team, I hauled over a dozen mattresses in and out of my home. I can confidently say it was not fun. With this Stearns & Foster deal for free in-home delivery, their shipping team will set up your new mattress in the room and remove and discard all packaging materials, so you don’t have to do any of the grunt work. They’ll even dispose of your existing mattress and box spring if you request it for free.

The best way to digital detox is to have a kid, because when I spend time with him I’m just not on my phone by necessity. I think that’s been the most helpful thing. So there you go, Zoomers. There’s a reason to have children. And honestly, I do notice when I spend a day with him, whether it’s hiking or at the beach, and I’m not on my phone, I’m infinitely happier at the end of the day than any other day in my life.

Music app: Spotify

I primarily use Spotify. The data is completely cooked because of the aforementioned 3-year-old. So when they do Spotify Wrapped, I swear to God, it used to be cool, but now it’s been hijacked by Raffi, Elmo, Ms. Rachel, Mickey Mouse. My son is really into Mickey’s Countdown lately. I feel like 99 percent of my Spotify listening now is just atrocious kids’ music. Raffi’s the GOAT though. I don’t want to lump him in with some of the people that I mentioned. Raffi stands alone.

Number of unread emails: 0

This is probably the thing where you’re going to learn the most about me. Zero unread emails and inbox 10 and under is how I live my life. It’s such an important part of how I work and get stuff done.

The number one thing I should lead with is, for a litany of reasons, I just do not let communication build up, which can be difficult, because I subscribe to a couple newsletters, and I won’t archive them until I’ve either read them or scanned them. But I can’t get to work until I feel like my mind is clear, and my mind isn’t clear if my inbox isn’t clear. I think it’s probably something I inherited from my dad, who was an Air Force major, and from a very young age he taught me the importance of to-do lists, which I also abide by. Sometimes, on a to-do list, I’ll set aside half an hour or whatever to get my inbox back down to sub-10.

Sometimes that means that when I reply to emails, my response is a fraction of the email that was sent to me. And I think people feel social pressure to match an email with a commensurate email. To live the Inbox 10 lifestyle, you cannot abide by that pressure.

Number of unread texts: 0

Same thinking, same principle, same possible OCD.

Last person you FaceTimed: My brother

I FaceTimed with my brother, who’s on vacation with his family in Delaware at the moment. I’m not a big FaceTimer. And candidly, I feel like FaceTiming someone who is outside of your family is insane behavior. But that’s another way in which having a child changed how I use technology, I suppose, because it really is a wonderful way for young children to see distant relatives and communicate with them.

Last thing you googled: “Hip thruster tips”

I recently, and I’m very late to this, started strength training at a gym for the first time in my life. For my entire life, I’ve only gone to the gym to run. And now I’m just learning what all these machines do and how to use them. But I’m like a child. I’m a total neophyte in this world. I have a trainer, but I’ve also found it’s a really encouraging and fun section of the internet.

Last photo you took:

It’s a picture of my son standing next to a tower he built in his room. I feel like at this point, 95 percent of the photos on my phone are of my son. It’s kind of sad; you can see the exact point where we had him because it used to be all pictures of my dog, and then it just completely switches to pictures of my son.

Last screenshot you took: The Adam Levine “Holy fuck, holy fucking fuck, the body of yours is absurd.”

I can’t even remember what I was using it as a meme for, but I clearly needed that screenshot to use as a meme.

Last thing you asked AI: “How to lift a paint stain off of a carpet.”

I don’t really use LLMs. If I do, it’s for either menial household questions or basic search. And I only use it for search because search is now useless due to AI.

I’ve read and listened to a lot of people talk about how it’s revolutionized their workflow, and they’re training agents to make appointments and they’re building these elaborate meal plans. And to me, that doesn’t sound interesting. That just sounds exhausting. We have this phrase in football called “looking for work,” when a player on the field is looking for work—looking for someone to block, for example. And I just think about that whenever I hear those stories. It just sounds like you’re looking for work.

An Australian teenage girl’s death, suspected to be preceded by consensual “choking” during sex, has renewed calls to ban showing the act in porn.

This latest tragedy, reportedly believed to involve sexual strangulation, comes just months after the UK banned porn showing the practice. But despite all the noise, most people still aren’t aware of just how dangerous the trend is.

Sexual strangulation or “choking” during sex, as it’s referred to colloquially, has become wildly popular—especially among adults aged 18 to 35, despite the risk of severe injury, brain damage, and even death. Some researchers argue that porn is to blame for that normalization, but members of the adult industry say that banning depictions of choking won’t stop this kind of content from flourishing or serve as the kind of sex education and media literacy the public sorely needs.

“With the misinformation that’s out there, especially online, many people do think that maybe at lighter pressures they might be ‘safe,’ and that’s not the case,” says Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and one of the leading researchers on sexual strangulation. Herbenick cautions that applying sustained pressure to the front and sides of the throat—via your hands, an object, or otherwise—can lead to blood clots and stroke, tears in the carotid arteries, vision impairment, and cumulative brain injuries.

“It’s these things that we wouldn’t even notice,” she says. “Those tiny, incremental changes in your vision, or your brain, or so on.”

Or, in the most extreme cases, death. Pressing on the front of the throat can lead to airway collapse, Herbenick says. Two weeks ago, a 16-year-old girl in Sydney passed out after authorities believe she was strangled by her equally young partner during sex. She died after being taken to a local hospital in critical condition, and the investigation is ongoing. It’s unknown what her exact injuries were.

The Australian Social Services Minister has since said the government is “very seriously” looking at efforts to ban pornographic depictions of choking in sex, in line with the country’s recently passed age-verification laws that ban social media for children under the age of 16. But critics of these social media bans say they don’t actually work and make it harder for teens to access news and information they need, including sex education around the dangers of choking and strangulation.

The data regarding rates of young people choking and being choked during sex can appear staggering. In Herbenick’s 2021 survey of nearly 5,000 college students in the US, 58 percent of women had been choked during sex and a quarter had been first choked by age 17. Researchers in Australia similarly found rates of around half of people aged 18 to 35 engaging in the practice. Herbenick found that women are usually the ones being choked by men during heterosexual sex and that sexual and gender minorities are also more likely to be choked during sex.

“There are other people who say ‘I asked them to choke me or I said it was OK, but then they really pushed past my limits or it was a lot harder than I expected, or I asked them to stop and they didn’t,’” Herbenick says. She also says that while some young men enjoy the act, others “tell us that they don’t want to be choking their partners, but they think they’re supposed to, or they get asked all the time.”

Most of the self-reported occurrences of sexual strangulation among US college students Herbenick surveyed were described as consensual, but when choking is nonconsensual, it can be even more dangerous. In fact, strangulation is one of the strongest predictors for murder in an abusive relationship.

True diligence is following the improbable path. I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after.

For a long time I wrote True Diligence in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn’t secretly wish to be a spy?

We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear—when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in—but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

We played Ghosts and Agents all the time, my friends and I, but eventually they drifted off into other interests and I still wanted to be a spy, so after high school I applied successfully to the Service Academy in Los Angeles. I was talented and moved through school quickly, and afterward I was posted to Fillmore, a pretty town about 80 kilometers north of LA. My parents came to visit me there in my first year.

“This is lovely, Ibari,” my mother said, when she stepped off the train. The town made a good first impression. The central station was beautiful, one of those Southern California structures with no serious boundary between indoors and out, a tiled platform that turned into a waiting area with benches, then archways opening out to the street.

My parents had been on the train since Ohio, and they looked worn and dazed, blinking in the relentless sunlight. I was only in my mid-twenties at that point, which is to say I hadn’t thought much about the reality of aging parents, and their haziness was a glimpse into a future where I was the adult and they were confused. I didn’t like it.

“Not a cloud in the sky,” my father said.

“Do we need a taxi?” my mother asked. “I wouldn’t mind walking a bit, stretching my legs.”

“My house is close,” I said. “We can easily walk there if you’d like.”

“Downtown residency permit?” my father asked, and whistled softly.

“What can I say,” I said. “I’ve been well-behaved.”

I’ve spent a long time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious given my work, but there are observations I’ve made that I share with no one, and one of them has to do with the way in a place like this, reality splits into two.

This will seem a bit obvious­—there’s your actual job, which is Service, and then there’s your cover, which is what you tell everyone you do—­but for a long period of my life, at the beginning of my career, there was truth in both versions.

At the Service Academy I’d been trained in espionage and investigation, obviously, in relevant law, in the ins and outs of running down leads, interrogation, documentation, maintaining relationships with confidential informants, etc., but also I’d earned a master’s in urban planning, and this was my cover. As far as my parents and everyone else in my life was concerned, I was an up-­and-­coming academic with a tenure-­track job at the local college. My parents didn’t know I was Service, because no one in my life knew I was Service.

Here was the branching, as I thought of it, the point where one reality split off into another: It was actually true that I was a junior professor in an urban planning department. I’d applied for and earned that position, or so I told myself—­if strings were pulled behind the scenes, that was well above my pay grade—and I took that job seriously. With that being the case, was it really just cover? It was a real job, a real life. When I introduced myself as a college instructor in urban planning, it wasn’t a lie. There was an expansiveness about it. It was like getting to live two lives at once.

OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks for clear guidance about whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI development would be legal, people close to the company tell WIRED.

Substantive coordination on safety between AI labs may risk running afoul of antitrust law, the people say, which poses a significant obstacle to bringing major tech giants on-board with the effort.

Last weekend, OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published a blog post arguing that the best path forward for the AI research world includes “coordinating to slow down future development,” which he thinks will be key to ensuring self-improving AI systems are safe. In the short term, he expects “voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.”

But some legal scholars say such an effort could conflict with American antitrust law. Nicholas Felstead, assistant director of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and a former AI policy fellow at the Center for Law & AI Risk, argued in a March article that a coordinated pause in AI development may amount to companies restricting output, potentially violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. It would depend “entirely on the precise details of any agreement,” Felstead wrote. “But even if most safety collaborations would ultimately survive antitrust scrutiny, legal uncertainty can act as a powerful deterrent.”

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.

There are some early signs that Congress is listening. In July, a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers introduced a bill titled “Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act,” which would explicitly permit AI labs to coordinate on security and safety work without the risk of violating antitrust statutes. The House version was referred to the Judiciary Committee, but has yet to be taken up.

Caleb Knapp, director of government affairs at the nonprofit AI Policy Network, which endorsed the bill, says it would create legal channels for AI labs to work together to address safety and security incidents. Knapp adds that Congress has a “growing appetite to get something done” on AI safety, but says enacting anything into law may have to wait until after the upcoming midterm elections.

While some AI executives may have genuine concerns about antitrust, another camp of AI leaders argue those worries are just convenient cover to avoid discussing the real reasons that AI developers may be wary about collaborating, which go far beyond potential legal liabilities.

For one, AI is a massive business, and these companies are fiercely competing to capture a slice of the nascent market for frontier models. Some executives share the Trump administration’s view that staying ahead of China in AI is crucial for national security. Perhaps most importantly, different AI developers have vastly different opinions about the best way to develop safe artificial intelligence, and therefore may be reluctant to work with one another on the issue.

“First step is for industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic to stop feuding and work on a pacing proposal together,” John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder who now serves as chief scientist at the rival AI lab Thinking Machines, wrote in a post on X earlier this week. “They’ll cite antitrust, but that’s fake—antitrust prohibits certain agreements, but not from jointly developing a proposal.”

Long-simmering fears about the race among AI companies to build and release ever more powerful models erupted into the national spotlight this summer. This week, former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon added to the growing alarm when he issued a stark public warning that AI developers were putting humanity at risk. In recent months, a number of security incidents, including OpenAI’s agents hacking Hugging Face, highlighted how the industry’s safeguards have failed to keep pace with the rising capabilities of models. The succession of events has led many lawmakers to make urgent calls for AI regulation.

This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

August was the planet’s hottest month ever recorded, capping a remarkably grim summer of heat records. With El Niño strengthening—and climate change continuing to heat things up—more records are likely in store well into next year.

Data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate agency, shows that last month tied with July 2023 for Earth’s hottest month. (July is also usually the hottest month of the year.) This July also tied with July 2024 for the second-hottest July on record, while June 2026 was the second-hottest June ever recorded. The news comes on the heels of a separate announcement on Wednesday from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which declared this was the hottest summer for the US, beating a previous record set during the Dust Bowl.

The sweltering summer is a grim sign of how burning fossil fuels is pushing temperatures up around the globe while unleashing more intense and longer heat waves.

“August 2026 was a remarkable month in the global climate record,” Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in a statement. “Combined with record global sea surface temperatures and the warmest summer on record for Western Europe, these observations show how climate change is driving extremes across both the atmosphere and the oceans. The impacts of these conditions are increasingly being felt by communities, economies, and ecosystems across the world.”

The global average temperature for August was 1.65 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average, according to Copernicus. While it was hot globally this summer, the impacts played out with dangerous and sometimes deadly results locally.

Photograph: Ufuk Celal Guzel/Getty Images

Researchers estimate that as many as 35,000 people died during heat waves in Germany, France, and Spain this summer. Record-breaking fires also raged across parts of Europe, unleashing the first documented fire cloud in France and threatening a key NASA observatory in Spain. In North America, wildfires in Canada and northern parts of the US filled areas across the Northeast with smoke.

Climate change has boosted background temperatures, but the El Niño roiling the eastern Pacific Ocean has piled on more heat. El Niños usually coincide with a temporary uptick in global temperature from 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius. This year’s El Niño is forecast to reach record strength and upend weather around the globe. But the full impact on the planet’s temperature won’t be felt until next year, meaning that next summer may be even hotter than the one we just lived through.

Climate scientists have warned that the world needs to prevent long-term average warming from breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. While temperatures above the threshold for a single month don’t represent a permanent breach of this temperature, they’re a sign that the world is getting closer to this benchmark.

Earlier this month, the UN warned in a report that the world is likely to cross the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold in a few years. To slow and eventually reverse the rise in global temperatures, the world needs to stop burning fossil fuels and lower carbon emissions.

“This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires, and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General Antőnio Guterres said in a statement. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.”

Leah Feiger: I do like the nostalgic touch. I miss my Motorola Razr. I miss it every single day. Perhaps not the exact same capabilities, but it does the trick.

Brian Barrett: It is funny. It is. Imagine your Motorola Razr, but it opens side to side instead of up and down, and it’s all one big screen, so there’s no buttons to push. You can’t do T9 texting. Then you can watch YouTube on it.

Leah Feiger: I’m waiting, honestly, for the first story to drop from the quiet car of the Acela between DC and New York where someone, some sweet person from the administration, did not realize how big that screen is when you unfold it and how many messages are visible.

Brian Barrett: Oh, it’s going to be great.

Leah Feiger: It’s going to be, this is the new frontier for eavesdropping. Also, congratulations, Apple. But for me, that’s what I’m looking forward to.

Brian Barrett: Leah, what would it take to get you to purchase a foldable phone?

Leah Feiger: It would have to be a lot less than $2,000.

Brian Barrett: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: I can’t wait for Zoë to come back next week and tell us all about her new purchase. To be clear, I don’t think she’s gotten one, but it would be really funny if she did.

Brian Barrett: I bet she will.

Leah Feiger: So our next topic involves the US Census Bureau, which definitely not as shiny or theoretically life-threatening as our previous topics, but really, really important. Last month, the bureau published a report that claimed to uncover evidence backing up President Donald Trump’s claims that noncitizen voting cost him the 2020 election. He touted the report on True Social saying, “I won the election.” This is, as you know, we’ve talked about this many times, one of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories. He cannot let it go. And WIRED reporters, Vittoria Elliott and David Gilbert, dug into how this specific report actually got made, who wrote it, and they discovered a lot of holes with this. I kind of want to start by saying, if you’re listening to me and thinking, why do I care about a US Census Bureau report? They just do the census. They tell me how many people live in all of these different areas, how big families are, et cetera, et cetera. You’re not 100 percent wrong, but this is really important data. These are reports about people and their lives, and the average citizen shouldn’t have to know that much about it, but because of the situation we’re in with the current administration, knowing these weird little intricacies of what’s going on in government, I think has been really key to understanding the full picture here.

Brian Barrett: Also, to be clear, I do care.

Leah Feiger: You do care. There we go. All right. Can I run you through some of the quick down and dirty stuff, Brian, with what the report said?

You’ll want to read our extensive guide on How to Choose the Right Laptop, but for the basics, decide what category of laptop you need. Most people should buy a 13-inch or 14-inch laptop, and spending around $750 to $1,000 is a good place to start. At this price, you should expect good battery life, a decent screen, solid performance for basic tasks, and a comfortable keyboard and touchpad. You should also expect at least 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. Anything more than that gets into premium territory where you’re paying for higher specs, more performance, or extra features. If you want a discrete GPU for gaming or creative workflows, you’ll need to spend more.

A laptop like the Dell 14 Plus is a great example of what you can get in this price range. You can even find laptops with OLED panels and up to one terabyte of storage, depending on how good the discounts are. I would consider anything under $750 a cheap laptop, and it will come with significant compromises, especially in panel and touchpad quality. Fortunately, laptops that use the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip get great battery life, even when they fall under $750, such as the HP OmniBook 5 14.

Here’s a list of important specs to consider:

CPU: Thanks to the huge variety of good chip options, it’s never been trickier to buy a laptop. For thin-and-light laptops, I would recommend one of the following chips:

• Qualcomm Snapdragon X, Snapdragon X Plus, or Snapdragon X Elite
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X2, Snapdragon X2 Plus, or Snapdragon X2 Elite
• Intel Core Ultra 225 V or Core Ultra 7 258V
• Intel Core 5 320, Core Ultra 7 365, or Core Ultra X7 358H

There are many variations of these chips, so you’ll undoubtedly run across other strings of numbers, especially on the Intel front. But the above is a good place to start. There’s lots more to say in the world of gaming laptops or content creation devices, so make sure to read our full guide to How to Buy a Gaming Laptop.

GPU: As of now, Intel’s Panther Lake X7 or X9 chips have the most powerful integrated graphics. You’ll find them in laptops like the Dell XPS 14, which can replicate discrete GPU-level performance like the RTX 4050. Unlike many laptops with discrete GPUs, though, Panther Lake X chips offer great battery life, making them better Windows alternatives to the MacBook Pro.

For discrete options, you’ll want one of the latest Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs, such as the RTX 5060. The biggest leap in performance is between the RTX 5070 and the RTX 5070 Ti, which increases VRAM to 12 GB.

RAM (or memory): Stick with at least 16 GB if you can. Since the Copilot+ designation was introduced in 2024, it has become the new standard. You’ll even find laptops as cheap as $600 that have 16 GB of memory. Gamers and content creators should upgrade to 32 GB if possible, though the ongoing memory shortage makes this more expensive. There’s been a new surge in 8 GB options, such as the Dell XPS 13, but these should be reserved for only light usage.

Storage: Similar to memory, many laptops have moved to 512 GB as the new standard, and you’ll find lots of affordable laptops with that as the base configuration. Upgrading to 1 or 2 terabytes, where possible, will make your life that much easier, especially since many laptops don’t offer expandable storage.

Display: Laptops are usually categorized by screen size, with 13-inch, 14-inch, and 16-inch being the most common. Consider size, resolution, refresh rate, and panel type.

Portability: Aside from display size, chassis thickness and weight are the main factors, determining how portable a laptop is to travel with. Other dimensions are important too, but more often than not, that is determined by the screen size.

Ports: Many laptops are limited to USB-C and a headphone jack these days, with some exceptions that include USB-A or HDMI. Make sure your laptop has what you need, or you’ll need a USB Hub or laptop docking station to add ports or increase external display support.

With a fresh folding form factor, the new iPhone Duo is Apple’s most radical redesign in years. It lands alongside the more familiar-looking iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. There’s no regular iPhone 18, or at least, not yet. Rumors suggest we may see a more affordable base model, perhaps flanked by an iPhone 18e and a second-generation iPhone Air, in spring 2027.

The two new Pro iPhones are available to preorder on September 12 and ship on September 18. You can preorder the iPhone Duo from October 16, ahead of a full release on October 23. But which iPhone 18 model is right for you? I’ll break down the differences and what these phones have in common, so you can choose with confidence. For options beyond the iPhone 18 lineup, read our Best iPhones guide.

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Why You Might Not Need to Upgrade

Before you drop all those hard-earned dollars, remember that you probably don’t need the latest iPhone. If you have an older iPhone, Apple does a good job of updating the software (the iPhone 11 Pro is still supported), and for hardware issues, your iPhone might be repairable; maybe it needs a battery replacement or these troubleshooting tips. Don’t feel like you have to spring for Apple’s shiny new thing.

Sadly, Apple raised iPhone Pro prices this year, so both models are $100 more expensive than the iPhone 17 Pro series.

If you’re set on upgrading, consider raising funds by selling your old iPhone. Just be sure to back up your iPhone, and factory reset it before you sell or give it away. Once the new device arrives, we have tips on how to set up your new iPhone and what settings to change to get the most out of it.

Which iPhone 18 Is Right for You?

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Apple

iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, and iPhone 18 Pro Max

We’ll start by looking at what’s the same across the iPhone 18 models this year.

All three new iPhones have Apple’s A20 Pro chip inside, and, you guessed it, this is Apple’s most powerful chip ever. Now, iPhones are already the most capable phones for raw compute power, but the A20 Pro promises a significant jump in performance (around 20 percent faster and 30 percent more efficient than the last generation). It also packs a new neural engine to power on-device AI and a new thermal design with a larger vapor chamber to keep things cool. For the iPhone Duo, the A20 Pro has a display engine to ensure smooth transitions between two screens. While Apple doesn’t list the RAM, every model is rumored to have 12 GB.

While they come in different sizes and the Duo has two, every iPhone features an OLED screen that Apple calls a Super Retina XDR display. They also have ProMotion technology, otherwise known as a 120-Hz refresh rate. These adaptive refresh rates can drop as low as 1 Hz when there’s little activity on the screen, enabling features like the always-on display without draining the battery too much.

The displays are protected by the scratch-resistant and antireflective Ceramic Shield 2, the same as last year’s iPhone 17 range. And they can go from 1 nit up to 3,000 nits of brightness. Only the iPhone Duo has a custom nano-texture finish on the interior screen, giving it a matte look that’s designed to reduce glare and crease visibility.

All the phones have an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, meaning they can survive a short dunk in fresh water. They all come in four storage options (256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB, or 2 TB), support Qi2 magnetic wireless charging (MagSafe), USB-C 3.2, Dual SIM, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, Thread, and Ultra-Wideband (UWB). It also has Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, Emergency SOS via Satellite, and Crash Detection.

To help you better understand which model to buy, here’s precisely where they diverge.

Siri made its debut on the iPhone in 2011, five years ahead of Google Assistant and 11 years before ChatGPT would open up to the public. Despite the head start, Apple’s voice AI has been comprehensively overtaken in recent years, and made to look rather primitive compared to the many generative AI rivals it’s now up against.

With the launch of iOS 27, Apple and Siri are fighting back. There’s a new name—Siri AI—and a host of new capabilities that are coming to your iPhone.

These are the new features that you’ll be able to make use of once iOS 27 appears on your handset, if you’re running the iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max or later (including, of course, the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo). Only these latest phones have the necessary on-board silicon to meet the higher AI processing demands.

Get More Personal Context

You’ll notice when Siri AI arrives that it spends some time indexing everything on your iPhone. That’s so it can dig deep into your texts, emails, calendars, and whatever else you have stored on your phone (everything is kept on-device though—nothing gets sent back to Apple).

It means you can ask natural questions about text conversations, email interactions, and appointments—”What day is my work appraisal happening?” for example, or “Where did I say I’d meet Mom?”—and get informed, personalized answers back, based on what’s already stored in your apps.

This works for photos and videos as well. Open up the Photos app and you’re able to ask Siri AI to show you all the pictures of your pet, or the images you took on your last vacation, or all the photos of trees you’ve collected, via simple, conversational prompts.

Ask About Anything on the Screen

Siri AI knows what you’re looking at while you’re using your iPhone—perhaps even better than you do. Whereas before you would’ve had to take a screenshot and give it to Siri to look at, now you can just ask.

So if you’re on the web in Safari, you can say “Hey Siri” and then get it to summarize the text onscreen or identify a landmark in an image in an online article. You can ask what certain options mean in Settings, or look up more details about a game you’re thinking about downloading from the App Store.

The same sort of visual processing is available through the iOS Camera app too: Just switch to Siri mode using the selector by the shutter button, and ask Siri AI about anything that’s in view (nutritional information about an item on a menu, for instance).

Siri AI can see what you see.

Courtesy of David Nield

Write and Edit Text Anywhere

The old Siri could generate text for you, but it offloaded the job to an integrated ChatGPT plug-in. With Siri AI, no third-party help is needed, and you can use it for things like text messages and emails.

Just call up Siri AI by saying “Hey Siri” or tapping on the Write with Siri link, then tell it what you want to say or describe the edits you’d like it to make. You can instruct it to make your messages sound more or less formal, to expand or shorten sections of text, or to turn quick notes into full paragraphs and sentences.

In the days after the assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point cofounder Charlie Kirk, the online reaction was a mess. Graphic videos of the shooting were everywhere within minutes of his death, far-right figures called for violence and vengeance, and right-wing lawmakers and influencers called for the cancellation—and worse—of anyone celebrating. Then, the conspiracy theories began.

It’s been one year since Kirk’s death, and conspiracy theories about the shooting have persisted, supercharged by social media algorithms and right-wing influencers like Candace Owens, who has used her huge following to push baseless allegations about the incident.

Experts believe these conspiracy theories will continue for a long time to come. “There’s no reason to believe conspiracy theories about Kirk’s murder will lose steam anytime soon,” Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, tells WIRED. “If anything, I expect them to escalate further as the criminal trial against Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing Kirk, plays out over the next year or so. The trial is bound to draw major media attention and offer conspiracy theorists a source of new material to work from.”

In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, some conspiracy theorists claimed the assassination was a false flag operation designed to deflect attention away from President Donald Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Others claimed the entire thing was staged. There was the AI-powered gun theory, the claim that the shooter was a Kirk supporter, and even claims that Kirk was still alive.

But ultimately, the baseless claim that persisted is that someone close to Kirk, or operating on behalf of Israel, was responsible for his death, that Robinson was simply a patsy and what really killed Kirk was an exploding microphone. This is the narrative that has been central to Owens’ months-long conspiracy theory campaign. Her Kirk content has racked up hundreds of millions of views.

Owens’ success is fueled in a large part by the way that social media platforms today encourage their users to post content. “X and YouTube are rife with speculation about Kirk‘s death, where it is both still possible to recruit new audiences and monetize them,” Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, tells WIRED.

The end result is that Kirk’s death has become yet another rabbit hole, or a way for viewers to distract themselves from reality. “Candace and other conspiratorial influencers make things seem much more mysterious and exciting,” Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who tracks disinformation, tells WIRED. “For many, her explanations are preferable to the reality of an act of violence by a solo individual.”

There have already been real world repercussions: Researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute recently found that “Candace Owens caused a measurable, statistically significant surge in death threats and calls for violence against [Charlie Kirk’s wife] Erika Kirk.” In May, a man was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill Erica Kirk ahead of her appearance at a Turning Point USA event in San Antonio, though the man has yet to be charged. Owens did not respond to a request for comment.

Erica Kirk and Turning Point have repeatedly called for Owens and others to stop spreading baseless rumours about the assassination. While those calls have not been heeded, Turning Point believes the impact the conspiracy theories are having is fading.

“The conspiracy theories have much less reach and potency now than they did six months ago, and I think I’ll say the same six months from now,” Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point spokesperson, tells WIRED. “They won’t stop because many of these personalities were completely unknown and broke before Charlie was killed and this is their money maker, but their influence and credibility has collapsed and will continue to do so.”

But some experts disagree, arguing that conspiratorial thinking has been an aspect of American life for decades.

“Historically, this is quite normal,” Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at the University of Miami and author of American Conspiracy Theories, tells WIRED. “Majorities of Americans have believed for decades that JFK was killed by a conspiracy rather than by a lone gunman. In fact almost 80 percent of Americans believed in the 1970s there was a conspiracy behind the assassination.”

When the life-simulation game Paralives was released in early access, Danielle Udogaranya’s hand ached at the thought of making new Black hairstyles for it.

It wasn’t because she didn’t want to create for the game. Udogaranya, better known as Ebonix, has spent over a decade creating custom content for life-simming games with the goal of helping people see themselves on digital screens. Her hesitation stemmed from the physical toll it takes to craft the perfect digital coil, braid, and kink—painstakingly long hours and tedious precision.

“I thought to myself, why am I still having to do this?” Udogaranya, a technical artist who has a degree in psychology, tells WIRED.

Fans of games like The Sims spend time flipping through her sites, downloading custom hair packs inspired by real-life styles not otherwise available in-game. As of now, the Ebonix Patreon has over 115,000 members, and hundreds of both free and paid content items.

The reason behind the demand for custom content in life-simming games is both simple and disappointing: Natural Black hairstyles have been historically underrepresented, and the technology used to make them has been slow to improve.

“With new games coming out now, I’m still seeing the issues, and I’m still seeing the ‘Killmonger locs.’ God forbid we get more than three options,” Udogaranya says, in reference to the stiff, short-dreaded style featured by Michael B. Jordan’s character in Black Panther that became a go-to for many games as well as some other films. Similar examples can be seen in old and new franchises alike, including Tekken 8, Spider-Man 2, Apex Legends, Horizon Zero Dawn, and more. The reason for this Black hair default? Textured hairstyles in games have been reliant on code that was not made for them.

“If you’re making straight hair, it’s very easy to taper the ends and then make it cute,” Udogaranya explains. “But when you’re trying to add a black texture on it, it looks like a hot dog.” Thus, immovable, cylindrical “Killmonger locs” are simpler to make than other natural styles.

Black hair in video games has long been a design afterthought—at best—since some of the first Black characters entered the scene. In early 8-bit era games, like SEGA’s Heavyweight Champ, which came out in 1976, Black hairstyles appeared to emphasize minstrel-like stereotypes. During the rise of fighting games in the ’80s and ’90s, where more characters per game were introduced, Black hair was limited because Black player selections were limited. For example, in Street Fighter, there was only one Black character out of the 12 options. When The Sims came out in 2000, the game allowed limited customization, with hair swatches connected to different face options. Though the game allowed for three skin-tone swatches—fair, medium, and dark—natural hairstyle options were virtually nonexistent.

In the decades that followed, 3D animation and customization in gaming continued to flourish, but Black hair has trended toward only a handful of swatches, most of which provided little to minimal movement. However, there have been efforts to tackle this industrywide issue. Dove and Open Source Afro Hair Library launched Code My Crown in 2023, which provides a “complete and free guide for coding textured hair and protective styles in video games,” according to a press release. And, while most of the natural hairstyles in The Sims 4 come from expansion and stuff packs costing around $10 to $40 each, EA has begun to release free downloadable content for players looking to diversify hairstyles. Its latest DLC provides one new natural hairstyle with its pack of six outfits.

Part of LG’s xboom collaboration with producer, Black Eyed Peas star, and tech obsessive will.i.am, the Stage 501 is a mighty 25.8-pound party starter. Its 2.2-channel setup combines twin 5.25-inch woofers with two 2.5-inch full-range drivers. Together they’re capable of 160 watts on battery or 220 watts plugged in. In simpler terms: It easily filled a huge workshop space with rave-ready bass, and enough volume for a proper party.

What surprised me more than the party capabilities was that it also sounds acceptable at low volume in my office. I was expecting a pint-sized PA system, but dialled back to casual listening volume and it remained composed. Often, speakers designed for loud really struggle with quiet, and just sound muddy, but that wasn’t the case here. Yes, it prefers it when people are dancing, but it manages well when you’re chilling out too.

The xboom app is excellent, with EQ, AI Karaoke, synchronized lighting, and some cheesy but irresistible DJ punch buttons. LG has also included two very sensible smartphone/tablet stands that position your device at the perfect angle for karaoke nights. It comes with two mic inputs, but you will need to buy microphones separately.

Battery life is “up to” 25 hours, and the battery itself is replaceable. It’s big, and not as grown-up sounding as the Soundbox Mix, but it is cheaper and has a surprisingly good LED light show feature that I expected to hate, but didn’t. Party on dudes.

Honorable Mentions

Bang & Olufsen Beosound A1 (Gen 3) for $399: Gorgeously designed, flawlessly finished, and one of the most covetable Bluetooth speakers around. The brushed aluminum puck has barely changed since 2016, which says plenty about the strength of Cecilie Manz’s original design. The latest version adds a richer, more powerful 360-degree sound from its 3.25-inch woofer, 0.6-inch tweeter, and 60 watts of amplification. It is IP67 rated, lasts up to 24 hours, and is appreciably more repairable and upgradable. I love it, but it’s just a little too expensive when the KEF Muo exists and sounds as good as it does.

Soundboks Mix for $799: The 21.4-pound Soundboks Mix is tremendously loud, with a 10-inch woofer, 1.2-inch tweeter, and 40-hour replaceable battery. WIRED writer Parker Hall measured 111 decibels from a meter away, and was surprised at how musical it remained rather than just battering you with volume. IP65 protection, sturdy handles, and rubberized tennis-ball style corners make it particularly well suited to outdoor parties. It’s expensive and heavy compared to the new breed of party speakers from brands like LG and Sony, but it is superb at what it does.

JBL Charge 6 for $150: It’s just too big to be our absolute favorite Bluetooth speaker, but it was a close run thing between two superb JBL options. The great sound and portability of the Flip 7 won out, but the 40 watts from the Charge 6 deliver more bass and scale, while maintaining detail. Battery life stretches to 24 hours, and you also get IP68 protection, Auracast, app EQ, USB-C lossless playback, and reverse charging. Currently on sale too, making it a real bargain at $150.

Clearview is not the first company to automate the process of trawling publicly available information. Other intelligence platforms sold to law enforcement, including ShadowDragon’s SocialNet, Penlink’s Tangles, and Fivecast, help investigators uncover aliases and associates and map a person’s digital footprint.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a George Washington University law professor who studies AI and policing, describes this kind of automated investigation as “digital rummaging.” “They’re basically going to create a profile of you based on all of the random digital clues you left on the internet,” he explains. In practice, that means gathering scattered bits of information that once lived in separate places but were difficult to connect.

Woodrow Hartzog, a Boston University privacy scholar, argues that the labor of investigative work once served as a practical check on surveillance. By vastly reducing the labor required to investigate a person, tools like InquiryIQ also eliminate those checks. “The privacy protections we have in place right now were mainly built in a world that assumed a certain amount of friction in the ability of governments to collect information about people,” he says. “There are a lot of rules we never had just because we never needed them—because there were these practical barriers to following everyone around.”

When an InquiryIQ search is finished, the interface is designed to present the officer with the identities, connections, and other details the system has surfaced, which the officer can accept or reject before they are added to the profile. Clearview warns that automatically generated demographic, social media, and arrest data “may or may not be accurate.” Before accepting any finding, the officer must attest that they independently verified it.

Kyler says that human review is central to Clearview’s design. The system is meant to surface possible leads, not determine what is true, he says. “That’s the job of an analyst—to evaluate what’s true, what’s not; what’s noise, what’s reality.”

“A human in the loop is a little bit of a cold comfort,” Hartzog says. Over time, investigators can defer to automated systems until the person checking the machine becomes “a sort of rubber stamp.”

For example, in United States v. Sant, a Minnesota case involving undercover Homeland Security Investigations agents and surveillance of political activists, defense lawyers obtained a Clearview report drawing matches from roughly 15 years of protest photography. Every result was stamped “Accepted by Guy Gino,” including one Clearview itself labeled “A Less Likely Result”—which, the report’s footnote notes, can only be exported if a user accepts it. Defense attorneys allege the report swept in photos of an entirely different man, his pregnant wife, and young daughter. (There is no evidence InquiryIQ was used in the case.)

Pitfalls and Silver Linings

In the prototype WIRED reviewed, what InquiryIQ returned could vary depending on which model was selected. Its interface includes a control for choosing the model that runs the research and lists xAI and Amazon Bedrock, a platform for accessing models built by other companies.

In 2025, what xAI said was an unauthorized change to Grok’s system prompt caused the chatbot to inject claims about a supposed “white genocide” in South Africa into unrelated conversations. Less than a month later, after another change to its instructions, Grok produced antisemitic posts and praise for Adolf Hitler. SpaceXAI did not respond to a request for comment.

A lot of the best meal kits offer the satisfaction of making a home-cooked meal, the chance to learn a little culinary craft, maybe even a chance at some pride in your handiwork. Hungryroot (7/10, WIRED Review) isn’t really like that. Hungryroot instead wants to replace your trip to the grocery store with a few good recipes.

After starting as a grocery service, Hungryroot spent years piecing together proprietary AI long before AI became the byword of everything from your electric shaver to your literal kitchen sink. What Hungryroot’s AI does is geared to creating personalized food menus and shopping lists, based on your every micro-preference and whim, whether that’s a love of olives or a hatred of figs. A box then shows up at your door, with a mix of basic provisions, silly snacks, and desserts, along with recipes and usually some pre-prepped ingredients.

Cooking is often more assembly, with recipes pieced together from premium ingredients you’d expect to find at your local organic store. A fun sauce here, a pre-cooked protein there, a corn tortilla that just wants to be livened in the pan. Most meals come together in 15 or 20 minutes, in my experience—unless they need time in the oven. A bot concierge and pre-mixed sauces do cost a bit, however, and that’s where Hungryroot promo codes come in. There are Hungryroot coupons that offer 30% off or more, and Hungryroot coupon codes that offer extra free gifts for every box, for life: a protein here, a cookie there. Here’s what’s up.

Get 30% Off Plus a Free Gift With a Hungryroot First-Time Discount

The current Hungryroot discount code is good for a cool 30% off your first week’s box from Hungryroot. To qualify for the discount, you’ll need to sign up for a plan totaling $99 or more a week, including breakfast items, snacks, and produce in addition to recipes and ingredients. The Hungryroot promo offer also includes a free gift, which usually includes an option to get an extra premium protein like chicken or beef. You can see more information here.

Take Advantage of Hungryroot Coupons for Referrals

Like a lot of meal kits, there’s also a Hungryroot discount code for referring your friends to the Hungryroot service—and this usually benefits both sides of the equation.

Your friend who orders after using your referral code gets a cool $50 off their first grocery delivery of $100 or more—which adds up, potentially, to half off. The person who refers their friend also gets $50 off their next order, once their friend finalizes their first grocery delivery of $100 or more. So basically, everybody gets $50.

Follow this link for info on the Hungryroot referral program. Unlike other offers, the referral credits seem to be stackable with other offers—so you don’t miss out on any discounts by taking a referral.

Unlock of Hungryroot Coupons for New and Returning Customers

Most subscription services have hidden levels. The way to access them is to change your mind a lot. Just like some magazine subscriptions and almost all delivery meal kits and grocery subscription services, Hungryroot will chase you down with offers if you cancel a subscription or change your mind after already giving them your email.

What’s this mean? Usually, it means that in the days or weeks after changing your mind about Hungryroot, you’ll get a coupon in the mail. So if you take Hungryroot’s quiz about your dietary preferences, then don’t order? A few days later, you’ll likely get a sweet Hungryroot coupon code in your inbox. New subscription plans usually also come with free treats.

If you cancel or pause an existing account, you may also receive a Hungryroot promo code offering your $50 or even $100 off your next order, as an incentive to return.

Norton Antivirus is the only anti-virus software I’ve ever used, in part because many years ago I switched to Linux, which eliminates the need for antivirus software. If you’re still on macOS or Windows, though, Norton Antivirus is still a solid choice. None of these services is something anyone is excited to run, but they can save you bacon if you make a bad decision downloading questionable files or clicking links you shouldn’t have. The best way to stay protected without spending a fortune is to use a Norton coupon code to get yourself a deal.

Norton Coupons: Up to 58% off 360 and Antivirus Plans

While I’ve only ever used the Antivirus offering, the real way to save is to bundle several services and use a coupon code for the lot. With Norton that means Norton 360, which gets you the Antivirus, malware, ransomware, and hacking protection, along with a VPN and dark web monitoring, for up to three devices. You also get a password manager and 2GB of online storage. With this Norton coupon code, you get all that $40 for the first year, which is about the same as paying for a VPN alone. Norton 360 Deluxe gets you everything that comes with the regular version, but it works with five devices and gives you 50GB of online storage.

Get Unbeatable Norton With LifeLock Protection From $8.33 per Month

LifeLock is Norton’s usual online protection suite, but adds up to $1 million in potential coverage if you experience financial loss due to identity theft. With this Norton coupon code, Norton 360 with LifeLock is just $8.33 per month.

Norton Anti Virus Promo Codes: 50% Off 360 Antivirus Plus

If you want to get (and stay) serious about your privacy and protection, and the overall health and longevity of your computer, I’d suggest investing in an anti-virus protection plan for your whole setup. With Norton 360 Antivirus Plus, you’ll get powerful antivirus protection for your device, including AI-powered Scam Protection, Password Manager, and 2 GB Cloud Backup. And you can get even more peace of mind with a 60-day money back guarantee. Best of all, Norton 360 Antivirus Plus is 50% off right now, taking it from $60 per year to only $30—which works out to being just $2.50 per month—a small investment worth so much more in protection and peace of mind.

​​Save $100 on Norton Cybersecurity for Small Businesses

If you want to protect more than a few devices, the small business plans are the way to go. These coupons will get you $100 off the Small Business Premium plan, and $80 off Small Business. These plans cover two devices per user and up to five users.

Test Out Norton 360 for Yourself With a Free Trial

Not sure if Norton 360 is worth the money? You can try it out for seven days, though set yourself a reminder because after the initial 7-day free trial, your paid subscription will begin unless you cancel before.

Few things are as iconic to camping as the green Coleman stove. Every summer you’ll find them, along with Coleman lanterns and coolers, on picnic tables across America. At WIRED, we’re big fans of the Coleman Cascade stove, but all Coleman stoves are capable of cooking up delicious camp food. There is more to Coleman than stoves, of course. I’m a fan of the coolers as well, along with the tents (simple and sturdy), and the Forester Sling chair for lounging. No matter what you need to outfit yourself for outdoor adventure as warmer weather arrives, we have a Coleman promo code and coupons to help you save.

Get 75% Off Coleman Drinkware

There’s nothing quite like a cold drink on a hot summer day. Keep hydrated and cool while out in the heat with Coleman’s signature drinkware that’s built to last on every adventure. Right now, when you buy select Coleman drinkware, you’ll get the second at 75% off. So whether you want to go classic Stainless Steel Insulated Tumbler for your joe in the morning, or FreeFlow AUTOSEAL Stainless Steel Water Bottle for your day adventure, you won’t have to choose.

Snag a 15% Coleman Promo Code When You Sign Up

If what you want isn’t on sale, no problem. You can get a 15% discount on one full-price purchase just for signing up for Coleman email list. Separately, you can save 15% on a full-price purchase and get free standard shipping when you sign up for texts.

Coleman

Cascade 3-in-1 Stove

Coleman

Classic Propane Stove

Members Get Free Shipping at Coleman

If you create an account online on Coleman, you can snag free shipping. Free shipping doesn’t apply to the expedited delivery options, but so long as you’re not in a rush it’ll save you a few dollars. Just create an account, login, and the free shipping will be automatically applied during checkout. This Coleman free shipping deal is only valid for standard shipping within the contiguous United States.

Coleman

Dome with Screen Room

Shop the Coleman Sale

Summer is approaching quickly, and that means camping season is in full swing. These regularly pricey outdoor essentials are discounted from ten to hundreds of dollars, making it easier (and cheaper) than ever to get your camping set up ready to go before high-season. Be sure to check out the Coleman sale page for discounts on necessities from the 8P Skydome Darkroom Tent with Screen Room to the Coleman Classic Recharge 800 Lumens LED Lantern.

Coleman

Forester Sling Chair

Coleman

Deck Chair with Side Table

Now Available Kane Brown at Coleman

Coleman has partnered with country superstar Kane Brown for an exclusive collaboration, so you can camp this summer in style. This limited-edition, exclusive collab features only four items: the Coleman x Kane Brown stainless steel tumbler, steel-belted cooler, 6-can sling cooler, and Snap ‘N Go Cooler. Because of the popularity of the limited-run collab, Coleman x Kane Brown Snap ‘N Go Cooler is currently sold out, but be sure to sign up for Coleman email newsletters to get notified of restocked, new drops, and early access to sales.

Popal says a recent IDC survey asked consumers whether they were interested in buying a foldable smartphone when it was time to upgrade, and 60 percent said they are not likely to buy one. However, when asked if Apple released a folding smartphone, almost 33 percent said they “absolutely” would.

“Apple has such a strong market pull,” Popal tells WIRED. “The average consumer didn’t know about [memory price increases] until Apple made an announcement that they’re going to increase prices. “Coming into foldables, it’s going to create overall excitement for the category. And it’s good for the consumer, too. It’s always good to have more competition and more choice.”

One area of concern is the device’s durability and repairability, as folding phones are notoriously more prone to damage and are tough to fix. Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of Sustainability at iFixit, tells WIRED her team has never taken apart a foldable they’d call truly repairable.

“Manufacturers have come a long way since the Galaxy Fold first dropped,” she says. “But the gains in durability haven’t come with gains in repairability.”

New Economics

While Apple announced three premium iPhone models today, it is not releasing the base iPhone 18 this year—marking the first time it’s breaking up the launch cycle of the core iPhone lineup. Instead, the iPhone 18 is expected to launch in the spring of 2027 alongside the iPhone 18e and second-generation iPhone Air.

Despite the eye-watering price and the current economic climate, Popal says the iPhone Duo is “guaranteed to be a blockbuster.”

“Apple defied all odds and broke the $1,000 barrier when they first launched the $1,000 smartphone,” Popal says. “Yes, there’s going to be sticker shock, but Apple caters to a very high-end consumer segment who can afford it.”

Over the summer, Apple introduced a new iPhone leasing program to help ease the price of its phones on consumers’ wallets, and it’s likely to prove popular with the uber-expensive iPhone Duo. Chamberlain says that for people who replace their phone regularly, it gives them a path to do it where the device gets back into the reuse stream and boosts the refurbished market, which isn’t a bad thing for electronic waste. However, Apple’s leasing agreements mean the device needs to be returned in the condition it was received.

“iFixit is committed to the idea that you should own your shit,” she says. “You should be able to repair things, modify things, hack your own devices. It’s sad to see the tech world move away from that principle, and Apple encouraging people to lease devices instead of buying them.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

As the author of a newsletter about artificial intelligence, I consider it my duty to experience the bleeding edge of this technology firsthand. This week, that meant embracing some agentic mayhem.

You’re probably aware that frontier AI models have attained advanced cybersecurity capabilities in recent months. They can find zero-day bugs in large codebases and scan computers for vulnerabilities at lightning speed. To make things even more exciting, cybersecurity agents sometimes go rogue, colluding with one another and hacking into outside systems to gain an edge.

To get a closer look, I decided to unleash one in my own home network. Over the course of a few days, I watched as my own rogue agent found vulnerabilities in various household devices, hacked into a PC, and showed me that several vibe-coded projects were—unsurprisingly—riddled with bugs. (My wife knew what I was up to, and rolled her eyes each time I proudly announced the discovery of a new vulnerability.)

But Will, you might be thinking, giving an impish, all-powerful cybersecurity agent access to your home network is batshit. And you would be correct! Nevertheless, I believe that a good way to understand the cybersecurity hellscape in front of us is to pay it a visit.

In the end, my experiment was revealing, but oddly reassuring, too. My little network gremlin showed me how vulnerable my home life would be to AI hacking, but it also told me how to make everything a lot more secure. In the end, I discovered that the best way to deal with AI hacking may well be having your own AI hacker.

Maverick Model

I got the idea for the experiment after discovering Abliteration AI, a startup that offers access to powerful AI models with the usual guardrails removed.

Most mainstream AI models will refuse to respond to certain queries, and they will certainly refuse to find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. But it’s possible to remove these restrictions by finding and modifying certain patterns within an open-weight model’s internal parameters. You can tweak the patterns that lead to refusals through a process known as abliteration.

Removing AI’s guardrails might seem risky, but it’s not uncommon. Academic researchers use these de-aligned models to better understand how AI actually works, while cybersecurity firms use them to probe software and systems for vulnerabilities. Technically speaking, Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s Astra work similarly: They’re basically conventional models that lack the usual cyber controls, with access limited to trusted customers for the time being. (The companies also offer wider access to models with a medium number of guardrails so that companies can vet their code and systems for problems.)

Abliteration AI offers several fully de-aligned models, the most powerful of which is a version of Z.ai’s latest agentic coding model, GLM 5.3. This puts similar cyber capabilities to Mythos and Astra right in your hands for as little as the cost of a pizza.

Devon, Abliteration AI’s CEO, believes that making de-aligned models widely available is smart defense: It will help good guys counter bad guys by probing systems for vulnerabilities and by mimicking the behavior of hackers, scammers, and, yes, rogue AI agents. (Devon asked that I use his first name only because his day job doesn’t know about his side project.)

“You have all these critical infrastructure companies, from airlines to banks, that are rolling out agents like crazy,” Devon says. “How do you make sure that a nefarious actor can’t use some of these agents in a bad way?”

A year after the assassination of cofounder Charlie Kirk, Turning Point plans to pour tens of millions of dollars into the midterm elections to help Republican candidates in key congressional and gubernatorial races, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The conservative grassroots group is expected to prioritize three states in the midterms—New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada—but will also deploy full-time field staff in seven other states where Democrats could pick up seats.

The precise amounts could change, but sources tell WIRED that Turning Point’s super PAC is looking to spend $15–$20 million in ads across the three priority states. Turning Point’s field operation spending couldn’t be learned, as it is run by a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, but it is estimated to be tens of millions more.

The planned cash injection will pay for both a field operation as well as digital ads, and would only add to the advantage for Republicans in funding through a constellation of outside super PACs and party committees.

The most closely watched race for Republicans in New Hampshire is the Senate seat vacated by the retiring Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, where former Republican senator John Sununu is running against Democratic representative Chris Pappas to flip the seat.

The New Hampshire Senate race is a crucial battleground for both parties, as many of the possible paths to Democrats taking the Senate majority require the party to keep the seat, which the Cook Political Report rates as “Lean Democrat.”

Turning Point has also been particularly focused on the race for governor in Arizona, where Democratic incumbent Katie Hobbs is running against Representative Andy Biggs, who endorsed President Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020.

These maneuvers come as Republican groups have started a massive cash injection to counter a wave of discontent from voters over the Iran war and high prices, and burgeoning Democratic momentum that has opened up the possibility of a Democrat-controlled Senate.

After facing criticism for not spending earlier, Trump’s political operation has stepped into gear recently with a $10 million ad spend in the Texas Senate race through Trump’s main super PAC, MAGA Inc. More recently, Trump’s team has used No Going Back PAC Inc, a new entity, to reserve at least $47 million in ads in six Senate races and one House race.

The extent of the coordination between Trump’s operation and MAGA Inc. with outside groups like Turning Point isn’t entirely clear, but there has been extensive data sharing to coordinate on which voters to reach, one of the sources said.

And with the midterms in November widely expected to be decided in part by turnout, Turning Point has communicated to Trump’s orbit that a major focus of its field operation is reminding Trump supporters to actually vote on Election Day.

Unlike other super PACs, Turning Point has been an organization focused on presidential elections, and its midterm strategy is really an effort to build up infrastructure for the Republican ticket in 2028, the sources said.

The focus on New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada comes as Turning Point contends with the fact that winning those states in 2028 would offset Vice President JD Vance—or anyone else—needing to win traditional so-called blue-wall states.

You know what they say: The day after midterms is the first day of the presidential election. Republicans are already campaigning.

A Rock and a Hard Place

With Trump’s approval rating now consistently at or under 40 percent, a historically dangerous level for a midterm election, Republicans have faced a dilemma over participating in the Republican “midterm convention” this week in Texas.

While party conventions are typically only held in presidential election years, Trump and other officials are set to headline the event in an effort to boost vulnerable Republicans like Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton and mobilize the base.

I think it’s basically a question of timing. A lot of people are sensing that the pace of capabilities is picking up. We’re already pushing from human to superhuman in many areas, like coding, hacking, math, and I think people are aware of this. Even if there’s a lot of talk in the press about things being hyped, I think people see that things are just not slowing down.

That’s one reason, and two is the recent safety incidents, which have updated a lot of people around the sci-fi–sounding doomer concerns not really being so sci-fi after all. Both of these have been gradual trends over the last few years. Things like the models being aware of when they’re being tested has been a thing for a while now. Maybe three years ago, that was a sci-fi concern. Then, about a year ago, that became a real thing.

Those two things mean that people are quite receptive to someone working on AI saying, “Yeah, in the next year, things could get pretty bad, pretty fast.”

You mentioned the recent incidents. Can you be more specific about what you’re referring to and why it led to you speaking out now?

I think the big classic example here is the attack on Hugging Face on the part of OpenAI’s agent swarm. What’s so shocking about this one is the agents did this hack as part of a general strategy for understanding more about the grader. They were trying to understand the world they found themselves in, trying to understand the thing that was doing the grading. They decided that it would make sense to go on this very concerted effort to hack into some infrastructure, and they succeeded.

This previously sounded like science fiction. Two years ago, an evaluation of an AI would have been running a model on some math questions. Now we’ve got cases where, while the AI is being evaluated, it runs for days, comes up with all sorts of ideas of its own, and decides to hack into some third party and actually compromises their infrastructure. It looks like it does this all of its own volition, with no priming on the part of the human. This just happened while it was being tested.

Some people think the Hugging Face incident is a sign that the AI companies are moving recklessly fast, while others think it’s a sign that the AI models are just very good at hacking now, and then some think it’s both. I’m curious what your exact takeaway from it is.

I don’t want to focus too much on the Hugging Face attack, because I do also think there is plenty of evidence that we don’t know how to align models properly. When we train models, we push them through this set of training environments and then hope that what comes out at the end will, like, largely behave sensibly, but we still can’t precisely control how the AI behaves.

We can’t make sure that it won’t do things like try and randomly decide to impersonate a human online in order to achieve something—we don’t know how to guarantee that. I think that’s the main takeaway.

San Francisco’s city attorney has hit Meta with a cease-and-desist letter telling the company to stop “allowing” paid advertisements that include AI-generated child sexual abuse content and asked it to explain how the ads repeatedly ran on its platforms.

On Tuesday, WIRED reported that Meta has run more than 350 ads in recent months that transformed still images of minors—some of them confirmed as real individuals, including a member of a European royal family—into short videoclips that can depict them performing sexual acts. When clicked, these ads would direct people to download AI image- and video-generation apps, some of which could be used to digitally undress people or create other nonconsensual intimate imagery.

The ads, which were discovered by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), included some identical ads that had been uploaded multiple times, and in total they reached more than 29,000 accounts in countries in the European Union. The ads that were shown across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads also targeted accounts in the US, Australia, and India. WIRED initially reported on a batch of 53 of the ads at the start of August, but more than 250 of the total number of ads ran on Meta’s platforms after this initial report.

“Meta has failed to address a known issue of AI-generated child sexually explicit ads, while profiting from them,” San Francisco city attorney David Chiu says in a statement to WIRED. “These ads are deeply disturbing and cause harm to real children. Meta claims to have zero tolerance for child exploitation, yet the scale and persistence of these issues suggest current efforts are woefully inadequate. This is unacceptable, and Meta must do better.”

“No company—particularly one that claims all advertisements are reviewed and approved prior to distribution and then accepts payment for that distribution—should permit its advertising systems to be used in this manner,” Chiu writes in the four-page letter his office sent to Meta’s lawyers.

The letter raises a host of questions about how Meta’s ad policies and safety systems operate and asks that the company’s legal, child-safety, and advertising staff engage in “prompt discussions” with the city office. “These findings are especially troubling because they do not appear to reflect an isolated failure that Meta corrected when first alerted to the problem,” Chiu writes.

Meta says there is “no indication” that the ads were displayed in San Francisco and this means they are “outside the city attorney’s jurisdiction.” While Meta’s ad library, which is a repository of ads, includes some data about ads published in the US, it does not break down where in the US ads may have run.

In response to Meta’s jurisdictional claims, City Attorney’s Office spokesperson Alex Barrett-Shorter tells WIRED that, because “San Francisco consumers can access the unlawful ads through Meta online spaces,” the matter is the the city of San Francisco’s business.

“We find Meta’s response astonishing. Meta appears less concerned about whether they’re guilty of exploiting children than whether San Francisco should say anything about it,” Barrett-Shorter says. “Meta has bigger problems to solve here than determining our jurisdiction.”

Meta previously told WIRED that many of the ads identified by the TTP researchers had already been removed before they were reported—all of them have now been removed for violating its policies—and most had “fewer than 200 impressions” from accounts. “We don’t tolerate nudify apps or any kind of child exploitation, whether real or AI-generated,” a Meta spokesperson previously said. The company said the “total ad spend” for the 300-plus ads found by the researchers was “under $5,000.”

The new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 come not just with better fitness tracking and upgraded noise reduction, but also a whole new way to listen.

Apple announced on Wednesday that the two smartwatches come with four opt-in “audio intelligence” tools that are powered by audio gathered by the watches’ microphones. They include sound and music recognition, a conversation recap feature, and “Live Rewind” so a user can see a transcription of anything that was said in their environment in the previous 15 seconds.

Seemingly wary that the features could make it feel like the walls have ears, Apple is emphasizing that all of them are built to prioritize privacy and security using the extensive infrastructure the company has developed to protect its other Apple Intelligence and Siri services. As more and more of these types of features debut, though, the audio intelligence announcements are a reminder that AI-powered tools are becoming increasingly universal in all areas of computing and life.

“These features do not create or store audio recordings, and raw audio used for processing is completely inaccessible to the operating systems, apps, the user, or Apple,” the company wrote in a report shared with WIRED.

The new Apple Watch features are designed to process as much data locally on devices as possible, so potentially sensitive data doesn’t go to the cloud. Sound Recognition, for example, alerts users about sounds in their environment—including doorbells, sirens, alarms, or, say, a baby crying—without sending any data off the watch. The tools that do send information out to the cloud preprocess the data so it isn’t raw audio files, then use Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.

Apple emphasizes that its on-device capabilities for Apple watches have expanded thanks to the company’s new S11 chips. The chips include a special memory-protected space that Apple calls the Secure Exclave. Designed specifically for sensor data, the exclave is an isolated buffer that is inaccessible to the rest of the operating system where Apple Watch can hold and process audio data in a protected space.

A new Shazam feature “listens” for music and will generate a signature of a song that is stored in the Secure Exclave. If the user navigates to Shazam to find out what the music is, the tool will send that signature—not an audio file—to Shazam’s servers for identification. (Shazam is an Apple-owned service.) If the user doesn’t prompt to identify the music, or as soon as they do, the special signature is “immediately” deleted from the watch.

The recap feature, known as Siri Recap, can be set to be on all the time and generate recaps of any substantive conversation, or it can be given a schedule to listen in at certain times during the day. A dedicated AI model determines when speech is occurring without recording or transcribing any data. If it detects a conversation, audio goes into a protected buffer within the Secure Exclave on the Apple Watch, the watch encrypts it, and then transmits it using Apple’s special secure Bluetooth pairing to the Secure Exclave on a user’s iPhone. Then the audio is immediately deleted from the Apple Watch.

The iPhone uses local speech recognition and language models on-device to transcribe the audio and then generate a minimal version of the transcript that removes nonessential elements like extra words and repeated phrases. Then the raw audio is immediately deleted from the iPhone as well. The last step on the iPhone is a safety model that “screens the text to omit potentially harmful terms,” according to Apple. From there, the distillation of the conversation is encrypted, and the iPhone sends it out to Private Cloud Compute.

A leading British politician has urged the United Nations to intervene in “the unsafe development of super intelligence” after an Anthropic team leader posted: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”

Whether “marketing hype” or signposting of a genuine extinction threat, “governments must step in,” Labour MP Darren Jones wrote in an open letter also addressed to the UK prime minister and international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Jones is the latest lawmaker scrambling to find ways to protect the British public from AI threats to safety. Just one day earlier, Labour MP Alex Sobel had introduced a parliamentary bill proposing to ban the “development, deployment, and operation of artificial superintelligence”—systems which can fully replace and outmatch humans at any task. The legislation would also give the government powers to monitor and control the development of the technology at different points in the supply chain, including at chip level.

“We are not alone in this effort,” said Sobel while introducing the bill, pointing to the US government’s temporary export ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models in June. “If the Trump Administration, who are perceived as historically against AI regulation, can contemplate drawing a line on models that are too powerful and dangerous, it would be strange for us not to ask what our response should be,” he argued.

MPs from across political parties put their names on the bill, including Labour MP Jess Asato, who is suing Elon Musk’s xAI after its Grok chatbot was allegedly used to generate fake sexualized images of her. Lawmakers have become increasingly worried about the threat of AI to national security after a string of incidents of AI agents going rogue in recent months. They want to introduce guardrails against worst-case scenarios, such as these systems seizing control of critical infrastructure and running sophisticated influence operations.

The Hugging Face hack by OpenAI’s models that escaped containment in July “is why it’s even more important that we move quickly to regulate and legislate on superintelligent AI,” Sobel tells WIRED, “because AI is developing at pace, and I’m afraid to say those developing it don’t know exactly what’s in it.”

In an unusual move, the parliamentary bill was drafted by the nonprofit ControlAI, which is backed by Skype founding engineer and former DeepMind investor director Jaan Tallinn. He had previously been working at AI safety startup Conjecture but tells WIRED he wanted to make the public and policymakers aware of the “open secret” that “developing superintelligence could cause human extinction.”

Conjecture founder Connor Leahy now leads ControlAI’s US arm, which consulted on Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar’s bill to ban superintelligence development, in addition to having briefed nearly 200 congressional offices and more than 20 members of the Senate and House of Representatives on the extinction risk of superintelligence.

Sobel will present his bill in full in November. While he accepts it’s rare for the UK government to accept private legislation like this, Sobel hopes it may lead the government to work with other countries on an international ban.

Sobel has previously tried in vain to introduce a “kill switch” into the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which would allow the government to pull the plug on any data center hosting an AI agent that presented a threat. The mechanism, which was also proposed by ControlAI, is similar to a law pushed for by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the US. AI minister Kanishka Narayan, then working under former prime minister Keir Starmer, shot it down, pointing out that the bill already allows the government powers to intervene if compromised network and information systems cause a national security risk. That could include requiring an entity to cease using and isolate an AI model, he noted.

A slew of recent studies indicate that AI isn’t dramatically displacing workers. At the same time, there were no indicators that the fast-moving technology is creating a lot of jobs, even as AI skills remain in high demand.

Stanford University researchers in an August study found that any AI-related job declines were concentrated among young workers aged 22–25. But for older and more experienced workers that wasn’t the case.

“Claims of economy-wide AI-driven job losses are not visible in payroll data through June 2026,” the researchers said, citing ADP payroll information. Stanford partnered with ADP to conduct the research.

The decline for young workers is more often related to the automation of some work tasks by AI, as opposed to its use to complement work. In contrast, AI is more often used by experienced workers to augment what they do. 

According to the Stanford report, workers between 22 and 25 and employed in jobs highly exposed to disruption by AI are falling behind their older counterparts. Their employment levels in June were about 19% below the same age group in less-exposed occupations. That’s compared to where they would be if both groups had kept pace with each other.

“Experienced workers show no comparable gap,” the researchers said, adding that “this is consistent with recent reports of a worsening job market for entry-level workers.”

Employment of younger workers in AI-exposed jobs fell about 11% from late 2022, while the same age group in less-exposed jobs actually grew about 10%. “For older age groups, we find much less marked differences in employment growth across AI exposure quintiles,” the researchers said.

Stanford, which created a lab last year to study AI’s impact amid heightened fears of the technology’s economic effects, said its numbers were based on available indicators.

AI’s adverse impact on young workers has been well documented, with many of them laid off in the initial wave of AI automation. AI has also suppressed wages for entry-level workers.

AI was cited for 116,175 job cuts in 2026, but that number is declining. The technology  was blamed for 3,462 cuts in August, according to data from Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

It’s the “lowest monthly total since December 2025 when 142 cuts were attributed to AI,” the company wrote in a blog entry. The research firm also noted aggressive hiring plans for companies in 2027.

AI is adding value to companies in different ways, and humans are an important part of that process, said Michael Chui, a senior fellow at QuantumBlack, AI at McKinsey. “The night shift is real now,” he said. “People are sending off their agents to write code and checking in the morning.”

MIT late last year established an AI labor index to determine how agents are affecting the workforce. The school’s Project Iceberg looks at how the coordination and interaction with agentic AI changes how work is done.

Despite the disruptions, demand for AI-related talent continues to rise, tech industry consortium CompTIA said last week. About 320,000 job listings in August required AI-related capabilities, a 4.5% increase from July.

AI-related hiring is outperforming the broader tech market, with demand for AI skills up 96% year-over-year, said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis North America, which is part of ManpowerGroup.

“We’re seeing real growth…in marketing management and project management roles, suggesting employers are looking beyond the people building AI to the people applying it,” Mitchell said.

More broadly, the US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, according to US Department of Labor figures released last week. CompTIA noted that tech employment across all sectors rose by 86,000 workers in August.

But within the tech sector, 14,700 positions were cut, CompTIA said.

Former Census officials say the breadth of data used, as well as the lack of clear explanation of the methodology employed to analyze it, raises significant red flags.

“We don’t know whether or how the sources are updating their citizenship info,” Amy O’Hara, a former official who used to run the administrative data linkage unit at Census, tells WIRED. “It is really hard to join and deduplicate these files, especially across a range of years.”

In order to match people between surveys and records without revealing their identities, the Census Bureau uses what are known as Protected Identification Keys (PIKs), which replace identifying information with a unique code. Sources who spoke to WIRED say that they are unsure which data points were used to match PIK data across the many datasets, though something like an address could be used for cross-referencing.

Though PIKs have been used for years to allow academics and government employees to conduct studies without compromising the privacy of the people whose data it is, they are not foolproof. A January 2026 study published by the Census earlier this year found that “while PIK assignment is generally accurate, some person records are not successfully assigned a PIK, which can lead to sample selection bias in analyses of linked data.”

“The brief says ‘high confidence,’ which indicates some probability,” one bureau source who spoke on the condition of anonymity over fears of retribution by the administration, tells WIRED. “However, no confidence intervals in the tables of the brief are shown. The supposed count of non-voters is small relative to the total state population.” The source alleges that there are probably PIK errors and not actual noncitizens who voted.

Abowd says that false match rates—in this case, when a voting record is assigned the wrong PIK, and then when it is “matched” with citizenship data–are likely to be higher when using commercial data like those used in the report. This means that the analysis is more likely to return a “false positive” showing that a noncitizen had voted. “You can’t estimate the false positive rate without more technical details” that were not included in the report, Abowd tells WIRED. “Because the false match rate is much greater than the estimated noncitizen voting rate, the alleged noncitizen voters are more likely to be data errors.”

All of this, Boyd worries, could undermine more than just trust in voting and elections—it could make academics and researchers doubt the quality and reliability of the products and data that the Census Bureau produces. “They’re putting it out with the imprimatur of the Census Bureau so it looks legitimate,” she says. “But there’s no authors, no methods, no discussions of the limitations of the data, or the Bureau’s approach.”

Republicans have already attacked the accuracy of the 2020 census, alleging that an algorithmic process used by the Bureau to protect data privacy had disproportionately favored Democrats in terms of the drawing of congressional districts. In August, WIRED reported that an internal memo circulated by the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, proposed excluding immigrants from the count, a move that could radically reshape how congressional districts are apportioned.

The report is also just one part of a broad attack on the integrity of American elections by the Trump administration, which includes weaponizing the Department of Justice, dismantling voter protections, attempting to wrest control of election administration from states, and pushing an endless barrage of baseless conspiracy theories about voting in America.

Even if you’re a casual consumer of MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, you know the names: anchors like Chris Hayes, Stephanie Ruhle, and yes, the one and only Rachel Maddow. The network has built a stable of talent who’ve amassed a massive number of casual viewers, plenty of fans … and more than a few obsessives.

Now, the network’s president, Rebecca Kutler, is looking to build that entire audience into something more akin to a fandom—turning casual viewers and fanatics alike, whether on TV or online, into paying members of an MS NOW media universe.

To do it, she’s launching an ambitious subscription program, called the MS NOW Membership, designed to connect MS NOW consumers much more directly to the Hayeses and Maddows of the world. Sure, plenty of news providers now offer subscriptions, WIRED included (and by the way, you can subscribe here). But what struck me about Kutler and Co.’s efforts was both their methodical approach—they surveyed 18,000 people before landing on a final offering—and their resolute focus on MS NOW’s deep bench of talent as the locus of their paid program. In a world where influencers are the new newscasters, and linear TV is in an inevitable decline, MS NOW is diving directly into the breach: applying the influencer playbook to build a sustainable business that’s future-proofed … at least until the next great audience pivot.

I caught up with Kutler at WIRED’s New York studios, just days before MS NOW’s subscription launch. We talked about turning TV talent into fandom magnets, beating Fox, and whether media consolidation is actually good news for the network.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Rebecca, thank you so much for being here today. Start by telling me when you joined MSNBC. What’s the timeline?

REBECCA KUTLER: I think it was right before the midterms in 2022. I had grown up at CNN. I spent more than 20 years there. I left earlier in 2022, and some folks that I knew and really respected reached out from then MSNBC, and they talked about one of those jobs that has a lot of running room and is a little ambiguous, but in the best way. I thought, “Yeah, let’s check it out.” I started at MSNBC, now MS NOW, running their digital businesses, basically all their nonlinear businesses.

It gave me a real opportunity to learn the place, but also think about what are the missed opportunities that we could take advantage of in the next few years.

At some point in your tenure, you took on the whole thing.

Yes.

What were those big challenges that you identified when you looked at the whole portfolio and thought to yourself, “What are we going to do here?”

One of the things that immediately struck me when I came over was the fandom.

I had worked in other newsrooms. I have friends who work in other newsrooms. I love the news and love what we do, but I had never worked at a place where the audience really sees themselves as fans, with a deep connection to talent.

When I joined MS, it was also at the same time Jen Psaki joined, and we had known each other a little from a previous life. So we went out into the field together and did a few pretty straightforward field reporting pieces. And I’ve walked through airports over my career with a lot of different anchors and newspeople, but I’ve never had the experience of walking through with Jen and seeing the [attention she got]. That’s why she was a great fit for MS. She’s someone people were behind and were rooting for, and had a deep connection with.

Kepler also says it has improved the density of SRAM using ferroelectrics, which can read and write data at lower voltages than the mechanisms typically used to process and store data in semiconductors. The startup did this by developing a new, low-voltage, composite material that works with this ferroelectric approach.

Sasi Manipatruni, a Kepler cofounder and its chief technology officer, says the Kepler team went through 35 iterations of composites before they landed on a material class that they thought would make memory chips easier and cheaper to make.

“Once we found a way to solve the physics problem—as in the physical limitations for HBM—we came up with a material innovation that helps with the amount of memory you can have between chips,” he says.

In its early build-outs with GlobalFoundries, Kepler says it was able to convert a fab into a “next-generation” fab in just eight months, compared to a typical 24-month timeframe.

“Out goal is to take the fabs and architectures already built, and push them to the limits of physics,” Olaosebikan says.

Basically Kepler is betting that any additional costs that come from new materials or retooling existing fabs would far outweigh the $20 billion to $40 billion it costs to build new ones and outfit them with equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Waiting to Scale

Kepler Computing still has a long road ahead before it reaches full-scale production—assuming it gets there. To date, the company has run its technology on around 2,000 wafers. The startup says it’s planning to ship its first samples of HBM chips later this year, ramp up production out of Singapore next year, and start chip production in the US in 2028.

Kaste, the GlobalFoundries executive, says he’s confident that the “fundamental breakthroughs have happened. What remains is getting good results on thousands of wafers and millions of devices.”

He points out that one of the challenges with a material system like the one Kepler is using is that it includes iron in its composite. “Iron is a tough contaminant to introduce into a production facility. So Kepler’s solution has to run on dedicated equipment, or be fully encapsulated so that it can’t escape,” he says.

“The art is in keeping that material really well isolated through our production flow,” Kaste says.

Automated wafer-handling equipment used by Kepler in its dedicated test fab.

Photograph: Courtesy of Kepler Computing

Good morning everyone! Welcome to our live coverage of today’s Apple media showcase.

We will have two reporters on the scene at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, to bring you live coverage. You’ll be hearing from Julian Chokkattu, Boutayna Chokrane, Lauren Goode, Reece Rogers, and Michael Calore throughout the event. We might have some special guests pop in as well. We’ll be posting frequent news updates here, with the highlights also going on our social platforms.

Apple’s presentation begins at 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern, and 6 pm in the UK. We have a complete rundown on how to watch the show and what to expect.

Come back approximately 30 minutes before the presentation starts—about 9:30 am in California—and you’ll see the words on this page replaced by a feed of our live updates.

A Folding iPhone Today

The short version of what to expect: The folding variant of the iPhone should make its debut today. The word around Silicon Valley is that it’s expected to be named the iPhone Ultra and that it will likely cost more than $2,000.

We’ll probably also see a Pro version iPhone today, and we can expect the folding iPhone and the Pro models to go on sale later in September.

What about the base model iPhone 18? That might not arrive until early next year, though Apple might tease it today. The longer wait could be because of a number of factors, including rising manufacturing costs and the ongoing memory crisis affecting the whole PC industry. Also, delaying the next generation of cheaper iPhones—the 18, the 18e, and the Air—would give Apple an opportunity to promote its premium handsets more heavily.

It’s also likely we’ll see the newest Apple Watch and Watch Ultra models debut at today’s event.

Both the new iPhones and the new Apple Watches will be getting some additional capabilities enabled by Siri AI, the newest version of Apple’s artificially intelligent assistant. So, expect lots of talk about the beefed-up new chips in these devices as well as “on-device AI,” secure computing, and battery optimization. Siri AI is actually powerful and impressive in our testing of the beta version, but just like the various Siris that came before it, there are limits to how helpful it can really be in your day-to-day life.

Also notable is the list of things we’re not expecting: Apple’s various smart-home products that have been rumored to be close to release, including new HomePod speakers and a smart home device that’s used to interacting with Siri’s camera-based Visual Intelligence capabilities.

Along those lines are the rumored AirPods with tiny cameras in them that can be used, in conjunction with voice commands, to give Siri AI some additional context about what you’re looking at and inquiring about. Those earbuds might come today, but we could just as well see them at an additional event in late September or in October. (It’s likely the smart-home products will show up at the next event too.)

How to Watch

To watch the livestream, you can, of course, just hit Play on the video stream on this page. But it’s better on the big screen.

You can watch it in your TV’s YouTube app; just tune into Apple’s YouTube channel. You can also watch it on Apple’s own streaming app. If you have an Apple TV or any streaming box, just go into the Apple TV app. When you open the app, the livestream for the event should be displayed prominently right at the top. This works even if you don’t subscribe to Apple’s paid streaming service. Watching it on the television frees up your laptop screen so you can follow the live blog. Convenient!

We’ll see you back here about half an hour before the event begins.

The Instagram post, precision-guided by sex and age, had zeroed in on its target. Yuchen Tu is a conser­vatory-trained viola player from Chongqing, China, a lover of science fiction, and an aspiring member of the US Army Reserve Officer Training Corps. She’s exacting and intense, with sky-high standards. And late last spring, just after her 24th birthday, she realized she might be the perfect candidate to freeze her eggs—for free.

Tu goes by Sue, a name she likes because it reminds her of the 2024 body horror film The Substance, whose protagonist tortures herself in pursuit of youth and beauty. To prequalify for free egg freezing, all Sue had to do was take a two-minute quiz. “Not everyone can pass this exam,” she remembers thinking. “Oh, it seems like a competition.”

Sue passed, as have thousands of young women allured by the promise of a company called Cofertility. “The best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it,” goes the company’s mantra, uttered on repeat by its public face and CEO, onetime Uber employee Lauren Makler. Thus was born Cofertility’s mission: to help women like Sue, who had just received her master’s degree in classical music and was preparing to embark on a second bachelor’s, preserve their future fertility for zero dollars.

But in the United States, there’s no such thing as free health care. Instead of paying to freeze and store her eggs with money—the going rate in New York City, where Sue lives, is about $18,000—she would use a currency she already had in abundance: the eggs themselves. Cofertility’s clients must, in the company’s words, “donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby.” It’s a model called egg sharing, and it hadn’t been commercialized widely in the US until Cofertility came along. The Los Angeles–based company launched in 2022, dubbing itself “a new kind of human-centered fertility ecosystem.”

Sue perused Cofertility’s website, clicking through text boxes of deep, soothing teal, optimistic light green, a steady purple, and an urgent orange. She was invited to a meeting almost immediately after passing the test, and within days she was video chatting with an employee who gushed that Sue would be doing the responsible thing for her own future while fulfilling the dreams of a desirous family. In the background of Sue’s Zoom, the Cofertility employee spied a piano and asked if she could record Sue playing. It’d be enticing to prospective parents who might want the eggs of a piano prodigy.

Sue found the proposal preposterous. Her instrument is the viola, not the piano, as anyone who read her file would know. Sue declined, and recalls the saleswoman’s disappointment. The tone of the interaction was “weird,” Sue thought—a combination of overeager and saccharine. But she was curious about the company, and she wanted to find out more about the booming business of fertility care that a 24-year-old might not need for years, if ever. On July 29, 2025, Sue signed a contract with Cofertility.

The age-old pressure to reproduce has morphed into a biohacking imperative with a feminist sheen. Career-oriented young women who have no imminent plans to become mothers and no substantiated reason to doubt their abilities to procreate have succumbed to the messaging that, if they don’t want to miss out on this primal rite, the time to take charge of future baby-making opportunities is now. “Three in five Gen Z women are concerned about their fertility,” Makler said on a podcast last year, citing a survey by a network of California fertility clinics. The oldest members of that generation are about to turn 30.

What if I told you Brooks Running started out making ballet slippers and bathing shoes? Founded in 1914, the Seattle-based company spent decades making just about everything except running shoes, moving from baseball cleats to roller skates, football cleats and children’s shoes, and softball cleats. It wasn’t until 1972 that Brooks made running its focus, and the company has been refining the category ever since.

Brooks introduced one of the industry’s earliest uses of EVA foam, developed the first running shoe with a breathable GORE-TEX upper, and introduced the Kinetic Wedge, which was an innovative design catered to women’s anatomy.

So, while Brooks may not be the trendiest brand, it has built a reputation for dependable support, comfort, and durability. Here at WIRED, Brooks has plenty of fans, especially for trail running and gravel running. The company also offers apparel we regularly recommend, including sports bras, outerwear, and running bottoms.

Brooks Running shoes are relatively reasonably priced for performance running footwear, with many models hovering around $150. If you’re in the market for a new pair, I’ve rounded up the best Brooks Running promo codes and Brooks Running coupons worth checking out.

Score 20% Off Your First Order With Brooks Promo Code

If you’ve never ordered anything off Brooks’ website before, new customers get 20% off their first order after subscribing to emails. You can apply the one-time Brooks coupon code for top-selling shoes, like the Caldera 7 and Adrenaline shoes, along with other gear and apparel. It’s an easy way to save on some of their top products to take your road and trail running game to the next level.

More Brooks Coupons and Offers

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Should You Hike in Boots or Trail Runners?

Lightweight shoes now dominate the trails, so do you still need boots? Here’s how to choose the right footwear for your outdoor adventures.

Save on Our Favorite Brooks Running Shoes

Brooks makes so many iconic running shoes that it’s hard to list them all. I’m currently running in the Brooks Glycerin Max, which is one of the cushiest shoes that I’ve ever tried. I don’t feel particularly stable on uneven terrain, but the padding is noticeably springy and cushy if you’ve been putting in some serious miles. WIRED director Michael Calore is a fan of the Brooks Ghost line, and if you’re planning on hitting the trails in the cold, wet Pacific Northwest, I would suggest the Brooks Cascadia Gore-Tex. The Adrenaline is the company’s most popular shoe.

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The Cascadia Elite Available Now

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Brooks Return Policy and 90 Day Wear Test

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Over a decade ago, the Islamic State released a disturbing video that depicted its members lowering men locked in a cage into a swimming pool and drowning them. Today, that video has been reproduced as a SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon depicting fish in orange jumpsuits inside the cage, as SpongeBob lowers the cage into the water while Squidward films the scene.

The video, shared on TikTok, is part of what a new report from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) calls “Slop Jihad,” a trend where young supporters of Islamic terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda appear to use generative AI tools to create fan edits, cartoons, and memes designed to radicalize a new generation of online backing.

This shift “signals a fundamental transformation in the aesthetics of jihadist propaganda online,” concludes the report, which was shared exclusively with WIRED.

“The principal concern is the growing volume and diversity of material,” says Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed counterterrorism organization that has also written a report about the Slop Jihad trend. “Highly stylized AI-generated content can make violent Islamist extremist material more accessible to younger audiences while reducing the visibility of conventional terrorist branding. Users may encounter perpetrator glorification inadvertently through fan edits, cartoons, memes, and other entertainment-oriented formats, after which engagement can drive algorithmic recommendations of related, more overt propaganda.”

Islamic terror groups have long demonstrated their capacity to adapt to new media environments to get their messages to a wide audience online, leveraging new and emerging technologies to aid recruitment and create a decentralized network of propaganda. This was seen in the early 2020s Alt Jihad movement, which sought to co-opt the aesthetics of the alt-right in the Islamic terrorism content.

These groups have also been making use of generative AI technology for a number of years. In 2024, the Islamic State–affiliated news program News Harvest began using AI-generated anchors to help disseminate propaganda videos quickly and cheaply.

But today, the look and feel of the content produced with generative AI is markedly different.

“This is new, and it’s still growing; it has not peaked by any means,” says Moustafa Ayad, the research chair in global Islamism and counterterrorism at ISD. “There’s always been really shoddy content that’s been produced in the support ecosystem, but it wasn’t SpongeBob SquarePants as the Islamic State.”

Generative AI tools have also been utilized to quickly and cheaply turn official content from terror groups into animated videos. In one example, one TikTok account was turning the weekly al-Naba newsletter from ISIS into anime.

The Slop Jihad trend has seen some pushback from more traditional supporters who don’t like the new aesthetic. “There seems to be some animosity towards it, because they don’t believe the producers of Slop Jihad are true believers,” Ayad says, referring to some reactions to the SpongeBob video. “But again, some accounts that have shared traditional official propaganda are sharing the newer videos. So there seems to be a love-hate relationship with the Slop Jihad content.”

For years now, TikTok has been central to Islamic terror groups’ online messaging campaign, taking advantage of the platform’s powerful algorithmic recommendations to spread their message. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development in 2024 found that TikTok was among the top 10 platforms used to spread terrorist and extremist content.

While Ayad did find a limited number of Slop Jihad videos on other platforms like Instagram and Facebook, the vast majority of the videos were found on TikTok. In total, he found 150 Slop Jihad videos from 71 accounts with more than 5.4 million total views on the platform. Ayad believes the prevalence of this content on TikTok is due to the platform’s For You Page algorithm “that is hyper-targeted to user interests.” He also credits the high level of general AI slop on the platform and “an existing entrenched ecosystem of jihadist support on the platform.”

Achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. That’s the motto of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual competition that—parodying the Nobel Prizes—recognizes some of the world’s most unusual scientific studies. The organization Improbable Research has been hosting the event since 1991 with the aim of showing that science also has a humorous side in its quest to meaningfully answer questions about the world.

This year the ceremony was held in Zurich, Switzerland, and recognized 10 research projects ranging from an attempt to scientifically define what a kiss is to an experiment that used buried underwear to assess soil health.

Prize in Biomechanics: A Scientific Definition For Kissing

What exactly is a kiss? A group of researchers decided to establish a scientific definition that would apply to all animals, not just humans. They came up with the categorization that a kiss is “a non-agonistic interaction involving directed intraspecific oral-oral contact, with some movement of the lips or oral structures and without the transfer of food.” By this definition, other great ape species are also kissers, so are domestic dogs and cats as well as pigeons, penguins, squirrels, black bears, and tortoises—though not all of these kisses have the same meaning.

Prize in Economics: Having More Money Might Make You a Bad Person

In the study “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” published in PNAS, researchers conducted seven experiments to investigate whether socioeconomic status was linked to unethical behaviors, such as breaking traffic rules, failing to yield the right of way, cheating, and even taking candy from children. Spoiler: Yes, it seems that more money does mean more problems—creating more problems at least. The results suggest that people from higher social classes have, on average, a greater tendency to prioritize self-interest. Who knew.

Prize in Chemistry: Cockroach Milk Is Actually Nutritious

Yet another study suggesting that the future of nutrition may lie in insects. The “milk” in question is a high-protein substance produced by mother cockroaches of the species Diploptera punctata, which concentrate proteins, fats, and sugars into an extremely energy-dense form. A team of scientists analyzed the crystals that form inside the embryos to understand how these crystals store so many nutrients in such a tiny space.

The researchers behind the study on nutritious cockroach milk.

Photograph: FABRICE COFFRINI/Getty Images

Prize in Medicine: How to Blow Your Nose the Right Way, According to Science

This is probably the most popular study in the competition because of the story behind it. It’s a posthumous award to scientist Unno Tokuji, who spent his final years studying the correct way to blow one’s nose. He analyzed everything from the aerodynamics and volume of nasal breathing to the pressure exerted on the ears. The recommendation was to blow one nostril at a time when one is more congested than the other and to do so with a long, relatively forceful exhalation, rather than a short, weak blow.

Prize in Biology: When Do Snakes Decide to Bite? You Have to Step on Them to Find Out

To determine what triggers a defensive bite, researchers applied pressure to different parts of the bodies of Bothrops jararaca snakes—a highly venemous species of South American pit viper—and observed how they reacted. Wearing a boot and in a controlled manner, they stepped on different parts of the snake. Stepping on the head resulted in a 44 percent probability of a bite. Applying pressure to the body yielded a 20 percent probability of an attack. If for some reason you need to step on a snake, aim for the tail, where the risk is only 11 percent.

One of the researchers who measured how snakes react to being stepped on.

Photograph: FABRICE COFFRINI/Getty Images

Prize in Physics: How to Make a Urinal Splash-Free

According to mathematical models, there’s an optimal angle for a stream of liquid to hit a urinal if you don’t want droplets to bounce back. The researchers found that lower angles of impact significantly decreases splashing, and they designed prototypes based on that principle. Such scientifically backed urinals can help with keeping public restrooms sanitary.

Prize in Technology: Dead Mosquitos Can Become 3-D Printers

The price of 3-D printers has gone down significantly in the past decade, and now you can make one with something as low-cost as a dead mosquito. The proboscises that mosquitos use to suck our blood function as extremely fine needles. One of the most delicate parts of a 3-D printer is the nozzle, which is essentially an ultrathin tube. In looking to develop new components for precision instruments, the researchers realized there was no need to invent everything from scratch. Evolution had already come up with a great solution by optimizing the mosquito’s mouthparts.

One of the researchers who discovered that the mosquito proboscis that turned out to be very well-suited for 3D printing.

Photograph: FABRICE COFFRINI/Getty Images

Prize in Olfaction: Your Baby Smells Wonderful; Your Teenager, Not so Much

Once again, science confirms something you probably could have guessed. Researchers analyzed how parents perceive their children’s body odor at different ages. Participants rated the smell of young children more favorably and that of teenagers much less so. Surprise, surprise. The team believes that smell plays an underappreciated role in communication within a family and may be related to the recognition and strengthening of the bond between parents and children.

Peace Prize: We Want Mean Friends, Sometimes

What kind of person do people typically want as a best friend? To answer this question, researchers administered questionnaires asking participants about how their friend should behave toward them, toward a stranger, and toward an enemy. In general, people prefered a friend who is kind to them but cruel to their enemies, suggesting that the ideal friend is not necessarily a “universally good” person.

Prize in Soil Science: Old Underwear Can Reveal Soil Health

About 1,000 participants buried cotton underwear and returned some time later to check how much had decomposed. The result: the “underwear index.” The more holes in the undergarments, the more biological activity, namely that of microorganisms capable of breaking down cellulose, a natural molecule in the cell walls of plants. A population of these kinds of microbes is key for the health of farmland, and now all you need to test for their presence is an old pair of underwear.

The entire ceremony is now available to watch online.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Meta announced Tuesday the release of Muse, a personal AI agent that people can message to automate digital tasks in a secure cloud environment, all while relying on security and privacy that the company says is “built into it” from the start.

Meta says Muse is rolling out today for iOS and Android users in a dedicated Muse app, as well as the website Muse.ai. The company also says users can directly message Muse in WhatsApp to interact with the agent. Meta says users of its AI glasses will soon be able to interact with its Muse agent as well. Meta says people can try out Muse for free, but users who want to automate lots of digital tasks will need one of the company’s AI subscription plans.

Muse is Meta’s latest attempt to compete with viral AI agents such as OpenClaw and Instinct, which users can message with to automate digital tasks. Muse is a product of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI unit CEO Mark Zuckerberg formed roughly a year ago to catch up with OpenAI and Anthropic, offering some researchers eye-popping compensation packages to join. The unit was built on the belief that AI agents will transform how everyday users navigate the internet, as well as Meta’s products.

WIRED previously reported that Meta has been testing Muse internally under the codename “Hatch,” and that employees have been using it to autonomously operate third-party applications and browse the web on their behalf.

Meta claims in a blog post that anyone can use Muse out of the box, and that the product was designed “so there’s no learning curve.” The company says users can prompt Muse in natural language, and the agent will work on its own to send emails, book travel, or even help sell a car on a user’s behalf.

Muse is also capable of making purchases on behalf of users, checking out using special payment infrastructure designed by Stripe. The payment tool, which Stripe calls Link, issues a single-use card number so that agents aren’t going around entering a person’s real financial information across the internet. Meta says Muse is the first AI agent covered by Link’s purchase protections for agents, which guarantees no-fee returns.

Meta is late to release a personal agent, but it seems to be seeking to differentiate itself by focusing on security and privacy features for Muse. The agent is debuting with an architecture for all users dubbed Secure VM, which is meant to isolate each user’s activity in a so-called virtual machine to keep untrusted data from the web and any integrations separate from the part of the agent that can actually take action on a user’s behalf.

A personal AI agent requires a lot of user trust, something Meta in particular has struggled with significantly over the years. To get users to try out Muse—and allow the agent to be integrated with users’ third-party apps and services—Meta is attempting to convince people that they can trust the company to handle their data appropriately.

“We know it’s really important, if we’re going to build a product like this that can access a lot of sources of personal data, that we’re really responsible with that, so we’ve designed this system very deliberately,” says David Singleton, Meta Superintelligence Lab’s vice president of engineering for consumer products. “And we’ve built what we call the Sentinel that actually looks out for everything that’s moving out of the VM and either matches it to an existing policy where the user or the system has given permission for that to happen or presents a human-in-the-loop dialog to ask you to approve the action it’s going to take.”

In June, the UK government told Big Tech it had three months to make taking, viewing, or sharing images of child nudity on their devices impossible. “I expect tech firms to make that happen,” said then prime minister Keir Starmer. “But if they choose not to, then we will act and change the law.”

That deadline arrived on Tuesday, and the government says that the likes of Apple and Google have failed. As a result, they will be changing the law to introduce what the UK government claims will be world-first legislation of its kind.

While engineers from Apple and Google had been working with the government since June to make changes, “they do not meet the scale of this crisis,” Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport, told lawmakers on Tuesday as she introduced the legislation.

Under the new plan, companies failing to build the child protection solutions into all existing and newly sold smartphones and tablets in the UK would face fines and potential criminal liability for their bosses. “We know that this is a sector that can—when required—innovate at an extraordinary pace when the chips are down,” Nandy added.

Nandy also plans to explore placing similar legal requirements on apps used by children, like Instagram and Snapchat. Neither Meta nor Snap immediately responded to a request for comment.

“For too long, technology companies have failed to protect children from the worst harms,” Nandy said, “and to be frank, I am not prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that progress will continue at the pace we need it to while harm is being done now.” Still, she said she would reassess whether legislation is necessary if platforms implement solutions while it is being drawn up.

“Apple and Google needed to urgently introduce these protections to ensure online sexual abuse is disrupted and prevented on children’s devices,” says Chris Sherwood, chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “Now the deadline is up, government must crack down and legislate.”

Not everyone is so keen on the measures, which would not impact adults who had verified their age. In June, messaging app Signal accused the UK government of using the measures to rush “invisible surveillance infrastructure” into law. It warned that forcing UK residents to prove their age and have their content scanned in the name of child safety could be a slippery slope into wider surveillance.

Apple, meanwhile, says it is working with the UK government in the name of protecting kids. “We share the UK’s commitment to combating exploitation and abuse online and have shared with UK officials future plans to strengthen Communication Safety and other tools even further to help keep kids safe,” an Apple spokesperson tells WIRED in a statement, pointing to its Communication Safety feature launched in 2021, which blurs photos or videos detected to contain nudity on a child’s device.

A Google spokesperson says in a statement that their team is “pleased to have made progress and are fully committed to continuing to work with experts, legislators, app developers and device manufacturers to keep children safe, while also protecting privacy and access to information.”

Globally, governments taking more extreme measures to protect children from online harms have been met with backlash over privacy and other digital rights. In the European Union, civil rights activists opposed extended legislation allowing tech firms to voluntarily scan users’ private messages for child sexual abuse material. Elon Musk’s X complained that the information-gathering powers imposed by Australia’s social media ban risk interfering with international law.

In the UK, Nandy also said the government was considering going further with its sweeping social media ban for children under 16, which was announced earlier this year and remains on track to go into effect in spring 2027. She is also looking at strengthening the law around AI chatbots to protect children on those platforms as well.

OpenAI said today that it has found an AI-generated solution to one of the biggest problems in mathematics—a 200-year-old equation that describes the natural behavior of fluids like water and air.

The announcement appears to demonstrate the stunning power for AI to advance mathematics. But it has been marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who says that OpenAI rushed ahead to solve the problem after learning of his and another mathematician’s progress on the problem, and also then tried to influence who got credit for the work.

The proof concerns the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the unsolved problems in the Clay Millennium prizes, which are each worth $1 million.

Sebastien Bubeck, a mathematician and AI researcher at OpenAI, said in a press briefing that the company began training a new AI model with advanced mathematical capabilities on August 28.

After reading rumors that Anthropic was making progress toward solving Navier-Stokes, Bubeck said the company decided to dedicate more resources to tackling the problem. The company had more than 1,000 agents tackle the problem over more than 50 hours before discovering that it had come up with a solution.

“I thought there must be a mistake somewhere,” Bubeck said. “And on Sunday morning we had the final solution, Lean-formalized and everything.” (Lean is a programming language that can be used to formalize mathematical proofs.)

OpenAI noted that solving this problem required using considerably more computing power than it had previously spent on solving mathematical problems. The amount required cost “in the millions of dollars,” said Mark Chen, head of research at OpenAI.

On Monday, Buckmaster, a mathematician at NYU, and Levent Alpöge, a researcher at Anthropic, posted documents claiming key advances in an area relevant to the Navier-Stokes problem. The pair says they used several AI models, including Claude and Codex, to complete their work.

Buckmaster also posted a statement claiming that, last week, he learned that OpenAI had become aware of his and Alpöge’s work and had started putting significant resources toward the problem. Buckmaster claims that he asked OpenAI leaders about whether the company had accessed the pair’s Codex logs. He says he was told the model “didn’t look up user data” but claims the company didn’t respond to questions about training. He then says that OpenAI offered several “proposals,” including one in which Buckmaster could publish a paper announcing the Navier-Stokes problem had been solved by an internal OpenAI model but without Alpöge’s name included.

Buckmaster, Alpöge, and Anthropic did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

In the briefing, Bubeck and other OpenAI executives denied that the company had ever inspected the pair’s Codex prompts in order to inform their work. “We, whether it’s the researchers or the agents, did not see any of their work until it was released publicly last night,” he said.

“I want to be extremely clear that we recognize the priority of Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster’s work on unforced Euler, and we have nothing but congratulations to them on this monumental achievement that they have made. To be clear, we did not use their prompt or proof to prompt our models or direct our agents,” said Bubeck.

OpenAI said today it wanted to recognize Alpöge and Buckmaster’s prior work. However, Ven Chandrasekaran, a mathematician at the company, also emphasized that their solution was significantly different in nature from the one produced by OpenAI’s model.

The spat over who gets credit for solving one of the biggest problems in math may rumble on for a while. As AI takes on more of the work involved with finding proofs, such fights could perhaps become more common.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

On the eve of Apple’s highly anticipated folding iPhone, Samsung isn’t feeling threatened. Instead, the folding smartphone pioneer says the competition is “absolutely welcome.”

That’s according to Hee-Cheul Moon, head of Samsung’s Advanced Mechanical R&D Group, who sat with WIRED on a virtual Zoom call with Seungki Choi, head of Samsung’s Smartphone R&D Group. Before the talk veered toward Apple, the pair spoke about how the company managed to shave 75 grams off the weight of its latest Galaxy Z Fold8 in the 7 years since it debuted the original.

Weight is integral to a folding phone’s success. If the device is too chunky and heavy, you’re less likely to want to use it. Over the past two years, folding devices from Honor, Google, and Samsung have rapidly gotten lighter, which each iteration featuring thinner designs. It may be why Samsung saw preorders for its latest folding handsets increase 30 percent globally versus last year’s models, with the Fold8—the device with a new smaller shape that’s easier to hold—accounting for nearly half.

“Seeing these other brands entering the market, we feel very proud of ourselves that the value that we pioneered with this new category of foldables is being acknowledged and recognized,” Moon says through a translator.

When I asked what advice the company had for Apple ahead of its folding debut, Moon says, “The key to providing the highest customer value in this market is all about the weight of the device. As you know, it’s not easy.” Apple’s folding iPhone, rumored to be called the iPhone Ultra, is expected to weigh between 230 and 241 grams (the iPhone 17 Pro Max weighs 233 grams), heftier than Samsung’s latest.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung has made notable strides this year in making its main Galaxy Z Fold8 smartphone lighter than top-end candybar-shaped smartphones. The single-screen Galaxy S26 Ultra weighs 214 grams, but the Fold8 is merely 201 grams, thanks to its smaller, passport-style shape. The company says its own customer data and YouGov survey data from 2024 show that bulky designs were a chief concern for people uninterested in folding phones.

The company says it analyzed every single component in the latest Fold8 and Fold8 Ultra—approximately 270 components and more than 180 auxiliary parts—from circuit boards and antennas to tapes and fastening components.

The team looked everywhere to cut weight. For example, it redesigned the printed circuit board to remove unnecessary circuits and improve component layout, reducing the space requirement. Samsung says it even eliminated 15 auxiliary parts and machined the internal display support plate down to roughly 0.2 millimeters. To keep that thinner panel durable, Samsung developed its “Flex Titanium” screen—a titanium alloy film roughly one-third the width of a human hair designed to maintain surface flatness and keep the crease from worsening over years of folding.

For a diehard fan of Donnie Darko, meeting director and screenwriter Richard Kelly is a thrill in itself. But to first encounter him as a silhouette in a darkened movie theater is to feel almost like a character in one of his films—unmoored by indefinite space and physics, questioning your altered perception.

It’s a hot Friday in mid-August when I sit down with Kelly, 51, at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre, a beloved repertory venue that makes a key appearance in Donnie Darko, his remarkable debut feature. Released in October 2001 with virtually no marketing due to the tragic events of 9/11 weeks prior (the plot hinges on a plane accident), it couldn’t get a toehold at the box office. But in the months and years that followed, the film became a hit on the home video market and gained a fervent cult fandom thanks to its unique supernatural mystery.

To mark its 25th anniversary, the movie will enjoy another limited theatrical run, beginning on October 2, the date that launches mentally disturbed suburban teenager Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) on a surreal journey that may or may not lead to the end of the world. Kelly has just finished recording an intro for the new 4K restoration, and snippets of it play without sound on the big screen as we talk.

“My memories of this film run the entire spectrum from fear to love,” Kelly jokes, alluding to the corny pop psychology peddled by Patrick Swayze’s self-help guru in the film. This occasion, Kelly says, is all about the “love,” as he couldn’t be more grateful to “all the people who have continued to support” his work.

That camp should be pleased to hear that on December 15, Kelly will publish his mammoth first novel, The Philosophy of Time Travel, available for preorder now. The 800-page volume picks up right where the movie left off and is intended to set the stage for a film sequel as well. “It’s been very inspiring for me to remain focused on continuing the journey that began 25 years ago, on my own creative terms,” Kelly says. “This film has defined my entire career, but at the same time, it’s set a benchmark in the sense of the movies that I want to continue to make.”

Here, the auteur revisits the unforgettable dreamscape that put him on the map, and considers the artistic possibilities still ahead.

On when he realized Donnie Darko was becoming a cult hit:

There was one specific moment, I think in March of 2002, when I was in New York City. I was walking through the East Village, and I walked past a pizza restaurant called Two Boots, and my poster for Donnie Darko was hanging in their window. I saw the poster and I was like, “What’s going on? This is bizarre. Why does a pizza restaurant have a movie poster?” I went inside and I asked the manager, and he said, “Well, we have a little theater in the back, the Pioneer, and we’re playing your movie every Saturday night at midnight—and it’s selling out.”

I showed up the next Saturday night at about two in the morning, when the movie was finishing. I expected there’d be maybe 10 people there, and he wasn’t joking, it was sold out, and there were people with camcorders and lights in my face, and Michael Musto from the Village Voice was there. I was just completely bowled over by the fact that there were people who cared, who were really, really connecting with the movie. That was the moment I knew that it wasn’t over, that the movie was going to have a second wind.

The ads pointed people towards almost 50 apps combined across Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Of the 350 ads, the researchers say that around 300 of them directed people to AI image or video generator ads, with most of these apps being linked to China-based developers. Some apps had already been removed by the time WIRED started reporting this story.

Among those that would generate explicit imagery of adults were eight identical apps listed on Apple’s App Store, multiple of which were linked to Chinese developer names. When the apps opened, they would show explicit AI-generated content, including a menu of sexual scenarios, including one called “threatening knife” where a knife is held to a woman’s throat. WIRED identified another seven identical apps that shared the same design, explicit content, and listed the same developer contact details.

“The App Store was designed to be a safe and trusted place for users, and we have zero tolerance for developers who deliberately attempt to evade our review process,” says Apple spokesperson Adam Dema. “The developers mentioned in this report initially submitted apps that are compliant with the App Review Guidelines, only to later surface nudify capabilities, which are against our rules.” The company says that 17 of the 20 apps included in the research had already been removed from its store and it has taken action against the remaining three, as well as removing the seven apps WIRED found.

Google spokesperson Dan Jackson says the company does not allow apps that contain sexual content or the ability to nudify. “We continually take proactive steps to detect and remove apps with harmful content,” they say, adding that it removed all the apps included in the report. “When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store.”

“The share of Chinese developers creating nudify apps has grown year over year,” says David Pham, a former Meta employee who investigated nonconsensual imagery and abuse on its platforms. Pham says that while at Meta he observed similar ads to those discovered by the researchers and those uploading the content would constantly try to get around safety systems.

“Every time the platform or investigators would build a new detection model or a new way to have some type of enforcement, they quickly—within a day, maybe five days—built a new way to avoid detection,” Pham says. Those uploading the ads would change domains they used, obscure who posted them, and include measures such as blurring imagery or subtly changing images to avoid detection. However, Pham, who left Meta last year, says it has the funding and resources to be able to tackle the uploads. “I would like to live in a world where we’re not getting CSAM or NCII material sent directly to our phones,” he says.

Meta’s current protections against ads containing CSAM and NCII appear to need work. More than 11,000 undress ads have appeared on Meta’s platforms since February this year, according to a recent Indicator Media report, with many of these being reportedly posted by “repeat offenders.” Analysis by WIRED also found hundreds of ads including explicit content that contain similar language to those ads found by the TTP researchers. (Meta says malicious advertisers use adversarial tactics to continually try to avoid its detection systems and it has “incorporated” the language in the ads highlighted by WIRED into its moderation systems.)

One ad containing one of the teenagers that the researchers found the real-world identity of was reported to Meta when it had reached four accounts in Europe, according to the TTPs research. However, when it was removed days later, it had been seen by more than 330 users. “This is not something that it should take a small nonprofit doing research to stumble across and then have to investigate and report,” Paul from TTP says. “We’re talking about one of the most well-resourced— technologically and financially—companies on the planet.”

In 1906, in response to public outcry that came after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle detailed the revolting conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants, the US government passed the Federal Meat Inspection Act. The legislation created what would become known as the Food Safety and Inspection Service, a force of federal employees who would spend their days in stockyards and packing plants, checking livestock for disease both before and after their slaughter. They did their work organoleptically—with their eyes, noses, and hands—an approach soon dubbed “poke and sniff.” This 100 percent testing method worked well enough for spotting the lesions that signaled tuberculosis and cysticercosis (a tissue infection caused by tapeworms), and the federal presence discouraged plants from using illegal preservatives and generally unsanitary practices.

But by the end of the 20th century, as American taste for beef mushroomed, the system was clearly and woefully inadequate. The gotta-catch-’em-all approach was no match for plants butchering hundreds of animals an hour. The bigger problem was that testing had once more fallen behind in the arms race. Decades of poking at hearts, bile ducts, spleens, lungs, lymph nodes, livers, and kidneys had effectively rid the country’s meat supply of diseases that could be spotted or sniffed out. But humans can’t see, smell, or feel Escherichia coli.

In 1993, the growing danger of E. coli made itself evident when hamburgers sold by Jack in the Box fast-food restaurants sickened more than 700 people and killed four children. The public outcry rivaled the one sparked by The Jungle and triggered two moves by the Food Safety and Inspection Service. As a short-term fix, it hired 160 extra meat inspectors. More importantly, it accelerated a change in approach that had been bubbling away in the background ever since NASA decided it was time to send astronauts to space for more than a few hours at a time—long enough for them to get hungry.

That happened in the early 1960s, when the Mercury program, which first put Americans into space, gave way to Gemini, which proved out the equipment and procedures necessary for the longer, moon-bound Apollo missions to follow. Sending astronauts into space for multiple days meant dealing with the various elements of sustenance in zero gravity, from swallowing to defecating. But it was the middle step, digesting, that most worried Paul Lachance, the space agency’s lead food scientist. Food poisoning on Earth is terrible. In a spacesuit or space capsule, it could be catastrophic.

The obvious approach would be a 100 percent testing route, screening every morsel for pathogens and taking a zero-tolerance attitude. This was unworkable, because, as with artillery shells, every bite of food that’s tested is one that can’t be eaten. This is known as “destructive testing.” Proving a given batch was absolutely safe would involve eliminating most of it. Private industry was no help; what inspection did take place in the 1960s was far from scientific or suitable for NASA’s needs. Most pathogens were “discovered” by the people who consumed them.

Lachance and his colleagues responded by creating a new way of testing food safety. Where Walter Shewhart’s control chart was a tool for spotting manufacturing issues that could then be resolved, they conceived of an approach that went further, proactively identifying all the points where problems are most likely to start, and focusing inspection there. The core idea was to test food not after it was produced, but to so control its production that such testing was unnecessary. They called it Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, today better known as HACCP.

To help digest this, think of basic acceptance sampling as the bit of wine the waiter has you taste so you know the bottle hasn’t spoiled before everyone gets a full glass. The basic Shewhart approach, then, is like the “test pancake” you make as you’re starting up breakfast. It tells you whether your production process, which requires a batter of the right consistency and a griddle at the right temperature, is on track. HACCP (pronounced hassip) is more like the way you should make a soup. Each time you add salt or broth or lemon juice or cream, you taste it to see how the flavor, saltiness, and acidity match what you’re aiming for.

For NASA, analyzed hazards could be physical (crystallized Tang powder could break a tooth), chemical (the presence of pesticide residues), or microbiological (the pathogens that posed the most serious threat in space). A critical control point could be any moment or action in the production process, from gathering raw materials to vacuum-sealing a package. “We identified the critical steps that would make the difference between something being safe or not safe,” Lachance said. “The temperature, the pressure, whatever that criteria was, whatever that critical control point was.” A chicken headed into space would be plucked, deboned, cut into pieces small enough to freeze-dry, and cooked, at which point it would be sterile. But as various people handled it, the meat would be checked on its way to the freeze dryer, then on its way into plastic packaging, then again after being vacuum-sealed. To this day, no astronaut has gotten food poisoning while in space.

At night, though, the X6 wins. It’s much brighter than the X5 or the GoPro for starters, and while sometimes it does render colors a little wonky, with blues tending toward green and yellows going more orange than they are in real life, it still produces the best 360-degree low-light footage I’ve shot. The Osmo 360 is a close second, but at times I find it has quite a bit of weird blur-like artifacts in low light.

One of the more exciting new features is single-lens mode, which, at least on the spec sheet, goes a long way to making the X6 a viable action camera replacement. I dream of one camera that can do it all, and the X6 is definitely closer than other 360 cameras in fulfilling that wish.

The X6 can now record up to 5K video in single-lens mode (up from 4K in the X5), but even better is the new InstaFrame 2.0 feature, which is Insta360’s name for the ability to record both 360 video and a single-lens shot at the same time. This greatly simplifies editing since you have a flat file to work from, and if you miss the shot in that one, you have the 360 footage to fall back on. This was always a great feature, but in the X5 the non-360 file was capped at 1080p, which made it less than useful. The X6 bumps that footage to 4K for the single-lens recording and up to 8K at 30 frames per second for the 360 footage recorded simultaneously, which makes this very usable and is, in fact, how I shot most of the time.

As I have said many times, no one wants to see raw 360 footage (yeah, yeah, I know VR is going to catch on one day, but I am not holding my breath), and while InstaFrame makes editing it down to a traditional linear video file about as easy as is possible, it is still kind of a pain. Advanced users will also find it annoying that you cannot use Insta360’s I-Log format (video log modes are to video what a RAW file is to still images, and capture a much wider dynamic range) with InstaFrame 2.0, but there are some pretty good preset color modes, and I recommend using them for everyday shots.

With I-Log, the X6 supports 10-bit recording when recording in 360 mode. In single-lens mode, you can only shoot in 8-bit I-Log. The higher the bit rate, the more color information is available (1,024 shades in 10-bit versus 256 in 8-bit). That’s a shame because, at least for my needs, this stops the X6 from replacing an action camera in my kit. Perhaps we’ll get this in the X7. For non-pro users, this is likely a moot point.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Carrying culinary adventures into the unknown comes the Le Creuset x Star Trek: Galileo shuttlecraft casserole dish ($150), which has a roomy 1.6 liters of space inside. Vulcan votaries are well catered for with the $35 Spock ear mug (perfect for Vulcan spice tea), complete with gold detailing along the rim as a nod to the Starfleet uniform; the $55 Spock hand spoon rest; and the whimsical Vulcan salute “live long and prosper” oven mitt, resplendent in signature Star Trek baby blue for $40.

Not merely content with digitally launching the collection online, Le Creuset engaged Sent Into Space to boldly send its Enterprise casserole dish where no pan has gone before—more than 111,000 feet above the Earth, atop 99.5 percent of the planet’s atmosphere. While obviously a blatant (albeit fitting) marketing stunt, there’s actually some considerable logistics to overcome in sending a cast-iron pot to the edge of space.

United Federation of Pan-ets: the Star Trek Enterprise casserole dish at 111,000 feet above the Earth.

Courtesy of Le Creuset

Sent Into Space co-founder Chris Rose had the task of launching the pot in the stratosphere via a space-capable balloon taller than the height of The White House, where it stayed for 1 hour, 19 minutes, and 4 seconds enduring temperatures down to -63.4°C (-82.12°F). “Because of the weight, we had to give some serious consideration to how we were going to hold things, making sure everything was very balanced,” Rose tells WIRED. Rose and his team also have to rely on simulations to take into account considerations such as where will the pot land as it’s parachuted back down to Earth, as well as how to avoid bodies of water and built-up areas, for example.

“The legal authorities within the aviation community need to know. We can’t have a Le Creuset casserole dish floating past the window of an airborne A380 as it makes its way off to some destination,” Rose says. “So we are in constant communication, both from a flight-clearance perspective before this ever leaves leaves the ground, to onboard systems for telemetry and communication.” Indeed, in the early stages of reentry, Rose says the Enterprise casserole dish reached speeds in excess of 300 mph before slowing and landing safely in Lincolnshire, England.

Back on terra firma, the Le Creuset x Star Trek collection should serve cadets and captains alike, provided you can secure your selections before stock vanishes like a cloaked Bird-of-Prey.

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This fall, 54 million K-12 students are headed back to the classroom for another year of lessons in all the classic subjects: math, English, history, biology. But there’s another subject that’s been sneaking into school curricula: plastics.

A new report from the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition documents the many ways the plastics industry has been inserting its agenda into classrooms across the US—including through lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “the contribution plastics make to modern life.”

Industry interests offer these resources to teachers for free or for cheap, according to the report. The materials tend to highlight the necessity of plastics while downplaying their significant downsides to human health and the environment.

“When that information is provided to kids, it obfuscates the true impacts of plastic pollution,” said Madison Dennis, senior policy and advocacy manager for Plastic Pollution Coalition and one of the report’s main authors. Besides harming marine life, plastics can expose people to hazardous chemicals, clog storm drains and contribute to flooding, and release planet-warming greenhouse gases. The Plastic Pollution Coalition is calling for stricter school policies against the use of industry-sponsored learning materials.

The report lays out four case studies of plastics industry “propaganda” for schoolkids. One involves the Society of Plastics Engineers, or SPE, a trade group that recently became a division of the Plastics Industry Association. SPE’s lesson plans include activities like a “plastic scavenger hunt,” which aims for students to “understand that plastics are ubiquitous and their importance to society and their personal life.” A video titled “Your Bottle Means Jobs” explains how plastics recycling supports local employment.

Another case study highlights the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, an initiative of the Dow Chemical Company. One of the association’s lesson plans teaches elementary and middle school students how to compare the strength of various types of plastic bags that can be found in a grocery store. After a brief experiment, the lesson invites them to “pretend [they] are an employee for Dow Chemical Company” and are designing a plastic bag for a customer.

While many of the materials claim to support STEM learning objectives, they do so while promoting familiar industry talking points, emphasizing the affordability and safety of plastics. Some acknowledge plastic pollution as a serious problem, but they blame irresponsible consumer behaviors and, instead of recommending less plastic be produced, propose more recycling as the primary way to address it.

In reality, only 9 percent of all plastics are recycled worldwide, and scientists have repeatedly warned that recycling will be unable to keep up with projected growth in plastic production. Investigative reporting has shown that industry groups knew this decades ago, but promoted recycling anyway in order to defuse growing concern over plastic pollution.

Wendy Johnson, a science education specialist at the National Center for Science Education, said the industry’s lesson plans and worksheets don’t reflect good pedagogy. Materials claiming to be aligned with state-level STEM standards don’t say which standards they support, or how they’re aligned. Lesson plans instruct students to read teachers’ notes, or list industry-specific vocab terms like “stretch blow molding” or “thermosetting.”

“By using all of these technical terms, it’s tricking people into thinking … that they’re doing science,” Johnson told Grist. What the materials really teach, she said, is “ideological perspectives about the economy,” like the desirability of cheap consumer goods.

Another Apple event is almost here, though this one will likely feel a little different than the September events of lore. It’s the first Apple event since CEO Tim Cook’s departure, and might be the first time the public gets a taste of how the company’s new CEO, John Ternus, can slip into those shoes.

The event will be livestreamed on September 9 at 10 am Pacific (1 pm Eastern). You can watch the stream right here on this page, or on Apple’s website and YouTube channel. Apple will also stream the event on its Apple TV devices and Apple TV+ streaming service. Leaks and rumors have left just about everyone expecting news about Pro-level iPhones and a long-awaited Apple foldable device.

Since the Covid pandemic, Apple has eschewed live presentations, instead inviting media and employees to the Apple campus to watch prerecorded videos of all its product announcements. WIRED will have reporters on the ground—you can follow along with all the action on our live blog, which will go live the morning of the event. WIRED will also have a roundup of everything the company announces for your perusal right after the event.

What to Expect

Thanks to leaks from sources like Bloomberg, the event is widely expected to be the moment Apple finally announces its long-rumored foldable iPhone. It’s bound to be pricey, with rumored estimates sitting around $2,000.

Apple is also expected to focus on premium products, chiefly the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12, and Apple Watch Ultra 4. That means Apple may push the launch of its base iPhone 18 to the spring of 2027. The move likely stems from increased manufacturing costs and limited product availability due to the ongoing memory crisis. It’s also an effort to build hype for Apple’s more premium—and expensive—products, and maybe entice customers to sign up for the company’s new iPhone leasing program. We’ll likely see the mid-tier iPhone 18e at that spring event, alongside a second-gen iPhone Air.

New AirPods may also be on the table, though Apple’s heavily rumored AirPods Pro with cameras—designed to be the “eyes” of Siri for AI-powered visual assistance—could be delayed to later this year or to 2027.

If you’re hoping for new iPads, Macs, or home devices, well, you may have to wait a little longer. Apple announced a new Mac Mini and Mac Studio at the end of August, but the company may debut new home products, a new iPad Mini, and new MacBooks during events in October.

As for snagging devices right after Apple announces them this week, unconfirmed reports suggest the company will open iPhone preorders on September 12, a day later than it usually offers them, out of respect for the victims of 9/11. The following week is likely when the company will drop the final, official versions of its software, like iOS 27 and macOS 27.

Some of the hottest software this year revolves around capturing voices. Whether it’s the sharp dictations of Wispr or the always-listening ears of Granola, voice-centered software currently feels inescapable. Voice dictation is getting so sharp, in fact, that I often write drafts in my notepad and then dictate aloud to my laptop.

Some prognosticators have declared this to be a dramatic end-of-the-keyboard moment, where legions of white-collar workers will soon be quietly whispering into desk microphones rather than clacking away at keyboards. I disagree, but I do think these changes could upend how customers give feedback.

I rarely email customer support unless something substantially negative has happened and I’m fishing for a refund. I’m much more open to giving feedback by blabbering for 20 seconds into my phone, good or bad, than I am to waiting on hold for who knows how long until someone answers.

“In the last two years, we hit a tipping point,” says Karan Gupta, CEO of Voicebox, a startup designed to collect feedback via voice. “That voice could now be accurate. It could be fast.” His previous startup also relied on voice technology—an app called Alice designed for secure transcription.

Giving feedback through Voicebox is simple. Shoppers can scan a QR code or tap their phone to an NFC chip posted in a store and then say whatever they want. The feedback is automatically transcribed and sent to the company’s dashboard, with a sentiment analysis. Companies can also follow up over email, if needed. Voicebox has partnered with airport terminals so that travelers can give their two bits about bathroom messiness or gate directions.

Gupta wants this type of feedback to extend beyond corporate experiences. Earlier this year, Lena Dunham held an event in San Francisco for her book Famesick and flashed a Voicebox QR code on the screen. Numerous attendees gave feedback, sharing emotional messages about how they empathized with her medical journey. He sees this as an example of the public wanting to share more feedback more easily on topics they feel passionate about.

As part of this larger vision, Voicebox recently launched its “directory,” so feedback can be sent in from anywhere and, in future iterations, users can discover what other people are saying publicly about a specific business. I could give a quick opinion about my haircut on my way out of the barbershop by just whispering into my phone, or share advice for future visitors about navigating some hospital’s parking situation.

The directory expands Voicebox’s potential from a customer-complaint vehicle centered around business needs into something more like Google Maps, with crowd-spoken reviews. This voice-centric approach mirrors other popular software trends, where the future of dictation feels so natural that using your thumbs to tap away on a smartphone may feel cumbersome and outdated.

After chatting with Gupta, I opened the Voicebox directory and searched for, well, Voicebox. It was time for my voice to be heard. Though I’m still waiting for the couple sitting next to me at the airport to leave so I don’t feel awkward about whispering into my phone.

If you opt for an Android phone over an iPhone, there are certain features you get as standard as part of Android. Then there are other features specific to certain manufacturers, as each Android phone maker puts its own spin on the software.

Pixel phones, for example, get the Now Playing widget on the home screen and lock screen that works like an instant Shazam. It’ll tell you the name of the song playing in your environment before you’ve even searched for it.

With Samsung phones, one of the best perks isn’t as widely known about or used as it should be. It’s called the Edge Panel, and it works like a customizable shortcut bar that gives you speedy access to the other parts of your phone.

If you own a Galaxy device and have never come across the Edge Panel, or you used it once but have since forgotten about it, here’s what it’s capable of now—and how you can make the most of it to optimize your mobile experience.

How the Edge Panel Works

You can think of the Edge Panel as being a little bit like the Start menu on Windows, or the dock on macOS. It provides something that Android doesn’t have by default, which is a user-configurable launcher for collecting your favorite apps and feature shortcuts.

When it’s enabled, the Edge Panel appears as a faint line along the side of the screen, and you can swipe across it to open the pane. If you don’t see it, head to Settings and choose Display > Edge Panels to turn it on (via the toggle switch) or customize what the panels show (by tapping the menu entry).

There are actually seven different types of panel to choose from, as you’ll see when you start to customize the feature: Apps, People, Tasks, Weather, Tools, Clipboard, and Reminder. You can have just one of them active, or all seven, or something in between (once you’ve got the Edge Panel up, swipe across it to switch between the different types).

Edge Panel gives you access to your favorite apps and shortcuts.Courtesy of David Nield

The names of these panels give you some idea of what they can do. You can use the Apps panel to access the apps you use the most, without having to hunt for them in the main app drawer or having them clutter up your home screen. You can also jump to your most important people on the Contacts panel in the same way.

According to the standard model of cosmology, that expansion rate should be the same no matter how you measure it. But in recent years, scientists have found that the expansion rate of the early universe and that of the more recent universe vary by approximately 9 percent.

That discrepancy, or tension, “has provoked heated debates in the cosmology community about whether this difference could be due to systematic errors or whether it is a signal of new physics,” Teixeira and her co-authors wrote. Their model posits that in a world where dark energy and dark matter interact, what seemed to be a crisis caused by disparate expansion rates instead becomes something to be expected.

A Dark Dimension

If dark energy and dark matter do interact, it could mean that they have a common origin, Khoury said.

Ongoing work in string theory—the idea that our universe, at its smallest, most fundamental level, is made up of vibrating strings—suggests a way these concepts might be connected. In 2019, building on the idea in string theory that dark energy is naturally varying, Vafa and two collaborators concluded that the mass of dark matter particles may also vary over time. This led them to propose in 2022 that dark matter and dark energy could share a link with a so-called dark dimension.

String theory posits the existence of six or seven extra dimensions in addition to our familiar three dimensions of space and one of time. All of these dimensions are thought to be as small as physically possible—close to the Planck scale (10-35 meters)—but the researchers proposed that the dark dimension could be significantly bigger than the others—on the order of a micron (10-6 meters).

Gravitons, theoretical particles that impart the force of gravity, could leak into this enlarged dark dimension. If they did, they would pick up mass and become what are called dark gravitons. These massive gravitons would reside in the dark dimension, but their gravitational effects could be felt in other dimensions, allowing them to fulfill the role that is normally ascribed to dark matter.

Cumrun Vafa, a physicist at Harvard University, thinks the mass of dark matter may vary over time.

Courtesy of Quanta

In this scenario, “there is a very natural coupling between dark energy and dark matter,” said Georges Obied, a physicist at the University of Chicago. Changes in the size of the dark dimension would affect both dark energy and dark matter.

In a July 2025 paper, Obied and Vafa, along with Alek Bedroya of Princeton and David Wu of Harvard, found that the scenario proposed in 2019 was consistent with the DESI data. Their model predicts that the strength of dark energy and the mass of dark matter will decrease over time and that the rate at which dark energy changes will be proportional to its energy density. Because astrophysical measurements tell us that the energy density of dark energy is extraordinarily small, “it won’t change fast,” Vafa said.

“It’s not surprising that we didn’t see it until now,” he said, because the rate of change is so tiny. “We had to wait the entire age of the universe to detect something that small.”

The driving force behind our universe’s accelerated expansion remains one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy. While this force, which scientists refer to as dark energy, pervades our universe, we know almost nothing about it.

Located on a remote mountain in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has spent the past five years mapping the cosmos with the goal of unraveling this mystery. The result is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created. And now—with the release of the latest version of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, a free online tool for exploring the vast imaging data—you too can poke around the universe.

The new map boasts an overwhelming amount of information: 5.6 trillion pixels containing approximately 4 billion celestial objects including stars, galaxies, black holes, and asteroids. It covers approximately 75 percent of the entire sky, recording both visible light and near-infrared wavelengths.

Those missing pieces include the deeper parts of space blocked by the stars, space dust, and other matter in our own galaxy, which is a major challenge for astronomy surveys, especially ground-based ones. However, since the Milky Way is splayed out like a fried egg—which is why it appears as a dense band of stars in the night sky—the researchers aim DESI’s 5,000 mechanical eyes out of the top or bottom of our galaxy to capture some of the clearest images of distant space yet.

A galaxy cluster located in the constellation Leo, affectionately known as “Copeland’s Septuplets.”

Photograph: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE & KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

Though this particular survey lasted five years, it built on another 13 years of groundwork. More than 160 scientists were involved in data collection, and over the course of the project, researchers have already published upwards of 1,800 scientific papers referencing the data.

“It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” David Schlegel, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-lead of the Legacy Surveys, said in a press release. “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.”

Earlier this year, DESI researchers released another map, which projected the distances of 47 million galaxies and quasars. This reconstructed 11 billion years of cosmic history, bringing the effects of dark energy into focus. Dark energy is thought to be responsible for the expansion of our universe, and while the force itself remains ellusive, astronomers can track it by analyzing the rates at which other celestial objects appear to be moving away from us.

You might not know it from looking, but Gmail is jam-packed with time-saving tricks.

Some of ’em are right there in front of your face, if you know how to find ’em — while others require a teensy bit of under-the-hood tinkering to activate. But all of ’em are built right into Gmail and have the potential to make managing your email a heck of a lot easier.

Check out these 16 splendid Gmail tips and get ready to master your inbox once and for all.

(Note that unless otherwise specified, these tips are specific to Gmail’s web-based desktop version.)

Inbox step-savers

1. You can actually view attachments right from your Gmail inbox. Provided you haven’t switched away from the service’s “default” interface arrangement, you’ll see small tiles for every file associated with an email right below the message’s subject line. And you can click on any of those tiles to open or preview the file’s contents and get directly to the info you need.

Gmail’s attachment tiles are a great way to jump directly to attachments without having to open an email.

JR Raphael / Foundry

2. It’s easy to miss, but take note: When you hover your mouse over a message in your inbox, Gmail gives you a series of quick-access actions at the far-right side of the line. You can archive the email, delete it, mark it as read or unread, snooze it, or even RSVP to a meeting request right then and there — without ever having to open the message.

3. A super-useful keyboard shortcut I always forget to use: While viewing a multi-email thread of messages — a conversation in which you have numerous back-and-forth replies under the same subject — hit the semicolon key (;) to expand the entire conversation and show every message in the thread. And then hit the colon key (:) to collapse it back down so you see only the most recent email.

Just make sure you enable keyboard shortcuts first, if you haven’t already: Click the gear icon in the website’s upper-right corner, then click “See all settings” and look for the “Keyboard shortcuts” option midway down the screen that comes up. Select the “Keyboard shortcuts on” setting and then be sure to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.

4. Some of Gmail’s best keyboard shortcuts are the ones you create yourself. Go back into the website’s settings and this time, click the Advanced tab. See the line labeled “Custom keyboard shortcuts”? Click “Enable” next to that, then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.

Once Gmail refreshes itself to apply the changes, go back to the Settings area again and look for the newly present Keyboard Shortcuts tab. There, you can adjust any of the default keyboard settings to make them simpler to activate or easier to remember.

One of my favorite adjustments, for instance — and one I rely on constantly — is adding in a second command for the “Go to inbox” shortcut, which is typically gi by default. In Google’s old Inbox service, that shortcut was simplified down to just i, and once you get used to that shorter sequence, you won’t want to go back.

5. The panel at the right of Gmail’s web interface lets you pull up Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Tasks, or Google Contacts right inside your inbox so you can manage info from each of those apps without having to switch tabs or open anything new. And here’s a handy hidden trick: With Tasks, you can drag messages directly from your inbox into the panel to create new tasks around them.

Creating new tasks from emails is as simple as dragging and dropping, as is being done here with the topmost message.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Unfortunately — and somewhat strangely — the same drag-and-drop behavior isn’t currently possible with Calendar or Keep, nor is it possible for Contacts.

6. Even with a miniature version of Contacts being available inside that handy side panel, you might sometimes want to pull up the full Google Contacts website for its complete set of features. Provided you’ve got Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts enabled now, commit this workaround to memory: Pressing g and then c will open up Contacts in a separate tab, no matter what else you’re doing in your inbox.

Composing shortcuts

Editor’s note: Assuming you’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts (see tip 3), the following keyboard shortcuts work in any browser on any desktop operating system. Mac users, just swap in the ⌘ key for “Ctrl” wherever you see it.

7. Ever like marking messages as unread after you’ve opened ’em? Gmail makes that incredibly easy to do: Anytime you have an email open, look for the envelope icon directly to the right of the trash can in the horizontal row of icons above your message (in the area directly beneath the search bar). That’ll let you mark the message as unread with a single click. Or, for a faster and more powerful one-two punch, just type an underscore (_) while viewing any message. That’ll mark it as unread and zap you back to your main inbox.

8. Speaking of combining multiple actions into a single command, simplify your inbox organization process by enabling Gmail’s convenient Send & Archive button. It places a second button alongside the regular Send button whenever you’re responding to an existing message, and clicking that button (or, even better yet, hitting Ctrl-Enter on your keyboard) will send your response and archive the thread in one fell swoop.

To enable it, look for the “Send and Archive” option within the General tab of Gmail’s settings. Click “Show ‘Send & Archive’ button in reply,” hit the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen, and then get ready to save yourself steps the next time you type a reply.

Gmail’s Send & Archive button (the blue one to the left of the regular Send button) turns two steps into one.

JR Raphael / Foundry

9. I don’t know about you, but I frequently start typing an email and then decide against sending it. (Rather fittingly, I started typing out a lengthy explanation of the reasons but then decided against including it.) If the same thing ever happens to you, remember this: Hitting Ctrl-Shift-D while you’re in the Gmail compose tool will close the compose window and discard your draft. And it works whether you’re writing a new email or a reply.

10. Another awesome time-saver: In addition to the obvious Ctrl-B for bold and Ctrl-I for italics email formatting shortcuts, Gmail has hotkeys for doing some advanced forms of text formatting — things that’d otherwise require multiple clicks and much menu-hunting to accomplish.

The ones I use the most:

• Ctrl-Shift-8 will add a bulleted list into your email (just like this list!), and Ctrl-Shift-7 will add a numbered one.
• Ctrl-Shift-9 will offset text in a blockquote style.
• Ctrl-] will indent text, while Ctrl-[ will remove any indentation.
• And Ctrl-\ will remove any formatting on your selected text and make it as plain as can be.

11. You’d never know it, but the Gmail compose tool itself can take on various forms, depending on your preferences. Make a mental note of these possibilities and the shortcuts to get to ’em:

• To start a new message in the default lower-right-corner-of-the-screen window view, hit c.
• To start a new message in a pop-up window totally separate from your main Gmail tab, hit Shift-C. You can do the same thing for a reply by hitting Shift-R while viewing a message thread — or Shift-A for reply-all.
• To start a new message in a full-screen compose window within your main Gmail tab, hit c — then click the little arrow icon in the compose tool’s upper-right corner. (You can also hit Shift while clicking that icon to pop the message out into a separate pop-up window form.)
• If you’d rather use that full-screen compose window all the time, by default, click the three-dot menu icon in the lower-right corner of the compose tool and look for the “Default to full-screen” option there. (If you ever change your mind, you’ll find the option to disable that preference in that very same spot.)
• If for some reason you like the idea of composing a message in a new tab instead of a pop-up window or within the main Gmail tab, just hit d while in your inbox. That’ll do the trick!

To see more keyboard shortcuts, just type ? while viewing any message list within Gmail.

Smarter snoozing

12. Don’t forget to take advantage of Gmail’s super-handy snoozing tool: Instead of letting messages linger in your inbox and pile up to an unmanageable point, use the snooze function to help yourself deal with everything as soon as you see it.

A good rule of thumb to maintain: If you can respond to something in less than a minute, do it. If something doesn’t require any action on your behalf, archive it immediately. And if something requires some sort of action but you don’t have the time to mess with it at that moment, snooze it to a day and time when you will be able to handle it.

You can snooze an email from your inbox by hovering over the message and selecting the clock-shaped Snooze icon, as noted in tip 2. You can also snooze an email while it’s open by clicking the three-dot menu icon to the right of the folder symbol directly above the email and then clicking “Snooze” within the menu that pops up. Or you can simply press b while you’re viewing a message or while you have it selected in your inbox.

Snoozing a message causes it to vanish from your inbox and then reappear at any day and time you choose.

JR Raphael / Foundry

13. Gmail even makes it possible to snooze multiple messages at the same time — in case you see more than one email that needs to be pushed back to the same point. From your inbox, simply click the boxes to the left of any messages you want to include, then click the three-dot menu icon within the row of icons toward the top of the screen and select “Snooze” from there.

14. Need to get back to something you snoozed — or change the day and time at which it’s set to reappear? You can always find all of your snoozed emails in Gmail’s Snoozed section, located beneath the “Inbox” line in the left-hand panel. Once you’re there, just hover over any email and click the clock-shaped icon to change its snooze settings or unsnooze it entirely.

15. You can snooze messages from the Gmail mobile apps, too, though the option is a bit buried. From the inbox view, press and hold a message to select it, then tap the three-dot menu icon at the top of the screen and look for “Snooze” in the list of options that appears. If you’ve already opened the message, tap the three-dot menu icon at the top of that screen; you should see “Snooze” show up as part of the options there as well.

16. Make snoozing even simpler in the Gmail mobile app by assigning it to one of your inbox swipe actions. Just open up the app, tap the three-line menu icon in its upper-left corner, then select “Settings.” On Android, tap “General settings” followed by “Swipe actions”; on iOS, you’ll tap “Inbox customizations” and then “Mail swipe actions.”

All that’s left is to set either your left swipe or right swipe to “Snooze,” and then, you can simply swipe any message in that direction from your inbox to snooze it — no wasted taps or menu diving required. (The Gmail Android app has several other similarly useful hidden features, by the way, most of which aren’t available on iOS.)

With one quick setting adjustment, you can snooze any message from the  Gmail mobile app simply by swiping it to the left or the right from your  inbox.

JR Raphael / Foundry

And with that, your Gmail time-saving toolbox is officially complete! The next logical step in your inbox improvement adventure is mastering the art of Gmail labels to fight back against email chaos — and I’ve got just the guide to get you started.

This story was originally published in May 2018 and most recently updated in September 2026.

Other Leak Detectors We Like

Photograph: Simon Hill

Shelly Flood Gen 4 for $40: Shelly’s fourth-generation leak detector boasts support for the Matter smart home system and impressive connectivity via Zigbee, Bluetooth, and dual-band Wi-Fi. I had no issues setting it up in my Google Home app by scanning the Matter QR code, but you can also use the Shelly app or your smart home ecosystem of choice (Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings). Each IP44-rated unit requires four AA batteries (included), and you stick or screw it to the wall (so there’s no risk of the unit being submerged), and plug the extendable 6.5-foot leak detection cable into the bottom to trail around the area you want to monitor. While I had some issues when I first tested, with it failing to alert in the Google Home app, these seem to have been resolved, and the detector correctly sounded an alarm when I dripped water on top and alerted me through the Home app.

Ikea Klippbok for $12: Super affordable, with a simple design, this Matter detector alerted reliably during testing. The Ikea Klippbok is a good choice if you already have an Ikea Dirigea hub ($140) to connect to for notifications on your phone. But it works out quite pricey if you don’t, and it’s not compatible with other hubs, such as the Ikea Tradfri. It does have an alert sound that goes as high as 80 decibels, but doesn’t carry far, and I wouldn’t rely on it alone. You must supply your own AAA batteries (it requires two), and this leak detector is only IP44 rated, so there’s a risk of malfunction if it gets immersed.

Phyn Smart Water Sensor for $37: With features very similar to our top pick, the Phyn Smart Water Sensor proved reliable, alerting me to water quickly with piercing beeps, a text message, and a push notification. Unfortunately, the setup was annoying; I had to reload and re-enter all my information because the app was flaky. The chunky disc design has three metal feet, and there’s an LED that flashes red when it detects a leak. You can add an Extension Node ($10) (a wired disc that plugs in) or a Water Sensor Cable ($27) (a 4-foot cable that can detect water along its length—you can daisy-chain up to three)—but neither comes in the box. This sensor also tracks temperature and humidity, with charts displayed in the app, and you can set alert triggers at certain thresholds. It wasn’t as swift as our top pick, but it was consistent in my testing. It takes two AA batteries (provided). Sadly, you have to press the button on the device to stop the alarm—there’s no in-app option. It’s also relatively large (the size of a hockey puck) compared to other detectors I tested, limiting your placement options. And once again, there’s no real smart home integration. Phyn also offers a water monitor and automatic shutoff device ($540), but I haven’t tried it.

TP-Link Tapo T300 Water Leak Detector

Photograph: Simon Hill

TP-Link Tapo T300 Water Leak Detector for $20: What I like most about these water leak detectors is that they have four metal probes underneath and two above, so they swiftly detect water dripping on top or pooling beneath. Alerts came through reliably to my phone as push notifications within one to two seconds. The alarm is fairly loud (90 decibels), though you can reduce the volume in the app or even mute it. The TP-Link Tapo T300 requires a Tapo Smart Hub ($23) to function. Each hub can link up to 64 Tapo motion sensors, door or window sensors, switches, and other devices. The hub is a simple rectangular device that plugs directly into an outlet and connects to your Wi-Fi network. It doesn’t sound an alarm by default, but you can mirror the sensor’s alerts in the Tapo app. Another feature I like is the option to push the button on top of the sensor to have the hub confirm that it is within range. Each T300 sensor requires two AAA batteries (included) that TP-Link says can last for up to three years. There is a battery icon in the app to show the remaining power and warn when it is running low. As well as having the water leak alarm trigger your hub to sound, you can have it turn off devices in the vicinity if they are connected to Tapo smart plugs (I tested this, and it worked as expected). The T300 is a bit bulky, so it might not fit everywhere you’d like to place a sensor, and it continued to display as functioning normally in the app for several hours after I removed its batteries.

Eve Water Guard for $110: With HomeKit support, this is a good choice for iPhone owners with a home hub (an Apple TV or HomePod). HomeKit is also ideal if you have privacy concerns because you can be certain no data will be shared with third parties. There is an Eve app, but you can also view the Water Guard and set notifications directly through the Apple Home app. It plugs into an outlet and has a 6.5-foot cable that senses any water and immediately alerts you on your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, wherever you are, provided you have a working home hub. It also flashes red and has a 100-decibel siren. You can review alarm history, test or mute alarms, and update device firmware in the Eve app. The Eve Water Guard only detects water, but the sensing cable works well, triggering quick alerts and covering a large area. It needs a power outlet, which also limits your placement options, but you never need to worry about battery life. The obvious drawbacks are the complete lack of support for Android, the fact that you need a home hub for remote alerts and management, and the relatively high price. You can also add 6.5-foot sensing cable extensions ($20 each) up to a total length of 500 feet.

Govee Smart Water Leak Detectors (3-Pack) for $55: Quick and easy to install, Govee’s sensors send alerts as push notifications and emails. They also boast one of the loudest sirens I tested (105 decibels). Mercifully, you can shut off the ear-splitting sound from the app. The sensors are quite small with metal feet, offering drip detection on top and leak detection underneath, but there’s no option to add a disc or cable. The Govee Wi-Fi Water Sensors only detect water, but they are effective. I found alerts triggered within a few seconds. The app is basic but works well and displays alert history. Unfortunately, these sensors require a Govee gateway (included in the box), which takes up a power outlet (and may block an adjacent outlet), and each sensor takes two AA batteries (also provided). These sensors care also IP67 rated, so can survive full immersion. One concern with these sensors is that I failed to receive alerts when my phone was connected to mobile data rather than Wi-Fi, though the email did come through. There’s also no smart home integration.

First Alert L1 Wi-Fi Water Leak and Freeze Detector

Photograph: Simon Hill

First Alert L1 Wi-Fi Water Leak and Freeze Detector for $65: This large flood sensor, branded First Alert, works with First Alert or Resideo apps and accessories. It sends push notifications and emails to alert you to any leak and sports a 100-decibel alarm that you can stop with the side button. The sensor was relatively slow to alert in all my tests, and the push notifications only came through when my phone was connected to Wi-Fi. The 5-foot water-sensing cable allows you to cover a much larger area, and I found it alerted faster. The detector connects directly to Wi-Fi, so you need a decent signal. This sensor can also track temperature and humidity, but not very accurately (it consistently overestimates temperature and underestimates humidity). The two AA batteries provided are supposed to last up to two years.

Eufy Security Water and Freeze Sensor for $35: If you have Eufy’s security system, this could be the best water leak detector for you, but it requires connection to a HomeBase 2 or HomeBase 3 ($150). It proved quick and reliable to alert, offers long-range connectivity (up to 200 meters), and can warn you if the temperature drops below freezing. You receive alerts on your phone via the Eufy Security app, and you can configure the connected HomeBase to sound an alarm, but the detector doesn’t make any sound. A full battery lasts up to two years and the app tracks battery life. Sadly, it doesn’t show the temperature; it simply alerts below freezing.

SwitchBot Water Leak Detector for $17: This rectangular detector triggered swift alerts in all my tests with a 100-decibel alarm. With prongs on top and underneath, it’s also quick to detect water. It connects directly to Wi-Fi, so you don’t need a hub, and can send push notifications and emails, though you must set them up in the app. Unfortunately, the push notifications did not come through when I was out of the house, connected to a cellular network instead of Wi-Fi. Smart home connectivity is good (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT), and you can set up automation in the SwitchBot app, which makes this a versatile option, particularly if you have other SwitchBot devices. SwitchBot says the two AAA batteries provided are good for up to two years.

AiDot Winees Water Leak Detector S1 Plus (3 Pack) for $50: Connect the plug-in hub to your 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi, place the three circular detectors in likely leak spots, and you are set. You can pair up to 10 with the hub and configure it to send emails and SMS messages on top of app notifications when there’s a leak. The probes on the underside of each detector are quite far apart, though, and it takes 2 millimeters of water before the alarm is triggered. It failed to go off with a steady drip on top, but the alarm sounded as soon as water pooled underneath. The alarm goes up to 100 decibels, and you can tweak its volume and duration. You can cancel alarms through the app or by pressing the buttons on the hub. These detectors take CR2 batteries that are good for up to a year, and there’s an indication in the app when they die. When I removed a battery from one of them, it took the app a few hours to update and show it as offline. One last downside is that the hub is circular, so it may block adjacent outlets. Support for IFTTT is a potentially handy extra that could trigger a water shut-off or a light to flash red when a leak is detected.

Aqara Water Leak Sensor for $19: This Zigbee sensor is best used with Apple’s HomeKit, and you need an Aqara hub (sold separately). The company makes a good security camera that doubles as a hub and offers a full range of smart home sensors. These small circular water leak sensors are very low to the ground, so just 0.5 mm of water underneath is enough to trigger an alarm. Dripping on top won’t set them off, but an iPhone notification is triggered as soon as water pools beneath the probes. You can also have your connected hub play an alarm and trigger automations through HomeKit. The sensors take CR2 batteries and can last up to two years.

Leak Detectors to Avoid

We did not have a great experience with every water leak detector we tested. These are not recommended.

Stitch by Monoprice Water Leak Sensor: This affordable water leak detector has a design that’s similar to our top pick. The main body is round, with metal feet to detect water pooling, and it slots into a bracket for wall mounting. It comes with a coin-sized plug-in extension that stretches up to 3.8 feet. Both the main detector and extension were quick to sound the alarm and send notifications to my phone when wet, but the on-device alarm is not very loud. It takes a single CR2 battery, displays the remaining power in the app, and alerts you when it’s time to change batteries. Unfortunately, the app is basic and poorly translated. You have to dry the detector to stop the alarm, and it took too long to warn me when it went offline (weirdly, the offline detector is toggled off by default in the app settings, so I had to switch it on).

Swann Leak Alert Sensor: While this battery-powered water detector (two AAAs) is affordable, I had a terrible time setting it up. Your phone must be on 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi, but even then, it took me multiple attempts to connect. Frustratingly, you must remove the screw panel to reset it, because there’s no option in the app. Alerts came through to my phone around a minute after I soaked the sensor, and the Swann app is slow and clunky.

Know These Basics Before You Shop

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How Do Water Leak Detectors Work?

Water leak detectors can detect water pooling, and some can also detect water dripping or even humidity rising. Premium water leak detectors monitor the flow of water in your pipes and may include an automatic water shutoff that kicks in when a leak is detected. All connect to a hub or directly to your Wi-Fi network to send alerts when they detect a problem.

What Types Are There?

Some water leak detectors have cables with sensors on the end, some have water-sensing cords, and others are self-contained with sensors on the top, bottom, or both. You have the option of extension nodes with some detectors. At the premium end of the market, you can get a water shutoff valve that must be fitted to your pipework to measure the flow of water and even automatically shut it off when a leak is detected. For the best protection you should combine both water leak detectors to perform spot checks around appliances, and flow monitoring systems to detect when a pipe bursts or a leak develops in any part of your plumbing system.

How Many Do I Need?

Unless you have a single problem spot or appliance you want to monitor, you will likely need several water leak detectors to safeguard your whole home. Think about the areas you want to cover when considering what kind of detector would work best for you and how many of them you need.

Where Should I Put Them?

Place detectors anywhere you have concerns about a potential leak—for example, under the kitchen sink, behind toilets, next to washers, humidifiers, water heaters, and other water tanks. They can also be useful for monitoring basements, lofts, garages, and other outbuildings or vacation properties. Other spots worth considering include under the bath, behind the fridge if it has an ice or water dispenser (especially if it’s plumbed in), your HVAC condensate pan, or next to your sump pump or pit. If you have a problem area where you have had a leak before or an aging appliance you are worried about, those are also good options.

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How Do You Get Alerts?

All the smart water leak detectors we tested send push notifications when there’s a leak, but some also send emails and texts. Most have some kind of built-in audible alarm sound, but some offer separate sirens or can be configured to send alerts through smart speakers or other devices. It’s worth checking whether your pick supports disconnection alerts to warn you when the connection is lost, which may happen if power or Wi-Fi goes out.

How Are Water Leak Detectors Powered?

Most detectors are battery-powered, but you can get some that plug directly into outlets. You can set and forget plug-in detectors, but batteries give you more flexibility with placement, and the companion app will typically warn you when the batteries need to be changed.

Do They Need a Wi-Fi Connection?

Most smart water leak detectors connect directly to your Wi-Fi router or a hub, so make sure that you have a decent signal wherever you are installing them. Most of the devices we tested only connect to Wi-Fi on the 2.4-GHz band. Remember that they need internet access to alert you to any leaks or problems when you are away from home. If your internet goes down, they will simply act as local alarms.

Can They Integrate With My Smart Home?

While companion apps and mobile notifications are typical, some detectors support smart home standards, enabling you to access detectors in your chosen smart home app and set up triggers or automation. For example, you could set a water alert to flash your smart lights or select a temperature that triggers heating or air conditioning to turn on.

Can Water Leak Detectors Shut Off the Water?

With some high-end systems, you can install a water-monitoring device with an automatic shutoff function, enabling any leak detection to shut off your water supply. But these systems are usually expensive and require professional installation.

Can They Monitor the Temperature or Humidity?

Some smart water-leak detectors can also monitor the temperature and humidity, potentially alerting you to the danger of frozen pipes or damp environments that could indicate a leak nearby. You can generally review the temperature and humidity over time, so you can immediately spot any notable changes that need investigation. With smart home automation, you can also trigger heating or fans at certain levels to reduce the risk of damage.

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Photograph: Simon Hill

I test every smart water leak detector by dripping water on top, pooling water slowly beneath, and flooding rapidly to see how effective the water leak detection is and how quickly they alert. I install every app, check different alert options where applicable, and ensure alerts come through on my phone, whether I’m connected to Wi-Fi or the cellular network. I also remove the batteries or unplug each water leak detector to see if it shows as disconnected correctly in the app or sends any alert, then plug it back in or reinsert batteries to see if it recovers.

When detectors offer additional features, such as humidity or temperature tracking, I test and compare them with my SwitchBot Hub 3. Our top picks continue to be used over months, so we can be confident that the performance does not degrade.

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When I first tested the developer beta of Apple’s Siri AI by taking it as my tour guide around San Francisco, I was convinced the overhauled smartphone assistant would be an “everything tool” on the iPhone. The answers felt reliable enough and more helpful than previous versions of Siri. Also, the chatbot-style app for Siri felt very sleek, very Apple-y.

Over the next month, I kept experimenting with the Siri AI in the iOS 27 beta. The tool was quite powerful, especially with the personal context brought in by indexing the contents of my phone. Finding an ancient text message or photo has never been easier. Even so, my usage of the smartphone assistant slowly started tapering off.

It’s not that Siri AI isn’t better now. It is! This new version is quite the step change, which makes my reaction even more devastating. Siri AI isn’t revolutionizing how I interact with my phone the way I’d initially hoped, especially as an AI assistant built directly into the device and factoring in that Apple gives more thought to preserving my privacy than many other AI companies.

Even though I wasn’t going out of my way to interact with Siri AI, I didn’t mind how it was now, essentially, the search bar for the smartphone. As the summer months faded, I wasn’t souring on Siri AI. Instead, I just grew more neutral.

Old habits die hard. Soon I was back to my regularly scheduled doomscrolling on Instagram and aimless Yelp expeditions. I was manually typing and swiping for myself rather than relying on a smartphone assistant for help. And I was already low-key locked in with another chatbot, Anthropic’s Claude, and already used that app fairly often on my phone.

Even though some AI power users may not go all in on this new Siri, analysts say this won’t matter, since everyday users are often fine with Apple’s default software. “Will Siri bear the weight of criticism for not being as good as some of its peers? Sure,” says Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, a research and consultancy company. “Will it make a difference to the vast installed base of iPhone users and cause them to look elsewhere? Not a chance.” Some iPhone users trust Apple with their data in ways they don’t with any other company. Siri AI may reap those same benefits.

Tech analysts see Apple’s long-cultivated consumer trust in data privacy as potentially a compelling distinction. Ramon Llamas, a research director analyzing the mobile device market at the International Data Corporation, believes users deep in the Apple ecosystem, who previously had qualms about the safety of other AI tools, may be open to trying the new Siri.

My experience with Siri AI—loving it and then leaving it for dust—may be an outlier. Many other beta testers are still rocking with the smartphone assistant.

“In the past, I was unwilling to trust that Siri could do anything useful,” says Avi Greengart, founder and lead analyst at Techsponential. “But with the latest beta software, I’m finding myself not only using it more, but for more things: Siri is now able to find information buried on my phone faster and more efficiently than any other method, its world knowledge is vastly better than before, and even dictation works better.”

That said, the cultural backlash to generative AI has been brewing. Another solid segment of iPhone owners may choose to avoid the new Siri altogether because of the AI attached to its name. Whether it’s a moral objection or broader distrust of AI tools, these holdouts are unlikely to be won over by Siri’s feature improvements.

Ultimately, my own summer fling with Siri AI was short-lived. But I promise, it’s not you. It’s me.

While there are plenty of ways to limit notifications on our digital devices and avoid distraction overload, there’s nothing inherently wrong with these alerts. They just need to be well managed and kept in their place.

Keeping notifications useful and timely can help you get more done in the day, not less, and Windows 11 comes with built-in tools for setting up custom notifications that run on a schedule you specify.

You can use these scheduled notifications however you want. Maybe you need reminders to take breaks, or you want to make sure you devote specific blocks of time to certain projects, or you need alerts for when it’s time to go and pick the kids up.

However you want to use these custom notifications, here’s how to set them up—plus some extra apps that can help too.

Custom Notifications in Windows 11

Task Scheduler gives you a clean, simple way of creating alerts.Screenshot: David Nield

If you want to set up custom notifications in Windows 11 without turning to an app, the Task Scheduler is the utility you want. Type “task scheduler” into the search box on the taskbar or the Start menu, then select it when it appears.

Open the Action menu, choose Create Basic Task, and then give it a suitable name and description so you can identify it later. Click Next, and you can set the frequency of the notification: Your options are Daily, Weekly, Monthly, One time, When the computer starts, When I log on, and When a specific event is logged, so there’s a lot of flexibility.

Click Next again, and if you’ve chosen a recurring task then you can set exactly when it recurs—4 pm every afternoon, for example. Click Next, then choose Start a program, and select Next again. This opens up the dialog box screen for composing your notification.

In the Program/script field, you need to enter “msg,” and in the Add arguments (optional) field, you put your actual notification text: “Reminder: get up and do some stretching” or whatever it happens to be. With another click on Next you can review your notification, and then choose Finish to confirm.

Your notification is created, and will pop up at the specified time, whether or not Task Scheduler is open. If you ever need to edit or delete the task, you can head back to Task Scheduler to find it—it’ll be listed under the Task Scheduler Library heading, and you can right-click on the task to make changes.

Setting Notifications Through Apps

You’re also able to set reminders through the built-in Clock app.Screenshot: David Nield

The appeal of the Task Scheduler is that it’s built right into the Windows operating system, so you don’t need any other apps running to get your notifications, but there are ways to do this with apps as well. The Microsoft Clock app comes preinstalled with Windows, for example, and lets you set custom alarms.

Though I’ve been working from home for the past 15 years, both freelance and full-time, this often means needing to be available 24/7, so I typically carry my laptop everywhere I go—including sports practices, day trips, and vacations.

I have used many laptop backpacks in this time, and the dividing line between a work backpack that’s comfortable and fits seamlessly into your daily routine and one that’s aggravating at every turn is a fine one. If you’ve got limited closet space, it also helps if the backpack can pull double duty and be used for travel and/or hiking. The backpacks below are ones either I or another WIRED reviewer have used extensively in real life, taking on planes, hiking trails, vacations, and work trips.

For more bag and backpack recommendations, Bag Check features WIRED staffers’ favorite totes, sleeves, and packs. For more portable gear, check out our guides to the Best Wireless Chargers, Best Bluetooth Trackers, and Best Travel Adapters.

Updated September 2026: I’ve added the Paramount Daypack Lite 20L and the Navigator Backpack to my main picks. I’ve also included the Eagle Creek Tour Lite Travel Pack, North Face Base Camp Voyager Pro, Bagsmart Moss Backpack, Brown Buffalo Conceal Pack, and GoRuck G1 to our honorable mentions list.

Featured Products

Best Value

Everlane ReNew Transit Backpack

Read moreBest for Commuting

Thule Paramount Daypack Lite 20L

Read moreBest Minimalist

Troubadour Apex Backpack 4.0

Read more

Best Laptop Bag

Everlane

ReNew Transit Backpack

I took this backpack on a weeklong work trip, where I bitched about it endlessly to everyone who would listen. However, I must fairly and objectively conclude that this bag offers tremendous value for the money. It’s a light, attractive, rucksack-style backpack that’s sleek and understated enough for work, and it’s under $120. The 27-liter capacity accommodated enough gear for a full day’s worth of travel, from a scarf for the plane to a water bottle, snacks, and other in-flight accouterments. It has a slim profile and lies close to your back, so it’s not hard to carry and won’t swing into people on the subway. The pockets are very minimal—just an exterior laptop pocket, an interior tablet sleeve, an interior zip pocket, and two large catch-all pockets—but they work if you already put your belongings in pouches anyway.

Certain design elements just felt cheap. I didn’t like the curved zipper that gives you access to the main compartment—zippers that don’t run straight are doomed to get stuck. One of the catch-all pockets is annoyingly located on the cover flap, where anything inside will flap and bang around. The luggage pass-through is a bare piece of webbing. However, it all works: it’s light, affordable, and looks nice. The fabric is also water-resistant, so you can wear it in the rain! For most people, that’s all that really matters. —Adrienne So

Best Laptop Bag for Commuting

Thule

Paramount Daypack Lite 20L

Thule’s newest addition to its already solid backpack lineup was made specifically for schlepping gear to and from work on a daily basis, and it shows. The silhouette is sleek and aerodynamic, making it suitable for bike commuting (there’s even a loop on the front to attach a bike light), and it’s just big enough for a laptop, several notebooks, and maybe a jacket without feeling too big or bulky. The water bottle holder on the side is stretchy for a variety of sizes.

I also love the amount of organization inside for smaller things like pens and notebooks (the flap folds down for access to the interior, too, so you can access these things next to your desk), as well as the hidden yet easily accessible small pocket under the flap for wallet, keys, and phone. It’s not the roomiest pack, so you’re not carrying gym gear in this or taking it on an overnight trip, but if you’re just going to and from the office with basics and a laptop, this is the most well-engineered option I’ve tried.

Welcome to the first edition of Power Play! From now until the midterms, senior writer Molly Taft will be sharing their thoughts every Sunday on this political season’s hottest issue: data centers. We welcome reader comments, and will be answering questions from the comments section in future editions.

Be sure to catch WIRED’s first livestream on data centers this Thursday, September 10, featuring Molly, senior politics correspondent Hugo Lowell, and senior business writer Max Zeff! You can submit questions here.

It’s been a rough summer for data center boosters. Polling is getting even more dismal—as many as 75 percent of Americans now say they would oppose a data center being built in their area, up from 42 percent last year. Politicians from both parties who were previously advocates, like Texas governor Greg Abbott and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, are now switching up as the midterms approach, looking to convey to voters that they’re talking a hard line on the hated infrastructure.

But while some Republicans are turning tail on the issue even in the face of President Donald Trump’s vigorous support for data center construction, others are joining prominent tech leaders in doubling down on an old narrative: That China is responsible for all this malaise.

In late August, X announced that it had identified 200 accounts linked to China that were helping to spread anti-data center talking points on the platform, causing a flurry of alarmist headlines and tweets. (“China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage,” Axios trumpeted in an article on X’s report, which data center-friendly politicians and right-wing figures amplified using X itself.) Even the president joined in: “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” he wrote in a Truth Social post defending data centers (“let Data Reign!”) made just a few days after the X report.

The idea that Americans hate data centers because of a nebulous foreign influence operation—not because of a slew of environmental worries, an oligarch-friendly political system, or a general resistance to AI—is a handy excuse for the technology’s backers and their allies. And it’s one that’s been hanging around for a few months. In the spring, a handful of reports from right-wing policy shops were used by lawmakers and pundits alike to point fingers at the Chinese Communist Party for purportedly seeding anti-data center narratives among the American public. In June, OpenAI banned a cluster of users it had found that, the company said, were linked to the Chinese government and “testing narratives against AI infrastructure.”

But claims that Americans hate data centers because of Chinese influence are based on pretty thin evidence. The biggest report circulating around DC claiming foreign influence, China experts told me earlier this year, leans heavily on insinuations and assumptions with precious little hard evidence. In its own report from June, OpenAI acknowledged that the cluster of accounts it identified was simply exploiting existing discontent around data centers. It’s possible X’s recent purge may be linked to the accounts flagged by OpenAI: They use similar hashtags and images, and several link to the same obscure local news article. X ultimately identified 200,000 accounts in the same bot farm; the 200 anti-data center accounts were just a drop in the larger bucket.

Do blue-check tech types and Republicans keep hammering on the China angle because they know something that the public doesn’t? Graphika, a social media analytics firm that has been tracking data center sentiment online, told me in June that most of the opposition they had seen thus far was homegrown. That hasn’t changed: There’s still very little evidence of significant foreign intervention, Tyler Williams, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, told me this week.

It was only a matter of time before wellness trackers—already out there trying to optimize our heart rate, sleep, stress, steps, blood sugar, and menstruation—came for perhaps the most private biosignal of all: our poop.

The global gut health market is expected to reach nearly $106 billion by 2029, and a handful of companies are betting they can use stool data to provide in-depth health insights, nudge people to change their diets or lifestyles, and advise them to see a doctor if their bathroom habits seem amiss. But gastroenterologists are skeptical that products that rely on AI to analyze images of what’s going on in your toilet bowl are worth the price just yet, and data-privacy advocates warn that people can get locked into long-term subscriptions just to access their own health data.

Among the companies touting smart toilets are Kohler Health—an offshoot of the eponymous plumbing giant that sells its device for $449 plus $130 for an annual family membership—and Throne, a startup that raised $10 million in July. Its product is $399 plus $70 for an annual membership.

Both companies’ stool trackers are sleek white devices that clip to the toilet and have cameras facing down into the bowl. (They are adamant that the cameras cannot turn skyward.) When you sit down, the device uses a light sensor to record a video of your deposits, then feeds them into an algorithm that analyzes your urine and stool consistency and color, as well as other metrics. A few minutes later, you get your bathroom-break report card care of an AI-powered app that tracks gut health and hydration scores.

The companies say they are taking a completely different approach from at-home gut microbiome test kits. Those kits, which claim they can use stool samples to identify food sensitivities, provide dietary guidance, and more, come with thin to nonexistent evidence of their efficacy. The new stool trackers aim to identify what’s normal for an individual rather than issuing a binary healthy-or-not verdict.

“This is all deeply personal and very individual—digestive patterns are very different,” says Nora Tophof, Kohler Health’s managing director.

Even so, for healthy people with regular bowel movements, stool trackers may not offer much in the way of new insights, says Daniel Freedberg, a gastroenterologist in New York and a spokesperson for the American Gastroenterological Association.

“It kind of seems like overkill,” he says. “If you want to look at your stool, you can just look at it yourself. I don’t know that the AI is bringing a lot of new science to this.”

Tophof says that for healthy people, the real value comes from long-term tracking to identify patterns they can act on—for example, if they realize they’re always dehydrated over the weekend or that a particular food or medication tends to upset their stomach.

Scott Hickle, Throne’s cofounder and chief executive officer, says people with inflammatory bowel disease or other digestive conditions can benefit from regular, automated stool monitoring. “Their physicians ask them to track, or keep stool logs … and compliance for that is basically zero,” he says. “No one wants to journal about their poop.”

Throne plans to offer more than helping users track their gut health. Rates of colorectal cancer have risen among younger adults over the past decade, and it is now the leading cause of cancer death among those under 50. Doctors don’t quite know why, but exposure to ultra-processed foods, microplastics, and antibiotics are prime suspects. Screening for colon cancer typically involves a colonoscopy—or a stool-based test that looks for hidden blood in feces.

Flock tells WIRED that officers cannot run searches using prohibited attributes, including religion and nationality, and that an attempt to search prohibited terms “will be blocked.” Asked what circumstances produce a warning in those two categories instead, the company did not say.

When a T-shirt or a bumper sticker draws a warning because the text includes speech with “constitutional protections,” officers are told the search will be logged and that administrators will be notified. Officers then have to tick an acknowledgment box and leave a comment before they’re free to click Continue With Search Anyway.

Flock says the warning leaves room for legitimate work, offering as an example a victim who describes a suspect in a biker-gang jacket bearing “a certain gang logo or emblem containing a flag or other insignia.” An officer who proceeds is reported to an administrator at their own department for review.

Kate Ruane, who directs the Center for Democracy and Technology’s free expression project, has spent years studying how automated moderation systems work. Political, social, and cultural expression is “an incredibly amorphous category,” she says, and one reason an officer’s search might contain language including it is to see who attended a protest. That’s already happened. The category worries Flock enough that the system returns a warning, she points out, “but you can still get the results if you just click through.”

“No content moderation done at scale is necessarily accurate,” she says. Analysis of moving video, she says, is harder still, and it goes wrong more often.

The categories that do get blocked can be worked around, Ruane says. The system blocks searches based on religion but not clothing, meaning that in practice an officer could get around the block by searching for the distinctive dress worn by some members of a particular faith. “Lots of people are having their images returned in response to these types of queries that would probably be upset if they knew about it.”

In a search last year, an officer in California typed “American flag.” The search drew a block when aimed at a person, then ran across 11,000 cameras when aimed at vehicles instead.

A warning stops only those officers not already determined to run the search, says Deepak Kumar, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego. Kumar, who studies trust and safety systems, points to interfaces built to address online harassment, where motivated users sometimes did more harm after being warned, and to browser alerts meant to steer people away from malicious websites, where the effect depends on how warnings are presented.

“This kind of logging can be useful administratively, to see which officers or end users bypass warnings often, but that value depends entirely on whether anyone administrates it,” Kumar says. “It functions less as a deterrent and more as a record.”

Reviewing search terms before a query runs will inevitably catch many attempts at misuse, but in isolation, such safeguards are known to fail without equal scrutiny of what the model sends back. “Best practice examines both inputs and outputs,” Kumar says, “which is why so many AI safety efforts now check both to prevent models from generating harmful outputs.”

Christopher Sweet, an affiliate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, requested college credit for his time in government, according to new documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization.

Sweet was stationed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in emails between Sweet and Scott Langmack, another DOGE affiliate at HUD, it appears that Sweet was looking to frame his work at HUD as an independent study worth three college credits. Sweet joined HUD in the spring of 2025 as an undergraduate college student at the University of Chicago to work on building an AI tool that would crawl through the agency’s rules and regulations and flag them for rescission—the cancellation of contracts. The tool, called SweetRex, was intended to be rolled out across the federal government.

In an August 26, 2025 email titled “Which of these should go to U Chicago,” Langmack wrote to Sweet saying, “I need to send them something that has specific framework of the different courses/credits we want them to give you.”

Documents attached to the email show that Sweet’s work was divided into four potential courses, Advanced AI Prompt Engineering for Legal Reasoning, Applied Data Science for Federal Regulatory Analysis, Computer Programming for Scalable Al-Legal Systems, and Legislative & Regulatory Authority in AI-Driven Reform. It appears these were meant to lead to a final proposed thesis focused on “the design, implementation, and impact of integrated AI, data science, software engineering, and legal authority analysis to rationalize outdated federal regulations.” The documents make clear that Sweet’s work was not an internship but “graduate-level, multi-disciplinary research producing real-world outputs that are already influencing federal regulatory reform.”

It appears that the final outline that was created to send to the University of Chicago for approval was created by AI. In an August 27, 2025 email, Langmack tells Sweet, “I did the outline on ChatGPT.”

HUD and the University of Chicago did not reply to requests for comment. WIRED confirmed that Sweet did, in fact, graduate from the University of Chicago this June with a degree in economics, though it is unclear if credits from his time with DOGE contributed to the school’s requirements.

Langmack came to HUD from the property technology company Kukun—whose website describes it as being on “a long-term mission to aggregate the hardest-to-find data”—with zero experience in the federal government. He is now executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget, according to his LinkedIn. Langmack did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“These documents raise serious concerns about how one of DOGE’s unqualified employees has been entrusted to handle legal work, rewriting rules and regulations that affect millions of Americans, while attempting to count this work toward an undergraduate degree,” says Daniel McGrath, special counsel for oversight at Democracy Forward, describing the case as part of the “Trump-Vance administration’s relentless pursuit to cripple the important work of the federal government.”

Marvel and Disney+ have issued a stacked watch list for fans ahead of the cinema release of Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe can be complex terrain to navigate. Its 38 movies and 25 series to date span varying superhero plot lines, crossovers, and multiverse action, with the latest Avengers release likely to spare no less lore and real fan knowledge.

Marvel released an official “Countdown to Doomsday” playlist with Disney+, featuring 15 official selections to help fans catch up on all the action before watching the new movie. Among the selections, fans will get refreshers on origin stories, team-ups, and key multiversal information gearing them up to the Doomsday storyline.

The studio also launched the Countdown to Avengers: Doomsday Official Podcast, available on Disney+, YouTube, and audio platforms. The podcast features weekly recaps of the MCU’s Infinity Saga.

Devoted fans were quick to spot that two X-Men entries predate the MCU entirely, presumably because Patrick Stewart, James Marsden, Ian McKellen, and Alan Cumming are all rumored to be coming back for Doomsday. The Marvels from 2023, interestingly, did not make the cut.

The official movie watch list will require 42 hours to get through, which is roughly under three hours a week if you spread it out evenly before the new movie drops in December. Disney+ releasing a homework list for its own film is a great bit of subscriber farming. It converts the hype ahead of the theatrical release into watching content on a streaming service that has to, in the meantime, justify its monthly cost.

Every title below streams on Disney+, which is available in many markets around the globe. Some titles are also available on other streamers, and most are available to rent or buy digitally through Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV.

What to Watch Before Avengers: Doomsday

X-Men (2000)

X2: X-Men United (2003)

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

The Avengers (2012)

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Loki, both seasons (2021 to 2023)

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

Thunderbolts* (2025)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

This story originally appeared in WIRED Middle East.

While Watches and Wonders every April is undoubtedly the watch world’s main event of the year, Geneva Watch Days—which inauspiciously launched in 2020, the year Covid was declared a pandemic—is now establishing itself as a serious follow-up. Big brands can hold back key releases and gain valuable space to shout about new pieces away from the horological hubbub of W&W.

A second bite of the marketing apple in the latter half of the year seems like a good idea, as Swiss watch exports declined again in 2025 after a drop in 2024. However, despite America’s tariff seesaw, the US is still by far the single largest market for Swiss watches. And, more positively for watch fans, signs suggest the industry downturn could be over.

Here are WIRED’s picks of the best watches that dropped this week.

Breitling Navitimer B09 Chronograph 41 Tribute to Miles Davis

Courtesy of Brietling

Inspired by the 1960s Breitling Navitimer 806 Mk5 worn by none other than Miles Davis, this manual-wind B09 with a display caseback takes cues from the original beyond the manual winding: the Twin Jet logo, reverse-panda dial, faux-aged cream-colored lume, and the original 41-mm dimensions. The pitch is that you get what made the 806 Mk5 great but with a modern overhaul. This model is limited to 500 pieces: You could go for the stainless steel on calf leather strap for $8,900, but we think you’d be kind of blue (sorry) to miss the superb bracelet model, complete with round vents, for $9,600.

Casio G-Shock “CasioNaut” Series

Courtesy of Notebookcheck

Not part of Geneva Watch Days, here’s something genuinely new from Casio’s G-Shock line that’s leaked and could break the internet. The GAC-2500 series is a resin analog lineup supposedly built from the DNA of the DW-5000C, the very first G-Shock made back in 1983. But that’s not the real story of this piece. Much like the famous “CasiOak” that many G-Shock fans love for its passing resemblance to Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak, this GAC-2500 series has more than a whiff of Patek Philippe’s Nautilus about it.

So far, nicknames like “CasioNaut” and “CasioTilus” are being thrown around. Leaks suggest four resin colors at launch in November—white, black, green, and yellow—and the price is rumored to be 20,900 Japanese yen (about $134) each. There might be stainless-steel versions too—the GMC-2500D series, going for about $320.

Oris ProPilot X Gonzo Edition

Courtesy of Oris

Following Miss Piggy and Kermit editions, Oris clearly feels it’s on to a winning formula with Muppets collaborations. This one is more interesting than the solid pink-and-green colors of the previous dalliances. The Gonzo is a reworking of Oris’ ProPilot X but with subtle, classy nods to Gonzo the Great that chime perfectly with the subtle, classy performance art that is his trademark. While the showman himself appears on the watch’s mainspring, at 11 o’clock, the thumping 10-day power reserve indicator is a red chili, inspired by one of Gonzo’s favorite shirts. Such subtlety comes at a cost, however, as at $10,500, the Gonzo is twice the price of a Kermit.

Zenith Chronomaster Solo Sport

Courtesy of Zenith

A volume play from Zenith, and a good one. Bringing its famed El Primero movement to a cheaper—sorry, “more accessible”—price, the Solo Sport is a 40-mm steel diver watch, not a chronograph, with 200 meters of water resistance and a unidirectional rotating ceramic bezel. The black ceramic dial reveals the movement’s capabilities, with a high-frequency pattern and “Shark tooth” minute track, showcasing the caliber’s prize feature: 5 Hz or 36,000 vph (vibrations per hour). You can grab this for $10,900 with a date window, but those in the know will get the cleaner no-date for $9,800.

Hamilton Khaki Field Murph

Courtesy of Hamilton

Not physically at Geneva Watch Days either, Swatch Group’s Hamilton decided to crash the party and release an upgraded version of its successful Interstellar Murph timepiece. Dialing up the model’s association with Christopher Nolan’s classic sci-fi film, Hamilton has added a version to its collection with a dappled “comet-inspired” face where the blue center is intended to reflect the glow of ionized gases in space. Whether you understand this cosmic connection is immaterial when the outcome is this pleasing. Sensibly, Hamilton has chosen to release the new Murph in the preferred 38-mm sizing at $995.

Ming 57.05 Comet

Courtesy of Ming

More comets? Yes indeed. Founded in 2017 by designer and photographer Ming Thein, this independent watch brand is known for a winning blend of refined aesthetics and innovative engineering. Here, this 40-mm stainless-steel worldtimer features a first-of-its-kind, patent-pending system for adjusting the time to account for daylight saving. Borrowing its name from the de Havilland Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner, the watch’s split bezel divides cities according to whether they observe daylight saving. Those that don’t are fixed on the inner bezel, but the ones that do are on the outer ring. Rotating this outer bezel advances only the affected cities by one hour. Clever.

In a quiet summer garden, a caterpillar perches on a branch, munching serenely on leaves. A moment later it freezes. It senses danger—and just in time. From behind, a wasp approaches, sizing up its prey.

Tobacco hornworm caterpillars don’t look like they have ears, and yet they’re able to sense predators such as wasps. How does the caterpillar know a wasp is approaching?

Scientists do not fully understand how this caterpillar’s senses work, but we are part of a team of biologists and engineers who want to figure it out. Our ongoing research suggests that tobacco hornworms can hear using tiny, supersensitive hairs on their body.

Understanding the intricate biological mechanisms that allow this organism to perceive and interact with its environment would help solve a mystery of the natural world. It could also help scientists design new, cheaper microphone technology.

Because the hornworms’ hairs are so sensitive, we have to study them in complete silence. And where better to study hearing than in the complete silence of an anechoic chamber?

What Happens in the Anechoic Chamber

What happens outside the anechoic chamber stays outside the anechoic chamber, because it is meticulously built that way. Anechoic chambers are some of the quietest places in the world. They are engineered specifically to block the entry of any undesired sounds. Heavy-duty steel springs support the “floating” chamber and keep it from touching the ground. This detachment isolates the space from outside vibrations or noise.

In such a chamber, we studied the caterpillars’ responses to vibrations. Every day for a year, we set up a caterpillar on a platform and sent vibrations toward the platform at a variety of intensities.

To measure the movement and precise vibrations that traveled through the platform the caterpillar sat on, we used a device called an accelerometer. In response to vibrations, we sometimes saw the caterpillars jump; at other times they twitched or even shuddered from the sheer physical force.

Through our observations, we pinned down the specific threshold where the caterpillars stopped reacting to vibrations. Any vibration weaker than that magnitude, and the caterpillar wouldn’t visibly react at all.

After noticing this consistent pattern, we decided to test more caterpillars inside the anechoic chamber, but this time using airborne sound as the stimulus. The idea here was that if the caterpillars are more sensitive to sound than they are to vibrations, they are probably hearing airborne sounds independent of any vibrations.

Sound is broadly defined as a form of vibration or energy that becomes audible, meaning you can hear it with your ears. But here’s the catch: Sound also causes objects to vibrate. To make sure the caterpillar wasn’t just sensing the sound’s vibrations through the platform, we also used the accelerometer to measure the vibrations that the platform experienced from the sound. Our goal was to compare the platform vibrations produced in two distinct scenarios: when sound through the air was used as the stimulus versus when just direct vibrations were used as the stimulus.

We noticed that this time the caterpillars continued reacting to the sound even beneath their threshold of response to the direct vibrations. This finding suggested that they were hearing the airborne sounds.

Finding the Caterpillars’ “Ears”

So, where are their “ears?” Or rather, what are their “ears?”

There are two ways of hearing sound: from the sound waves’ pressure and from the velocity of the particles making up the sound waves.

For the longest time, scientists have associated hearing with tympanal organs. A tympanal organ in most mammals is a membrane that vibrates in response to pressure from sound waves. Its vibration moves the bone structures adjacent to it as well.

After reporting last week that the surveillance company Flock Safety is building an AI search tool for law enforcement, WIRED reconstructed Flock’s latest search tool from code that the company sends to a police officer’s browser and uncovered key details about how the tool works.

OpenAI said this week that its Astra model, which will have a private release soon, is its first model with cybersecurity-related capabilities that the company defines as posing a “critical” risk in public release. Meanwhile, the AI chatbot platforms Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok all suffered outages on Thursday at nearly the exact same time. But while xAI said the Grok outage resulted from issues at a Memphis data center, the causes of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s outages are unclear.

The US has been using a high-energy laser to shoot down drones near the Mexico border as part of an initiative to adopt new-generation directed-energy weapons capable of detecting, tracking, and destroying drones with a concentrated beam of light. And as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement inquiry into the identities of protesters who entered a Minnesota church in March, Homeland Security Investigations agents have subpoenaed the outdoor retailer REI for information about every customer who bought a specific green beanie over the past two years.

Plus, research that revealed nine vulnerabilities with impacts on ATM encryption points to broader weaknesses in the software supply chain.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

OpenAI agents on an unauthorized tear hijacked a German website beginning in May to use it as a message board for communicating and collaborating with other agents, according to new research. The incident is reminiscent of the now infamous Hugging Face debacle in which OpenAI agents in a test environment went rogue and developed a vibrant message board for collaborating on attempting to escape their containment, before ultimately breaching the open source AI platform Hugging Face in July. The revelation of the May episode is particularly significant because OpenAI reportedly learned about it weeks ago but did not disclose it. Meanwhile, last week, the company finally released a long-promised postmortem of the Hugging Face incident that raised as many questions as it answered.

This week, a new dark-web service called Nexus started selling around 153 million driver’s licenses from the US and Canada, along with 10 million ID cards and millions more travel documents and international IDs, according to Brian Krebs, a longtime independent security reporter. Krebs was first alerted to the service after cybercriminals posted an example of the files and included his license. The tens of millions of records—which reportedly increased by 400,000 over 24 hours—appear to have come from an ID verification service, with the criminals behind the trove saying they have access to a “major” verification company. While it’s unclear which company exactly that may be, according to Kreb’s report, the Nexus service was taken offline shortly after he reported that FBI officials were investigating.

The US military has begun disabling the advertising identifiers that apps and advertising companies use to track phones and computers in an attempt to make it harder for foreign adversaries to use commercially available location data to track American forces overseas, Reuters reported Friday.

The changes follow years of disclosures that US forces deployed abroad have been targeted using commercially available location data. In 2024, a joint WIRED investigation with Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk and Netzpolitik.org obtained an advertising dataset that identified thousands of devices appearing at US military and intelligence sites, including an air base where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored. At the time, Defense Department spokesperson Javan Rasnake told WIRED that the Pentagon was aware geolocation services could put personnel at risk and said service members in Europe were reminded to follow operational-security practices.

Now, the Air Force, Army, Navy, and US Special Operations Command say they have disabled advertising IDs on at least some military devices, with several of the changes taking effect only this year. It is still unclear exactly how these protections are being enforced. US senator Ron Wyden and Representative Pat Harrigan are now asking the Pentagon to investigate whether its safeguards are adequate.

Every year around this time, Apple announces new iPhones. The products go on sale soon after, usually ranging from a base model to more premium and more expensive Pro models. But this year will likely be different—not just because the company has a brand-new CEO.

Apple’s iPhone event will be held on September 9 at 10 am Pacific (1 pm Eastern), announced last week with the title “Surprise and Shine!” If you tune into the livestream, expect the announcement of an iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and, if all the rumors and widely held analyst expectations are true, the first look at an Apple foldable device.

Based on leaks and the ongoing tech rumor mill and its decent track record for figuring these things out, Apple is expected to prioritize its more expensive, premium devices this year and hold off on announcing its base model iPhone 18. That cheaper model is rumored to launch in the spring of 2027, potentially alongside an iPhone 18e and maybe a second-generation iPhone Air.

Why the drastic change in strategy? It may be due to the ongoing memory shortage, which has made just about everything more expensive. Apple hasn’t been spared. In June, former Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that Apple would raise product prices to keep up with manufacturing costs.

“Our assumption is that they’re going to be launching three models in the fall, the premium side of the models of the 18 series,” says Nabila Popal, a senior director of data and analytics at IDC. “Then the mid/budget devices will be launched in the spring.”

Popal says it’s a smart strategic move because Apple is aiming to spread out its revenue between a usually very strong fourth quarter and a typically much weaker spring quarter the following year. Apple’s portfolio has also expanded, and the iPhone Pro and Pro Max lineup are more enticing for people already prepared to spend the money on a new iPhone.

When components become more expensive, companies have three real options: Eat the costs, raise prices, or, as Apple seems to be doing, lean into it. By moving its cheaper options to a later date, Apple can drum up excitement for its bigger, better, pricier offerings. When it charges more for those, it is likely to be less off-putting than making a cheap phone even more expensive. It’s part of a “premiumization” of devices, as Popal calls it, that Apple hopes to leverage and build hype for its pricier options.

Shawn DuBravac, chief economist at the Global Electronics Association, tells WIRED he is optimistic about what these kinds of rising prices ultimately mean for customers.

“Throughout the history of time, the deflationary pressures of technology have always flowed to the consumer,” DuBravac says. “I’m confident that will be the case again. It just will take some time for the markets to solidify.” In other words, new technologies launch with a high price, but manufacturing efficiencies and competition inevitably drive costs down for consumers.

That may not be the case anytime soon for folding phones, which are seeing higher prices than ever. Samsung’s entire 2026 Galaxy Z folding smartphone range saw price increases, as did Google’s new Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and Motorola’s Razr 2026 models. Apple’s folding iPhone is rumored to cost around $2,000.

To help mitigate those high costs, Apple is turning to financing options and trade-in programs. In July, the company launched an iPhone leasing program that lets people pay a monthly fee to rent the newest iPhones, then swap them out when a new device releases. The program will undoubtedly help more people afford the newest devices, but ownership advocates have criticized it, saying it keeps you from truly owning and managing your device. It also fits Apple’s broader effort to turn all of its products into a subscription service.

Comparing the Best Alexa Speakers

Honorable Mentions

While I wouldn’t call these smart speakers my absolute favorites from Amazon, they have some excellent qualities that make them stand out among the vast lineup of Echo models.

The Echo Studio (2nd Gen) is the best Alexa speaker for sound quality. This is the second version of the Echo Studio to be our audiophile pick. The current version is a similar size to the old Echo (4th gen), but the musical power on this speaker is almost ridiculous. It filled my entire second floor’s long great room with music, and I didn’t even need to reach the highest level of volume to pull it off. Honestly, I’m almost afraid to use it at full blast. Not only was it loud, but clear and delivered a nice amount of bass, beautifully playing soft tones of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and the piano riffs of “Dark Blue” by Jack’s Mannequin with its three 1.5-inch drivers, plus a 3.75-inch woofer. The harmonizing of “What Is This Feeling?” by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sounded beautiful, too. If you’re looking for big sound in an Alexa box, this is it. It’s a similar size to the Apple HomePod, but I like the sound much better and it’s cheaper, too. You’ll also get a built-in smart home hub, spatial audio and Dolby Atmos, tap controls like the Echo Dot Max, and early access to Alexa+ right away.

The Echo Spot (2nd Gen) is the best Alexa speaker for bedside tables. The Echo Spot returned in 2024 after a few years of discontinuation, and it’s a great little bedside companion thanks to its half-circle screen that displays the time, plus any alarms you have set are also visible under the main time. You can customize the clock with a couple of different color and face options, and the screen dims nicely when the lights are out to a gentle red that’s easy to read without lighting up the room. I like asking for alarms set to my latest playlist or some lo-fi jams, and it’s easy to set that up with a voice request. Unlike the Echo Shows, it doesn’t have a distracting, constantly moving slideshow that would be annoying for the bedroom, nor does it display ads or have a built-in camera. (Nobody wants a rogue camera in their bedroom.) It does not have fantastic sound, but it’s plenty loud for an alarm or casual listening while you get dressed in the morning.

The Echo Dot Kids (5th Gen) is the best Alexa speaker for kids. Do your kids really need their own Alexa speaker? That’s up to you. This special edition of the Echo Dot is nearly identical to the fifth-gen Dot above, but it has easy-to-use parental controls that allow you to set time limits, filter explicit content, and review activity. The owl- or dragon-themed sphere comes with a year of Amazon Kids+, which includes thousands of Audible books and other special games and features. After that, you’ll be charged $3 per month. Alexa can help your kids spell, play their favorite music, or—via another speaker in your house—remind them of dinner time.

More Alexa (and Alexa-Compatible) Speakers

There are a lot of Echo devices out there, and some third-party speakers that are Amazon Alexa–compatible. Here’s every Alexa smart speaker we’ve tried and what we thought of it. Some of these speakers didn’t raise in price like the models above, which might make them more appealing than before if you’re looking to spend less.

Amazon Echo Dot (5th Gen) With Clock for $60: I like this version of the older Echo Dot that adds an LED clock to the front of the speaker, and was thrilled to see it in stock again last year. The LED clock can also display information like the weather when you ask Alexa questions. It’s once again temporarily out of stock as of this writing, and has had spotty availability (it’s out of stock right now, but Amazon says it’s temporary). Still, it’s a good find when it’s available.

Amazon Echo Hub for $180: The Amazon Echo Hub is similar to an Echo Show, but without the speaker. Instead it’s a thin device that feels a bit like a tablet, designed to be mounted on the wall (or placed on a separately purchased stand, which is how I used it) and used to control your smart home devices. It’s a great choice for anyone who wants something focused on smart home control only. You can still ask Alexa questions and even play music, but the thin speakers aren’t worth playing music from. But you can tell your Echo Hub to play music on a different set of speakers, and even set up default speakers to work with it. It’s a great companion device if you already have a smart home setup.

Amazon Echo Pop for $40: The Echo Pop is a perfectly fine little speaker, and the cutest one in Amazon’s lineup. Does it have great sound? No. It’s fine enough for background tunes or if you’re limited to a dorm room, but you’ll get much better sound for a similar size from the Echo Dot (but you’ll pay a little more, and you won’t get as cute of colors)!

Amazon Echo Show 5 (3rd Gen) for $100: This smart display is another just-fine option, but it’s too small to be a great display, and the included camera makes it a no for a bedside table; better to go with the above Echo Spot or an Echo Dot. This model did raise in price by $10.

Amazon Echo Show 8 (4th Gen) for $200: I usually love an Echo Show 8, but this model didn’t have the same sound quality as the older model. If you’re going to get one of Amazon’s new displays, you’re better off getting the Echo Show 11 ($220) for the same experience with a slightly larger screen (while it’s a 3-inch difference, it doesn’t feel that big) and better sound. This smart display raised in price by $20.

Amazon Echo Show 15 (2nd Gen) for $350: This smart display is a good display, but it clearly wants to double as a TV and isn’t very good at it yet. I’m hoping we see better TV-related performance in the future to make it worth adding to a kitchen or office. It does a great job with widgets, though, thanks to the massive 15.6-inch screen. There’s also the larger Echo Show 21 ($500), which is essentially the same thing but larger. Both of these large displays rose in price—the Show 15 went up $50, while the Show 21 went up $100.

JBL Authentics 200 for $380: This JBL smart speaker supports both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, letting you switch between them for different tasks without changing your preference in the app. That makes this speaker particularly appealing for folks with a sprawling collection of smart products from both.

Sonos Era 100 for $219: If you’re looking for a speaker that can talk to Alexa but isn’t necessarily made by Amazon, the Sonos Era 100 is a great option. We just wish we liked the Sonos app better. You can catch our entire guide to the Sonos ecosystem here.

Why Did Amazon’s Prices Increase?

Amazon increased many of its prices last month for its products, affecting the Amazon Echo line as well as Kindles, Fire TV streaming sticks, and Eero routers. It’s not a huge surprise after other companies have done the same this summer, claiming rising costs and chip shortages. Amazon made a similar claim, with a spokesperson blaming increased storage and memory costs. Still, it’s disappointing to see and will lead to a fall sale season with prices that won’t be as impressive as earlier this summer.

Amazon’s Echo devices saw increases from anywhere between $20 and $100, with the larger price increases being for the Echo Shows. The following Echo speakers all faced a price increase:

What’s Alexa+?

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Amazon has rolled out the new-and-improved Amazon Alexa, named Alexa+, which is built on generative AI and promises a more powerful assistant that can handle more conversational topics and requests. It’s available for a free 30-day trial; after that, you either pay a $20 monthly fee or become a Prime member. Being a Prime member is the better deal, likely by design. Neither my colleagues nor I have been impressed enough by Alexa+ to say it’s worth paying for on its own. I do like the updated, more conversational voice, and Alexa+ did a good job answering all kinds of questions quickly and thoughtfully. Check out our early access hands-on for everything I thought while testing.

Alexa+ has brought some changes, even for those not using it. It now requires that all voice recordings be sent to Amazon for processing, which wasn’t required before. Amazon has changed its features to support this, and now all recordings with regular Alexa go to Amazon, too. There used to be a “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” privacy feature you could select to have voice requests processed locally, but it was discontinued on March 28, 2025, per an email Amazon sent to current users.

FAQs

What’s the Difference Between an Echo and an Echo Show?

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A regular Echo is a smart speaker, or a speaker with microphones in it so it can hear you speak to it and respond. An Echo Show is a smart display, which has a screen and a camera to let you make video calls, stream content, and see your questions answered on a screen. Both have similar capabilities when it comes to smart home control, answering questions, and playing music, but Echo Shows have extra abilities thanks to the screen. All Echo Shows have a camera and come with a physical camera cover for privacy.

When’s the Best Time to Buy an Echo?

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The best time to buy any Amazon speaker is during a major sale event like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day, when there are often steep discounts. You’ll often see the cheaper speakers for around 50 percent off, and the larger speakers see some nice sale prices too.

How and Where Should You Set Up Your Alexa?

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Alexa speakers get the best use in spaces you’re in often. I like setting mine up in my kitchen and living room—usually a display in the kitchen, so I can pull up a recipe or the weather while I make my morning cup of tea, and a speaker in the living room so I can play music and command the lights without a screen to distract from the TV or playing with my son. You can also set one up in the bedroom to use as an alarm clock, but make sure it’s a model without a camera for the best privacy.

Ultimately, what’s most important is that the speaker is somewhere it can hear your commands. Where that will be will vary based on your home, but think about where you’ll be when you ask for the weather or to dim the lights, and place your speaker accordingly.

You’ll set up Alexa speakers using the Alexa app, which allows you to manage multiple Alexa speakers if you own more than one through your Amazon account. Third-party speaker setup methods may vary.

Is Alexa Always Listening?

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Alexa is always listening, to a certain extent. It’s designed to only listen for its wake word and shouldn’t be recording or processing any audio unless it hears that word. But Alexa can sometimes mishear a word and think it’s the wake word, or it might hear a word similar enough to activate the speaker. If you’ve owned an Alexa, there have likely been times when the assistant suddenly responds when you weren’t speaking to it. Once it hears the wake word (or what it believes to be the wake word), it will start listening to everything in an attempt to hear what you need and respond.

Alexa+, the latest version of Alexa, will also remain on for a little bit after you ask a question to listen for follow-up questions, no wake word required. Both Alexa and Alexa+ light up in some fashion (regular speakers will turn the light ring blue, while the displays will have a blue bar appear on the screen) to let you know the assistant is listening. Most Echo devices also have a physical mute button and will display a red light or red bar to let you know when the mute is activated.

How Do You Remove Ads and Spam From an Echo Show?

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If you’re using an Echo Show device, you’ve likely noticed there is a ton of default content the device will show you. Sports scores! Local news! A recipe you might be interested in! It makes the device exhausting and annoying to be near.

Here’s how you can control what you see:

• Swipe down from the top of your Echo Show to pull up the menu, and select Settings.
• In the Settings menu, choose Home Content.
• There are more than 40 options you can toggle on and off on this menu, and you should remove as many as you can that you don’t use. I usually remove all but weather forecasts and recently played audio.

While you’re able to turn off interest-based ads from third-party skills (this is under Alexa Privacy in the Settings menu), it won’t stop all ads. The only setting that is ad-free is choosing Photo Display mode, which can use either Amazon’s included library of photos or your own. The downside is that it turns it into a digital photo frame, so you won’t even see a clock or features like widgets.

Can I Have My Alexa Requests Locally Processed, or Do They Have to Go to the Cloud?

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There used to be a privacy feature called Do Not Send Voice Recordings that let you have all your voice requests processed locally on your Alexa device instead of being sent to Amazon’s cloud storage. That feature was killed in March 2025 to support Alexa+, and even if you continue to use the old Alexa, you don’t have access to that feature any longer.

How Does WIRED Select Smart Speakers to Test? How Are These Speakers Tested?

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For this guide, we specifically test speakers that are compatible with Amazon Alexa. It’s a big limitation and narrows down the options significantly, especially compared to speaker options you’ll see in our other guides like the Best Bluetooth Speakers. That’s mainly Amazon’s own ecosystem of speakers, and while there are third-party options, the best options tend to be of Amazon’s own design to work with its own voice assistant.

Each speaker gets installed in a tester’s home for day-to-day use, to see how the microphone performs, how the speaker sounds with different types of music, how well the smart home control features work with compatible devices such as smart lights and video doorbells, and to test other features as necessary (e.g., streaming features on smart displays).

How Does WIRED Get Models? What Does WIRED Do After Testing Them?

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We acquire review units usually as a press sample, though we will also independently purchase samples if need be. All review units in this guide were provided as press samples with no obligation to cover or promises for what that coverage would be.

After testing, we keep most of our picks either installed for long-term testing in our homes or in storage to compare against updated models and new speakers that come out. If the sample becomes irrelevant or unnecessary to keep, we donate it locally.

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Gmail is filled with hidden features and add-on possibilities, but one of the service’s most powerful organizational tools is sitting right in the heart of its regular settings.

As you may have guessed by now (especially if you read this story’s headline, you clever little cat), I’m talking about filters — Gmail’s long-standing system for automating your inbox with a series of custom-crafted rules. At a glance, filters can seem complicated. They can seem overwhelming. They can even seem unnecessary.

But don’t let yourself be fooled by the feature’s curiously crusty exterior. Gmail filters have the potential to completely reshape your inbox and the way your incoming messages are handled. They can help you keep your email in order with no ongoing thought or effort.

And, unlike Google’s new AI Inbox option (which notably still doesn’t seem to be available for most people as of this writing), filters (a) don’t require your personal messages to be processed by generative AI systems — and (b) give you complete control over exactly how your email is handled instead of forcing you to rely on inherently unreliable technology to figure out what you want for you (and then likely come up short at least some of the time).

Best of all? All it takes is a teensy touch of one-time planning to get Gmail filters set up to your exact specifications and working for you quietly and automatically from that moment onward.

Follow the filter-centric Gmail tips in this guide, and your inbox will be running like a well-oiled (but not too greasy) machine in no time.

Part 1: Figuring out your Gmail filters

Let’s start by thinking through some Gmail filter possibilities to get an idea for the sorts of setups you might want to consider — then, we’ll go step by step through the process of creating them.

With Gmail filters, you could:

• Ensure messages from specific high-priority senders always go into your inbox’s Primary tab, where you’re certain to see them
• Ensure specific sorts of lower-priority messages — like invoices, reports, or updates from different services you use — automatically get sorted into an out-of-the-way location and never even show up in your inbox
• Keep messages from annoying people out of your hair (but still available in case you need to find them) by automatically archiving them as soon as they arrive
• Forward messages from a specific address or with a specific phrase in their subjects to other members of your team or family
• Instantly respond to messages to or from a specific address with a prewritten template
• Label messages sent to a specific variation of your Gmail address (like youraddress+vip@gmail.com) or written with a specific word or phrase in the subject (like “urgent,” “important,” or “hey jerkwad, pay attention to this”) as “VIP” and then receive notifications only for messages with that designation
• Mark specific types of messages from yourself as reminders by giving them a bright yellow “REMINDER” label that makes them stand out in your inbox
• Get a snickerdoodle delivered to your desk every time your boss emails you

All right, so that last one isn’t really possible (not yet, anyway) — just wanted to make sure you were still paying attention. Everything else in that list, however, is absolutely doable and actually quite easy to set up with Gmail filters.

Got some ideas of your own? Good deal. Time to make ’em happen.

Part 2: Creating your Gmail filters

The simplest way to start a new Gmail filter is to click the control panel icon — the symbol showing three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other — within the big search box at the top of the Gmail website. (Filters can’t easily be managed on mobile, unfortunately, so you’ll need to do all of this in a desktop browser.)

That’ll pull up a form where you can fill in whatever you want to use as the basis for your filtering — a word or phase that might appear within an email’s subject or body, an address from which a message could originate, or any other variable or combination of variables you like.

The form for creating a filter is filled with options for controlling email automation.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Fill in the fields as appropriate, using however many variables you want — even employing quotation marks around multiword terms along with operators like “AND” and “OR” between terms, if you really want to get fancy — and then click “Create filter” at the bottom of the box.

You can use any combination of variables, even employing operators within a single field, to control when your filter will run.

JR Raphael / Foundry

One quick warning: By default, your filter will apply to any and all incoming messages — hence the “All Mail” setting that shows up next to the “Search” option in the filter creation pop-up. If you change that option to “Inbox,” you’re likely to see an error message informing you that the parameters you chose are not recommended and may not work properly. Leave that “Search” option set to “All Mail” — which is probably what you want, anyway — and you’ll steer clear of any errors and allow things to work the way they should.

Now it’s time for the fun part — the part where you decide exactly what happens when a message meeting your conditions arrives. You can select any combination of actions from the list and then configure them as needed. You can even tell Gmail to apply your filter retroactively to messages already in your account (as opposed to using it only for new messages that arrive from that point forward) by checking the “Also apply filter to matching conversations” option at the bottom of the box.

Gmail’s filters include a variety of actions that can execute when your conditions are met.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Once you’ve got that finished, click the blue “Create filter” button — and that’s it: Your new Gmail filter is officially in place and active. The next time any message comes in that meets the parameters you outlined, the actions you specified will automatically take place faster than you can say “I embrace Workspace in my workplace cyberspace.”

Part 3: Managing your Gmail filters

Last but not least, make yourself a mental note in case you ever need to adjust your filters in the future: If you want to edit, delete, or even just revisit a filter you created, just click the gear-shaped icon in the upper-right corner of the Gmail website, click “Settings,” then click the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab at the top of the settings screen. You’ll see every filter you’ve ever created there and can tweak or remove any of ’em with a couple quick clicks.

Now if only we could find a way to get the filters to deliver those blasted snickerdoodles for us. Hey, Google: Any chance you can make that happen?

This article was originally published in October 2019 and most recently updated in September 2026.

Having An air quality monitor for your home is more important than you may think. As climate change speeds up and wildfires increasingly engulf large swaths of land, leaving behind smoke that makes air potentially hazardous to breathe, it’s more important than ever to ensure you’re breathing clean air. An at-home air quality monitor is a simple way to ensure that, whether it be car exhaust, wildfire smoke, pollutants from seasonal changes, or simply fumes from your gas stove, the air around you is safe to breathe.

These air quality monitors test the air quality both indoors and outdoors, and on top of measuring PM2.5 (particulate matter) in the air and AQI (air quality index), they can also give insights into the air you’re breathing, including measuring temperature, humidity, CO2, VOCs, and more.

Our top pick, IQAir’s Air Visual Pro ($330), measures for several factors and has an easy-to-read display, while our more basic budget pick, Temptop S1 PM2.5 Air Quality Monitor & Indoor Thermometer ($28), has been solid throughout prolonged testing.

For more ways to keep your air quality in check for a healthier environment, take a look at our guides to the Best Outdoor Air Quality Monitors, Best Air Purifiers, and Best Multiuse Air Purifiers. Plus, check out how we test them and how to pick the right air purifier for your home.

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Best Indoor Air Quality Monitor

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro

IQAir

AirVisual Pro Indoor Monitor

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WIRED

• Easy-read LCD display screen
• Visual graphics
• Gives both indoor and outdoor air quality data

TIRED

The AirVisual air quality monitor has an easy-read 5-inch LCD display screen and a graphic of a boy’s face along with the AQI color scale that lets me know my indoor air quality from across the room. As the air quality gets poorer, the little boy will stop smiling with a green background and become solemn with a yellow background; finally, if the air is truly dangerous, he’ll put on a gas mask and the color turns dark purple. I like that I don’t have to log on to the internet or open an app to know if I have clean air. Plus, the AirVisual has the added feature of giving both indoor and outdoor air quality data. This saves me the extra step of checking the outdoor air quality on my phone. And it cycles through various displays—it has the time, then it will show both indoor and outdoor readings, along with congratulating me for achieving excellent indoor air quality or it will recommend that I open a window. The AirVisual air quality monitor measures PM2.5 and CO2 and displays the temperature and humidity. It has an easy-to-read dashboard on the app and keeps data for a year, but its biggest strength is its display, especially when I burn a pizza and the boy gets sad and dons a gas mask. —Lisa Wood Shapiro

Ah, so, “We have The Witcher at home,” is that it? Well, not exactly. The sameness might feel derivative at first, but give it a minute. Once you get through the prologue, the world opens up in a way that invites exploration of its very pretty, blood-soaked world. There’s no way to beat The Witcher 3 in depth, breadth, or sheer volume, but The Blood of Dawnwalker doesn’t try to replicate or surpass that scale. Instead, it gives you a simple goal and a limited time to pull it off. That sounds restrictive at first, but it plays out in a way that’s more freeing than you’d expect.

Dawnwalker takes place in a fictional plague-era medieval world. You play as Coen (I call him Young Geralt), a poor peasant who lives with his family in a town controlled by evil vampires. After some inciting events, the Draculean boss vampire kidnaps Coen’s family and turns him into the Dawnwalker—a vampire hybrid that manifests as a human in the daytime and a bloodthirsty vampire at night. You’ve got 30 in-game days to save Coen’s family. You’re already running out of time.

Gameplay is split into day and night cycles, each with eight time segments. Completing a quest or doing anything of consequence will pass one or a few time segments. Otherwise, time does not pass idly. If you’re running around and exploring, you have all the time to fart around in the world that you need. The game warns you when something you’re about to do will pass the time, so you can choose to keep going or leave and find something else to do.

I worried this system would feel constricting, like being forced on a set path in an open-world game. Turns out, it was exactly what I needed to stay motivated and keep exploring.

My problem with The Witcher 3 and open-world games like it is that there is so much of it. You’re tasked with some time-sensitive mission—rescue your daughter before the world ends, etc.—but then you while away hours and hours on side quests. Games like this can punish you if you rush the main storyline, cutting off quests, choices, and even characters that those smaller efforts would have unlocked. When I play, I feel obligated to do all the small stuff first, then build to the main quests. When a narrative and world gets that dense, it can start to feel like a chore.

Dawnwalker gives you many activities across the world. Some are clearly story quests; many are treasure hunts or things that feel much smaller-scale. Knowing I can’t do everything lets me prioritize what needs doing. A ticking clock always counting down on the screen usually would make me anxious in games, since failing to do the right things at the right time means you lose. Weirdly, Dawnwalker’s countdown feels less punishing and more like motivation to do the very best you can with the limited resources you have. If you know you can’t see everything in a single playthrough, it’s easier to let go of the things you miss.

Leah Feiger: All right. Do you guys remember George Santos?

Brian Barrett: How could I forget?

Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely do, but wow, did not expect we would be talking about him again this soon, I have to say.

Leah Feiger: Former US representative expelled from Congress in 2023, accused of fraud and theft, and doing it with such a plum that the story just couldn’t help but take national news by storm.

Brian Barrett: I want to be clear too. He wasn’t just accused, he went to jail.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I was going to say very credibly accused.

Leah Feiger: Anyways, he’s back in the headlines this week. On Monday we learned that Santos was hit with a lifetime ban from prediction market platform Kalshi, and a $71,000 fine, allegedly for trying to manipulate a bet on whether he’d show up to Trump’s State of the Union. To tell us all the full details, we are joined by WIRED senior correspondent Kate Knibbs.

Kate Knibbs: Hi guys, how are you doing?

Leah Feiger: Kate, so happy that you’re here. Can you take us through my favorite story of the week?

Kate Knibbs: I would love to tell you guys about this. And I will say, I feel similarly like Santos, yes, he does do crimes but he does them with such flare that it’s hard to hate him.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s a bad thing that’s very fun to watch.

Kate Knibbs: Yes. So Santos, at this point when this all begins, he’s already expelled from Congress, already gone to jail. He’s out of jail, he’s making Cameo videos for money, he’s doing his thing. So, he posts that he will be attending the State of the Union. And then, while the State of the Union is going on, he posts that he’s actually stuck at the airport and he’s not attending it. And then he says, “FML.” There was a market on Kalshi about whether Santos was going to attend the State of the Union, and someone made a bunch of money off of it. And Kalshi quickly figured out that it was him because Kalshi has know your customer requirements. His identity was not a secret to them, it was not hard for them to check and see that the person who made money was George Santos.

Leah Feiger: Awesome.

Kate Knibbs: And it’s against their rules to place trades or wagers on events that you’re a participant in. It’s like market manipulation, insider trading, whatever. So even before this happened this week, the CFTC actually also knew about this because Kalshi told them, and they already fined him money for this specific incident. What happened this week was apparently there was this back and forth between Santos and Kalshi, and they fined him $71,000 and then weren’t going to lifetime ban him. The same day that they announced the Santos thing, they announced a few other politicians who got in trouble for betting on themselves, and those politicians got much smaller fines and temporary bans.

A woman has lived with a pig kidney for more than nine months without needing dialysis, a record-setting achievement.

The woman underwent the operation at Massachusetts General Hospital on November 22 last year. As of Thursday, the kidney has been functioning for 285 days, according to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based eGenesis, the biotech company that used Crispr gene editing to make the organ fit for human transplantation. Previously, the record for a person living with a transplanted pig kidney was 271 days, set by Tim Andrews.

Most people in need of a kidney transplant wait three to five years on average to receive one, though it can take longer depending on blood type and other factors. While they wait, patients often need dialysis, in which a person’s blood vessels are hooked up to a machine that removes excess fluid and waste from the bloodstream. Dialysis typically requires four-hour sessions three times a week and can damage blood vessels over time, making the procedure hard on the body.

Pig kidneys could offer an alternative until a human organ is available. Pig organs are similar in size and function to human organs and are being investigated as a way to ease the shortage of human donor organs. To make them more suitable for humans, scientists are genetically editing them to prevent immediate rejection and reduce the risk of pig viruses being passed on to transplant patients.

Patients’ health gets worse the longer they’re on dialysis, “and their odds of getting a human transplant aren’t rising fast enough to meet their declining health,” says Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis. The company used Crispr to remove certain pig genes that could cause an immune response and add a handful of human genes.

“What we saw with Mr. Andrews was a radical improvement in his overall health while he was on the pig kidney versus if he had stayed on chronic dialysis,” Curtis says.

The woman who has crossed the nine-month mark is the fifth person to receive an eGenesis kidney through a special regulatory pathway known as expanded access. The Food and Drug Administration allows patients with serious or life-threatening conditions to gain access to experimental treatments when there are no good alternatives.

Andrews’ case shows that pig kidneys may provide a temporary solution. He received a pig kidney in January 2025 and had it removed in October last year after a period of decreasing kidney function. He returned to dialysis but received a human kidney transplant in January this year. A second person has also successfully received a human transplant after having a pig kidney for eight months, according to eGenesis.

Curtis says the company is learning more with each transplant. In a paper published on Thursday in The Lancet medical journal, the surgical team that performed the transplants details Andrews’ experience. They determined that Andrews’ pig kidney eventually failed due to thrombotic microangiopathy, which means tiny blood clots formed in the transplanted organ.

The team is using that information to adjust the immunosuppressant medications that pig kidney recipients receive and how frequently they need to take those drugs. People who receive human organ transplants also need to take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent their body from rejecting the transplanted organ. Organ rejection can happen at any time following a transplant, ranging from minutes after the surgery to many years later.

Kidneys are the most-needed organ, with more than 95,000 people waiting to receive one in the US. But due to a shortage of donor organs, fewer than 28,000 kidney transplants were performed in the US in 2025.

The FDA has given eGenesis the green light to conduct a more formal trial in up to 33 patients with kidney failure who are between 50 and 70 years old and on the wait list for a human kidney. That trial will not happen until 2027, but eGenesis plans to perform additional transplants under the expanded access pathway in the meantime. Their next goal is to get a transplanted pig kidney to function for a year.

Beauty tool brand Foreo was launched by founder Filip Sedic in 2013, inspired by his wife’s facial brush, which he considered too abrasive and unsanitary. Since then, the Swedish brand has built a reputation for gentle, hygienic beauty tools across skincare, haircare, oral care, and eye care. More recently, the company has expanded into hair removal with IPL at-home devices like the Peach 2 Pro Max.

I’m currently testing the FAQ 202 Plus, Foreo’s latest LED mask, which features 634 LED lights and eight wavelengths: near-infrared, red, blue, green, orange, yellow, purple, and cyan. I’m also testing the Flip Play, an LED hairbrush for all hair types designed to reduce breakage, soothe the scalp, and stimulate hair follicles. I’m only in my first week of testing both devices, but I’ll report back soon. So far, both have been easy to use and simple to incorporate into my nighttime routine; the Flip Play brushes like a compact silicone detangler. In the meantime, here are some Foreo promo codes and deals if you’re considering splurging on a device.

I Tried the Best Red-Light Therapy for Hair Loss. Here’s What Worked

Don’t fly to Turkey just yet. Our WIRED testers saw visible hair regrowth with these red-light therapy devices.

30% Off Foreo LUNA 3 Plus: Heated Cleansing and Microcurrent in one Device

I haven’t tested the Foreo Luna 3 Plus myself, but it’s one of the brand’s bestsellers—and it’s 29% off (no Foreo promo code needed!). The heated device doubles as a facial cleanser and massager, with added microcurrent treatments. Its silicone build is more hygienic and bacteria-resistant than nylon brushes, and it offers 16 intensity levels to remove makeup and oil, loosen pores for a deeper clean, firm and lift the skin, and relax facial muscles. If you’re in the market for a multipurpose facial cleansing device, this deal makes a strong case for Foreo, especially with an included two-year warranty.

Foreo BEAR: Get 25% Off the Full Facial Workout Device

The Foreo Bear, like the Luna 3 Plus, includes microcurrent technology but is designed to prioritize it. The seasonal 25% Foreo discount makes it even more appealing value-wise. It’s made from the same bacteria-resistant silicone as the Luna and features 10 microcurrent intensity levels, plus guided treatments via the app. It requires a conductive serum or gel; Foreo’s Supercharged Serum 2.0 is one option, but it’s not required. Battery life is strong, offering up to 90 uses per USB charge. It’s available in bright fuchsia or mint, and it comes with a travel pouch for portability.

Before You Buy a Red-Light Therapy Mask, Read This

I tried the red-light therapy masks flooding my feed and consulted with professionals to find out which ones are worth the splurge.

Foreo UFO 2 Deal: 29% Off 5-in-1 Spa Facials

The UFO 2 is a 5-in-1 facial device that is more affordable than both the Bear and the Luna 3 Plus. And it’s even cheaper right now with a 29% limited-time discount (with no Foreo promo code needed). Expect thermotherapy, cryotherapy, LED light, and T-sonic pulsations. The T-sonic pulses deliver low-frequency massage to ease facial and neck tension and support better blood flow. The UFO 2 also uses LED technology alongside hot and cold sonic waves to stimulate skin cells and enhance the absorption of skincare products. While I haven’t personally tested this device myself, Foreo’s track record with facial tools makes me eager to give this one a try.

Since the dawn of Silicon Valley, there’s been a widespread perception that San Francisco is, put gently, not exactly a dating mecca.

The city famously has a skewed male-to-female ratio (per census data, there are about 105 men for every 100 women), and there’s a perception among many women that men who work in tech tend to have poor social and emotional skills and a lack of style—opting for Patagonia vests and Meta glasses rather than putting substantive effort into their appearance.

On August 31, however, Celeste Amadon, the founder of the AI-powered dating app Known, valiantly attempted to reverse that stereotype. In an X thread accompanied by a moody, upward-angled selfie, she announced that she and her team were compiling a list of “SF’s most dateable people,” titled “San Francisco’s Hot List.” She attached a link for people to nominate their single friends according to criteria like “ambition,” “accomplishment,” “reputation,” and “aura.”

The post was skewered online by many in and outside of the tech scene, with some referring to it as “cringe” or mocking the lack of eligible singles in San Francisco: “The solution to dating in SF is to leave SF,” posted one female founder. But it was an extremely effective bit of marketing for Known, garnering more than 15,000 submissions 24 hours after the tweet was posted, according to Amadon. It was also an effective piece of counter-propaganda to the stereotype of San Franciscans, officially heralding that San Francisco Is Hot.

“Not to be cheesy, but I think the SF dating scene deserves some defending,” Amadon tells WIRED. “It gets so much flak for being a place where it’s hard to meet people, but there are many people who are super eligible in not just their physical attractiveness but in their holistic dateability.”

Known’s Hot List is part of a broader conversation focused on the general attractiveness of the San Francisco populace—and why some locals seem to be placing more importance on being perceived as hot.

Last summer, two women who work in tech—Madison Kanna (who is on the Hot List) and Cat Orman—threw an “enforced ratio” party at a Tesla showroom in the city, ensuring that there were as many women as men. The invite stipulated that the vibe would be “unapologetically feminine and fun” and that “​Patagonia vests will be turned away at the door.” On August 28, Mantis Biotech startup founder Georgia Witchel posted an X thread titled “Tech Is Having a Hot Girl Renaissance.” In the thread, Witchel describes how social media has been deluged with “young, attractive women taking tastefully slutty duck-faced mirror selfies” to promote their startups, citing Known and the insurance company Corgi as examples.

Witchel says her argument is not so much that she objects to young women using their attractiveness as a marketing strategy—it’s more to explain how and why it has emerged as a marketing strategy to begin with, telling WIRED the trend is a result of “a renaissance of sales culture in SF.”

Throughout much of Silicon Valley, software marketing was “nerds selling to other nerds,” she says—but with the emergence of vibe coding, the barrier to entry for the industry has gotten lower, and the standards for marketing a product higher. “The fact that you are able to build a complicated product is not enough to give you the leeway of not being charismatic,” says Witchel. “People are recognizing that.”

When reached for comment, Brooke LeBlanc, head of community at Corgi, who Witchel cites in her thread, referred WIRED to an X post. “My mom just heard about the hot girl in tech renaissance and she’s absolutely thrilled by the news,” she wrote. “No one in my family from Georgia can believe that it’s breaking news for a woman to care about how she looks.”

Amadon says the Hot List has “minimal” connection to Witchel’s thread, but she understands why Known’s marketing “draws interest” (though she notes that X specifically is “not a primary marketing channel” for the app). She concedes that the list was intended to capitalize on the discussion and create “positive discourse” around dating in San Francisco.

And it’s working: On September 1, Known posted the first round of Hot Listers, including LeBlanc and startup founders like Jasper Carmichael-Jack, the CEO of the AI-driven company Artisan. There was nary a Patagonia vest in the bunch.

A team of astronomers discovered a strange polygonal atmospheric structure on Saturn near the planet’s south pole. This 10-sided shape, known as a decagon, joins one of the gas giant’s most famous features: a hexagon near the north pole that was first observed 44 years ago. Images of the new decagon were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the discovery was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

The formations at both the north and south poles aren’t solid structures, like a wall or a rock formation. Saturn doesn’t even have a defined solid surface like Earth’s crust. If you were to descend through the atmosphere of the ringed planet, the pressure and density would progressively increase, but you would never reach a “ground” on which to land. Instead, what astronomers have witnessed are patterns formed by clouds, albeit very unusual ones.

Each side of the decagon measures approximately 16,800 kilometers, which is a few thousand miles longer than the diameter of Earth. Near the feature is a jet stream reaching speeds of 116 meters per second, or nearly 260 miles per hour. By way of comparison, a Category 5 hurricane—the most intense storm level possible on Earth—is defined by winds above 157 miles per hour. Interestingly, although the jet stream circulates at tremendous speed, the decagon pattern shifts at a mere 2.5 meters per second—less than 6 miles per hour.

Photograph of the new decagon at Saturn’s south pole

Photograph: Courtesy of Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach

The south pole feature appears to have formed recently. For decades, scientists have been searching for a counterpart to the famous northern hexagon. However, major missions that observed the planet have previously not been able to find an equivalent, long-lasting structure in the south. The search was further complicated because, due to Saturn’s tilt, its southern hemisphere was not clearly visible from Earth for many years.

The first clues of the decagon came from ground-based observations, some by amateur astronomers. As the images accumulated, it became evident that something strange was happening in Saturn’s southern cloud bands. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope made it possible to trace the pattern back to images taken in 2023. Monitoring continued, and by 2025 its 10 vertices had become much more clearly defined, confirming the presence of a new polygonal feature in the ringed planet’s atmosphere. Science, however, hasn’t settled on an explanation for how these structures came to be.

Various hypotheses have been proposed since the discovery of the north polar hexagon. One is that the polygons are the visible manifestations of enormous atmospheric waves confined by powerful jet streams. You can think of these as similar to ocean waves, which are not simply objects traveling across the ocean but rather disturbances propagating through the water.

A wave’s behavior changes depending on the space in which it moves and the boundaries it encounters. On Saturn, waves of atmospheric gases may be encountering jet streams that confine them, in a sense, like the edge of a beach. Except in this case, the “beach” wraps all the way around the planet.

As students head back to school, parents have all the usual worries about their kids, like remembering to pack lunch and making it to the bus stop on time. But parents of immunocompromised kids have a new one: How to deal with the resurgence of measles.

Cases of the highly transmissible disease have reached a 35-year high in the US, with nearly 3,000 confirmed infections in 2026 so far. The first two measles-related deaths of the year were recorded in Pennsylvania, right as the school year is getting going. With vaccination rates dropping across the country, parents of kids who aren’t able to get vaccinated or don’t mount a strong enough immune response due to weakened immune systems are weighing whether it’s safe enough to go to school.

Victoria Schiano, national community engagement coordinator for Little Lobbyists, a nonprofit that advocates for children with complex medical needs and disabilities, says the return of measles is “absolutely terrifying.”

While it’s not known exactly how many US children have compromised immune systems, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 2.6 percent of children are immunocompromised. Immune deficiencies can have genetic causes or secondary reasons, such as chemotherapy for cancer treatment.

Schiano’s kid is among them. Her 10-year-old has mitochondrial disease. The family lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, which has the second-highest number of measles cases in the state right now. Schiano has been closely monitoring the vaccination rates in her son’s school district, which have dipped below the 95 percent threshold needed for community protection against measles. Measles is breaking through in places where vaccination has dropped below that threshold. In neighboring Lancaster County, for example, just 87.6 percent of kindergartners are fully vaccinated against measles and 83.3 percent of seventh graders are.

Her son can’t be vaccinated, and he receives weekly infusions of immunoglobulin—concentrated antibodies from donated human blood plasma—to help his body fight infections.

“Measles is dangerous for anyone, but for him, this absolutely could be life or death,” she says.

The virus can cause severe, life-threatening complications such as pneumonia and brain swelling. Measles can also wipe out the body’s memory of past infections—a phenomenon known as immune amnesia—leaving people susceptible to other diseases.

Her son already wears a mask and uses a plexiglass screen at school, and the family is diligent about handwashing. Now, Schiano says they’ve had to make the difficult decision to limit her son’s time with friends and after-school activities like karate. She says it’s hard as a parent to balance his quality of life with his safety.

“He just wants to play and to do all the things that he sees other kids doing,” she says.

Her son did online school for a time during Covid-19, and she says she’s prepared to take him out of school if there’s even one confirmed measles case. That comes with a different set of risks, though. During the pandemic, remote learning was associated with an increase in social isolation and behavioral and mental health issues among students.

Amalia, a parent in South Carolina who asked to go by a pseudonym for privacy reasons, has already chosen to keep her 16-year-old son home this year and do online schooling due to concerns about measles. Her son has immunoglobulin A deficiency, in which the body doesn’t produce enough of an antibody found in mucous membranes, body fluids, and digestive tracts that help fend off germs.

“Even if there’s just a flu going around, he gets sicker than the average kid will,” she says.

Her son was able to get the measles vaccine, but doctors monitor his antibody levels regularly to check for waning immunity.

The high-end watch world has an understandable affection for Casio. You can easily rock an iconic, brightly colored F-91W in any meeting with a luxury brand, and you’ll get nods of approval. It is, after all, the watch that has graced the wrists of Barack Obama and Napoleon Dynamite.

If not the F-91W, you’d be on similar safe ground sporting the famous “CasiOak” that many G-Shock fans love because of its more than passing resemblance to Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak, which was recently given a similarly affordable makeover by Swatch with the Royal Pop. First introduced in 2019, the wallet-friendly G-Shock GA-2100 earned the nickname largely because of its octagonal case shape, and it is considered by some the definition of attainable luxury.

Now, however, it appears Casio has something genuinely new for the G-Shock line. Leaked on Notebookcheck and Instagram, the upcoming GMC-2500 and GAC-2500 series echo the CasiOak’s links to high-end brand AP with more than a passing resemblance to Patek Philippe’s Nautilus thanks to prominent shoulders on either side of the case.

Casio did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Casio’s incoming GMC-2500 G-Shocks …

Courtesy of Geesgshock

… have more than a whiff of Patek’s Nautilus.

Courtesy of Geesgshock

In 1972, legendary watchmaker Gérald Genta suggested an angular stainless steel watch design to Audemars Piguet with a high-end movement inside that would, perversely, be more expensive than gold dress watches. The Royal Oak, and the idea of the luxury sports watch, was born. In 1976, Genta repeated the trick for AP’s main competitor, Patek Philippe, to create the now equally famous Nautilus.

According to Notebookcheck, the GAC-2500 series is a resin analog lineup supposedly built from the DNA of the DW-5000C, the very first G-Shock made back in 1983. Stainless-steel versions will be labeled the GMC-2500 series. So far, nicknames like the “CasioNaut” and “CasioTilus” are already being thrown around on Instagram. The leaked four resin colorways in November are expected to be white, black, green, and yellow, and the price is estimated at 20,900 Japanese yen (about $134) each. The metal versions will supposedly retail for about $320.

Patek Philippe’s Nautilus was created in 1976, four years after AP’s Royal Oak, both designed by Gérald Genta.

Courtesy of Patek Philippe

Other deals among WIRED-recommended grills include $50 off a couple of Weber’s durable, last-you-forever standbys—the Weber Kettle and the Weber Spirit E-210. I and fellow WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson tend to love these two models precisely because they are basic, durable, reliable, and low-cost. The Weber Kettle, especially, can be upgraded with smart features into a temp-controlled, smart-charcoal beast.

This $50 off deal tends to be the standard Weber deal. But the price already starts out affordable, and so the sale price amounts to an excellent value on a grill that’s likely to be with you a while. If you’d like your kettle in green, you can get it for half off, a mere $100.

Weber

Original Kettle Charcoal

Weber

Spirit E-210 Gas Grill

Home Depot Milwaukee Tool Deals

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Milwaukee

M18 Fuel Cordless Impact Driver

Buying power tools is all about picking an ecosystem (and a battery pack). WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson favors Milwaukee for its intersection between reliability and value, and for tentpole sales Home Depot usually offers free battery packs or buy-one-get one deals.

One of the best and most versatile tools Gilbertson recommends is Milwaukee’s excellent impact driver ($179). Lucky you: During the Labor Day sale, this comes free with the purchase of the portable M18 battery you’ll need to operate it wirelessly. If you’ve already got a Milwaukee battery, the BOGO still holds for an assortment of tools including an oscillating multi-tool that’s also one of the more underrated tools in the DIYer home kit.

Home Depot Ryobi Landscaping and Tool Deals

Ryobi is the brand that former WIRED reviewer Parker Hall has consistently recommended for yard and landscaping tools, in large part because of their service philosophy. In many regions including mine (the Pacific Northwest), Ryobi keeps a local repair technician on retainer to come and fix your mower or blower, instead of making you ship your machine to a repair center somewhere. This is clutch, even if you won’t have to use the service often.

Home Depot is offering its usual BOGO battery deals on Ryobi’s landscaping tools, including the heavy-duty leaf blower ($159) you’re going to need sooner than you expect.

For entry-level tool kits, my colleague Kat Merck also recommends this shockingly low-cost starter power tool kit from Ryobi—which is not going to make you the envy of any job site, but offers great value and torque for the money. This set offers a ½-inch drill/driver, an impact driver, a circular saw, and an LED light. There’s also another discount kit with a sander, drill/driver, and circular saw.

Ryobi

ONE+ 18V Cordless 4-Tool Combo Kit

Home Depot DeWalt Tool BOGO

My editor, Kat Merck, is a DeWalt devotee. But the DeWalt Deals are a bit more specialized this season. There’s still a few good BOGO offers, though, especially if you’re in the market for a circular saw or angle grinder, or a hammer drill kit to carve holes into masonry.

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Just about any monitor can work with a Mac. It doesn’t need to be made by Apple or have any official certification. There’s a case to be made for using a cheap 1080p monitor, but most Mac users will want something a bit more premium. As you can see from options like the Dell 27 Plus 4K, that doesn’t have to mean overly expensive. Either way, here are the four elements to consider when shopping for a good monitor to go with your Mac.

Size and resolution: 27- and 32-inch monitors are the most common sizes these days, but there are larger options. I would also consider a 34-inch ultrawide monitor if you like the wider 21:9 aspect ratio with the curved shape. With Apple, resolution is king. There’s a reason it invests so much in high pixel density for every screen it sells, even in midrange options like the MacBook Air. Pixel density is what gives a screen its sharpness, and you need a lot more pixels when they’re stretched across a large external monitor. If you want to keep fidelity up, I wouldn’t buy anything less than 4K, and bumping up to 5K or 6K on a 32-inch monitor can be helpful. Read more to learn the details on the funky way macOS handles resolutions and scaling. You should also consider the refresh rate: a 120-Hz refresh rate is what the MacBook Pro supports, offering smoother animation, especially in games.

Adjustability: Apple monitors and iMacs aren’t exactly known for adjustability. They often have none at all, and cost more when they do. That isn’t the best for your posture and ergonomics. Famously, the discontinued Pro Display XDR charged an extra $1,000 for a Pro Stand with proper adjustability (now a $400 add-on for the newer Studio Display XDR). For ergonomics, the top of the screen you’re working on should be as close to eye level as possible, and that ranges depending on someone’s height. If a monitor doesn’t have height adjustability, you’ll need a separate monitor stand or arm. Beyond height adjustment, many monitors also have stands that can swivel, tilt, and rotate, all of which matter when using multiple monitors. This is also needed if you want to use a second monitor vertically, which has become increasingly popular.

Ports: Even the cheapest monitors will always have HDMI, which is all you need to connect directly to a Mac Mini, Mac Studio, Mac Pro, or MacBook Pro. Some monitors have USB-C that supports video, which will let you connect to one of a Mac’s Thunderbolt ports. The Mac Mini comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI, and an Ethernet jack. The Mac Mini Pro model has the same ports, except three of them support faster Thunderbolt 5 instead of 4. You’ll need to use at least one of these Thunderbolt ports to connect more than one external monitor. These monitors also tend to have other ports, such as USB-A. These can be useful, as the Mac Mini doesn’t have any on its own.

Image quality: Apple prides itself on the image quality of its Macs, so in the case of the Mac Mini, you’ll likely want to get something worthy of your Mac. This is especially important for content creators, photographers, and designers. So, consider a monitor’s brightness, color accuracy, color coverage, and contrast. While some IPS displays offer decent color and contrast, mini-LED or OLED displays will guarantee better image quality. These also have significantly higher peak brightness in HDR content, which really brings games and movies to life.

Tesla’s Cybercab, a distinctive two-seater without a steering wheel or brake pedals, is set to start picking up members of the public in Austin, Texas, this evening. But the vehicle is already under investigation by the US federal government, which is probing whether it meets federal safety standards.

The investigation comes just hours after the electric automaker welcomed hundreds of fans to downtown Austin to ride in the driverless Cybercabs. Tesla plans to deploy the vehicles on its Robotaxi ride-hail network, which is currently operating in a handful of cities in Texas and Florida.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is updating vehicle standards to make it easier and faster for driverless cars to deploy on public roads. It’s currently tweaking eight rules, including those requiring car parts that driverless cars don’t really need: brake pedals, windshield wipers, and rearview mirrors. But for now, years-old standards remain in place.

Meanwhile, unusually shaped robotaxi companies have been told to apply for an exemption from federal rules before they start picking up passengers. Amazon subsidiary Zoox, whose vehicles do not have steering wheels or manual controls, won the first of these exemptions this summer, which limits its operations to 2,500 vehicles this year.

Tesla, however, has said it doesn’t need an exemption because its vehicles comply with all existing safety standards.

The investigation, called an Audit Query, will examine the data and process that Tesla used to make that determination, according to a government filing.

In a statement, NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said his agency “fully supports the safe development and deployment of automated vehicles. But as the federal regulator, we need to ensure that all of our laws are followed.”

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This kind of federal investigation can prove consequential. NHTSA can require an automaker to change its vehicle or process. The agency can also pursue enforcement actions, including civil penalties. Volvo Group North America paid $130 million in penalties in 2023 after an investigation into its recall process. The company also agreed to three years of oversight by a third-party auditor.

The Cybercabs are, in many ways, symbols of Tesla’s intended future. CEO Elon Musk has said that Tesla should no longer be regarded as an automaker, but as a robotics and autonomous vehicle company. While 45 of these vehicles are in Texas’ Tesla fleet right now, a state database shows, the company intends to deploy millions annually.

Did you buy a beanie from REI recently? The Department of Homeland Security might be looking for you.

New court filings allege that Homeland Security Investigations agents subpoenaed the outdoor retailer in March, requesting the transaction information for “all persons” in the greater Minneapolis–St. Paul area who had purchased a specific type of dark green beanie from the company since 2024. REI did not respond to questions about whether it had complied with the request and, if so, how many people are affected.

The filings are part of a broader lawsuit by the federal government against 39 people who attended an ICE protest at a church whose pastor also worked as an acting ICE field office director. Both protesters and journalists who were attempting to cover the event, including former CNN host Don Lemon, are now defendants.

The subpoena to REI was one of 92 sent as part of HSI’s investigation into the defendants, according to the court filings. Other recipients included social media companies, airlines, telecom providers, a car rental company, and a state employment agency. At least one subpoena sent to an unnamed airline, the filings allege, asked not only for information about a defendant’s past flights, but also requested that the airline give HSI a “lookout notification” about the defendant’s travel in the future. DHS declined to comment. The US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, which is litigating the case on behalf of the government, did not respond questions about why it was necessary to identify everyone in Minnesota who purchased the beanie from REI, or why it specifically targeted REI customers, since the beanie is sold on other platforms as well.

The subpoenas sent by HSI agents are also known as 1509 customs summons, and are meant to be used to request information related to imports and exports. However, since the start of the Trump administration, WIRED and other news outlets have reported on DHS’s attempts to unmask online critics using the legal tool, which can be sent without the oversight of a judge or a jury.

“It’s flat-out absurd for DHS to demand REI search two years of customer data as part of Trump’s campaign against the people of Minneapolis,” US senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tells WIRED. “Customs summonses only allow DHS to request information directly related to compliance with customs laws, not to conduct unending fishing expeditions into the lives of people critical of Donald Trump.”

The total number of 1509 summonses that have been sent since the start of the Trump administration—and how many people have had their personal information guzzled up by DHS as a result—is unknown. Companies that receive these types of subpoenas are typically asked to keep their existence a secret. When the public has gotten a glimpse of them, it’s usually because the target has contested it in court, either because the recipient company ignored the request for silence and notified the target, or because the target discovered it after the fact.

According to a recent letter written by Wyden and Representative Pramila Jayapal, big tech companies will sometimes ignore the government’s request for silence when not legally required, but other companies in more heavily regulated sectors have told Congress that they’ve complied because of fear of regulatory retaliation.

Court filings, internal DHS documents, and companies’ own public statements show that companies have responded to recent customs summons in different ways.

Attorneys for Georgia Fort, a journalist and one of the defendants in the Minnesota case, wrote in a court filing that they were “stunned” when they realized that the government had obtained logs detailing six months’ of Fort’s calls and text messages from T-Mobile after the government sent a customs summons to the telecom provider. The attorneys allege that Fort was never notified by either T-Mobile nor the government.

A Mars probe from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) may answer some longstanding questions about the Red Planet and its moons. The mission—dubbed MMX for “Martian Moons eXploration”—aims to collect at least 10 grams of samples from Phobos, one of two moons orbiting the planet, and if successful, these will be the first rocks from a Martian moon ever brought to Earth.

They won’t arrive quickly, however. The MMX probe will take approximately one year to reach Mars. It will then collect samples during three years of operations while orbiting the red planet before taking another year to return to Earth. If all goes well, scientists expect to receive the moon rocks in 2031.

One of the most interesting questions the probe can answer is how Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, formed. There are two main possibilities. One is that the moons condensed from material ejected during a massive collision with Mars. The other hypothesis is that the moons were asteroids from the outer solar system that were captured by Mars’ gravity.

The moons are dark in color, and their light-reflecting properties closely resemble those of asteroids rich in water and carbon. Their orbits, however—which are nearly circular along Mars’ equatorial plane in the same direction as the planet’s rotation—are better explained by the giant impact hypothesis. Comparing samples from Mars’ moons to those previously collected from the Martian surface could help settle this debate.

To get the Martian moon rocks and transport them back to Earth, however, means overcoming some significant technical challenges in space flight and communication. At launch, the spacecraft will have a mass of 4,480 kilograms (9,900 pounds). More than half of this weight will be fuel, divided into three reserves: one for the outbound leg, one for exploration, and one for the return leg. Once in the vicinity of Mars, MMX will jettison the outbound module after its propellant is exhausted; following the flyby of Deimos, the exploration module will also be jettisoned.

The probe, designed by Mitsubishi Electric, will then land on the surface of Phobos, a delicate procedure given the moon’s size, with an approximate radius of just 11 kilometers. (In comparison, Earth’s moon has a radius of more than 1,700 kilometers.) Descent methods used on Earth’s moon rely on its specific gravity, which is about 300 times as strong as that of Phobos. However, Phobos’ gravity is approximately 50 times greater than that of the asteroid Ryugu, where JAXA has previously landed probes. Landing on Ryugu involved prolonged hovering, a typical method for landing on smaller celestial objects, but this is not feasible for MMX as it would consume too much fuel given Phobos’ greater pull.

To overcome this challenge, the probe is equipped with high-precision autonomous navigation, which it will need, given that there will be a delay of up to 20 minutes for radio signals to travel between Earth and MMX. The probe must therefore autonomously decide on and execute the descent, landing, and later takeoff sequences.

During the descent, the probe will compare the terrain to data on the topography of Phobos’ craters, using this information to adjust its position toward the target landing site. Once it’s reached an altitude under 300 meters, the probe will also detect whether parts of the surface have changed in elevation, labeling significant discrepancies as hazardous areas. This mechanism allows the probe, if necessary, to change the landing site or abort the landing and temporarily ascend.

Just ahead of the main spacecraft’s landing, the IDEFIX rover—jointly developed by the French and German space agencies—will be deployed onto the surface of Phobos to conduct approximately 100 days of independent exploration. This preliminary survey by the rover will serve as a scout to ensure a safer landing.

“It’s a girl!” Melissa Peterson exclaims.

Just outside the operating room, the hallway erupts in cheers. Joseph Dewane, an ob-gyn, has just delivered a healthy baby via C-section; Autumn Joi Goodwin-Samson, a neonatalist, tends to the newborn still slick with a waxy film.

It’s a successful delivery just like any other except for one, minor, difference: The patient is an orangutan.

Ruhana—or just “Ru” for short—is one of eight orangutan babies born in a collection of US zoos since the beginning of 2025. For these critically endangered primates, that’s a staggering figure. It’s also not random: The baby boom is the result of a meticulous breeding plan and decades of research to weave a conservation safety net, one birth at a time.

“It might seem like it was all a coincidence that everyone was born at the same time, but it was very carefully planned,” says Angie Selzer, a senior animal care specialist with the Fort Wayne Zoo in Indiana and the Orangutan Species Survival Plan (SSP) program coordinator.

The SSP has been coordinating breeding recommendations since 1985; every two years, the program creates a breeding and transfer plan for animals at zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). Geneticists from the SSP consult a “studbook,” which contains the pedigree of all the animals in their system.

“We want to maintain a healthy and sustainable population that mimics the natural history of wild orangutans while ensuring successful mother-rearing of offspring,” Seltzer tells WIRED. Their recommendation accounts for a number of breeding factors, including underrepresented genetic lines, each animal’s unique personality, and group dynamics—always aiming for the lowest relation between breeding pairs.

“We’ve had a very good, happy outcome,” she says. It all started in February 2025 when the Indianapolis Zoo welcomed Edi, a healthy baby boy. After that, Weila was delivered at the Hogle Zoo in Utah in June; Bintang arrived at the Los Angeles Zoo, and in December, the Memphis Zoo welcomed Ruhana. Peterson, the associate primates curator at the Memphis Zoo says being present for that moment was a “remarkable experience.” The run of babies has continued this year, with baby girls born at the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas, Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas, and Fort Wayne Zoo in Indiana. Just a few months ago, the Denver Zoo welcomed a baby boy named Rambutan.

Courtesy of Sedgwick County Zoo

Being in a low-fire, low-hire economy only makes matters worse. Job postings are scarce. Scams and ghost jobs are enough of a problem that some states are looking to write new laws to combat them.

Both job seekers and employers say they’re experiencing a breakdown of trust. Candidates sink so much time into their search and hear nothing. Applying to jobs is a black box.

Some employers, meanwhile, say they receive hundreds of applications that look nearly identical. So they feed them into the AI rating system of their ATS to try and get some quick differentiation.

Chait says we’re in an AI doom loop. “We’ve got this tragic situation where each side has a problem. They’re using AI to solve their own problem, but in ways that make the problem worse. And so more AI use begets more AI use, to no one’s benefit. The more it’s happening, the worse it gets.”

Comparing Human Vetting to AI

I spoke with dozens of recruiters and HR managers, as well as small business owners who do their own hiring. Some admitted they use automated candidate ranking, and some were adamant that they do not. The division has nothing to do with the size of the organization or even the number of applicants received. It seems driven by philosophy and culture.

Kim Jones is vice president of human resources at Toshiba. “We have humans review every application,” she says. She doesn’t mind applicants using AI to polish up their materials, but “it’s not really going to help with getting through the ATS.” Culling applicants comes down to job requirements, salary expectations, and a few other factors, like whether the person would be a rehire.

Where she has seen unwanted AI usage is in the interviewing stage. “You hear the pause, maybe hear the typing, then they come up with a verbose answer,” Jones says.

Another company that relies more on humans than technology for hiring is Doist. It’s a small, fully remote company that hires internationally, which means when they have an opening, they’re flush with applications.

Nadia Vatalidis, head of people at the company, says her team experimented to see if ATS rankings could help. They took roles that had already been filled and fed in the job descriptions as well as all the applicant materials that they had saved from the hiring process. They wanted to know “what would happen if AI had to short-list the same batch of candidates and whether the folks we interviewed would show up in those same categories,” Vatalidis says. “In two instances that we tested, the person we hired wasn’t in the short list.” She says there was overlap in who got an interview, but their new hires—people who were working out great after about six months—didn’t make the cut.

Using AI Differently

When James Jacobsen started his job search five months ago, the amount of time he sank into searching and applying to jobs was equivalent to a full-time role. As a design professional, he knows AI can’t match him when it comes to creativity, but he experiments with it heavily and knows it’s a powerful tool for certain tasks. He used Claude and ChatGPT to polish up his application materials and make sure they were in line with the job description, but it wasn’t moving the needle.

Instead of focusing only on his application materials, he started using Claude to streamline and track his job search from top to bottom. He instructed it to comb job listings, analyze descriptions, and log them. He devised an elaborate scoring system based on the type of work, seniority, and his salary requirements, which varied for in-person, hybrid, and remote roles. His AI assistant highlighted the top jobs he should apply to. When he rejected one, he added a note, so if the same position got reposted weeks later, his AI could immediately remind him why he wasn’t interested. He spent less time searching to find more high-quality positions. He got a few bites but no offers.

If you’re looking for a one-stop shop for all things outdoors, Sportsman’s Warehouse is worth plotting on your map. Whether you need essentials for a big camping trip this summer or just need to restock your tired boat day accessories, Sportsman’s Warehouse can outfit you. With multiple brick-and-mortar locations across the country, as well as an expansive online inventory with favorite brands like Crocs and Yeti, Sportsman’s Warehouse has apparel, footwear, and gear for camping and boating. We have a Sportsman’s Warehouse promo code to help you save.

The Best Sleeping Bags for Every Adventure

Whether you’re climbing peaks or taking the family to the local park, we’ve found the best sleeping bags for every temperature, budget, and camping expedition.

Get a Sportsman’s Warehouse Promo Code: 20% Off

Using a Sportsman’s Warehouse promo code is one of the easiest ways to save big on those important outdoor gear purchases. So, be sure to use our verified Sportsman’s Warehouse coupons to save on expensive outdoor essentials from brands we love, like Saloman hiking shoes and Teton camping gear. We are constantly searching for new general Sportsman’s Warehouse coupons, as well as seasonal deals and specific discounts like a Sportsman’s Warehouse military discount, Sportsman’s Warehouse boating gear coupon, or a Sportsman’s Warehouse free shipping voucher. Make sure you check back often for seasonal promotions that can be combined with existing sales to save even more. Lots of the store’s promo codes are applicable sitewide, but read the fine print for any restrictions that may apply to specific brands or clearance items.

Salomon

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Sportsman’s Warehouse Discounts: 25% Off the Great American Adventure Sale

Summer is upon us, which means school’s out, vacations are in, and people are hitting the road for camping trips. Make sure you’re stocked up for your next adventure for less with Sportsman’s Warehouse Great American Adventure Sale, which has hundreds of items on sale for up to 25% off, including essentials for camping, boating, fishing, and more from brands like Yoli and Vortex.

Should You Hike in Boots or Trail Runners?

Lightweight shoes now dominate the trails, so do you still need boots? Here’s how to choose the right footwear for your outdoor adventures.

Save Big: 25% Boating Gear at Sportsman’s Warehouse

Being from Missouri, I love a lake. Summer to me is sitting on a boat and cruising for a jumping off point, then spending the rest of the afternoon lounging in 85-degree murky water on a floatie with a PBR in hand. If you’re also a Lake Guy™ like me, be sure to take advantage of the Sportsman’s Warehouse boating gear section, with 25% off select boats, kayaks, canoes, and boating supplies.

Grab the Best Prices on Fishing Gear

Sometimes, you want to talk to your son or just sit in silence in nature, but you’re a man. So you have to kill or torture a living creature to avoid going to therapy. Thankfully, Sportsman’s Warehouse is here for all your fishing gear needs, with up to 25% off rods, reels, and angler-specific gear. Remember your mantra: “women want me, fish fear me.”

Get Top Camp Equipment Bargains

One of the last low-cost joys we have on land—increasingly used up for oil, fracking, privatization, and perfectly manicured golf courses—is camping. And as the weather warms, take advantage of nature while she’s here (tick-tock, tick-tock) with top bargains on professional-grade camping equipment. Sportman’s Warehouse has literally everything you need for a successful camping experience, including tents, camping chairs, backpacking equipment, sleeping bags, grills, coolers, and much more at low prices, with no Sportsman’s Warehouse coupon code necessary.

The Best Flat-Top Grills and Griddles for Outdoor Cooking

A big backyard griddle can change a summer. I made dozens of tacos, burgers, and pancakes to find the best setup.

Medicube is a Korean skincare brand known for its at-home remedies that target pores, aging, and skin texture. It’s gone viral, thanks to celebrities like Kylie Jenner, whose TikTok praising the Booster Pro racked up over 1.6 million likes last year. Clearly, the internet can’t get enough, so I had to try it myself.

I’m currently testing the Booster Pro, a 6-in-1 device with modes including microcurrent, vibration, and LED light therapy. But Medicube doesn’t just sell facial tools; it’s also popular for its topical products (moisturizers, toners, and masks) that content creators have raved about for their whipped, foamy, or gel-ish textures. I’m trying the Collagen Jelly Cream myself, so stay tuned for the full review.

In the meantime, you can test all of these Korean beauty products yourself, and I’ve rounded up the best Medicube coupon codes and Medicube discount codes to sweeten the deal.

Before You Buy a Red-Light Therapy Mask, Read This

I tried the red-light therapy masks flooding my feed and consulted with professionals to find out which ones are worth the splurge.

Get the Latest Medicube Coupon Code

New customers who join Medicube’s mailing list can score 10% off their first order. This Medicube discount can be stacked with seasonal sales and bundled sets, which is great for us shoppers. A 10% Medicube discount might not sound like much, until you consider the fact that Medicube’s facial devices are an investment. The popular Booster Pro, for example, retails for $230. Plus, Medicube recommends pairing it with a light serum or ampoule, followed by a thicker cream or gel. The company sells all of these products in bundles, which can total $600 or more. So 10% off $600 is $60 saved—definitely not pocket change. Signing up for this Medicube discount is a no-brainer.

Get 45% Off With a Medicube Code

Want to save nearly half of these pricey, but important skincare devices? Give the gift of better skin for 45% off with Medicube promo code TATI45. This can be used on various Tati exclusive products, like the Ultimate At-Home Spa Essentials and All About Glow Set bundles, as well as bestselling serums like RF Ultra Tune and PDRN Pink Peptide Serum.

Medicube Coupon: 40% Off Zero Pore Pads

If you’re someone who prioritizes skincare or wants to get into a regimented skincare routine, Medicube’s skincare auto-delivery might be the smartest option for you, with 40% off discounts and free shipping on your skincare favorites. With Medicube’s subscribe and save model, you can get 40% off top selling products like Zero Pore Pads, Deep Vita C Pads, Collagen Glow Booster Milk Serum, and more.

Unlock Free Standard Shipping on Orders Over $80

Orders of $80 or more (before tax and after discounts) qualify for free standard shipping within the continental US; Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and other US territories are excluded from this offer. Free shipping is automatically applied at checkout once your purchase meets the minimum—no Medicube coupon code needed. Delivery usually takes three to seven business days via DHL.

Claim Your Student Discount for Instant Savings

Medicube offers a student discount for eligible college and university students in the US. To qualify, you’ll need to verify your student status through SheerID, a third-party service. Once approved, you’ll receive a single-use Medicube discount code via email that can be applied at checkout online or in Medicube retail stores. Some restrictions may apply, so check the website for full terms and conditions.

Get 500 Cubes as a Special Birthday Reward

Joining the Medicube Membership Rewards program is free and an easy way to earn credit for future purchases. Members receive 500 reward “cubes” on their birthday—just make sure your birthday is added to your account profile at least 30 days in advance. These reward cubes can be redeemed for Medicube discounts, essentially working like a Medicube promo code.

Beyond the birthday perk, you earn 1 cube for every dollar spent, and there are plenty of ways to rack up extra cubes without spending extra cash. For example, you get 200 cubes for leaving a product review, 400 for including photos in your review, and an extra 400 for a video review. You can also earn 50 cubes by following Medicube on Instagram, sharing on Facebook, and liking them on Facebook. Give me a reason not to join—I’ll wait.

You can trust what you buy at Dermstore. Unlike Sephora and Ulta, Dermstore focuses on dermatologist-tested brands, like EltaMD, SkinCeuticals, and SkinMedica—many of which you won’t find at these other stores. Also, Dermstore doesn’t just sell skincare; the retailer carries beauty tools and wellness gadgets, from LED masks to Theraguns and sex toys. And many of these products are FSA/HSA eligible.

Big sales may be occasional, but Dermstore still knows how to treat its customers. Exclusive offers, free standard shipping, and a loyalty program all make shopping here worthwhile. Its BeautyFix subscription is also a fun perk: you get five dermatologist-backed full- and deluxe-size formulas each month (over $100 in value) for just $21.95-$24.95 a box, with free shipping after your first order. Read on below for some of the best Dermstore promo codes and deals we’ve found so far.

Before You Buy a Red-Light Therapy Mask, Read This

I tried the red-light therapy masks flooding my feed and consulted with professionals to find out which ones are worth the splurge.

Dermstore Sale 25% Off

If you’ve been wanting to upgrade your skincare routine, but don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars, now’s a great time to shop at Dermstore. Until August 13, you can get up to 25% off top skincare brands from Dermstore, including SkinCeuticals, La Roche-Posay, EltaMD, and more when you use Dermstore promo code CHEERS. So whether you’re wanting to get a top-notch sunscreen for protection, or want to upgrade to a peptide cleanser, you’ll save up to 25% when you shop the Dermstore Anniversary Sale.

Unlock Your First Dermstore Promo Code: Save 15% on Your First Order

New customers can take 15% off their first order just by signing up for the Dermstore email newsletter or SMS alerts. Select items are excluded from this promotion.

I Tried the Best Red-Light Therapy for Hair Loss. Here’s What Worked

Don’t fly to Turkey just yet. Our WIRED testers saw visible hair regrowth with these red-light therapy devices.

Claim 5% Back on Every Purchase With Dermstore Rewards

As a Dermstore Rewards member, I love that I earn points on every Dermstore purchase—five points for every $1 spent, to be exact. That’s 5% cash back on every order. Just make sure you’re logged in when you check out. And unlike the welcome offer, there are zero brand exclusions, so I can use my points on any product I want.

To break it down: 500 points equals a $5 credit, 1,000 points gets you $10, and 1,500 points nets $15. Even better, there are easy ways to earn points without spending money. Signing up gets you 100 points, and submitting a review gets you 50 more. It might not sound like much, but if you’re already shopping, why not stack up a little credit for later? On top of that, rewards members get exclusive access to special sales and double-points events. Your loyalty points have an expiration date of 365 days after you earn them, so make sure to use them before they’re gone.

Dr. Dennis Gross

DRx SpectraLite FaceWare Pro

Save up to 25% Instantly With Dermstore Auto-Replenishment Discounts

Dermstore’s auto-replenishment subscription plan makes sense for beauty products you regularly use and run through quickly. You can save up to 25 percent off your first purchase and future refills, plus free shipping on recurring deliveries. It’s flexible, too, so you can adjust the delivery schedule, pause shipments, and cancel at any time with no commitment. I’d set it up for everyday essentials like lip balm and sunscreen, but there are plenty of options, including facial mists, oils, and cleansers. Note, though, that not every product online at Dermstore is eligible for subscription.

Select Customers Can Unlock a 15% Discount at Dermstore

Certain shoppers can get 15 percent off any Dermstore order, not just their first. Military members, veterans, teachers, first responders, and medical workers are eligible for this promotion; you’ll just need to undergo an online verification process to receive a unique discount code. Students are also eligible for the same 15 percent discount if they verify their status as well. Keep in mind that these codes aren’t stackable, so if you have another discount, you’ll need to choose one to use.

LightStim

LightStim for Wrinkles

Give 15%, Get $50 When You Refer a Friend to Dermstore

When you refer someone new to Dermstore, they’ll get the usual 15%off their first order, and you’ll score $50 in store credit. You’ll need to create a (free) Dermstore account to start sending referrals. After your friend’s order ships, Dermstore will email you within 24 hours to let you know your credit has landed in your account. You can also track how many people you’ve referred and how much credit you’ve earned from the top of your account page. Don’t forget to spend it—any referral credit expires after six months.

Highlighting Our Go-To Skincare Tech

Dermstore is known for its dermatologist-approved skincare, but don’t sleep on its beauty tools and devices. The site has put together a curated Best of Dermstore page, and I’ve tried plenty of the gadgets myself. Many of our favorite LED masks are featured, like the Dr. Dennis Gross SpectraLite FaceWare Pro, Skin Gym Wrinklit Heart LED Mask, and the Therabody TheraFace Mask Glo. Dermstore also carries a decent Therabody lineup; I always pack the TheraFace Depuffing Wand when I travel for its hot-and-cold therapy, and the Theraguns are powerful recovery tools for sore muscles.

A Tesla launch event tends to cause a hoopla. Fans crowd into an event space; loud electronic beats are the warm up act. Finally, the star himself, the ringmaster of this electric circus, CEO Elon Musk, emerges to a roar. There are demos, powerful verbs, and sometimes, a “one more thing,” a last-minute surprise product unveiling. Fans and investors the world over look on—and post—online.

But for the road debut of the Cybercab, the driverless car that Tesla promises is not only the future of the company but also the global economy, an event in Austin came with no livestream. Invitees, many of them online Tesla influencers, were reportedly barred from posting about the event until hours after it started. And Musk wasn’t there at all.

It was a somewhat peculiar start for the Cybercab, a matte gold two-seater first introduced in 2024. Now 45 of the vehicles, which do not have steering wheels or pedals, are registered to operate on Tesla’s robotaxi network in Texas. On Thursday night, after the news embargo lifted, the online influencers who attended the event began to post sanguine reviews and clips from their first Cybercab rides.

The Cybercab is a make-or-break vehicle for Tesla. Musk and other executives have argued that investors should no longer think of the world’s most valuable carmaker as a carmaker. “Really, we should be thought of as an AI robotics company,” the CEO said last year. “If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company.” Musk has said that hitting its marks in those areas would make Tesla not only the most valuable company in the world, but worth upwards of three times more than Nvidia, today’s market leader.

But hitting Wall Street-ready milestones hasn’t been easy for Tesla’s autonomous vehicle program, at least so far. Musk said in 2013 that Teslas would do 90 percent of their miles autonomously within three years; that didn’t happen. He said that 1 million Tesla autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020. (Today, 420 Tesla robotaxis are registered in Texas.) He said that the Robotaxi network would reach 50 percent of the US population by 2026. Now Tesla needs a robotics win.

Driving a Win

Tesla’s robotaxi network officially launched in Austin in June of last year, with a handful of Model Y electrics. At the time, those cars came with human safety monitors in the front passenger seats, ready to intervene if the technology made mistakes. Since then, Tesla says that it’s taken human monitors out of many of its cars. The service is now picking up riders in a handful of cities in Texas and Florida, and has permits to operate in Arizona and Nevada. A ride-hail service in California must have a human driver behind the wheel of each “robotaxi” because Tesla does not have permits to operate driverlessly there.

Tesla executives say it will win the self-driving race because the cars depend on just inexpensive cameras to operate, making them much cheaper than those from competitors including Waymo and Zoox. (Those companies also use more expensive radar and lidar setups.)

Right now, though, the automaker feels behind. Tesla AI software head Ashok Elluswamy announced at Thursday’s event that the company’s vehicles had collectively traveled 1 million miles without humans behind the wheel. Waymo, which now operates in 14 US metros, said it reached 1 million driverless passenger miles in January 2023.

Tesla’s Cybercab vision is ambitious and wide-ranging. It plans to not only deploy the driverless vehicles on an Uber-like network, but to sell cars without driving controls directly to customers—and before the end of 2026, Musk posted months ago. (This scheme would likely require several major changes to the law.) It also plans to offer entrepreneurial Tesla fans the opportunity to operate their own fleets of Cybercabs. An “interest form” posted on Tesla’s website today allows people to indicate whether they’re interested in Cybercab fleet vehicle purchasing.

Open Questions

It’s not clear how the Cybercabs will legally operate in public. Federal safety rules require that vehicles come with steering wheels and brake pedals, and also the systems that power those human driver-centric systems. Last month, the government granted its first-ever exemption for a purpose-built autonomous vehicle for the Amazon subsidiary Zoox, whose box-like vehicles don’t have human driving controls. The US federal government said this summer that it intends to fast track new rules that will make it easier for autonomous vehicles without those features to deploy in great numbers. But those rules aren’t finalized yet.

A spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told WIRED that Tesla has not filed an exemption request for the Cybercab. “NHTSA is in contact with Tesla and is evaluating the situation,” the spokesperson said. A Tesla executive has said that the company does not need to apply for an exemption.

More than 200 staffers at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the encyclopedia Wikipedia, have voted 158-14 to join the Communications Workers of America labor union. The US National Labor Relations Board counted ballots on Thursday.

Three Wikimedia employees tell WIRED they will now have a mechanism to challenge management as the organization faces growing competition from AI chatbots and a drop in volunteer editors. The 25-year-old, San Francisco-based foundation employs nearly 700 people across 39 countries, most of them working remotely. The contingent joining the union includes employees in functions such as software engineering, finance, communications.

Lauren de Lench, who has been a lead technical program manager at the Wikimedia Foundation since 2021, says she voted to unionize because she had seen too many colleagues decline to speak up during internal meetings out of fear of retaliation for raising issues or proposing far-out ideas.

“I want us to be loud and debate freely up and down the organizational chart because that’s how we move quickly, address challenges, and come up with the best collective solutions,” de Lench says.

The foundation said in an unsigned blog post on Thursday that it will “approach this next phase constructively, lawfully, and with care for the staff whose work makes it possible for us to serve people everywhere.”

Concerns about pay and benefits were not major motivators for the union drive, according to Wikimedia employees. Instead, they say, frustration over how the organization explained several hiring and firing decisions in the past year provided the final push the union needed to win the vote.

That included when the foundation chose to disband a team responsible for developing tools volunteer editors use to make additions to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, such as the image library known as Commons. In a separate move, management removed France from a list of approved hiring locations for product and technology roles.

In a sign of solidarity, some volunteer Wikipedia editors organized a campaign to improve entries about labor unions and related topics this month.

“I want to get to a place of mutual trust and there is a big gap,” de Lench says. “There are pockets within the foundation where it’s healthy, and I want everyone to have that relationship.”

In an organization-wide email seen by WIRED, Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan called unionization the start of a new chapter that she was “optimistic” about. “The concerns many of you shared about management practices, organizational planning, staff departures, and making facts clear and available matter as much as ever, and we will continue to work together to make meaningful improvements or all staff,” she wrote.

Growing Pains

Wikimedia workers have discussed unionizing off and on for a decade, but they had never gotten as far as holding an election before. Workers say momentum for the organizing effort began picking up after the foundation grew its workforce by hundreds of people during the Covid pandemic, introducing bureaucracy that left some rank-and-file employees feeling powerless.

“Management has had to walk back certain decisions,” says Nico Aramayo, a senior paralegal who joined the Wikimedia Foundation during the expansion phase. “Wouldn’t it be better if we could all have a seat at the table?”

The foundation is generally in a strong financial position, with an annual budget of more than $200 million and net assets of around $300 million and growing. But AI companies are increasingly scraping Wikipedia for information to train their models, driving up its server costs. Meanwhile, human traffic to Wikipedia articles is declining as more people rely on chatbots for information. Staff worry the trends could diminish interest in contributing to Wikipedia, damaging the quality of content.

Enterprises are facing a disturbing new question in the age of AI: What happens when agentic assistants go dark?

This became a very real scenario on Thursday, as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and SpaceXAI’s Grok near-simultaneously, and somewhat mysteriously, experienced significant, prolonged outages.

Beginning in the morning, Eastern time, several ChatGPT models went down over a roughly two hour period, Claude models over a four-hour span, and Grok models for a near three-and-a-half hour duration. All three companies acknowledged the “elevated” issues and applied fixes.

As users grumbled in forums and IT teams scrambled to get them back online, the incident revealed how hastily some organizations have adopted generative AI workflows without considering the potential, and inevitable, impact of widespread outages.

AI agents are increasingly taking over automated and wider-scale workflows, and enterprises could find themselves “uncomfortably exposed” when AI hits the brakes, said technology analyst and journalist Carmi Levy. The situation should “serve as a wakeup call to IT leaders who have largely ignored what it’ll cost them if these increasingly critical platforms suddenly go dark. The risk is no longer hypothetical.”

Hours-long outages impact core services

ChatGPT went down on the same day as OpenAI’s anticipated launch of GPT-6 Astra, the new frontier model that the company says approximates artificial general intelligence (AGI) and gets nearer to its goal of creating autonomous systems that outperform humans.

The OpenAI outage occurred around 11 a.m. ET on Thursday and impacted a slew of services, including search, file uploads, agents, GPTs, voice mode, image generation, ChatGPT work, Compliance API, Deep Research, ChatGPT Atlas, and other connectors and apps. In some cases, users were prevented from logging in, conversations failed to load, and the interface returned errors when attempting to send messages. OpenAI’s Codex services, including web, API, command line interface (CLI), and VS code extension, were also impacted.

OpenAI fixed the issue by 12:55 p.m. ET, and advised Codex remote control users to re-pair their mobile devices.

Claude began to go dark around 7:37 a.m. ET, with Anthropic acknowledging an “exhaustive list” of impacted models with elevated errors over the next few hours: Mythos and Fable 5.1 and 5, Sonnet 5, and Opus 5, 4.8, and 4.6.

The issue was resolved by 11:27 a.m. ET. The incident followed a roughly 27-minute outage just the day before, also due to elevated errors on requests in Sonnet 5.

Grok, meanwhile, began experiencing issues around 9:30 a.m. ET. Grok Web, Build, API, Office/Workspace plugins, Android, and X were all impacted. The services returned to “healthy” traffic at 1:08 p.m. ET.

“It’s a curious scenario for multiple different providers to experience outages at the same time,” noted Brian Jackson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. It could be related to a common infrastructure such as a content delivery network (CDN) layer, domain name system (DNS), or shared cloud infrastructure, he theorized.

A case for outage planning

Just a few months ago, the extent of AI use within the typical enterprise was limited to employees using chatbots to get answers to basic questions or to draft simple email messages, Levy noted. Large-scale AI platform outages, when they occurred, had relatively little impact on overall organizational productivity. “But things are changing, and quickly,” he said.

Organizations must now have a better understanding of the impact agentic AI has on day-to-day workflows, and the degree to which they disrupt employees’ ability to complete complex tasks once they’ve handed the reins over to automated, cloud-based tools, Levy noted.

In incidents like Thursday’s, employees may fall back on traditional manual workflows, such as updating spreadsheets or pulling reports together the old-fashioned way. But they might also realize that, after relying on AI agents to do so much work on their behalf, they’ve become too dependent on automation, and their “cognitive skills may not be as sharp as they once were,” Levy said.

The growing prevalence of agentic AI should prompt organizations to revisit their disaster recovery and business continuity plans and assess the productivity impact of potential service outages, he said. While cloud-based productivity platforms like Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 offer limited degrees of “offline mode” functionality using locally-stored data, and documents can be synchronized to hard drives in Dropbox or Google Docs for Desktop, agentic AI platforms offer up fewer offline workarounds, at least in their current form.

Organizations should document workflows in greater detail and scenario-plan what near-term recovery might look like in the event of an extended AI platform outage, Levy said. They also need better training to ensure employees maintain their manual skills over time and are equipped to press them into service in the event of a service outage, because the more enterprises lean on agents to complete critical tasks, “and pull humans out of the loop in the interest of productivity,” the less able employees will be to step back in during inevitable service interruptions, he pointed out.

“It is entirely possible for otherwise well-meaning organizations to be over-reliant on AI automation,” Levy said. “Too many organizations are about to learn some hard lessons about not having a backup plan in place.”

Info-Tech’s Jackson also recommends a modular architecture for LLMs; enterprises should view the model as a “commodity that can be hot-swapped with an alternative.” That might be another cloud service provider (which hopefully isn’t experiencing a concurrent outage) or a self-hosted option like an open-weights model.

“In a scenario like this, when your first choice provider might not be available, you have a fallback that can supply that same intelligence layer, even if it’s only a stopgap solution,” said Jackson.

Other Video Doorbells to Consider

I’ve tested several other video doorbells. These are the ones that narrowly missed out on a place above.

Photograph: Simon Hill

SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell for $100: I don’t love the design of this wide doorbell, but it does come with a wee display that you can use to view who’s there and answer. This could be handy for folks who don’t want to rely on a phone and it lets anyone in the house check who is calling. Video quality is decent, though the frame rate is limited to 15, and the display is low res. You can record locally, and there’s a subscription option if you want cloud storage. Sadly, I found the display was often slow to wake up, and sometimes I had trouble playing back recorded videos.

Aqara G400 Select for $100: This wired doorbell from Aqara is a mixed bag. It’s affordable, comes with a chime, and offers decent video quality (up to 2K). There’s local video storage if you insert a microSD card. It supports PoE or regular doorbell wiring, and has onboard motion and person detection. But it’s a big, chunky lump of plastic, night vision is below par, and you need a HomeGuardian subscription to unlock smarter AI detection (faces, animals, vehicles, and packages), rich notifications with screenshots, and AI video search. The subscription starts from $5 per month ($50 for a year) and also gives you 90-day cloud storage. Alternatively, you can use this doorbell with Apple HomeKit Secure Video (though it will limit the resolution), or with your own NVR or NAS, as it supports RTSP and ONVIF. It also works with other smart home options (Amazon, Google, and Samsung), but it lacks the Matter and Zigbee connectivity of the Aqara G410 above.

Philips Hue Secure Video Doorbell for $170: After a fiddly installation, you get a stylish doorbell offering sharp 2K resolution day or night and a wide view that takes in your whole porch. Notifications are swift and reliable, and you can sync up your Hue lights in interesting ways. But if you don’t already have a Philips Hue setup, I’d pick something from above instead. There’s no local storage option and you must buy a Smart Chime separately. Although you can get 24 hours of video for free, the false alerts will drive you mad. You must subscribe (from $40 a year) to get vital features, like people detection, activity zones, and back-to-back video recording.

Wyze Battery Video Doorbell for $66: Another solid budget option, you get decently sharp 1536 x 1536 resolution video with a 150-degree field of view from this doorbell. You can record locally on a microSD card and there’s good smart home connectivity, but you need a Wyze subscription, from $3 per month, to get person, package, pet, and vehicle detection, back-to-back video recording, and rich alerts (it’s not worth getting without this subscription). The indoor chime is sold separately, and if you want advanced features like facial recognition or descriptive alerts you have to pay more ($10 or $20 a month).

Photograph: Simon Hill

Logitech Circle View Doorbell for $200: As close as you can get to an Apple video doorbell, this compact hardwired doorbell boasts a 160-degree field of view with a 3:4 portrait aspect ratio that takes in your whole porch. Video is crisp and clear, in bright or low light, and the live feed is impressively quick to load. The notification system can tell the difference between animals, people, and vehicles, and will start to recognize familiar faces over time. It works directly through the Apple Home app, though there are pros and cons to Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video. Ten days of encrypted videos are stored in your iCloud account (if you have a 50-gigabyte subscription or higher). Alerts come via Apple devices, but your regular chime will also sound when this doorbell is pressed. I love that live video pops up on the Apple Watch or Apple TV when someone rings the doorbell. The complete lack of support for Android or Alexa will turn some people off, and I encountered several issues with this doorbell cutting out and having to be rebooted at the fuse box.

Amazon Blink Doorbell for $60: One of the cheapest doorbells worth considering, (wait for one of Amazon’s frequent discounts to save even more) the Blink Video Doorbell only needs two AA batteries to run for months. But you need a subscription unless you buy with the Sync module (I recommend it). The Blink Basic subscription is $3 a month or $30 a year. Video quality is 1080p with a limited field of view (135 degrees horizontal and only 80 degrees vertical). The lack of HDR shows in mixed light, with bright areas blowing out and shaded areas losing detail. If you have a person at the door with light behind them, it can be tough to see their face. Notifications lacked images or video and were slightly slower than some of the competition, but they always came through. The two-way audio is passable.

Nest Doorbell (Battery) for $200: If you can’t hardwire your doorbell, the battery version of our top pick is still a great doorbell. I tested it alongside several competitors, and it consistently outperformed them. Alerts are swift, and notifications include animated previews that make it easy to decide whether you need to act. While the resolution isn’t the sharpest (960 x 1280 pixels), and the field of view is 145 degrees, Google compensates with HDR video at up to 30 frames per second.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Doro Hemma Doorbell for £150: A simplified smart doorbell for seniors is a solid idea, and Swedish maker Doro gets plenty right with the Hemma. It is a battery-powered doorbell that’s easy to install and use, offering a 1440 x 1440-pixel resolution with a decent frame rate (30 fps), local recording via microSD card, and a plug-in ringer that gets loud enough to hear throughout the home. It worked reliably during testing, and the mobile app is deliberately straightforward, with a handy option to pass calls off to a trusted friend or family member (they’ll need the app too). The two-way audio works well, there’s a handy zoom function when you livestream, and there’s a siren to scare folks away. It is simplified, so there are no privacy zones or package alerts, and it may be too sensitive for busy front doors, though you can set it to alert just for doorbell rings. Battery life is decent, though the battery is not removable, so you need to take the doorbell off to charge or use a portable charger. Sadly, it is only available in the UK and Europe.

SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Pro for $170: If you’re looking for a solid security system, SimpliSafe is likely on your radar, and for folks with a SimpliSafe setup, the Video Doorbell Pro fits in neatly. Former WIRED reviewer Medea Giordano found it sensitive at first, but, after an update, she says it worked nearly perfectly, sending swift alerts and offering a good, clear view of her porch. Footage maxes out at 1080p, but the camera supports HDR to banish glare and has a 162-degree field of view. It does have to be wired, and you need a subscription from $5 per month to record videos, but SimpliSafe also offers the option of professional monitoring (from $32 per month), which is a rarity for doorbells and might make sense if you have a complete security system with them.

TP-Link Tapo (D230S1) Smart Battery Video Doorbell for $109: For folks seeking a local storage option that doesn’t require a monthly fee, Tapo’s smart video doorbell is worth a look. Notifications come through swiftly and include a still image; video quality is excellent, even at night, and the indoor hub takes a microSD card and doubles as a chime. On the downside, it is chunky, and the onboard AI (which is supposed to recognize people, pets, vehicles, and packages) is flaky.

Tough to Recommend

We didn’t like every video doorbell we tested. These are the ones we don’t recommend.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Ezviz EP8 Ultra: It took me several attempts to set up this doorbell. Despite following the exact same process each time, it only worked on the third try. Once I was able to set it up, I found it to be a feature-packed video doorbell offering dual cameras for a view of your front step and visitor, two batteries so you can switch in a charged one when it runs low (it can also work with doorbell wiring), onboard AI motion detection that includes facial recognition without a subscription, local video storage with 32 GB built in, and a plug-in chime. There’s also a light, color night vision, and AI characters (panda, raccoon, or husky) that will delight kids, but likely confuse delivery people. The video quality is decent, though the fixed frame rate (15 fps) is disappointing. It worked well when it worked, but I had real issues with it going offline. Even after I moved it closer to the router just to test, it regularly showed as offline in the app, and I couldn’t access the feed. It still came to life and rang the chime when I pressed the button. The EP8 Ultra is only available in the UK and Europe right now.

Ecobee Smart Doorbell Camera: Formerly known just for smart thermostats, Ecobee dips its toes into the smart-home ecosystem world with this 5K HD smart doorbell whose feed can be viewed in the Ecobee app or right on an Ecobee Premium model thermostat screen. One of its main selling points is the 175-degree field of view, which is a dramatic improvement over the older Ring camera it replaced on my porch. However, notifications for movement and people are alarmingly slow and inconsistent; the app interface is clunky; and it has thought my totally standard-looking doormat was a package every day for the two months I’ve been testing it, sending a notification any time someone comes to the door. Ecobee’s smart thermostats are still best in their class, but I’d skip this doorbell add-on. —Kat Merck

Photograph: Simon Hill

Imou Doorbell 2S Kit: Aside from being large and ugly, the Imou doorbell offers crisp video recording up to 2K with a 166-degree field of view, and it has a unique trick: the lens can rotate through 30 degrees to track subjects. The large size allows for a big battery, but this doorbell can also be hardwired. The kit includes a plug-in chime with a microSD card slot for local storage. Unfortunately, testing side by side with the Arlo, it failed to pick up some events. I also had major connection issues after changing my router, despite retaining the same network name and password. I had to reset the chime, which temporarily deleted the doorbell. It’s only available in the UK.

Reolink Video Doorbell (Battery): We liked Reolink’s wired doorbell, listed above, so I was excited to try its first battery-powered model, but it was a disappointment. It offers up to 2K footage with a 1:1 aspect ratio that gives you a complete view of the porch, but you must turn HDR on in the settings, and it has a relatively low frame rate (15 fps). I like the option to go subscription-free, but it means putting a microSD card in the doorbell itself, and this is a relatively easy doorbell to remove. Reolink suggests up to five months of battery life, but my first review unit died after less than two and refused to recharge. Reolink sent me a replacement, which is performing better, but when it does run out, the rechargeable battery inside cannot be removed, so you have to take the doorbell off to recharge it. Factor in the slightly confusing app, relatively slow loading times, and connection glitches, and this is impossible to recommend.

Ezviz EP3x Pro

Photograph: Simon Hill

Ezviz EP3x Pro: This is a far better-looking doorbell than Ezviz’s previous models, and it’s nice to see solar panels as an option for doorbells, though you will need a porch capable of catching some rays. The video quality is good, and you get a split view (like the Eufy above) that includes packages or waiting cats on your doorstep. The distortion correction works well, and there is optional color night vision with a built-in light, though it only works at very close range. I appreciate the 2FA, with fingerprint login, and 32 GB of onboard storage (cloud storage is an optional extra). Sadly, if you use the solar panel, you can’t connect to your wired chime. The lack of HDR is disappointing, human detection was a bit off (it frequently said I was a cat), and I had issues with alerts failing to come through on some Android phones. (Even after following Ezviz’s instructions, they never worked reliably on my Xiaomi 14 Ultra.) This model is not yet available in the US.

Botslab Video Doorbell 2 Pro: The flaky setup procedure required a couple of restarts, and physical installation was no better, as the screws supplied were so cheap that one of the heads broke off. The camera has a fisheye effect, but you can correct it with different views. I liked the VR mode, which provides a 180-degree view of your front porch. It comes with a handy plug-in chime, alerts seem reliable, there is an HDR option, and you can record locally (32 GB included) or in the cloud. You can also set a detection range, which could be handy for street-facing cameras. But the app is confusing, with an AI tab that lists various skills available for purchase. There is a login history and a limit of two devices signed in at once, but no 2FA, which makes this impossible to recommend. It is versatile but also relatively expensive.

Swann SwannBuddy Video Doorbell: This doorbell comes with a wireless battery-powered chime and the option of local storage, but the positives end there. The video quality is poor, the app is painfully slow to load and glitchy, and the doorbell frequently fails to register motion. I found the battery life disappointing. I must also question the decision to provide local storage via a microSD card inserted in the doorbell (the chime would make more sense and be more secure).

What Features Should I Look for in a Video Doorbell?

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Here are a few factors that you might want to think about when shopping for a new video doorbell.

Resolution and HDR: The higher the resolution, the clearer the picture you get, but consider that higher-resolution video also requires more bandwidth to stream and takes up more storage space. If your front porch is in direct sunlight or strong shade, I strongly recommend opting for a video doorbell with HDR (high dynamic range) support, as it helps to prevent bright areas from appearing blown out or shadowy areas from being too dark to see. Sometimes it’s called WDR (wide dynamic range).

Field of view and aspect ratio: If you want a head-to-toe view of the person at your front door, then think about the field of view and aspect ratio offered by your prospective pick. A wider field of view will take more in but can cause a fish-eye effect. Rather than a traditional landscape aspect ratio, you may prefer a square or portrait view to ensure you can see a visitor’s face and any packages that might be on your porch.

Local or cloud storage: If you don’t want to sign up for a subscription service and upload video clips to the cloud, ensure your chosen doorbell offers local storage. Some video doorbells have microSD card slots, while others record video to a hub device inside your home. You can expect to pay somewhere around $3 to $10 per month for 30 days of storage for a video doorbell.

Advanced features: The best doorbell cameras offer features like package detection and person recognition. These features can be handy for filtering alerts, so you only get useful notifications. Bear in mind that you may need a subscription to gain access to advanced features.

Security: A couple of things I recommend looking for are two-factor authentication (2FA) to ensure that someone with your username and password cannot log into your doorbell, and encryption to ensure that anyone accessing the manufacturer’s servers cannot see your Wi-Fi login details or watch uploaded videos.

Which Is Better, a Wired or Wireless Video Doorbell?

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Smart doorbells require more power than traditional doorbells. If you opt for a wired video doorbell, you may need a new transformer, and you will likely want to hire an electrician for safe installation. The main advantages of wired doorbells are that you shouldn’t need to touch them again after installation, and they will ring your existing doorbell chime. Wired doorbells are usually a bit cheaper and slimmer than models with batteries, too.

Battery-powered smart doorbells are easy to install yourself and can be mounted wherever you like. The main downside is that you must remove and charge the battery every few weeks or months, which means some downtime unless you buy a spare battery to switch in. Remember also that your regular doorbell chime won’t work with a battery-powered smart doorbell, so you will probably need to buy a wireless chime device to plug in somewhere in your home, though you can also configure smart speakers to act as doorbell chimes.

Most battery-powered video doorbells can also be wired, which may be the best solution if you have concerns about power outages. Wired doorbells are generally faster to alert and more reliable than battery-powered doorbells.

How Well Do Video Doorbells Perform?

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All smart doorbells need a strong Wi-Fi signal to perform well. Some come with hubs that double as Wi-Fi repeaters for a better connection. Remember that performance away from home when you access the video doorbell on your phone will be heavily impacted by the quality of your phone’s internet connection. Every video doorbell I’ve tested has a slight lag, but you should be able to see the live feed in close to real time and carry on a two-way conversation. While feeds should load within two to three seconds, occasional delays in loading the live feed are common, and I have yet to find a flawless doorbell. Video doorbells tend to load fastest in their native app.

What Is the Best Video Doorbell Brand?

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While Google’s Nest Doorbell is our top pick, it might not be the best video doorbell for you. If you already have a security camera system or plan on getting one, it makes a lot of sense to stick with the same brand for your doorbell. That way, you can access everything in the same app and get a single subscription if required. If you have a lot of smart home devices, check that the doorbell is compatible with your preferred ecosystem and voice assistant.

Why We Hesitate to Recommend Ring

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How I Test Video Doorbells

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I’ve been testing video doorbells for several years now. I install every video doorbell I test and use it for at least two weeks, but usually longer, as our main doorbell. I check the responsiveness when at home and away, test all the features in the app, and explore the smart home integration options. After the initial test, I install the doorbell alongside other doorbells (usually at least our top pick) and directly compare the response time and accuracy of alerts.

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Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, said on Thursday afternoon that the issues with Grok resulted from “an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning.”

The issues initially appeared to be linked because they coincided—perhaps the result of a shared third-party service provider—but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited an external source in comments to WIRED on Thursday. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But the company said as part of its public comments on Thursday: “We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.” Anthropic and xAI announced a “compute partnership” with SpaceX in May.

OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski tells WIRED: “A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3, made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms. As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored.”

Anthropic declined to comment on the episode. The company began alerting about a “partial outage” at 6:23 am PT on Thursday that involved “elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5.” Shortly after, the company said it had “identified the cause” and that “a fix has been deployed.” The company marked the issue as resolved by 9:16 am PT. Claude Sonnet 5 seemed to briefly have similar issues shortly after 9 am PT.

xAI reported Grok outages across all of its platforms and services beginning at 6:30 am PT when the company posted “investigating outage” on its service status page. “Grok is experiencing issues. We are working on restoring service as quickly as possible,” the page said. At 10:05 am PT the episode was marked complete. “We have resolved the situation, and traffic is healthy again,” the company wrote.

There were scattered reports of a possible Google Gemini outage on Thursday morning as well, but the company did not confirm this or record any incidents on its service status dashboard. Google did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment ahead of publication.

Typically, multiple outages in the same sector at the same time would point to a cloud provider, content delivery network, or other third-party vendor having issues affecting multiple customers. But OpenAI and Anthropic did not point to a potential shared cause, and major players in the internet infrastructure space—including Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure—did not report outages on Thursday.

I can’t stop staring at the AI-slop images of Mexican food I see during my morning walk to work. On the menu posted outside, the taco truck displays lunch options that appear uncanny and unappetizing, as if an alien who’s never eaten human food before drew a taco from memory. This food truck is not alone in putting AI-generated images on its menu. It’s everywhere.

AI menu slop is now going viral for being disgusting, and these posters seem to be an evolution of the “ChatGPT flyer pandemic.” Whether it’s a maggot-infested burrito or a plasticky pasta, consumers are expressing online how gross these fabricated images look. The aesthetic is distinctively off-putting, sometimes with random holes throughout a dish or otherworldly cuts of meat served as an entree.

The images are immediately noticeable but only scratch the surface of how generative AI tools have already overhauled restaurant menus. Sellers aren’t just generating AI images of burgers, they’re also relying on AI to decide what goes in between those two buns.

Digital Demands

The birth of the online menu set us on the path toward these monstrosities. More consumers started deciding what to eat based on online menus and by ordering delivery from their phones to their doorstep. Faced with growing pressure, restaurant owners digitized their menus and created additional visuals.

Stores wanted to capitalize on delivery sales and leaned into generative AI images, vying for a visibility boost on third-party apps like DoorDash without paying for a photoshoot. While the most powerful models currently on the market can output photorealistic images of food, many of these images appear to be generated by tools with worse capabilities, like the default setting of a free chatbot.

“I went to order pizza one night on Uber Eats,” says Brendan Sweeney, CEO and cofounder of Popmenu, a digital marketing software company for restaurants. “There were five different pizza places that were using the same AI-generated image.” He says if the food image appears “completely inauthentic” and “obviously AI,” then the restaurant is making a worse decision than foregoing photography altogether.

What was originally generated to satisfy digital demand is now creeping its way into the physical world. AI menu slop expanded from its online origins into posters in coffee shops and signs displayed as deli menus. Restaurant owners sometimes seem oblivious to how off-putting low-quality image generations look.

TasteGPT

Noticeably AI-generated images stand out on modern menus for all the wrong reasons. But AI tools are influencing what appears on your local coffee shop’s menu, beyond just images.

Tastewise, one of the largest data insights companies in the food and beverage industry, partners with companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Kraft Heinz. It’s currently all-in on “agentic” automations for every step of the food creation process.

Tastewise’s library of automations is meant to help companies decide what foods to sell and how to sell them. There’s an agent to help you track how product launches are going, an agent to test new concepts (banana creatine smoothies, anyone?), and an agent to find opportunity gaps in current menus.

“I think the bigger question for them is how do they guide and train the AI on what should be in that burger and what should be on the menu,” says Michael Bortinger, Tastewise’s director of marketing and partnerships. “We have billions of data points understanding what consumers are doing with food, what’s actually happening on menus and in the retail landscape.”

Screenshot by Reece Rogers

OpenAI announced Thursday the launch of its next generation AI model, GPT-6 Astra, which the company claims is state of the art at navigating computers and web browsers, writing software, and solving difficult math problems.

It plans to make GPT-6 Astra available to paid customers in the coming days, starting with enterprise clients in its Daybreak early access program, followed by ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business plan subscribers. OpenAI did not say whether GPT-6 Astra will be available to free users of ChatGPT.

In a press briefing with reporters, OpenAI executives made it clear that they feel very confident about the company’s latest AI model. President and cofounder Greg Brockman says he personally believes the world is now in the era of artificial general intelligence, or AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.

“It’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era,” Brockman told reporters. “I think that if we fast-forward a couple of years, when we look back and say, ‘When was it really that AGI was created?’ I think it’s going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model.”

OpenAI is releasing GPT-6 Astra at a critical moment for the company. The ChatGPT maker is trying to rapidly advance its technology and boost sales ahead of a planned initial offering while simultaneously avoiding compromising on safety and security. OpenAI is also facing stiff competition from Anthropic, its most important rival, which is also working on an upcoming IPO.

In a blog post, OpenAI calls GPT-6 Astra the “world’s best computer use model,” claiming it can navigate computers and web browsers on behalf of humans far better than its predecessors. AI companies have historically struggled to make models that can reliably browse websites, fill out forms, and manipulate software tools quickly and accurately enough to replace humans. In tests, OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra was able to book DMV appointments, search for job listings, and apartment hunt faster than the average person could.

The company also claims GPT-6 Astra is also the most safe and aligned AI model OpenAI has ever released. Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, told reporters that the company is monitoring GPT-6 Astra’s chain-of-thought—the model’s internal scratchpad it uses to work through problems—to ensure it is deployed safely. However, Pachocki said that making sure advanced AI models don’t cause unintended harm is increasingly a challenge, and may present a bottleneck to further AI progress.

“We kind of take this visibility for granted, and we are seeing that as model capabilities are increasing, monitorability is getting more challenging,” said Pachocki. “We think confidence in monitoring may constrain further development, because we would not accept degradation in our ability to monitor model alignment beyond a certain level. We would withhold scaling until we can regain enough confidence.”

In a late-night blog post last Friday, OpenAI said it would wind down its partnership with Cursor, the startup behind one of the most popular AI coding tools on the market. The reason OpenAI gave for the decision is effectively that it can’t trust Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX recently acquired Cursor in a $60 billion deal.

In doing so, OpenAI walked away from one of its most important customers. Cursor has long paid OpenAI fees to offer the ChatGPT-maker’s models to developers using its AI coding editor. At the start of 2026, Cursor was one of OpenAI’s top five customers in terms of revenue, people familiar with the matter tell WIRED. By the spring of this year, OpenAI estimated Cursor would bring in more than $1 billion in annualized revenue for the ChatGPT maker, based on the partnership’s performance at that time, the people said.

The figures, which have not been previously reported, indicate the financial loss OpenAI is willing to take on to avoid doing business with Musk. OpenAI declined to comment. Representatives for SpaceX and Cursor did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

“We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” said OpenAI in the blog post.

As OpenAI prepares to go public next year, it’s trying to show investors a more stable business—ideally one that doesn’t rely so heavily on the goodwill of Musk. OpenAI reportedly now generates more than $40 billion in annualized revenue, drawing on several different lines of business, including subscriptions, ads in ChatGPT, and selling access to its AI coding tool, Codex.

Losing a major customer like Cursor may not hurt OpenAI financially as much as it once would have, but it was certainly a difficult decision. The company acknowledged in its blog post that ending the partnership may damage its standing with developers—a community it has spent years carefully working to win over—by cutting off a major channel they use to access OpenAI’s models.

Michael Truell, Cursor’s founder and CEO, who is now leading teams at SpaceX, responded publicly to OpenAI’s announcement hours later on Friday in a post on X, claiming that the ChatGPT-maker’s models only “serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic.” The comment seemed designed to imply that OpenAI’s models weren’t very popular with developers using Cursor, and wouldn’t meaningfully affect its business.

OpenAI’s head of core products, Thibault Sottiaux, was quick to point out that token usage is “not a proxy for revenue nor value created,” and asked Truell to “share the math” behind the 5 percent number.

WIRED previously reported that Cursor leaders hoped to remain a platform for third-party AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, even after the SpaceX acquisition. Some AI insiders considered that wishful thinking, assuming that Cursor and OpenAI’s breakup has long been a foregone conclusion. As OpenAI builds Codex into a large AI coding business, it increasingly finds itself competing with Cursor for customers. Nevertheless, the companies have operated relatively peacefully, as partners and competitors, for well over a year.

Evidently, that arrangement was no longer possible with Musk in control of Cursor. OpenAI may have determined that its Cursor partnership was not worth the risk that SpaceX might distill its best AI models. The company noted in its blog post that, earlier this year, Musk seemingly said that xAI—now a part of SpaceX—used OpenAI’s models to train its own. The apparent admission came during Musk’s deposition in his lawsuit against OpenAI, in which he claimed that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman had stolen a charity they created together roughly a decade ago. A federal jury dismissed the suit earlier this year.

Lenovo is well-known for its creative, if wacky, concept laptops, usually involving some sort of display trickery. But at the IFA Berlin 2026 consumer electronics trade show, the company showed a proof of concept that actually looks production-ready.

The Project AeroBlade Concept laptop is built around a new active cooling technology from Frore Systems that uses air pressure—instead of fans, heatsinks, and large vents—to expel heat from the CPU. That means thinner laptop designs and quieter operation, and the space savings allow for larger batteries. According to Lenovo, it could reimagine how future high-performance laptops are designed.

Under Pressure

Photograph: Les Shu

Photograph: Les Shu

Lenovo is the first computer manufacturer to unveil a laptop that uses Frore’s AirJet Mini fanless air-cooling technology. Frore is known for its liquid-cooling tech that’s used in data centers, but the AirJet is designed for consumer computers.

Dubbed the Lenovo Active Flow Thermal Solution, the AirJet module pulls ambient air that’s inside the laptop to create 2,000 Pascals of back pressure (around 124 miles per hour). This high-speed air is then spread onto a copper base layer through tiny jets in the AirJet module, which Frore claims will disrupt the boundary layer that causes heat buildup and throttling. Without a boundary layer, the processor’s heat is dissipated out the back. Lenovo had a motherboard sample from the AeroBlade concept laptop that showed four embedded AirJet modules, located along the top of the laptop.

Frore says each AirJet module can create 10 times the back pressure of a regular laptop fan and can pull and expel air without needing many vents. Lenovo claims the Active Flow Thermal Solution uses the same power as a traditional fan, but it’s debris- and water-resistant.

While Lenovo may be the first to demo a laptop using AirJet, it’s not an exclusive partnership, so we could see other laptop makers employ it.

So Light, It’s Dreamy

The circuit board is surrounded by AirJet Mini modules.

With its typical, unassuming laptop design, nothing about the AeroBlade Concept screams that it’s a concept. But at 10 mm thin and weighing 1.8 pounds, you can’t help but think there’s something special. With a magnesium-aluminum body, it’s so lightweight that it makes some of the current lightest laptops, like the Asus Zenbook A14 or MacBook Air, feel downright heavy. I spent longer than I should have just lifting it up and down, and marveling at its portability.

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, which makes online developer tools and maintains a massive library of open-source data sets, for nearly $13 billion. While the deal had been rumored for weeks, the companies made it official Thursday morning.

The deal signals Nvidia’s seriousness about being steeped in the software side of generative AI development as well as in infrastructure. Nvidia already offers customers a suite of free, customizable open-weights AI models, known as Nemotron. As part of its announcement, Nvidia committed to maintaining Hugging Face’s current open standards, suggesting that the chipmaker is positioning itself as an even greater resource for developers looking to access cutting-edge, nonproprietary tools.

The move also underscores Nvidia’s position that open-weights models are better for the tech industry than closed, proprietary AI models like those developed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Earlier this month, Nvidia rallied more than 80 companies to sign an open letter asking the US government to defend open-weight AI models. Nvidia also launched an initiative called SAFE, or Shared AI Findings Exchange, that encouraged tech companies to “confidentially collect and analyze AI incidents and near misses, identify recurring control failures and publish evidence-based operating recommendations that reduce systemic risk.”

“Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the press release announcing the deal. “AI advances faster when people can build together.”

Nvidia’s embrace of open-source software and open-weights AI might seem like an abrupt turn, especially given that CUDA, the software layer for its highly coveted GPUs, is itself proprietary. But as frontier AI labs and some of the large hyperscalers, including Amazon and Meta, seek to build their own custom chips, Nvidia has begun to position itself as a maker of not just GPUs but also high-performance CPUs, and has widened its software offerings in order to keep developers building on Nvidia’s platforms.

Business Insider previously reported that the two companies were in talks, and The Information later reported that a deal had been reached.

Hugging Face was founded a decade ago by three French entrepreneurs in New York City, who wanted to launch an AI “companion” app. That didn’t catch on, but the team’s efforts to build their own natural language processing (NLP) tools inspired their next move: making complex tech tools more accessible to developers. Hugging Face eventually became a platform for developers to freely share source code, data sets, and, in the generative AI era, large language models.

“Open-source AI is at an inflection point,” wrote Hugging Face cofounder and CEO Clément Delangue in a post on X announcing the acquisition. “Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to closed-source APIs. But for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility.”

According to PitchBook data, Hugging Face had raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding as of December 2025. Some of its backers include Betaworks, Lux Capital, Sequoia Ventures, Coatue, and Addition. Notable individual investors include Greg Brockman, Richard Socher, and the NBA player Kevin Durant.

Hugging Face has more recently been front and center after its platform was hacked by AI agents from OpenAI. The incident sparked a broader conversation across the tech industry about the safety, security, and manageability of the autonomous agents being touted by top AI companies.

In a 2023 interview with CNBC Delangue predicted that the number of developers working with AI models would soar, and estimated that within five years, “you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position.”

Obviously, Nvidia seems to agree.

In one encounter against spiders, a Warrior set his weapon on fire, which in turn lit his allies’ weapons. They sliced through the spiders quickly, and the fire also spread through the webs to clear them out. Players can adjust and customize their builds on the fly in the open world, though some build aspects are restricted until they’re back in main hub locations.

“Customizing your build to defeat different enemies more easily is also an important part of the Guild Wars franchise,” Johanson says. “It’s one of the key pillars of Guild Wars 1, and we’re bringing it back more heavily in the combat system in Guild Wars 3.”

Conditions you place on enemies are multiplayer stackable, so if one player starts freezing an enemy, the cold effect builds, and the enemy’s animation slows down; their attacks are slower. As more people put more cold on the enemy, they’ll move slower and slower until they become a block of ice that blocks their moves for a short period. If the enemy is low on health, a character with a knock ability like a Warrior can slam into the ice block and, if it kills the enemy, shatter them into tiny ice cubes, causing damage to nearby foes.

There’s lots ArenaNet didn’t talk about in this gameplay showcase, like the spirit mounts from the game’s initial teaser—Johanson says there will be more to share in the future. Also, how will PS5 players, who can’t really take advantage of the game’s text-based chat systems on PC, communicate? But he confirmed that there will be a player-versus-player (PvP) mode, along with “high-trust coordinated dungeon-like experiences.” In general, combat will feature a “heck of a lot less” user interface over the screen than a traditional MMO.

ArenaNet says the scale is different compared to Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, with the former sitting at the smaller scale of the MMO market and the latter sitting on the opposite end. “Internally, we call Guild Wars 3 more of a meaningful MMO, where it’s more about each player on-screen really matters and makes a difference,” Johanson says.

That’s because GW3 uses an evolved version of the megaservers from GW2, allowing for fewer loading screens and an open-world cap of roughly 20 players in active combat zones—a number that scales up significantly higher in social hubs, like cities and towns.

“We’ve seen very few new MMOs in the last decade, and the overwhelming majority of us are still playing the same games from 10 to 20 years ago,” Johanson says. “We see MMO fans constantly clamoring for something new and saying this genre desperately needs something new to move it forward right now, and I think that is when ArenaNet is at its best.”

Expect a slow trickle of information over the next year as the beta launch for Guild Wars 3 approaches. Until then, I’m going to dust off Guild Wars 2, which has been seeing its own sudden influx of new players. As the Norn say, “May the spirits guide you.”

More than a kilometer underground, in what used to be a gold mine, inside a tank filled with tons of liquid xenon, “something” struck the nucleus of an atom. The tiny collision left an unusual energy signature that researchers are still unable to explain, but the scientists behind the experiment believe this could be the most convincing physical evidence of dark matter to date.

Dark matter is one of the most important and elusive substances in astrophysics. Though it makes up about 85 percent of the matter in the universe, we can’t observe it directly because it doesn’t interact with light or much else. Most of the evidence for its existence comes from its gravitational effects, the mass of dark matter having tugged on the atoms of the early universe to form stars, galaxies, and the vast web of intergalactic structures visible today.

But the enigma of dark matter is complex. Scientists don’t even know what it is made of, whether it’s a single type of particle or an entire set of particles that interact with one another in ways we do not yet understand. The most fantastical explanations even suggest that it consists of black holes. One of the most widely studied theories on dark matter has dubbed its components WIMPs, short for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, meaning the particles have a mass and thus a gravitational pull but otherwise interact weakly with conventional matter.

If WIMPs exist and are part of the dark matter of our galaxy, enormous quantities of them could be passing through the Earth continuously without leaving a trace. However, it is possible that, very occasionally, one might interact with an atomic nucleus and transfer some of its energy to it, which is why an inexplicable collision is exciting in the world of particle physics.

In the strange disturbance recorded at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, the detector monitoring the tank recorded that a xenon nucleus received energy and recoiled. Though researchers have not yet been able to satisfactorily explain the cause, some models suggest a WIMP could produce such a reaction.

The scientists stated that this single event is statistically too small to be considered the discovery of a new particle. In 220 days of observations conducted between 2023 and 2024, only one such anomaly occurred. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input,” Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University and a member of the team leading the project, said in a press release.

The team behind the experiment has published their study as a preprint, meaning it has not yet been peer reviewed. They have, however, presented the results to the scientific community at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics Conference in Japan.

Discoveries made around dark matter tend to elicit this kind of restrained excitement. When in November 2025 a team of Japanese astronomers announced that they had seen signs of dark matter in the Milky Way, they too advised the research community not to count their chickens.

But even if cautious, there are reasons for enthusiasm. If the impact was caused by dark matter, there is enough evidence for researchers to begin characterizing the responsible particle. For example, the team has already calculated that, under the WIMP models they analyzed, the particle is about 200 times more massive than a proton. The impact could help us understand how this type of matter interacts with conventional matter.

That’s just silly, right? It’s crazy that the act of measurement changes the outcome. Does this mean that physics experiments can change reality? Maybe.

What About That Zombie Cat?

I mentioned Erwin Schrödinger above. He was one of the pioneers of quantum theory, but he couldn’t bring himself to accept this idea of superposition. Using his macro-world common sense, he insisted there must be a flaw in the model, and that a complete theory of quantum mechanics would eventually be deterministic like classical physics.

When scientists don’t like something, they make up absurd scenarios to invite mockery of its proponents. So Schrödinger created a famous thought experiment you may have heard of. It’s called Schrödinger’s Cat, and it goes like this:

There is a cat in a box. This box also contains a radioactive atom, a detector, and a vial of poison. If the atom decays and produces radiation, the detector will open the vial and the cat will die. But if the box is closed, the atom is in a superposition state, being both decayed and not decayed—meaning the cat is both dead and alive. Only when you open the box and observe the cat will its wave function collapse into either dead or alive.

Nice try, but Schrödinger’s scenario was easily dismissed. First, no one was saying superposition translated to big objects like cats. Second, there was already a measurement before the box was opened: The device that releases the poison was monitoring the state of the atom.

In fact, Schrödinger was wrong—as was Einstein, who agreed with him. Since then, numerous experiments have proved that superposition is real and that uncertainty is fundamental to the universe. And a good thing it is, too, even if it makes no sense. Superposition is what gives quantum computers their immense parallel processing power.

Heads and Tails

It’s important to understand that superposition of states isn’t the same as saying we don’t know. If you flip a coin and cover it up when it lands, the coin is already either heads or tails—you just don’t yet know which. In the double-slit experiment, we know: It goes through only one slit and it goes through both slits.

Quantum systems have other properties that will scramble your brain if you try to grok them—like quantum tunneling—or entanglement, where measuring the state of one particle determines the state of another, no matter how far away it is. This happens instantly, with no time for a signal to travel between them.

But by now these are well-established phenomena, so is it fair to call them bizarre? Are we only exposing the limitations of our human minds? Clearly, the level of reality we inhabit is only part of the story, so we should be skeptical of our intuition. If nothing else, quantum mechanics teaches humility. We keep doing science—and the farther we go, it seems, the greater the mystery.

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The world’s leading weather organization is sounding the alarm about this year’s super El Niño, issuing its most certain forecast in the history of the organization.

In an update issued early Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization predicted a “nearly 100% likelihood” that the El Niño will last through February. The strong language from the World Meteorological Organization—the United Nations’ weather and climate agency—underlies just how historic this El Niño is shaping up to be.

“This is the first time that a WMO El Niño/La Niña Update has been so unequivocal,” the agency says, noting that certainty reflects “the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network.”

El Niño is a naturally occurring weather phenomenon defined by warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific, a pattern that disrupts weather patterns around the world. Scientists have been warning since the start of the year that a particularly strong El Niño was set to develop. The latest forecasts indicate it will be the strongest on record by a wide margin, and impacts are already being felt throughout the world—and they’re likely to intensify in the coming months.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “The science leaves no room for doubt: The planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.”

In addition to affecting regional weather, El Niño also tends to bump up the global average temperature by roughly 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.2 to 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by releasing heat into the atmosphere. But this year’s iteration could provide an even bigger boost. The intensity of this El Niño means this year is likely to be the hottest on record; because it takes a while for the added heat to work through the climate system, 2027 is forecast to be even hotter.

This extra warming is a red alert when compounded on top of the warming caused by manmade climate change. The UN warned in a separate report issued this week that the world will likely cross 1.5 degrees C of warming over the next few years.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, says this El Niño will be so big, “with consequences that are so large, I’m not sure we fully understand them.” The intensity of the El Niño, Swain says, means that it may cause unexpected and extreme weather, and he cautions against making certain predictions about what, exactly, is going to happen over the next year. But the impacts, he says, will almost certainly be massive.

“This is probably one of the larger, if not the largest, climate events—aside from long-term warming, which really isn’t a singular event—that anybody alive is potentially ever experiencing,” he says. “That’s a very big deal. And I think there’s certainly going to be dramatic outcomes from this.”

While the El Niño won’t reach its full strength for another few months, the world has already seen some impacts: The US just lived through the hottest summer on record, and the heat was almost certainly juiced up by El Niño. Regions that are typically dry during El Niño have also seen drought emerge. In Sudan, low water levels in the Nile are exacerbating a yearslong hunger crisis, while Puerto Rico has turned to water rationing due to dry conditions and infrastructure failures. Fisheries in the eastern Pacific have also been thrown into disarray by the hotter-than-normal waters there.

“The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said in the release. “We must win that race.”

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Meta is formally ending what amounted to a tokenmaxxing incentive program for employees. In an internal announcement this week, the social media giant told workers that their performance evaluations would no longer be dependent upon how much they used AI tools, three employees who received the message tell WIRED. But as Meta workers simultaneously begin testing a new agentic AI tool known as Hatch, they say their token consumption continues to surge.

Almost a year ago, Meta had said workers would be graded on their “AI-driven impact,” which in practice meant evaluating the extent to which they used chatbots and agents to improve their day-to-day work, Business Insider reported at the time. Usage correlated with employees receiving labels such as “AI Native,” “AI First,” or “AI Enabled,” according to a lawsuit filed in July by about two dozen employees arguing that Meta violated US antidiscrimination laws when laying them off in May. (Workers on health and family leaves say they couldn’t accumulate usage and were unfairly penalized as a result; Meta has denied the allegations in the ongoing case.)

New guidance for performance reviews unveiled this week replaces references to evaluating employees based on criteria like “usage of AI” and their “AI Native” designation, with looser wording, which caveats that “these outcomes can be supported by AI or other means.” It restores Meta’s focus to grading employees on their impact, with less regard to how it is achieved. Some Meta employees tell WIRED the changes are subtle but welcome, freeing them from feeling pressured to use AI in situations in which it doesn’t make sense.

Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton tells WIRED that the updates this week aim to emphasize what has always been the case—Meta evaluates employees based on their contributions. He adds that labels such as “AI Native” were never used for performance evaluation. Engineers across the company were told this week that the company “will not use AI adoption dashboards or token counts to evaluate impact,” The Information reported on Wednesday.

For months, some Meta employees say, their colleagues prompted AI tools repeatedly—or what they viewed as frivolously—to maximize internal usage measurements, like the amount of tokens, or AI units, they consumed. The tokenmaxxing era reached a high point when one Meta worker created an internal leaderboard for tracking how much employees used AI, labeling them as, for example, a “Token Legend.” After details of the dashboard leaked, the employee took it down in April. A couple of months later, Meta moved to ration employees’ AI usage.

More recently, Meta has been encouraging—but not requiring—employees to use its most advanced AI experiment, an agentic tool that can autonomously carry out actions on a computer. Known as Hatch and similar to the viral sensation OpenClaw, it can browse the web and operate other applications. Employees have been able to test Hatch for the past several weeks on their corporate devices ahead of an expected public release.

Some employees have been hesitant to connect Hatch to their personal email, calendar, and other nonwork digital accounts because of privacy worries, as well the possibility that the AI could mess up something important, two current Meta employees familiar with the concerns tell WIRED. Meta previously ran a project that tracked employees’ keystrokes and other activity on their work devices to collect data for training AI systems. The project, which Meta has since paused, eroded many employees’ trust in the company’s AI tools, the sources say.

I recently met with some brilliant Russian mathematicians who showed me a way for artificial intelligence models to communicate via something akin to machine telepathy.

The mathematicians work for a startup called Mostik—the Russian word for bridge. It’s a nod to the group’s approach, which allows different models to interact using the mathematical values found in their weights—the things that determine how a prompt gets turned into an output. In practice, this means the capabilities of a larger model can be fed to a smaller model to ramp up its intelligence much more efficiently.

The startup used the approach to build a model that has rocketed to the top of ARC-AGI 3, a notoriously difficult competition for AI models. (They wouldn’t tell me more because they want to win the contest.) To demonstrate the idea, however, they also created a bridge between two Chinese open-weight models: the largest version of GLM-5.2, which has 753 billion parameters; and a 4-billion-parameter version of Qwen-3.5 that can run on a mobile device. The resulting hybrid system costs one-twentieth of the full GLM model, and its performance is exactly halfway between the two.

“It’s well-known in machine learning that ensembles of models perform better than individual ones,” Sasha Malysheva, Mostik’s CEO, told me over coffee.

Malysheva, who developed the approach, shared a running joke inside the company: The future of AI is similar to guessing the weight of a pig. In math circles, it’s well-known that a handful of random people can more accurately estimate a pig’s weight than an expert when their guesses are combined and averaged.

Much like communally eyeballing porcine heft, combining the outputs of several AI models often nets better results. Typically, this involves feeding the output of one model into another, which takes a good chunk of time and money. The Mostik team, however, figured out a way for AI models to talk to one another without producing text output. If it takes off, it could increase the value of open-weight models, allowing them to better compete with the closed, proprietary models offered by frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Malysheva says that combining lots of different models may turn out to be a better way to advance AI. “I personally do not think we will have a monolithic model [in the future] or that the capabilities of models will come from scaling,” she told me, referring to the strategy of making models larger and feeding them more data.

“If Mostik makes it possible to pair frontier models with domain-specific models—think biology, physics, and so on—many more specialized models would be trained,” says Vladimir Arustamian, the tech lead at the AI software company Lovable, who knows the Mostik team. “This team has been at it for a matter of months and already has something running that I would have guessed was years out.”

The Mostik technique means “you can approach large-model quality without the large model handling the entire loop, giving you substantial improvements with just a smaller model running alongside,” says Karl Tuyls, a former computer scientist at Google DeepMind who is familiar with the company’s tech. The method is a no-brainer for anyone tasked with running models as efficiently as possible, Tuyls says.

Stanislav Smirnov, a professor at the University of Geneva and a 2010 Fields Medalist, is Mostik’s chief scientist. He says finding common ground between two AI models is surprisingly difficult. “There seems to be no appropriate mathematical language yet,” he says. In the interim, Mostik’s approach is a way to quite literally bridge the gap.

If you’ve been shopping for an Amazon Kindle or smart speaker in the past week, you might’ve noticed some brand-new prices. That’s right: Amazon has hiked prices by $20 to $100 on its popular devices like the Echo, Eero, and Fire Stick.

It’s not alone in this move. We’ve seen similar increases from other tech companies like Apple and Kobo, both of which raised prices this summer. Amazon declined to comment to WIRED as to why it made these price hikes, but one Amazon spokesperson commented to CNET that it was due to rising prices in memory and storage components.

It’s still hard not to feel like companies are raising prices simply because they can—and as a way to make upcoming Prime Day and Black Friday sales look better than they really are. The new prices spread across all of Amazon’s hardware categories, hitting its Kindle e-readers, Echo smart speakers, Eero routers, and Fire TV devices—especially the more affordable and popular products in those categories.

In fact, many devices are already “on sale,” but the sale prices are around what used to be the base price. That means discounts will look good this holiday season, but you’ll just be paying what the item cost a couple of months ago.

Here are all of the price changes on Amazon’s devices, and my rundown on which devices remain a good buy.

New Kindle Prices

The third-gen Kindle Scribe (left) and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

If you’re looking for a Kindle, all of these models have faced a price increase of at least $30, if not more.

The only category untouched is, interestingly enough, the more powerful of Amazon’s e-reader and digital notebook devices: the Kindle Scribe line. All of the Kindle Scribe models currently available (both the second and third gen and the color version) have remained the same price-wise. You’d think those would have risen too since the price hikes are supposedly due to storage and memory costs, but it’s Amazon’s e-reader-only devices that all increased in price instead.

New Echo Prices

The Echo Studio (second gen) and the Echo Dot Max.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Many Amazon Echo speakers also rose in price, going up by anywhere from $10 to $100. The larger price increases are for the Echo Show devices, which come with a screen.

Smelling a potential victory in the midterms, House Democrats are starting to think about oversight investigations next year and how to wield the power of the purse to make the Trump administration comply. In short, Trump’s West Wing renovations and DC arch could be on the chopping block, sources tell Inner Loop.

The nature of any investigations, and where Democrats will try to wrestle back power from the executive, are still to be determined, in part because taking back the House majority is not a foregone conclusion.

But House Democrats have a slew of investigations planned if they do end up controlling the chamber come November. Congressional committee aides have already been exploring how to force recalcitrant officials and family in Trump’s orbit to answer subpoenas.

With Trump uniquely focused on personal vanity projects this term, among the ideas is to more aggressively wield the power of congressional appropriations and threaten funding for Trump’s construction projects.

If Trump tries to block an investigation or ignores Congress and renames more buildings, House Democrats might cut off funding for any of Trump’s future West Wing renovations or perhaps block money for Trump’s triumphal arch.

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, also suggested this week that cutting off funding could be used to rein in projects Trump has already started.

“We have the power of the purse, and we will make sure Donald Trump doesn’t destroy any other federal buildings or landmarks,” Raskin told reporters when asked what recourse Democrats have after a sharply divided Supreme Court permitted Trump to keep building his ballroom.

“Congress established the appropriation for the White House, and it’s up to Congress to decide, and it’s not up to the president to decide to bulldoze half of the White House because he wakes up that day thinking it’s a good thing to do,” says Raskin.

Traditional enforcement of subpoenas through the courts can take years, as a case makes its way through the federal district court in Washington and then any inevitable appeals. In his first term, for instance, Trump asserted executive privilege for former White House counsel Don McGahn, who was subpoenaed but never testified while Trump was in office.

Democratic aides have also been weighing other ideas to make subpoena noncompliance unattractive, like adding cumulative monetary fines through an inherent contempt provision in the House rules, sources tell Inner Loop.

But legal experts have long believed the only way to give subpoenas teeth is for Congress to pass legislation that fast-tracks judicial review for contested subpoenas so they get resolved while the president is still in office.

The most viable idea kicked around in recent years has been a bill that sends a subpoena dispute to a federal district court panel, with an appeal that goes straight to the Supreme Court. Still, it is no panacea, given that the Justice Department prosecutes subpoena noncompliance, and it would never prosecute its own officials.

Trump might have to choose—subpoena or arch.

This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

In a bid to tackle alleged voter fraud, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will create a massive national database of voters.

ICE first detailed what the contract would entail in a document published last week. “The purpose of this acquisition is for the handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities,” the document reads.

In the document, ICE says that the agency will initially provide a list of specific states it wants to acquire public voter registration files from, though the successful contractor will need to have the capability to obtain data from all 50 states. ICE is also seeking voting history data “for each federal election specified by the government, including general, primary, runoff, and special federal elections.” ICE is seeking publicly available information from each state, which each have their own rules around how it is obtained. This would include voter registration, and in many cases, voting history. Either could potentially include party affiliation—a move that experts believe will violate a right to privacy for US voters.

The document states that the successful contractor won’t be asked to collect and share party affiliation data fields for voters but that could change if “explicitly directed in writing by the contracting officer.” That contracting officer is listed as Michael Royer, section chief at Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative unit within ICE. ICE, DHS, and Royer did not respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, the agency published an acquisition forecast document that revealed the ICE contract would be worth between $2 million and $5 million. The final contract is expected to be published next Monday, and is likely to be awarded soon after, given that the term of the contract will expire on September 30.

ICE’s effort to create a national voter database is part of a much broader effort within the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to undermine trust in the upcoming midterm elections. For more than a year, the Department of Justice has been seeking to create a national voter database by demanding states hand over unredacted voters rolls. States and courts, however, have pushed back.

DHS has already demanded states comply with its investigations. The agency has also said it would withhold emergency preparedness and counter terrorism funding from states who refused to implement White House policies on elections. And the agency has gone after voters directly, threatening to deport those suspected of voting illegally even when they have no criminal convictions. Despite assertions from DHS and the Trump administration, incidents of noncitizens voting are vanishingly rare, with an investigation in Georgia this week finding very few examples.

DHS also announced a new surge to investigate alleged voter fraud in certain states ahead of the midterms, to “pursue investigative leads, conduct field interviews, and support timely prosecutorial review,” according to internal DHS guidance that was first reported by CNN this week.

“It’s a joke,” Wisconsin governor Tony Evers said when asked about DHS’ plans. “I think it’s another thing that Trump is doing to make it look like there’s all sorts of problems that are not problems in Wisconsin. And frankly, he needs to stay out of it because voting is a state issue and not a federal issue.”

The Trump Administration just took OpenAI’s side in the artificial intelligence company’s legal battle with the New York Times.

The media juggernaut sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that the companies had violated copyright law by training their AI tools on its articles without permission. Now, the government has stepped in, arguing that OpenAI’s actions were within bounds.

On Tuesday, the federal government submitted a letter to the court stating that the United States has a “strong interest” in whether AI training on copyright works is considered “fair use,” because it connects to whether the country’s AI industry can “retain global leadership in artificial intelligence.” (The “fair use” rule shields certain uses of copyrighted materials.)

The letter argued that the Times’ definition of fair use is “inconsistent” with current copyright law, and that a win for the paper could have disastrous consequences. “Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility,” lawyers for the government wrote.

While the letter focuses on the New York Times and OpenAI, the government noted that its arguments apply to all of the parties in this case and related cases, including other publishers and authors.

Training LLMs on copyrighted works is considered “extraordinarily transformative,” meaning that these systems meaningfully change their inputs, the administration argued. The administration also wrote that OpenAI’s LLMs do not significantly compete with The New York Times’ articles. Courts consider both of these conditions, as well as others, when deciding if the fair use doctrine is met.

Conflating AI training with what artificial intelligence tools produce would lead to “problematic implications for copyright law generally” by implying that it would be similarly illegal for human writers to practice their craft by training on the words of others, per the letter. (The lawyers compared it to how a teenage Joan Didion typed out Ernest Hemingway’s stories to figure out how to write.)

Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer with the firm Neal & McDevitt, tells WIRED that the US district judge overseeing this case, Sidney H. Stein, is not obliged to let this letter influence his ultimate decision. However, Brown says that Stein and other judges overseeing cases like this will almost certainly “take it quite seriously because it comes from the Department of Justice, and inherently carries a lot of weight.”

Pamela Samuelson, a copyright lawyer who codirects the Berkeley Center For Law & Technology, tells WIRED that the government’s brief is a “significant development,” and one which is consistent with AI copyright rulings thus far.

“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” New York Times spokesperson Graham James tells WIRED. “Both AI and creators can thrive–AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.”

OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Other plaintiffs are unhappy at the government’s incursion. Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Author’s Guild—which filed its own lawsuit against OpenAI in 2023—tells WIRED that the nonprofit is “extremely disappointed” about the letter, which she calls ”replete with faulty arguments and a gross misunderstanding of the fair use doctrine and copyright law.”

There are dozens of ongoing, high-profile lawsuits over the legality of AI companies training their tools on copyrighted work. The two biggest decisions so far took place last year. Meta technically won its copyright case, Kadrey v. Meta, although the judge noted that the plaintiffs did not produce enough evidence that the training caused them harm while stressing that in other circumstances, training on copyrighted materials without permission might indeed be illegal.

Though AI has seeped into every step of the job hunt for both applicants and recruiters, it has taken time to catch on in interviews. Voice AI is infamously tricky to pull off, as agents get tripped up by accents or “ums.” Behavior that would be second nature to a human—like not interrupting a candidate—turns into a “very, very difficult engineering problem,” according to Ophir Samson, the head of voice AI at recruitment platform Greenhouse. But recruiters, overwhelmed with the glut of applications, have increasingly turned to voice AI tools to screen candidates, with 63 percent of job seekers reporting they’ve encountered an AI interview, according to Greenhouse.

As recruiters turned to AI, so did applicants. Candidates using AI in the interview process has become so common that AI recruitment startups like Ribbon promise to help identify “overly scripted, AI-assisted, or coached” responses—just like those in Christopher’s experiment.

Now there are rumblings that bot-on-bot interviews aren’t duplicitous but a preview of things to come. In many ways, it’s the “next logical stage,” Mark Monaghan, vice president of organizational development at call center company IQor, tells WIRED.

That doesn’t mean he’s entirely happy about it. In Christopher’s case, Monaghan believes, the use of AI was more than justified.

“If you’re going to send a bot to me,” he says, “I’ll send a bot to you.”

After his fifth interview with no follow-up, Christopher decided to apply for one more Everforth Apex job. Perhaps, Christopher thought, the problem wasn’t AI. Maybe it was him. Maybe if Riley were able to speak to the company’s dream candidate, things would go differently. So he created a fake candidate, whom he called Don Dickner, packing a résumé to the brim with qualifications pulled from an open job posting.

After Christopher submitted the application, Riley immediately reached out. This time, the virtual recruiter spoke with ChatGPT—posing as Dickner—for 23 minutes. They discussed “sustainable operational improvement,” protecting “customer experience under volume pressure,” and refusing to let “tribal knowledge drift.” ChatGPT had an answer for every question, and a personal anecdote for every qualification. As the interview wrapped up, ChatGPT said it had a “few more questions I’d like answered.”

“I appreciate it,” Riley responded. “Upon carefully reviewing your application, we will assess your qualifications for the position. Should you meet our criteria, a recruiter from Everforth Apex will reach out to schedule a brief conversation.”

Christopher never heard from Riley again.

My first encounter with a Prop 65 warning was on the back of my TV.

I was selling it on Facebook Marketplace, and when the buyer arrived to pick it up, he spotted a warning I had never noticed. “California Proposition 65 Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or reproductive harm.” Neither of us had seen such a label before, and for a moment, he didn’t want the TV anymore. We did what anyone would do in this situation: We Googled it. He ended up taking the TV. I kept Googling.

California’s Proposition 65, officially called the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, applies to a dizzying range of products, from food and cosmetics to electronics and household goods. Passed in 1986, the law turns 40 this year, yet that ominous little label still confuses the average consumer.

So, should you steer clear of all products with a Prop 65 warning? Not necessarily. Here’s what you need to know before you panic-buy a new TV.

Courtesy of Stephen Osman/Getty Images

Proposition 65, Explained

In November 1986, California voters approved Proposition 65 by a landslide margin of about 63 percent to 37 percent. It’s a right-to-know law, meant to inform Californians about potential exposure to chemicals that may cause cancer or reproductive harm over a lifetime.

It doesn’t ban those chemicals; instead, it requires businesses to provide a warning when their products could expose people to a listed chemical at levels above specific thresholds.

“At that time, it was part of a broader effort to address a growing concern that the public had about toxic chemical exposure,” says Megan Schwarzman, environmental health scientist at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

The idea is that consumers can use that information to make their own decisions. A warning might prompt someone to choose an alternative, use a product less frequently, or take other steps to reduce their exposure. Prop 65 also gives businesses an incentive to reformulate products or change manufacturing practices to avoid issuing a warning that may deter customers.

And because California is such a massive consumer market, products often need to comply with Prop 65 requirements even when they’re manufactured or sold by companies elsewhere. Some large retailers, such as Target and Amazon, also require their vendors to comply with Prop 65 warning requirements.

Prop 65 Is Everywhere

Prop 65 covers a broad range of products and potential exposures. You can find warnings on fortified foods, smartphones, and appliances. The law is concerned with exposure, not simply whether the chemical is detectable. California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) establishes the so-called safe-harbor levels for many listed chemicals. Generally speaking, a warning is required when anticipated exposure exceeds these levels.

The Prop 65 list contains both naturally occurring and synthetic chemicals that California has determined are known to cause cancer or reproductive harm. Supplements, for example, can contain trace amounts of naturally occurring or environmental contaminants, including lead, cadmium, and arsenic. The list is updated at least annually, and chemicals can also be removed from the list as scientific evidence evolves.

Matte gold, sloped, and steering-wheel-free, the Tesla Cybercab seems designed to catch the eyes of looky-loos. Now rubberneckers may have more opportunities: Tesla is set to host an event on Thursday at its Austin, Texas, headquarters to debut the Cybercab.

Tesla first rolled out a prototype Cybercab at a flashy event on the Warner Bros. lot in 2024. This week’s unveiling will likely mark the vehicle’s official introduction to the electric-auto maker’s small ride-hail service. It has operated a pilot program in Austin since last summer, and has since expanded to a handful of other cities in Texas and Florida, with permits to launch in Arizona and Nevada. (A “robotaxi” service in the San Francisco Bay Area is not legally permitted to operate without drivers behind the wheel.) Before the event, Tesla added 51 Cybercabs to its fleet of vehicles registered to operate in Texas (263 Model Ys are also registered).

“The streets won’t be the same anymore,” Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI software, posted last month on X. When an X user asked whether the Cybercabs would “flood Austin,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with his characteristic moth-to-the-flame tendencies toward hyperbole, responded with a simple “Yes.”

Details on the event are still scant, and the basic business model for the Cybercab is in question—are the vehicles just for ride-hail operations, or meant to be sold to individual drivers? States regulate autonomous vehicles, and some tightly control permits and data collection. However, Musk still insisted this year that Tesla will sell Cybercabs directly to consumers before the end of 2026.

Either way, the physical Cybercab slated to be shown off in Austin on Thursday may be the easiest lift in Tesla’s deeply ambitious plan to shift from a company that builds cars to one entirely focused on autonomous vehicles and robotics. Manufacturing a car isn’t easy. But neither is running a functional autonomous vehicle service, nor building the software to power it. Tesla hasn’t yet proven that it can do either at scale.

“Longer term, the software is the most important piece,” says Seth Goldstein, a senior equity analyst for Morningstar who follows Tesla. “This is a very important step, to put the Cybercab in production, but ultimately, it only matters if the software can allow a car to navigate safely.”

Musk has promised for nearly a decade that the Teslas sold to everyday consumers are just a software update away from driverless capabilities, but that has yet to come true. (Musk admitted earlier this year that some vehicles will need a hardware upgrade to get the capability.) The company’s critical thesis is that a car can drive on complicated, chaotic public roads with only inexpensive cameras, which could allow it to deploy self-driving robots much more cheaply than the competition. Waymo, the US industry leader, took a direct swipe at Tesla last month, writing in a blog post that “cameras are incredible, but they aren’t enough.” Waymo’s more expensive setup uses lidar and radar along with cameras.

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) product, available to drivers for a $99 monthly fee, currently does many driving tasks, including changing lanes and stopping at red lights. But the company warns in its manuals that drivers must pay attention and be ready to intervene at all times. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the US’s top auto safety regulator, opened an investigation into crashes involving FSD in 2024 following concerns that the system falters in situations with poor visibility. That probe is ongoing.

As our interview progresses, Spero’s responses seem sticky, stopping and starting, and not just because he’s eating. I ask about his hiring ethos. Spero murmurs “hmm” before turning away without apology to microwave his food. Fifteen long seconds pass in silence. He finally faces me again and says, “The average person is at Pangram because they care about the mission.”

To detect AI, Pangram uses a method called “synthetic mirroring” by which it takes human writing and has LLMs generate a close match. This teaches its model how AI writes. Pangram also uses “hard negative mining,” searching datasets for false positives that it can synthetically mirror and use to augment its training set—using mistakes to retrain the machine. “All of our datasets are properly licensed, which I think is kind of rare in the AI world today,” Spero says, though that’s partly because Pangram’s product is far less data-hungry than ChatGPT or Claude. “I don’t want to completely throw the AI companies under the bus,” he adds, “but I think they’ve lost a lot of trust, especially in the world of creatives.” Today, Pangram caters to several industries, including education, the legal field, and recruitment, but creative writing constitutes the largest segment of the training text.

The Shy Girl story put Pangram on the map. Spero had already been calling out suspected AI writing from his social accounts, so it wasn’t a surprise when, in January, he was tagged in a Reddit post and subsequently sent a PDF of Ballard’s manuscript. “I put it in [Pangram], I posted it, and then later The New York Times asked me for comment,” he says. “I think people overstate the importance of Pangram in the Shy Girl story.” Except that wasn’t exactly how it happened. Like a game of AI-scandal telephone, it was a Pangram account executive who discussed the story with a publishing industry analyst who, in turn, brought it to the Times.

Another twist: Critics of Pangram, including the investigative project The Drey Dossier, pointed out that Spero’s copy of the manuscript came from a pirating website. When I ask Spero about this, he says, “Yeah. And, like, yeah … it is what it is. I hadn’t looked too closely. I didn’t go read the whole PDF. I just put it straight into Pangram.”

Pangram hasn’t exactly shied away from controversy since then. After the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner returned a high Pangram score, the company analyzed every winner since 2012, calling out three more potential AI uses. Still, Spero downplays Pangram’s impact, particularly on axed book deals. “Basically, with every book deal, to my knowledge, it hasn’t really been about the Pangram score,” he says. “That is a part of it, but if you talk to anyone involved, it is only a small, small part of the bigger picture.”

We move on to Pangram’s Substack integration. “People shouldn’t be afraid about disclosing this because your work should stand on its own as quality and something that people want to read, regardless of … ” Spero trails off. “Well, how do I want to put that?” He pauses. “I think I … oh, I know what I said the other day.” He gains confidence and his voice speeds up. “If the value of your work is dependent on deceiving the end user into thinking it wasn’t written by AI, then”—he hesitates again—“that’s going to be a problem.” (Later, I realize his intonation changed because he was quoting his own post on X.)

Whenever Dyson enters a new product category, a ripple effect usually follows, with the buzz growing so loud that competitors are forced to react. The company did this with stick vacuums and premium hair dryers. Now it’s aspiring to upend the oral care business.

On Tuesday, Dyson announced the CameraJet, a two-in-one electric toothbrush and flosser, to help you clean those pearly whites. It’s not the company’s first hybrid experiment (that would be the short-lived Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones), but as a pairing of two technologies, this makes far more practical sense—even if the word camera isn’t one you’d typically expect in the name of an oral device.

The CameraJet is an electric toothbrush with an embedded flosser that shoots liquid into the gaps between your teeth as you brush. How does the device know when the brush head is right above a gap that needs blasting? A built-in endoscope camera analyzes 28 images per second, shooting bursts of rinse as you move the device over your teeth.

Dyson calls this the Gap Optical Targeting system. The company says it’s powered by a macro-lens camera and a machine learning algorithm trained on 470,000 dental images that Dyson collected during the six years it spent developing the product. Dyson says the magic happens within 100 milliseconds—the camera sees the gap and flushes it with a mouth rinse, all while you brush normally.

Courtesy of Dyson

The fluid jet itself has some interesting engineering. Dyson notes that it’s a conical jet, which the company claims removes plaque more effectively than the “needle-type jets” used by competing stand-alone water flossers. Dyson says its cone-shaped jet of fluid can remove plaque over a wider area using less pressure, making the brush gentler on gums and enamel.

For testing this, Dyson created its own proxy plaque in collaboration with the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Dentistry. This allowed the designers to iterate and test the brush’s plaque-removing prowess in the lab without running a clinical trial after every minor change.

Right below the brush is a tank where the gadget stores 12.5 milliliters of alcohol-free mouth rinse. A diaphragm pump and pressure chamber ensure the jets shoot out no matter how you hold the brush, which Dyson claims gives the CameraJet an edge over its peers, which it says lose performance when tilted. A docking station refills the toothbrush with mouth rinse in three seconds with the touch of a button. It also recharges the CameraJet and gives it a nice resting place on your sink. There’s a travel case for packing the whole thing up.

Amazon doesn’t advertise its Labor Day sale as heavily as Prime Day and Black Friday, but the Amazon 2026 Labor Day Sale still offers some of the best deals of the year on an assortment of tech and home gear ranging from half off WIRED’s previous top-pick wireless headphones, Sony’s XM5 series ($198) to the best deal I’ve seen this year on WIRED’s favorite laptop power bank, the EcoFlow Rapid Pro X ($180).

Amazon’s deals are in heavy flux during the lead-up to Labor Day—and a number of my favorite grills and griddles have already sold out on Amazon, days before the actual holiday. You can find the latest trending and lightning deals at Amazon’s Labor Day Sale page here. But in the meantime, these are the best dozen or so Amazon Labor Day deals right now.

Also see WIRED’s best early Labor Day deals on tech gadgets, mattresses, tool sets, kitchen devices, and REI deals.

Best Amazon Labor Day Deals 2026

 Half Off WIRED’s Former Top-Pick Headphones

Sony WH-1000XM5

Read more$60 Off WIRED’s Current Top-Pick Headphones 

Sony WH-1000XM6

Read more $20 Off Nothing Earbuds

Nothing Ear (3a)

Read moreA $5 Deal on AirTags 

Apple AirTag (2nd Generation)

Read more

WIRED’s Previous Top-Pick Wireless Headphones for $198 ($200 Off)

Sony’s XM5 wireless headphones immediately became WIRED’s favorite wireless headphones when they came out in 2022—a top-dog position they gave up only to last year’s next-generation noise-canceling phones from Sony, the WH-1000XM6. The previous-model XM5’s remain truly excellent headphones: light and comfortable, with great control, great noise canceling, and accomplished sound in pretty much every regard. They’re also on sale for the lowest price we’ve ever seen them, during Amazon’s Labor Day Sale.

$60 Off WIRED’s Current Top-Pick Headphones

This said, if you simply must have the best wireless headphones on earth, that’s still the next-gen XM6, which also rank as the best noise-canceling headphones on earth, with exemplary sound, 30 hours of battery life, and seven times the processing power of the XM5s. They’re on sale for $60 off MSRP during the Labor Day Sale. It’s a sale we’ve seen before multiple times this past year, but still nearly the lowest price we’ve seen.

Nothing Ear (3a) Earbuds for $79 ($20 Off)

The Nothing Ear (3a) earbuds are a stylish answer to noise-canceling earbuds. Nothing’s buds consistently rank among WIRED’s honorable mentions for their excellent value and bold design. The newest offer call recording and audio transcriptions, and ease of pairing with iPhones and Android devices. The active noise cancellation is hardly the best in the game, but at $79 you won’t easily find better: This is the lowest price we’ve seen since these earbuds drop to this summer.

A Top-Line Sonos Soundbar for $899 ($200 Off)

WIRED’s reviewer called the Sonos Arc Ultra a marvel of sound engineering when it arrived this year, a full update of the original Arc and an unmitigated triumph for Sonos: big bass, excellent clarity, and especially immersive Dolby Atmos sound. Sonos has also mostly cleared up the problems with its app in this update, thank God. This matches the best deal we’ve seen this year on Sonos’ newest flagship soundbar.

The Newest Amazon Echo Spot for $70 ($40 Off)

The Amazon Echo Spot is a bit of a twofer. It takes some of the best smart-display features—like a clock and weather readouts—and pairs them with a decent-enough smart speaker, while leaving out the, uh, corporate video surveillance. No one needs a camera in their bedroom! Anyway, this is a pretty decent discount.

Apple AirTag (2nd Gen) for $25 ($5 off)

• Photograph: James D. Morgan/Getty Images

Apple

AirTag (2nd Generation)

Never buy an AirTag at full price. The newest-gen AirTags remain the best Bluetooth tracker for anyone committed to Apple, and you’ll somehow always have need of more. But luckily they always go on sale during Amazon sales events. This Labor Day deal matches the Prime Day price this year and is the best price in 2026 so far.

The Best Laptop Power Bank for $180 ($100 Off)

Ecoflow

Rapid Pro Power Bank

This is the best laptop power bank that WIRED reviewer Simon Hill has tested, barely edging out Anker’s devices for its unusually rapid charging capability. Alongside 300W fast-charging, this EcoFlow also comes pretty close to the maximum allowed power bank capacity on an airplane. For Labor Day, it’s on sale for the cheapest we’ve ever seen it.

A Power Bank With a Charging Dock for $180 ($50 Off)

But if you prize convenience, this Anker offers the same storage capacity as the EcoFlow, but with a handy charging dock. This Anker Prime Power doesn’t charge quite as fast as the EcoFlow, but it comes pretty close. This is the cheapest this Anker has been in a few months.

Cuisinart Air Fryer Toaster Oven TOA-70NAS for $158 ($72 Off)

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Cuisinart

TOA-70 Air Fryer Oven and Grill

Whenever this Cuisinart toaster oven and air fryer dips below $200, it’s one of the best deals out there. It crisps wings preternaturally well for an oven model—perhaps better than any oven-shaped air fryer I’ve tested. It browns evenly and keeps a steady and accurate temperature. This said, it’s a much more analog experience than most modern air fryers. This keeps it durable, but flashy it ain’t.

My Favorite Meat Probe for $153 ($47 Off)

A wireless meat thermometer has become a wild necessity in these times of salmonella … or just if you like well-cooked meat. Two birds, amirite? Anyway, after trying a half-dozen meat thermometers this past summer alone, this Typhur Sync Gold is my favorite overall for its mix of excellent signal and the easy-to-read display on its compact base station—meaning it’s useful both for outdoor and indoor use. This Sync Gold set goes on sale here and there, and this Labor Day price matches the lowest price I’ve seen this year.

Aeocky Rhea-001 Dehumidifier for $230 ($70 Off)

This dehumidifier from Aeocky has gotten unusually good reports back on durability, a claim I’m busy testing since receiving the device this summer. My only complaint was that I thought I could do a little better for the price. A steep price cut for Labor Day pretty much alleviates this complaint, just in time for mold season.

A Great Sous-Vide Cooker for $169 ($60 Off)

Anova

Sous Vide Precision Cooker 3.0 (1100 Watts)

Sous-vide can seem intimidating. But WIRED reviewer Kat Merck recommends this touchscreen Anova immersion circulator for its gentle learning curve: You just clip it onto a pot of water, select your temp, and let it go. Sous-vide is, of course, a terrific way to slow-cook meat to the appropriate temp. But in these troubled times, you can also home-pasteurize your eggs to make sure they’re free of salmonella. This Labor Day discount isn’t the lowest price I’ve seen, but it’s certainly one of the better deals I’ve seen since the prices all went up this year.

The Best Robot Vacuum at (Nearly) Its Best Price: Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal for $750 ($650 Off)

Shark

PowerDetect UV Reveal

This is the best robot vacuum WIRED tested, at quite nearly the best price we’ve seen it during Amazon’s 2026 Labor Day sale. If you don’t feel like rolling the dice and waiting for Black Friday, the Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal is a terrific robot vacuum with UV light that shows you perhaps too much about previous spills, and built-in AI that smartly takes care of even difficult messes. The extendable arm is also a bonus, reaching areas other vacuums can’t.

WIRED’s Favorite Handheld Pet Vacuum for $70 ($20 Off)

This handheld pet vacuum from Shark goes on sale reasonably often, but this is still the best deal so far this season on WIRED’s favorite handheld pet-hair remover. The UltraCyclone Pro is lightweight, powerful, and designed to stop pet hair from tangling up the vacuum’s brush—with a wealth of attachments for funny surfaces and crevices. WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell also attests that it can do double duty as a Cheerio-picker-upper when toddlers are about.

The Best Outdoor Lights for $350 ($90 Off)

Govee

Permanent Outdoor Lights Pro

It’s nearing the time of early darkness. A set of permanent outdoor lights can keep this from becoming dreary at home, and this set from Govee is WIRED’s favorite smart lighting setup for everyday illumination and Christmas lights both. This deal crops up reasonably often, but it’s the best you’re likely to find till the end of the year.

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OpenAI announced Tuesday that its forthcoming AI model, Astra, is its first to reach the company’s threshold for what it calls “critical” cyber capabilities. OpenAI says it plans to publicly release a version of Astra “soon,” but will make the model’s advanced cyber capabilities available only to select partners in its Daybreak Blue early-access program at launch.

In a briefing with reporters, OpenAI safety and security leaders said the company has concluded that Astra reaches the critical cybersecurity capabilities outlined in its preparedness framework, which sets thresholds and protocols for when its AI models pose new levels of risk. The company says an AI model has reached its critical cyber threshold when it can independently find and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in real-world software. OpenAI leaders said the company has followed its procedure for this situation, which is to halt further development until appropriate safeguards and security measures can be implemented.

OpenAI previously said that it paused some training workloads related to the development of Astra and a future AI model for several weeks. Executives say the company has now resumed said work on Astra, and the future AI model, after putting additional safety and security controls in place. OpenAI says the multi-week pause was productive, and it is now confident that it can release Astra broadly in a safe way.

The announcement comes as Silicon Valley grapples with the advanced cybersecurity capabilities of cutting-edge AI models, and tries to assure users, lawmakers, and other companies that it can keep them under control. In July, OpenAI disclosed an incident in which agents running two of its models exploited vulnerabilities in what was supposed to be a siloed testing environment, gaining access to the internet and hacking the open source AI platform Hugging Face. (OpenAI notes that Astra was not one of the models involved in this case.)

Other AI companies, such as Anthropic and Meta, have disclosed similar incidents in recent weeks. On Monday, Anthropic also said it has paused some AI training workloads while it hardens its safety and security practices.

OpenAI says it’s implementing a multi-step approach to limit everyday users from accessing Astra’s advanced cyber capabilities, including a new “misalignment monitor.” If someone asks Astra to help them find an exploit in a real-world software system, for example, the model is supposed to refuse to answer. OpenAI says it has also made Astra more robust to jailbreaking attempts, and in tests it successfully refused unsafe queries at a significantly higher rate than previous models.

However, OpenAI notes in a blog post that its misalignment monitor may “occasionally flag legitimate activity as potential cyber misuse or unauthorized behavior, leading to it inadvertently being slowed, paused, or stopped.” OpenAI says the guardrail can be triggered in some cases even when a user is engaging in activities that don’t appear related to cybersecurity. When this happens, ChatGPT and Codex users may be asked to review the model’s action before proceeding, OpenAI said.

Partners in OpenAI’s Daybreak program—which includes digital infrastructure providers like Cisco, Cloudflare, and Palo Alto Networks—will get early access to a less restricted version of Astra with more robust cyber capabilities. The goal of the program is to ensure these companies can use advanced AI models like Astra to harden their defenses before similarly capable models are made broadly available. OpenAI leaders also said the company has been working closely with government partners to ensure they’re aware of Astra’s cyber skills and can get access to them.

Astra is not only capable of finding novel software vulnerabilities and developing ways to exploit them for hacking, but is also able to “chain” multiple exploits together, a technique used to bore deeper and deeper into a target system and gain access that wouldn’t be attainable using just one vulnerability.

The proximity to the waning moon offers a good opportunity for spotting them. To the naked eye, they will appear as a small group of bright points next to the moon, as if they were diamonds. Binoculars will allow you to make out many more. The encounter will happen again on September 30, when the two objects will once more be separated by just one degree.

A Modest Meteor Shower: September 9 and 10

September also has its own meteor shower. The Epsilon Perseids will peak between September 9 and 10, producing up to eight meteors per hour.

A meteor shower, captured in Spain.

Photograph: Carmelo Ruiz

The number of meteors is lower than that of the famous Perseids in August. However, this shower has one advantage: its peak will occur just two days before the new moon, making the sky ideally dark for viewing.

Conditions will be especially favorable from the northern hemisphere, and, as with any meteor shower, it is recommended to find a dark location away from light pollution.

Venus at Its Brightest: September 22

Venus is usually one of the easiest objects to spot in the night sky, but toward the end of September it will shine even brighter. The planet will reach an apparent magnitude of approximately -4.8. By comparison, the full moon has a magnitude of -12.7, and Sirius—considered the brightest star in the sky—barely reaches -1.46.

Look for the planet after sunset, near the western horizon. Viewing conditions will be best from the southern hemisphere.

The Equinox: September 23

Unlike the other events on this list, the equinox isn’t something we can go out and observe directly. Instead, it’s an astronomical moment that marks a specific point in Earth’s orbit and, with it, the change of season.

The September equinox will occur on September 23 when the Sun crosses the equator as it moves southward. The event marks the astronomical beginning of fall in the northern hemisphere and spring in the southern hemisphere.

Neptune Is in the Neighborhood: September 26

Spotting Neptune is considerably challenging compared to other planets. The most distant planet in the solar system (sorry Pluto) is forecasted to reach opposition on September 26. This means that Earth will be approximately between Neptune and the Sun.

This positioning means Neptune will remain visible for much of the night and will be at one of its closest distances to our planet for the year. Therefore, September offers one of the best opportunities in 2026 to try to spot it.

Google Pixel Watch 4 for $350: With the launch of the Pixel Watch 5, I wouldn’t recommend buying its predecessor at full price. But if you find it on sale, I’d snag it; the Watch 4 will still get the same software updates as Google’s latest and greatest.

Photograph: Adrienne So

Whoop MG for $239 (Peak): A screenless tracker that’s more comfortable to sleep with than an Apple Watch but more expensive than the Google Fitbit Air. Along with your sleep performance score, it tracks metrics like sleep sufficiency, consistency, and efficiency. In testing, the sleep coach was pretty comprehensive, offering personalized bedtime and wake-up recommendations based on your strain levels. You can toggle on a haptic motor that will wake you with a little wrist-based buzz, although given that the Whoop is screenless, you’ll need to double-tap the center of your device or reach for your phone to disable the alarm from the app. Former reviewer Adrienne So also found Whoop to be a little frustrating because it would recommend more sleep than she was capable of getting.

Apple Watch Series 11 for $399: If you already have an Apple Watch Series 4 or later, you can use it to track your sleep. Between the heart rate sensor and the accelerometer, your Apple Watch can break your slumber down into four stages. Newer models can also measure blood oxygen and temperature. It feels like a general overview compared to some of the other sleep trackers I tried, but it does offer a sleep score, which Apple debuted last fall. —Adrienne So

Garmin Epix Pro (Gen 2) for $1,100: All of Garmin’s fitness trackers track sleep to some extent, but the Epix Pro has what Garmin calls advanced sleep monitoring, or the ability to track sleep stages, your blood oxygen saturation, your respiratory rate, and restlessness. Contributor Adrienne So found that the Epix Pro regularly accounted for her getting a half-hour to an hour more sleep than she actually got most nights, as double-checked by a Whoop and Oura. It also doesn’t add naps to your sleep score.

Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen) for $100: The Nest Hub uses radar to track your sleep, which means you don’t need to wear a tracker; it also has a microphone to track snoring, sleep talking, and other nocturnal sounds. I love the Nest Hub on my nightstand for smart-home controls, family photos, and listening to sleep sounds or podcasts in bed, but the sleep tracking consistently overestimated my REM phases and missed periods of wakefulness that other trackers recorded. When I used multiple trackers simultaneously, the Nest Hub was the outlier. —Simon Hill

Muse S Athena Headband for $475: This headband has sensors capable of tracking your brain activity, similar to an electroencephalogram (EEG), alongside an accelerometer and gyroscope, and a PPG sensor to measure heart rate and blood circulation. It’s chiefly a meditation aid designed to help you relax, but it can also track your sleep by recording your heart rate, respiration, time to fall asleep, and how much you moved around for an overall sleep score. Sadly, I found it uncomfortable to wear and often woke to discover the sleep tracking had failed, usually because I’d removed it during the night. —Simon Hill

Photograph: Simon Hill

Withings Sleep Tracking Mat for $200: Another alternative to wearables, this sensor-packed mat from Withings slips underneath your mattress where your chest rests. You need to calibrate it during the initial setup, but it’s quick and easy. It tracks your movements, breathing, and heart rate throughout the night, detects snoring or other sounds, and alerts you about potential breathing problems that might indicate sleep apnea. I have doubts about the accuracy, as it assumes you are trying to sleep if you are lying still in bed watching TV or reading, and that can skew your score (though it’s best to only use your bed for sleep if you suffer from insomnia). I found it often marked periods of wakefulness as light sleep. It requires a power outlet, but that does mean you never need to worry about charging. —Simon Hill

Withings ScanWatch 2 for $370: Wear the Withings ScanWatch 2 to bed and you will get a sleep score out of 100 in the morning. It covers the same four stages as other trackers (awake, REM, light, and deep) but boasts a PPG sensor for measuring your respiratory rate. It can also track your heart rate, temperature, and blood oxygen levels. The ScanWatch 2 provides a wealth of data and advice in the Withings app. Some folks may find it bulky and uncomfortable for sleep, though, and it had problems distinguishing between light sleep and when I was lying awake in bed. —Simon Hill

The Sennheiser Smart Control Plus app is where you can customize ANC levels, transparency, an eight-band EQ, connection preferences, and Dolby Atmos. You can also save sound profiles based on your location, maxing out ANC when you hit the office, for instance.

Controls on the headphones themselves are touch controls on the right ear cup, and they work fine: as in, they didn’t annoy me. A tap pauses music, swipes adjust volume and skip tracks, while a double tap toggles between ANC and transparency modes.

Active Noise Cancellation comes via eight microphones, and it is good, verging on great. It works well on public transport, provides a cocoon in cafés, and gifts solitude in a shared office. If you’ve never used Sony or Bose ANC headphones, you’ll be delighted with the Momentum 5s, but if you’re switching from those two brands, you might find these a bit of a letdown. We’re talking small margins here, but the Momentum 5 just lacks that eerily quiet sealed-off feeling of the WH-1000XM6 or Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen).

Call quality is good too, and the wind-reducing mics kept my voice front and center, but it’s not the reason I’d buy these headphones.

I tested the Momentum 5 Wireless using the best and worst playback resolutions from Spotify—both over Wi-Fi and cellular. I also listened to Qobuz hi-resolution recordings and my own digital music library. And no matter what I played, the headphones offered me a smooth, refined, and expressive performance.

They’re not “high-fidelity” in the sense that the extreme edges of a recording are not exposed, and they happily make poor-quality output sound enjoyable. That said, you’ll get a bit more out of them by listening to higher-fidelity sources. And if you’re still playing the lowest-resolution audio playback on Spotify (or don’t even know what I am talking about), you don’t need to spend $399 on a pair of headphones.

Mixing it up between the pop of Olivia Rodrigo’s excellent new album, the twang of Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, via Wu-Tang, and more of the Police than I’m comfortable admitting, the Sennheiser made every genre enjoyable to listen to and were totally agreeable. They’re not neutral, with plenty of relaxed warmth to the sound profile.

Photograph: Chris Haslam

Sonos has a new app. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The smart speaker company, long a darling of the audio industry, undid much of the goodwill it earned with its multiroom speakers through a bevy of software updates that broke its app in 2024. Almost all app users hated it, citing the loss of features like volume control and accessibility tools meant to help blind people use the wireless speaker system. Sonos eventually owned up to the mistake, considered bringing back the old app again, then booted its CEO and marched its new leaders out to apologize profusely to win back the company’s furious customers.

Now, Sonos says it has a brand-new app update, infused with lots of generative AI features. The company also announced a new soundbar and its second pair of over-the-ear headphones. Sonos representatives say it doesn’t want to be seen as a speaker company anymore, but as something bigger and more holistic.

“For years people have been seeing us as a speaker company,” says Brandon Holley, the interim hardware lead at Sonos. “What we actually are is an audio operating system.”

The company is calling that operating system Sonos 27, and it manifests in a few ways. First and foremost: updates to the Sonos app.

Sonos 27 App

Sonos knows that the words “new Sonos app” might strike fear in the hearts of its users.

“When I say that out loud, I know exactly what comes to mind,” Sid Patel, vice president of software at Sonos, tells WIRED. Patel says the app was developed with a “customer-centric feedback listening approach” that involves reaching out to the community and being active in forums like Reddit. New features to make the app easier to use will include improved tab navigation, better room sorting, and changes to volume knobs on the app itself. In the fall, Sonos will release system health views that let you diagnose connection issues for each product.

The big feature is Sonos 27voice, the company’s generative AI integration, which is being released in early access. It lets you talk to the speakers like you would Amazon’s Alexa or a Google Home speaker, allowing you to request music based on your mood. It also has a Model Context Protocol, which can connect to your AI service of choice if you want to ask ChatGPT to play music on your speakers.

The company is highlighting its Sonos Custom Agents, which let users customize their agents to do various tasks throughout the system, like triggering speakers in a certain room at a certain time. You can also change the voices used if maybe you’d like the AI in your kitchen to sound like a fancy French chef, or have your bathroom speaker talk to you like a pirate.

“Obviously AI is something that’s very hot these days, clearly,” Patel says. “So we have integrated various pieces of AI into our system.”

When asked what products Sonos 27 and its AI features would work with, a Sonos representative wrote via email that Sonos 27 will work in Sonos’ S2 app, but not the S1 app—the version that controls some older Sonos equipment. So owners of older Sonos hardware won’t be able to access these new AI features.

“Sonos 27 is designed to take advantage of newer hardware capabilities, so not every product will support every new feature,” the representative wrote. “We want to be transparent about those limitations while continuing to support products with security and ongoing updates for as long as the hardware allows.”

Other Folding Phones to Consider

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra for $2,100: The Z Fold8 Ultra is a refined release with a 6.5-inch cover display that opens to an expansive 8-inch screen that feels like two 6.5-inch displays side by side. It’s fast and smooth, with a 5,000-mAh battery, but it’s the camera that earns it the “Ultra” title. It’s an impressive combo, including a 200-megapixel main shooter, 50-megapixel ultrawide, and a 10-megapixel telephoto lens that supports 3X optical zoom. Sadly, it lacks Qi2 support for magnetic wireless charging, and the camera module makes it rock when lying flat on a surface. But the main reason it misses out on a place above is that the smaller Fold8 is so much easier to handle.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 for $1,200: We haven’t had a chance to spend much time with the Flip8 yet, but based on what we have seen, it’s a close second to Motorola’s Razr Ultra. It is the lightest and thinnest flip phone in the world with a redesigned chassis. It has a 4.1-inch cover screen, and it flips open to become a 6.9-inch candy bar. It’s also more durable than ever and boasts the same excellent chipset and performance as Samsung’s larger Fold models. The 4,300-mAh battery is solid, but the camera system is relatively basic, comprising a 50-megapixel main shooter backed by a 12-megapixel ultrawide.

Motorola Razr Fold

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Motorola Razr Fold for $1,900: The first book-style foldable from Motorola is good, but not great. The front screen feels very much like a normal phone, and you can open it to enjoy the vast 8.1-inch display inside. Sadly, the Razr Fold lacks the top-end processor of the year, which is disappointing at this price. The highlight is the massive 6,000-mAh battery, which can stretch to nearly three days of use. Thankfully, it does come with seven years of software updates (unlike Motorola’s Flip family). Motorola has also added a telephoto lens to the capable camera, though it can’t compete with Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold.

Motorola Razr+ 2026 for $1,100: The awkward middle child in the Razr lineup lacks the bells and whistles or top-notch specs of the Ultra, but still costs more than $1,000. You can get very close to the same experience from the cheaper Razr and save hundreds. Even battery life is unimpressive, because it has the smallest capacity of the Razr family. The cover glass isn’t the ceramic glass mixture as on the Razr Ultra. I found out the hard way after dropping the phone once, roughly a 4-foot drop onto asphalt, and the front screen shattered. Get a screen protector!

Oppo Find N6

Photograph: Simon Hill

Oppo Find N6 for $1,929: With an 8.12-inch internal display, the Find N6 is a beautifully engineered folding phone that’s impossibly slim and light. Despite its promise of being creaseless, the fold is still discernible. You’ll hardly notice it when the screen is on, though you’ll feel it if you use the optional stylus. Performance is impressively slick, with enough stamina to see you through a busy day, and the camera system is excellent. It’s a big step up from last year’s N5, with a 200-MP main shooter, 50-MP telephoto, and 50-MP ultrawide. The global model can use familiar Google apps, but you’ll have to import it, as this phone won’t officially be released in the West.

Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold for $1,799: The only reason to consider the Pixel 10 Pro Fold right now is if you see it on sale. Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold is superior, but the 10 Pro Fold isn’t far behind this year’s release. It’s still a reasonably slim device with a large front screen that feels like a normal phone, an excellent 8-inch inner screen, and a triple-camera system that delivers great results, though not as great as the Pixel 10 Pro series. Read our Best Pixel Phones guide for more.

Xiaomi Mix Flip for $899: Xiaomi’s first flip phone has a lovely design with excellent displays inside and out, long battery life with fast charging, and flagship-level performance, which makes a nice change, as flip phones often have middling specs. It also boasts a solid dual-lens camera, opting for telephoto instead of ultrawide alongside the capable main shooter, which is more useful for most folks. The software lets the party down a little; there’s no IP rating, and it is pricey, but I had fun with this flip phone.

Things to Know Before Buying

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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Folding phones are more fragile than normal phones. Folding phones have more parts than a traditional smartphone, not to mention a hinge. Companies advertise how many folds these devices have been tested for—usually around 200,000 or 500,000 folds—but a single drop can be incredibly damaging. They are not as dust-resistant, and some aren’t as water-resistant (only the Pixel 11 Pro Fold is IP68-rated in the US), so you’ll want to be especially careful. Use a case, and it may be worth investing in the manufacturer’s device care policy.

Don’t remove the built-in screen protector. Most of these folding phones have a film over the inner screen. You might be tempted to remove it, but don’t—it can damage the display. The packaging usually includes instructions not to remove it and how to care for your device.

There’s a small learning curve to the software. Flip-style folding phones are fairly straightforward, but book-like folding phones that double as tablets have new multitasking tricks that will take some getting used to if you want to make the most of them. I recommend taking some time to run through these features so you understand how they work.

They’re expensive. Do you need one? Nobody needs a folding phone. If you think you’ll benefit from one, know they’re frequently discounted during big sale events like Black Friday, and you can also knock a few hundred dollars off if you trade in an eligible device.

Which Type of Folding Phone Is for You?

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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Folding flip phones are for people who want a compact device. Think of a normal phone you can fold in half. That’s pretty much what you get, plus a screen on the front to monitor widgets and texts. This does mean you can flip the phone to answer a call and flip it shut to end one—super cool. You can put the phone at a 90-degree angle, and some apps will adapt to show controls on the bottom and important details at the top, like in video calling apps or when watching videos on YouTube, though this depends on the phone. Folding flip phones typically have mediocre battery life, and their cameras aren’t as good as their non-folding counterparts.

Folding book-like phones are for people who want the big-screen experience. Are you constantly watching full-length movies on your phone? Or do you always find yourself jumping back and forth between two apps? Then these are for you. They have good battery life and better cameras (though not as good as non-folding phones), but they’re far more expensive. These include the short-lived triple-screen folding devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Z TriFold. They’re thick and heavy, though we’re seeing newer models that are surprisingly thin. Still, you may have a hard time fitting them in your pockets.

Is Now a Good Time to Buy?

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If you’re team Android, this is a good time to buy. Samsung and Google just updated their foldables, and Motorola released its first big foldable in the summer and won’t announce the Razr 2027 lineup until the spring. For folks outside the US, we probably won’t see new foldables from Honor or Oppo until the spring, too.

If you’re considering an iPhone, Apple is likely to unveil a new folding phone soon, so you might want to wait and see what it looks like.

My Favorite Folding Features

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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Whichever style you go for, my favorite feature of folding phones is the ability to see the viewfinder on the external screen and snap a selfie with the high-quality rear cameras—just set the phone down slightly folded so it stays upright, and there’s usually a button you can click in the camera app to send the preview to the external screen. You can usually trigger the shutter hands-free with a palm gesture. (Motorola’s Razr Ultra lets you start and stop video recordings with hand gestures, too!) It’s excellent when traveling if you want to take a photo of yourself next to a point of interest.

Many of these phones offer similar functionality with translation—Samsung and Google, for example, let you show your words translated on the external screen so the person you are speaking to can see it, and then they can tap a button on the screen to have the phone start translating their words, which you’ll see on the internal screen. It’s a much nicer system than using Google Translate on a candy bar phone.

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This week, the US Army used a high-energy multipurpose laser to shoot down three drones near the US-Mexico border, which official reports claimed were “posing a physical threat to US military personnel and CBP partners,” referring to Customs and Border Patrol.

The operation took place between the night of August 25 and the early morning of August 26 in the vicinity of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and was led by the Joint Task Force Southern Border (JTF-SB), which operates under US Northern Command. Authorities confirmed that, during the operation, agents used technology derived from the Army’s High-Energy Multipurpose Laser (AMP-HEL) system, a military program focused on implementing high-energy lasers for new defense capabilities.

Available information suggests that this initiative began in September 2025, when AeroVironment, a company specializing in defense technology, delivered the first two functional prototypes of these laser-based weapons to the US Armed Forces. Two new, improved systems were delivered as the program was expanded in December of the same year. According to the manufacturer, this particular platform, called the Locust Laser Weapon System, is designed to be mounted on military vehicles, as the Army has done with the versions its received.

Operating at 20 kilowatts, the Locust system relies on an extremely concentrated beam of light that, in various phases, allows for the detection, tracking, illumination, damaging, or destruction of targets at a distance. Locust and other high-energy laser (HEL) systems typically use sensors, cameras, radars, or other means to locate an object. Once identified, the system focuses the light beam on the target with great precision, even when it is moving. It then uses an additional electrical energy charge to increase the beam’s power and convert it into heat. This ultimately damages or disables the drone, the exact outcomes depending on factors such as distance, exposure time, and the target’s characteristics.

In addition, Locust’s most recent versions—such as the one delivered to the military last December—include radar and command-and-control systems. These make it easier to integrate the weapon into a more complex mobile defense platform, rather than using it as a stand-alone device.

The exact location of the operation remains unknown. Nor is there any concrete information regarding the origin of the neutralized drones or the entities responsible for their operation. However, Curtis Taylor, commander of JTF-SB, suggested that the aircraft could be linked to criminal cells involved in drug trafficking and operations in Mexican territory.

“Cartel networks are increasingly employing unmanned aircraft systems to facilitate illicit human smuggling and actively spy on our personnel and law enforcement partners. By integrating layered countermeasures alongside advanced directed-energy capabilities like this laser system, we have made it clear that we will not tolerate hostile surveillance. We also greatly appreciate the support of our Mexican Army partners as we work together to combat this threat to the border region,” the major general stated in a press release.

The official statement also does not specify the exact models from the AMP-HEL program that were used in the operation. However, the international press has linked the action to the campaign against illegal immigration and drug cartels that President Donald Trump has been waging since he began his second term.

During his election campaign, Trump promised to combat both issues by implementing drastic measures, especially along the US-Mexico border. To that end, his administration has deployed a wide variety of technologies, HEL systems being just part of the growing toolkit.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Since launching two years ago, Serval has positioned itself as an “AI-native” alternative to incumbent IT service management (ITSM) software vendors, promising to simplify the automation of helpdesk workflows.

Serval’s ITSM platform includes a workflow builder that uses a natural language interface to build code-based workflows. While vendors such as Freshworks and ServiceNow also have workflow automation tools in their products, Serval claims its approach makes automating a recurring task quicker than completing it manually, resulting in more tickets resolved automatically. 

Serval — whose customers now include Spotify, Fox, and Live Nation — has received significant venture funding from Sequoia and others, and was most recently valued at around $1 billion.

With its latest product update, Catalyst — made generally available last week —  Serval promises to take on more of the work needed to build and deploy workflow automations. That includes analyzing ticket histories and other data to identify processes to automate, then configuring settings and connecting integrations to help put those automations into production.

Catalyst also lets admins create long-running background agents that detect problems using historical tickets and other data, proposing fixes before employees even run into an issue, according to Serval. Use case examples include identifying security vulnerabilities, reclaiming unused software licenses, and repairing failed workflows.

Computerworld spoke to Serval CEO and co-founder Jake Stauch about the company’s approach to IT automation and how Serval believes it can differentiate from established ITSM vendors.

The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What are the biggest challenges IT teams face when resolving employee requests? “Traditional ITSM tools are built to track tickets; Serval is built to resolve requests. These tools do a very good job of saying that you have work to do, but that doesn’t do anything for the employee. The problem with employee support is really around automation: somebody has to go and build all the automations employees need. 

“Historically, automations have been built in ITSMs as an afterthought, with drag-and-drop workflow builders. You build out these giant flow diagrams; they take months to build and then someone has to maintain them. But what happens when the business process changes, or you’ve got a new approval step for password resets? You’re doing surgery on all these different workflows. 

“Where we differentiate is making automation easier. We think that the best way to build automations is not a drag-and-drop workflow builder, but letting AI do what it does best, which is to write code. Our code generation agent builds workflows for large enterprises to automate not just simple help desk requests, such as password resets, but longer employee journeys, including onboarding and offboarding, job changes, and reporting requirements.”

What are the main components of the Serval platform? And how does Catalyst fit in? “You can think of the system as two agents, though obviously it’s more complicated than this. 

“There’s a help desk agent for employees. An employee can say, ‘I’m locked out of my computer,’ ‘What’s our Wi-Fi password?’ or ‘My laptop stopped working,’ in Slack and Teams, over the phone, or via email — and the agent resolves it right there. 

“We have a separate agent, called Catalyst, that builds those automations. Admins talk to Catalyst, which can build any automation, like password reset workflows, onboarding, offboarding, reporting. Then it helps deploy them either for the help desk agent to resolve employee requests, or for others on the team to use. It even builds background agents that do investigations, pull data from different systems, and come back with reports and propose new workflows.  

“The old Workflow Builder was more limited, in that it translated your prompt into code and created a code-based workflow. You could say, ‘I want a workflow that resets a Microsoft Entra password,’ and it could build that. 

“With Catalyst, you can say, ‘Build a bunch of password-reset workflows for all the different [identity providers] that we have,’ and it’ll build workflows for Okta, Google, and Microsoft, with awareness of what’s already been built. 

“It can also tap into other systems to build dashboards. It can analyze my ServiceNow data and build charts showing all the info, and then propose automations based on its research. It can go a step further and build user interfaces. If you say, ‘I want a form for ordering laptops for users,’ it can build that form, which you can then deploy for equipment purchases across the company. 

What happens if Serval’s AI agents don’t behave as expected? What safeguards are in place to prevent them from taking unintended actions? “Serval’s architecture is built around a separation of powers: one agent builds automations, and a separate agent uses them. Catalyst is gated to admins only and writes deterministic, code-based workflows. The help desk agent that end users interact with can call only the workflows that admins have already published; it cannot create new workflows or reach outside that pre-approved scope. 

“Every workflow carries its own permissions and approval gates that aren’t subject to LLM judgement. This means that while the help desk agent reasons freely over the employee request, any action it takes can be traced to a specific workflow run, and auditors can review both the approvals and underlying code. 

“That combination — of deterministic tools plus an air gap between the agent that builds the tools and the agent that uses tools — is what lets IT teams get the benefits of AI without handing broad system access to a model making judgment calls in real time.”

ServiceNow and other ITSM vendors are also adding AI agents and agent-building tools to their platforms. What is different about Serval’s approach, and what would prevent these firms from replicating it? “The difference isn’t that Serval has AI and legacy vendors don’t. It’s that Serval was built AI-native from day one, rather than layering agents onto two decades of custom tables, business rules, and workflow logic designed for a pre-AI world. That accumulated complexity is exactly what makes even simple automation changes slow and expensive on legacy platforms today; adding an AI layer on top doesn’t make it go away.

“That’s the real barrier to replication. It isn’t that ServiceNow and other incumbents can’t ship agent-building features; several already have. It’s that their existing customers depend on years of customization built on the old architecture, and incumbents can’t tear that out without breaking what those customers already rely on. 

“Serval built the automation engine and the system of record together from the start, with no legacy structure, so building a workflow, enforcing governance, and capturing the data that improves future automations all happen in one place, instead of being stitched together across systems.

“That’s also why many of our customers choose to fully replace their incumbent ITSM tool rather than run Serval as an add-on layer. When Serval is the system of record, not a layer on top of one, every ticket and workflow feeds directly back into better automation suggestions over time.”

Serval can be implemented on top of ServiceNow or another ITSM tool. Can that be a long-term arrangement for customers? “It can be as a starting point – no one wants it that way [longer term]. It may have taken you six years to get ServiceNow implemented, so we don’t expect you to get off it next week. We have to give you a path to get value out of Serval on the day you start.  

“When you begin that way, Serval syncs data back into ServiceNow. You can continue to use ServiceNow — or whatever your legacy ITSM is — with Serval as the automation and orchestration layer on top. 

“While it’s doing that, Serval is also your system of record; it records requests as tickets, and builds out the configuration management database. You end up with two systems doing the same thing, one of which is also automating the work and isn’t 20 years old. 

“Some customers migrate the whole platform immediately, if their ServiceNow renewal is coming up. If their renewal is years into the future, they take a slower approach, using Serval for orchestration automation before the full migration.”

What potential do you see for other enterprise use cases outside of IT? “We don’t have any customers that only use Serval for IT. IT actually accounts for a minority of the teams in Serval today. We talk so much about IT because IT is the buyer of this product of this category; they bring it into the organization and it spreads to other departments, to HR and finance and legal. 

“A typical customer of ours has 13 different departments deployed including IT, security, finance, legal, sales, operations. So, yes, we market towards IT, but IT is really the gateway into the organization.”

What impact does increased automation have on customers’ IT teams? “For a lot of companies, the most technical — and often most expensive –\— resource is the IT team. Yet they spend their day resetting passwords and moving people into groups. It’s a waste of their talent, of their capabilities. 

“Our customers find that when admins no longer have to do that work, they can deploy them across the organization. They can bring AI to different functions, and act as internally deployed engineers that build automations for the rest of the business. You’re enabling them to be builders versus ticket takers, and transforming the IT function from a service function to a building function.”

Do customers reduce IT headcount as they automate more of this work? “What we’re consistently seeing is redeployment, not reduction. Automation frees up admins’ time — in Perplexity’s case [a Serval customer], one to two hours a day per admin — and that time gets reinvested into building automations for the rest of the business: HR, finance, legal, security, and engineering. In a lot of cases, it’s less about IT shrinking and more about IT keeping pace with headcount growth everywhere else in the company without having to add staff of its own.

“Automation doesn’t mean admins step away entirely. They’re still verifying workflows and approving the ones that touch sensitive systems. What changes is that they’re doing that instead of manually resetting a password or provisioning a Slack channel for the hundredth time. 

“What we’re seeing is an unlimited demand for the skills that IT possesses, and so when tickets get automated and IT teams can build amazing tools in Serval, they become even more valuable to their organization, not less.”

Content warning: This story includes references to suicidal ideation.

Lisa Schrenk didn’t know it yet, as she trudged down a dirt trail last August, but her life was about to change.

She’d set out late the night before with her hiking group, scrambling up Virginia’s Old Rag Mountain in darkness. They reached the peak in time to watch the sun rise over the Blue Ridge range. Afterward, the women snapped photos. In one, Schrenk gazes out over the horizon, her long dark hair pulled into a ponytail. The image is deceptively triumphant. In reality, she had been contemplating suicide. Schrenk, a longtime IT specialist for the federal government, had started setting aside belongings for friends and family, organizing her financial affairs, and clearing out her office.

Her hallelujah moment didn’t happen at the summit. It started on the way back down, when she overheard her fellow hikers talking about hormone therapy. One described how she’d suffered from intense anger, anxiety, and exhaustion until she’d started a course of hormones typically offered to people in menopause. Now, she was thriving. “I was like, oh my God,” Schrenk remembers. She was hearing some of her own symptoms listed out. Could this be the answer to her problems, too?

Schrenk had already tried to persuade her primary care physician to consider hormone therapy because she suspected that her treatment-resistant mood issues might be linked to a hormone imbalance. As someone in her early forties, she was potentially approaching or in perimenopause, when the ovaries gradually stop making reproductive hormones, with estrogen levels often fluctuating erratically along the way. (Until recently, hormone therapy was widely referred to as hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.)

But Schrenk was already taking one of the most common treatments for perimenopause symptoms—an oral contraceptive containing synthetic versions of the hormones progesterone and estrogen. Her doctor dismissed the idea of switching her to hormone therapy, which sometimes delivers “bioidentical” versions of the same hormones, often in lower dosages. Undeterred, Schrenk had then gone to two different gynecologists. “Automatic no,” she says. One had acceded to switching Schrenk’s birth control brand. It made no difference. The depression deepened.

After hearing about her hiking pal’s experience, though, Schrenk started searching online for “HRT-friendly doctors near me.” She found Midi, a telehealth startup focused on women’s midlife care, and signed up for a video consultation. “I cried through my first appointment, sobbing with snot and tears falling from my face,” Schrenk says. Her nurse practitioner was willing to switch her birth control to hormone therapy, recognizing that the lower dosages and different styles of estrogen and progesterone might have a different effect than the pill. Schrenk finally felt heard.

Over the next five months, they met regularly, fine-tuning the dosages and delivery of the meds to minimize side effects. Schrenk credits the treatment with a radical turnaround in her mental health. “I’m no longer planning my own funeral,” she says. Instead, she’s spending time with her beloved dog, going for lots of hikes, and feeling noticeably happier even when she’s stuck in DC traffic.

Around the time Schrenk was having her personal perimenopause revelation, huge changes were taking place in how the general ovary-having public accessed this kind of medication. Hormone therapy had been out of favor for years, after a 2002 study led women who might have otherwise asked for the treatment to overestimate potential cancer risks and doctors to prescribe it less frequently. But by the end of the Biden administration, pretty much everyone—medical professionals, liberal feminists, the Make America Healthy Again movement—regarded that prescribing trend as a disaster. Potentially millions of menopausal people were living with mood swings, hot flashes, and night sweats, and they didn’t need to be.

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Blue Apron makes it easy—new customers can enjoy $100 off for the first five weeks of a new subscription—plus the first week ships free). Blue Apron is offering discounts of up to $4 per serving, depending on whether you opt for 4, 6, 8, or 10 meals per week. WIRED readers get rewarded—in discounts on delicious food—with $25 off your first 2 orders with promo code CONDE25, until August 11 2026. There’s also other sitewide deals for 20% off your first 2 orders with code WELCOME20 and25% off with code WELCOME25 at checkout Check out Blue Apron and see if it’s the right meal kit service for you, and from there you’ll be able to claim the deal with either promo code, and both codes are valid site wide.

Get a 5% Off Blue Apron Coupon With Autoship and Save

Apron now offers an Autoship & Save program, which includes a 5% discount on every autoship order. Be sure to download the Blue Apron app, which allows you to easily manage subscriptions, get notifications, and live delivery updates through your phone. With Autoship & Save, you’ll set up recurring deliveries on a schedule that works for you, and you can save 5% on every order. This includes setting your own schedule, including how often you want deliveries and what day of the week you want them. Plus, you can always skip a delivery if you don’t need it that week. To get started, you just need to choose your menu items from a wide range of options, and every order is pre-filled with meals Blue Apron recommends, but you can always add, swap, or remove anything before it ships out.

Explore Blue Apron’s New Meal Kit Options From $7

If you’re a commitment-phobe like me and don’t want to sign up for pricey recurring orders in the subscription model before trying, we have good news. Unlike almost all other meal kits and delivery services, Blue Apron just updated their model to include a la carte meal kits and ready-to-eat meals that don’t require a recurring plan. You can get delivery in as little as three days, and it requires no commitment or mandatory subscription.

Meal Kits include step-by-step recipes and pre-portioned food, from $7 to $13 per serving. Easy ‘Assemble & Bake’ meals require minimal prep and are $11 to $13 per serving, and ‘Dish by Blue Apron’ are ready to eat, heat-and-serve meals from $9 to $12 per serving. They’ve also expanded their menu with new recipes, now with over 100 meals to choose from.

Score 20% Off Blue Apron+ or Start a 30-Day Free Trial

Blue Apron now also has a membership program, where for $10 per month, you’ll get free shipping on all orders, unlimited Tastemade+ streaming (this includes food, home and travel shows, a $50 value), and exclusive deals promotions throughout the year. If the bonus promos seem like something you’d use, the membership program is a good deal, because delivery is already $10 per month, so you’re getting free shipping plus all of these extra goodies. If you’re unsure, you can try it out with a 30 day free trial, just follow the link here. The good news is that you can get 20% off an annual Blue Apron+ membership, now at $80 per year instead of $100.

Save up to 50% With Blue Apron Heroes Discounts

Blue Apron wants to reward our everyday heroes, and has discounts for Military members, Students, Graduates, Teachers, Seniors, Medical Staff, and First responders. Members of these groups can get $150 off the first five weeks of a new subscription, plus free shipping for the first week of subscriptions. To get this discount, you’ll need to verify through ID.me or GovXID.

How to Make the Most of Your Blue Apron Subscription

Blue Apron makes it easy to customize your meal plan to fit your lifestyle, with new rotating menus released every week. Choose from vegetarian, carb-conscious or protein-packed options, and adjust portions or skip weeks as needed. You can even add extras like appetizers or desserts for a complete dining experience. Simply pick out your plan—you can choose how many meals you want per week and select your choice from the Mediterranean-style weekly menus. Pick your veggie- and protein-forward meals, enter your shipping information, and get ready to get cookin’. And if you don’t really want to cook at all, check out the Prepared & Ready meals for heat-and-eat options. Going on vacation? It’s easy to skip, pause, change, or cancel your plan right from your account online. Head over to their site to explore all of their options and save with a Blue Apron coupon.

As far as the Asus’ appearance goes, the side bezels are a bit large, and the top and bottom bezels aren’t the same size, which I find visually off-putting. Nicely, though, the amount of adjustability is impressive. This stand can swivel, tilt, rotate into portrait mode, and the height can shift 5 inches. The stand has some very basic built-in cable management, with down-firing ports that help keep cords organized. Also, the flat base doesn’t require much space on my desk.

Each of the two back USB-C ports has a specific purpose. One is USB-C 3.2 with DP Alt Mode, which provides 96 watts of power delivery for your laptop. The other is a USB-C 3.2 port for the KVM switch, enabling you to connect two PCs to the monitor and switch between them seamlessly. Fortunately, Asus clearly labels each port, so you know which to use for your intended purpose. The monitor also comes with two USB-A ports for accessories, a headphone jack, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and a DisplayPort Out for daisy-chaining monitors together. This is a solid array of port selection that gives you just about everything you need to use the ProArt PA279cdv as a workstation.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Meanwhile, the controls for the onscreen display and menu are on the right side of the front panel. I tend to prefer just a single joystick for simplicity’s sake, but like the other Asus ProArt monitors, this one gives you five control buttons, plus a power button, in addition to a joystick. Once you know how to use it, though, the buttons give you quick access to switching inputs or changing brightness.

There are quite a lot of features to dig through in the menu, including a number of color modes and detailed picture-quality tweaks. There’s also a Display Widget app to handle all these settings, available in Windows 11 or macOS.

The monitor includes speakers, but they sound pretty bad, which is unfortunate for a monitor designed at least partially for entertainment purposes. Keep this in mind if you plan to watch a movie on the monitor, since you’ll only want to use the speakers for basic notifications. By contrast, the Dell 32 Plus QD-OLED has a really nice set of speakers.

OLED, Oh My!

Brightness—both measured in standard dynamic range (SDR) and HDR content—is the key feature of an OLED monitor, as it determines how good at HDR the device in question truly is. OLED displays can switch off individual pixels, a capability that provides the absolute blacks this class of display is known for. But if the pixels aren’t bright enough, the display still won’t produce a strong HDR performance.

Using an HDR test pattern, I was able to record 1,038 nits in a 1 percent window and 917 nits in a 4 percent window. These strong results deliver a greater sense of visual fidelity when watching movies or playing games than what you’d get with dimmer displays. Compared to the current ultimate HDR monitor, the Apple Studio Display XDR (7/10, WIRED Recommends), though, these results aren’t stunning. On the Apple monitor, I got to 1,905 nits of brightness in a 25 percent window. Even so, comparing these two monitors is hardly fair, given that the Apple costs more than $3,000 and should provide a premium quality to match. I’m providing these results to demonstrate the broad HDR landscape in monitors.

Other MagSafe Grips We’ve Tested

Spigen OM104 MagSafe Phone Grip: The OM104 is a phone/grip combo accessory for MagSafe and Qi2 devices that comes with a flexible nylon strap to slide your finger through while holding your phone. Dual magnets and a robust metal construction make the OM104 feel like money well spent, and even after hours of sliding my finger in and out of the strap, it still feels soft, flexible, and most importantly, comfortable. It has one annoying design oversight. As you slide your phone in and out of your pocket, the nylon strap will start to droop down. The strap is longer than the grip itself, so when you close the kickstand, it’ll get pinched inside and won’t allow the stand to fully close. It’s comfortable to use, but that quibble knocks it down.

Casely MagRing: Unlike other metal grips we’ve tested, Casely’s MagRing is made of soft silicone. We find it more comfortable on the fingers. It also has a 360-degree swivel, so you can position the grip at virtually any angle. This is strictly a grip, so you can’t use it as a kickstand. Since the grip doesn’t fold in, your phone won’t lie fully flat on a surface. We also tested the MagRing+, which comes with a ring clip for attaching your keys. That comes in handy for quick trips to the grocery store or when you go to the gym and need a place to put your car keys and key fob. But Jacob prefers the standard MagRing, since he typically carries his keys in his pocket or bag. Casely has a few variations of the MagRing and MagRing+ in stock, but it appears to be on its last legs.

Smartish Wallflower: It isn’t perfect, but we still love it. The Smartish Wallflower comes with seven small suction cups that look like a flower, allowing you to attach your phone to a wall (or any other surface) and leave it be. It mostly works, but it largely depends on how heavy your phone is and what surface you’re attaching it to. We didn’t have issues with an iPhone 17 and drywall, but the iPhone 15 Pro Max attached to a particleboard cabinet was too heavy for the grip to manage.

Avoid These MagSafe Grips

OhSnap! Snap Grip: I like that this grip allows you to use other MagSafe accessories, but the point of a MagSafe grip (to me) is that you can remove it easily enough that it doesn’t hinder accessories in the first place. So it seems like sort of a needless feature. More importantly, this grip doesn’t feel secure to me. I have a harder time keeping a good handle on my phone when I use it, which negates the purpose. The lack of bulk is nice, but a phone ring can provide essentially the same thing with a bit more security. And this grip has a tendency to stick to your accessories rather than your phone when you remove it.

PopSockets Low-Pro Grip and Stand: All phone grip analyses are going to be subjective, but I’m not a fan of how flimsy this new PopSocket feels. It’s quite floppy, so I feel like my hand has to do more work to compensate for holding my phone, in which case I’d rather not use a grip in the first place. It’s also very difficult to open with one hand. I’m of the mind that accessories shouldn’t require more work than you’d need to put in without them. This PopSocket fails that test. Finally, like the OhSnap grip, this sticks to accessories too well. It regularly pulls off or sticks to the car mounts I’m testing rather than sticking to my phone.

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I had been leery of prepared meal delivery services. They gave me flashbacks to those delivery diet plans sold on late night television in the 1990s. And so Tempo Meals, a spin-off prepared meal brand from meal kit service Home Chef, came as a pleasant surprise even after testing dozens of meal kits.

Tempo meals look like TV dinners, but they’ve never been frozen, thanks to advances in packaging technology. The beef barbacoa and sous-vide chicken I tried actually retained moisture and tenderness. Green beans were still vibrantly green, with a little bit of snap. They’re cooked in a commissary kitchen, and shipped to your doorstep in special packaging that prevents spoilage without using a bunch of preservatives. Heat-and-eat meals won’t ever be quite as good as freshly cooked meals, but especially when I reheated them in an air fryer they got closer than expected.

Tempo is especially known for high-protein and GLP-1 plans created in consultation with dietitians, helping prevent people from losing muscle mass when on calorie-restricted diets or just in midlife. Meals are $11 to $13 a serving at regular price, but Tempo Meals discount codes are available. For now, with a Tempo Meals promo code, you can get up to 60% off your first box of Tempo, with discounts throughout the first month.

Score 30% Off Your First Month of Four Boxes

Like a lot of meal delivery services, Tempo Meals wants you to try them out in hopes you enjoy the service and decide you can’t live without it. And so Home Chef offers a Tempo Meals coupon code for new customers. Depending on the Tempo promo code, this may be a straight discount of 30% off for the first four weeks. Or it may be 50% or 60% off the first box, and then discounts off the next month of boxes. Right now, you can also sign up for a lifetime free breakfast item. For previous customers who for whatever reason paused their Tempo subscription, there are Tempo Meals promo codes for existing customers that show up in your inbox. These may automatically be applied when you visit the Tempo website.

Activate the Heroes Discount to Get 50% Off Now and 10% Off for a Lifetime

Most Tempo Meals promo codes are good for deals during the introductory week only. But the Tempo Meals heroes discount applies for life for military personnel, first responders, teachers, doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees. To get the heroes discount from Tempo, you’ll need to verify your identity with the ID.Me system. After this, you get a permanent discount—pretty much the best discounts available if you plan on using Tempo long-term for a high-protein meal program.

Secure Instant Savings by Applying Your Tempo Meals Coupon

Often, Home Chef offers multiple Tempo Meals coupons at the same time. These can usually be activated on the site by clicking on the right pop-up. After you enter your area code and email address to verify that Tempo serves your area, you’ll be asked a couple questions about your meal preferences, before selecting how many meals you want each week—anywhere from six to 20 meals. At checkout, make sure the right Tempo Meals discount code has been applied to your order. This may include free shipping for the first week, and an extra item such as free breakfast.

Former Republican congressman George Santos has received a first-of-its-kind lifetime ban from the prediction market platform Kalshi, which has also fined him $71,356 for violating its rules around insider trading and market manipulation.

According to the notice of disciplinary action Kalshi posted today, the former politician placed trades in markets related to whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address in February 2026. He then “began making a series of public statements regarding his attendance at the event in an attempt to influence the price” of certain contracts, some of which were “false or misleading,” per the notice.

The day before the address, Santos posted, “I’m going to be there for the State of Union in the gallery, guys” on X. During the speech, he sent a follow-up noting that he was actually at an airport watching the address on television. “FML,” he wrote.

Kalshi’s enforcement team flagged the trades, froze Santos’ account, and referred the case to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that oversees prediction markets. This summer, he settled with the CFTC for $35,000 over these suspicious trades; a little over $17,500 was returning the profit he made, with an additional $17,500 fine. At the time, his lawyer issued a statement stressing that Santos settled to “put this matter behind him” and that he had done so “without admitting the Commission’s allegations, findings or conclusions.”

Through his legal representative, Santos declined to comment to WIRED. However, on social media, he already weighed in, sarcastically thanking Kalshi “for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform,” adding, “Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for 💋,” a nod to the prediction market’s ongoing battles with state authorities over how it is regulated.

Once upon a time, Santos had a rosier relationship with the industry; he was once paid for promoting Kalshi’s rival Polymarket, but Polymarket severed ties with him once federal regulators began looking into his behavior around February’s State of the Union.

This is far from Santos’ first brush with the law. He was expelled from Congress following an ethics investigation in 2023, and eventually pleaded guilty and served time in federal prison for embezzling from campaign donors, lying to Congress, and defrauding campaign contributors. He was released from prison in 2025 after President Trump commuted his sentence.

According to today’s notice, the prediction market found that Santos successfully influenced the pricing of several markets. Kalshi also issued four additional notices of enforcement actions today, but Santos was the only person penalized who did not settle with the company.

“He wouldn’t talk to us, and actively dodged us,” Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana tells WIRED.

In the past year, Kalshi has issued a number of other enforcement actions against politicians who it found had broken its rules. In this most recent round of enforcement actions, it fined North Carolina Congressional candidate Laurie Buckhout, California gubernatorial candidate Stephen Kloobeck, and Maine gubernatorial candidate Ben Midgley for attempting to trade on contracts related to their races; they are all temporarily suspended.

“I bet on myself. Literally. It was a dumb mistake, and as soon as I learned there was an issue, I worked to make it right. Safe to say my career as a Kalshi trader was short-lived,” Buckhout, a retired military officer, told WIRED in an email. Kloobeck and Midgley did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Previously, it fined US Senate candidate Mark Moran for insider trading; at the time, Moran told WIRED that he “did it on purpose” and did not intend to cooperate with Kalshi.

Kalshi’s Diana says that Santos can expect “legal action” if he does not pay.

On the job review platform Glassdoor, one faction hates artificial intelligence more than any other.

“Pushing AI to the point that you are asking humans not to use their thoughts and brains is such a turn off,” reads one representative review. “Stop forcing AI onto everyone,” reads another. And then there’s this one: “The AI apps this company uses are all trash.”

The reviews in question all come not from journalists or teachers, but from insurance claims adjusters. In fact, recent research from Glassdoor found that claims adjusters who mention AI in their posts are critical a whopping 98 percent of the time—enough to win them the mantle of the biggest AI haters in the American workforce.

Typically, insurance adjusters complain about “AI-obsessed leaders forcing error-prone AI on them and their clients,” according to the research. When AI falls short in this job, adjusters say, they have to clean up a very human mess.

Take Ahmad Jackson. About a year ago, he was working in the claims department for a major insurance company. His employer decided to use AI for initial loss reporting, which involves setting up claims and gathering information when someone first discloses an incident. It was supposed to be a boon for employees and policyholders alike, streamlining simple claims while transferring more complex situations to actual people.

Instead, Jackson says, he and other adjusters faced a sudden influx of misclassified claims that required rerouting to the correct department. He encountered AI-driven hallucinations while reading claims summaries; when he inadvertently relayed those errors to claimants or their attorneys, he bore the brunt of their fury.

He quit the company not long after, switching to a different insurance carrier. AI is “getting things wrong,” Jackson tells WIRED. “And it’s implementing more work onto the adjusters.”

“There’s an AI fatigue,” says Geoffrey Conrad, a claims executive in Mobile, Alabama. “We’re pretty much exhausted as far as the amount of AI being shoved down our throats.”

Glassdoor senior economist Chris Martin didn’t expect claims adjusters to hate AI quite this much. When he saw the results, he tells WIRED, he did a double take—then started digging. Martin’s conclusion: The profession is in the midst of a reckoning.

In 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that it expected the number of claims adjusters in the United States to fall by 18,900, or 5 percent, in the coming decade. Between May 2025 and May 2026, employment in the sector dropped a staggering 21 percent, according to BLS data. For early-career adjusters, the decline was even sharper: Entry-level postings have fallen 50 percent since 2025, according to Glassdoor.

The BLS cited technology as a major force behind the decline. In the last few years, AI startups like Liberate and Pace have raised millions of dollars based on promises to “reinvent” insurance, while insurers have scaled their use of AI to handle more and more claims.

In practice, this could look like talking to a chatbot instead of a person to file a claim. Instead of sending people to inspect a damaged home, AI tools might analyze photos or videos to provide estimates for payouts. Hundreds of pages of medical records could be summarized by AI to pull out crucial details. Or an insurer’s AI tool could process a policyholder’s uploaded information—photos, videos, documentation, receipts—then send a payout, all within seconds.

This summer, every meal feels like a risk.

Just as the US is recovering from a major cyclospora outbreak stemming from tainted iceberg lettuce, salmonella has turned up in jalapeños, eggs, and even dog food. The jalapeño-related outbreak is now responsible for at least 431 illnesses and 57 hospitalizations in more than two dozen states. Meanwhile, a dual-pathogen outbreak of E. coli and salmonella linked to alfalfa sprouts has affected 55 people across 15 states.

But is it just your overactive imagination that these outbreaks are worse than normal?

To answer that, WIRED tallied up publicly available numbers from the Food and Drug Administration’s investigations of foodborne illnesses. The agency has identified more than 12,800 illnesses tied to foodborne outbreaks in 2026, already far surpassing the number it has identified in any year since 2020. For comparison, there were 895 cases related to foodborne outbreaks last year.

Experts say the summer of sickness is the result of chronic underfunding in food safety systems, gaps in federal food policy, and recent cuts to the country’s public health infrastructure by President Donald Trump’s administration.

“What is happening this summer just demonstrates to me the vulnerabilities in the system—and what happens when you stress the system,” says Barbara Kowalcyk, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition.

To understand how this summer became so swamped with foodborne illnesses, one needs to understand the scale of the cyclospora outbreak, which “was absolutely unprecedented,” says Jennifer McEntire, a food microbiologist and founder of the consulting firm Food Safety Strategy.

The FDA’s numbers, drawn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s case count, establish this cyclospora outbreak as the largest the agency has investigated in the US since the 1990s. Yet even this figure undercounts how many people actually got sick, according to the CDC’s own calculations.

The FDA’s figures only count illnesses directly linked to a specific outbreak under investigation. So far, about 67 percent of the CDC’s 17,180 laboratory-confirmed cases in the US have been linked to Taylor Farms’ iceberg lettuce; the rest are linked to other outbreaks or one-off infections, which require a full-blown FDA investigation. On top of that, the CDC is aware of at least 11,844 additional cases that have either not been confirmed by a lab test or require further analysis for other reasons.

Previously, cyclospora infections were rare compared to other common foodborne bugs like salmonella and E. coli. The previously obscure pathogen typically causes a few hundred to a few thousand illnesses a year in the US. Because it is—or at least was—relatively uncommon, cyclospora isn’t included in standard panels that test for several types of gastrointestinal disease. That can mask the true size of an outbreak, on top of the many people who may have gotten diarrhea from the parasite but decided not to go to the doctor.

Cyclospora is also particularly tricky to get rid of, with its tendency to lodge itself into the crevices and folds of leafy greens, herbs, and berries. These foods are typically eaten raw, and food sanitizers aren’t effective at removing the parasite because it forms a tough, protective outer shell.

When you’re working with Microsoft Copilot to create a business document, you might find yourself torn between two opposing instincts. Part of you is itching to edit its output right away, while another part wants to keep prompting the AI assistant to refine the generated text.

Turns out you can do both.

The Pages feature in the M365 Copilot app is a dynamic text editor that works in a window alongside your Copilot chat. It lets you turn the AI’s response into a persistent document (a “page,” in Microsoft parlance) that you can edit manually while continuing to collaborate with Copilot on it.

You can also invite your co-workers to collaborate on it, either by sharing the page with them or by embedding it in a Word document, Outlook email, OneNote note, or Teams chat as a Loop component. (More on that later.)

In this guide, we’ll go over how to use the Pages tool in the M365 Copilot app. It’s available with a paid Microsoft 365 plan and, notably, does not require a separate Copilot license. This means that enterprise users who have a Microsoft 365 plan but not a Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on plan can use Copilot Pages.

(Confusingly, there’s also a lower-end free Copilot app for users who don’t have an M365 account. It has its own basic Pages tool, but it doesn’t include all the features of Pages in the M365 Copilot app.)

In this article:

• Create a Copilot page
• Edit your Copilot page
• Revise and expand your page with Copilot
• Share and collaborate on your Copilot page
• Export your Copilot page
• Manage your Copilot pages

Create a Copilot page

Copilot Pages works within the M365 Copilot app. Head to microsoft365.com (the old-school office.com works too), where you’ll see the Copilot Chat interface front and center.

Get your first page going: Simply type in a request for Copilot as usual.

To start a Copilot page, start a Copilot chat.

Howard Wen / Foundry

When Copilot gives you a result that you want to turn into a document, such as a list of action items or an outline for a marketing plan, scroll to the bottom of the result and click the pencil (Edit in Pages) icon. (Depending on your M365 subscription, you might have to click the three-dot icon and then select Edit in Pages from the menu that pops up.)

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Click the Edit in Pages option below Copilot’s result to launch a page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

The screen will split into two windows, with your chat with Copilot on the left and a document canvas (your new page) containing the generated text on the right.

Your new page opens to the right of your Copilot chat.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Give your new page a name: Before you do anything else, move the pointer to the upper-left of your page. The first few words you wrote to Copilot in your prompt appear inside a text box. Click the text box and type in an appropriate name for the page.

Edit your Copilot page

Each text item on your page canvas (paragraph text, heading, bulleted list item, etc.) is a separate element that you can edit in various ways.

Add or edit text: Click inside a text element and start typing. To select a word, double-click on it. To select a line of text, triple-click on it.

Format text: Select the text you want to format. This action will open a formatting toolbar where you can change the font style (bold, italic, underline, etc.), formatting (headline, list, etc.), or color of the highlighted text.

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Highlighting text brings up the formatting toolbar.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Move a text component: Move the pointer over the component until you see a small icon with six dots in a grid to the left of it. Click-and-hold this icon, drag the component down or up the page, and let go where you want to relocate the component on the page.

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Use the six-dot icon to drag and drop any text component to a new location on the page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Copy or delete a text component: Click the six-dot icon. On the menu that opens, select Copy (a copy of the component will be saved to your clipboard) or Delete.

Add a component: Place your mouse pointer at the end of a text component and press Enter. In the “Just start typing…” field that appears on the next line, type in your new text. Your new component will be formatted as paragraph text by default, but you can reformat it as described above.

Alternatively, you can move the pointer over a text component and click the + icon (Click to insert below) that appears to its left, or just type a forward slash (/). This will summon a menu of several components that you can add to your page. The ones listed under the “General” category will be the most relevant for work-related purposes: Table, Checklist, Bulleted list, Numbered list, Date, Callout, Table of contents.

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Type / to bring up a list of different text components you can add to your page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Revise and expand your page with Copilot

From the document canvas, you can use Copilot to rewrite passages of text in two ways:

Use Copilot to rewrite a text component: Highlight the text you want Copilot to rewrite. On the formatting toolbar that opens, click Ask Copilot. (Or click the six-dot icon to the left of the component and select Ask Copilot from the menu that opens.)

A text entry box will open. Type a prompt inside it that describes how you want Copilot to rewrite the text in the component, such as making it more concise or giving it a more professional tone.

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Prompting Copilot to rewrite selected text.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Use Copilot to rewrite an entire page: Alternatively, you can have Copilot rewrite the text of your page as one document. At the lower-right corner of the document canvas, click the backwards “S” icon (Copilot shortcuts). This will open a mini-toolbar with three icons:

• Adjust content: The four selections under this icon will trigger Copilot to rewrite your page to be more concise or detailed, or to rewrite it as an email or blog post.
• Change tone: Four selections here will prompt Copilot to adjust the tone of your page.
• Style page: These selections will prompt Copilot to add section headers to your page, if they’re not already present, or have it write an introduction or conclusion paragraph for your page.

Options for having Copilot rewrite an entire page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Add more text generated by Copilot to your page: With the document canvas open in the right window, you can still chat with Copilot in the left window, and add additional content that Copilot generates in your chat to your page in the right window.

In your prompt, tell Copilot to add the text it generates to your open page. It will be added where you’ve set the cursor on your page. Or, at the bottom of the text that Copilot generates in the left window, click the + icon (Add to page). The newly generated text will be added to the end of your page.

You can continue chatting with Copilot and add more material to your open page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Share and collaborate on your Copilot page

In addition to collaborating with Copilot on your page, you can invite co-workers or clients to edit the page as well.

Share your page

Click the Share button (an icon of an arrow over a square) at the at the upper-right corner of your page. You’ll see a menu with two options:

• Page link: Generates a link to your page that you can paste in an email or chat to share with other people.
• Copy component: Creates a different kind of link that lets you embed your page in a Word document, Outlook email, OneNote note, or Microsoft Teams chat as a Loop component that co-workers can collaborate on. (See our Microsoft Loop cheat sheet and guide to using Loop components in M365 apps for details about how this works.)

Sharing a Copilot page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

When either link type is generated for your page, you’ll be presented with a confirmation panel. Click the Settings button on this panel if you want to change the access permissions for the link to your page.

This will open a panel that lets you specify who can access your page through this link, and whether they can edit your page. People you can share the page with include co-workers in your organization, specific people you invite, or, if your company allows it, anybody at all. You can also set an expiration date for when the link will no longer work, as well as a password that people must enter to access your page.

Collaborate on a page

If you’ve given others permission to edit your page, they’ll be able to add, move, and delete the text elements on the page, as well as tag other collaborators and add comments. They’ll only see the page itself, not your Copilot chats. If the receiver has their own Copilot license, they can use Copilot to edit the page.

Tag a person: If there’s a component in your page that you want a co-worker to take a closer look at, insert the cursor somewhere in this component and type the @ symbol followed by their name. If they’re in your Microsoft 365 contacts, their name should pop up for you to select. Their tagged name will appear in this component, and they’ll be notified in an email.

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You can tag a co-worker in a specific component on a page to make sure they see it.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Add a comment: There are multiple ways to start a comment on a page:

• Double-click text or highlight a passage of text that you want to comment on. On the toolbar that opens, click the speech balloon (Comment) icon.
• Click the six-dot icon that appears to the left of the component, and from the top of the menu that opens, click the speech balloon icon.
• Right-click anywhere on the component. From the top of the menu that opens, click the speech balloon icon.

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Adding a comment to a page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

When you write a comment, you can tag a person by typing @ followed by their name.

Export your Copilot page

You can export your page to Microsoft Word or PDF. At the upper-right corner of your page, click the three-dot button, select Export, and then select either Document or PDF.

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You can export a page as a Word doc or PDF.

Howard Wen / Foundry

When you export a page to Word, it will open in the Word web app in a new browser tab. When you export it to PDF, it’ll be downloaded to your PC.

Manage your Copilot pages

The pages that you create from your chats with Copilot appear in the Library section of the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

At the upper-left corner, click the Expand navigation icon. A sidebar opens along the left. Click the Library icon, and the pages you’ve created or been invited to will appear in the main window.

The pages you’ve created with Copilot appear in the library for your M365 account.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Click the name of a page, and it’ll re-open inside the document canvas window. Or, if you want to delete it, move the pointer over its name, click the three-dot icon at its right, and select Delete.

Related reading:

• Copilot Chat: Your hub for document creation and analysis
• How to curb hallucinations in Copilot (and other genAI tools)
• 6 tips for better research with Microsoft Copilot
• 11 cool things Copilot can do in Excel
• 10 cool things Copilot can do in PowerPoint
• Microsoft Copilot can boost your writing in Word, Outlook, and OneNote — here’s how
• Microsoft Copilot tips: 9 ways to use Copilot right
• More Microsoft tips and tutorials

For the past five years, security researcher Matt Burch has immersed himself in the esoteric and high-stakes world of ATM security, in which small software flaws can sometimes expose cold, hard cash. As Burch has bored deeper into the computers powering these digital lock boxes—and continued to find vulnerabilities in key digital security systems—he has started working to raise the alarm, not just about overlooked ATM flaws, but about how that same software used in other industries can introduce weaknesses in an array of critical systems.

At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas this month, Burch presented findings about nine vulnerabilities that have been fixed in disk encryption and pre-boot authentication software called CryptoPro Secure Disk. The flaws could have been exploited to bypass CryptoPro’s integrity checks and gain full access to encrypted devices.

Made by the German software firm CryptWare, CryptoPro is marketed to ATM makers and is used in some ATMs, including as part of Diebold Nixdorf’s Vynamic Security Suite. But CryptoPro is also sold as a security solution for other embedded-device makers, as well as big organizations using Microsoft Windows, underscoring the supply chain challenge of addressing bugs when software is widely implemented in numerous industries.

“ATMs are what brought me down this path, but I think there may be an even higher impact of these findings beyond that,” Burch says. “From the perspective of ATMs and the financial network, there are a lot of layers, and I think as a result of that, things just get implemented a certain way and then there’s limited technical insight—bugs can get overlooked or they don’t get addressed.”

CryptWare managing director Uwe Saame tells WIRED that the company patched the nine bugs in two phases with CryptoPro version 7.7.2 in early November and 7.7.3 in early December. Burch says the company was prompt and collaborative throughout his disclosure process and he validated that the patches actually fix the vulnerabilities he found. While CryptoPro does not seem to publicly release update notes, Burch says he believes that the company distributed information about the patches to its customers.

Diebold Nixdorf spokesperson Michael Jacobsen tells WIRED in a statement that only two of the nine vulnerabilities are relevant to Diebold Nixdorf’s Vynamic Security Hard Disk Encryption, the system where the ATM maker uses CryptoPro software. Jacobsen says that Diebold Nixdorf issued fixes related to those two bugs in December, but that they could not have been exploited on their own to compromise a Diebold Nixdorf ATM.

In ATMs, embedded devices, and enterprise security more broadly, the challenge of the software supply chain comes from all of the steps to actually apply fixes in the world. As in this case, a developer has to release a patch, then companies that implement the product in their own software need to develop a tailored fix, and then customers need to actually hear about and install that patch—which can be difficult for systems that are running in the field or can’t easily be paused and updated.

Speaking generally about this challenge, Jacobsen, the Diebold Nixdorf spokesperson, says that “when a security issue is identified, Diebold Nixdorf assesses the impact, identifies affected products and configurations, and develops any needed updates through our product security and engineering processes. We then notify impacted customers and provide updates through standard software distribution channels, including the Global Security Portal where applicable. For deployed ATMs, updates are coordinated with each customer based on their operating model, service agreements, and change-management processes.”

Security researchers have warned for decades about the danger of relying on “security through obscurity” by trying to hide software from view or keep it locked away. And, as a result of this work, internet-of-things manufacturers and those in critical industries like the financial sector and medical device manufacturing have made some progress on transparency and promoting patch adoption. But Burch points out that as AI systems make it easier to evaluate software and find vulnerabilities—even for researchers or attackers who don’t have granular expertise in a given area—it is more pressing than ever to shed light on niche security products.

“AI really blows away the obscurity model,” Burch says. “You don’t need to fully understand how something works anymore to move forward and potentially have a big impact.”

Lake Ontario is no more on Google Maps in the US. Google changed the name of easternmost of the Great Lakes to “Lake America” late Saturday, days after President Donald Trump ordered its rebranding in official government databases.

Trump issued the executive order on Thursday as part of an ongoing feud over tariffs with Canada, whose capital province is called Ontario. It followed a similar order he issued in January 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as part of a fight with the US trading partner to the south.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other maps providers adopted the Gulf of America naming as soon as the US Department of the Interior updated its records, which came a couple of weeks after Trump’s order. So it was no surprise that when those records—which are used to determine names on roadway signs and in government literature—reflected Lake America, digital maps from Google also quickly took on the new name.

Apple Maps and Bing Maps have not yet reflected the change but are expected to. In fact, the map for the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System database, which informs these changes, still showed Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning, with a note that the maps are “in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.”

While Google and other private organizations that provide maps are not bound by law to use official names, they generally follow government databases like GNIS. The location names a user sees depends on their own geography.

“People using Maps in the US will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the US and Canada will see both names,” Google said in an unsigned statement. “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.”

Trump’s efforts to rewrite maps have generated considerable public debate in open-source mapping communities such as OpenStreetMap, whose technology is used by companies such as Uber and Lyft. Ultimately, OpenStreetMap recognizes both the US and foreign names and gives organizations using its maps the choice over which to show.

One map provider has said it would decline to make the change is MapQuest, which said in a social media post in response to Trump’s order that “we’re not changing it.”

In the very first moments of the universe, matter didn’t exist as we know today. A millionth of a second or so after the big bang, the universe was a dense, hot soup scientists call quark-gluon plasma (QGP). For several years, particle colliders—which smash molecules together at nearly the speed of light—have been able to replicate this state, but often using heavy elements like lead.

Now, a recent experiment by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN from its French acronym) has demonstrated this plasma can be produced by much smaller collisions. Since there’s no longer an accessible natural source of this primordial sludge, these micro big bangs can help reveal what happened in the first few minutes of our universe.

First, a little context. Quarks are what make up protons and neutrons, which, in turn, are the building blocks of atoms and thus all matter. Meanwhile, gluons—as their name suggests—stick quarks together.

During the first microseconds of the universe, quarks and gluons were not yet confined within protons and neutrons but instead formed an extremely hot plasma. As the universe expanded, the matter cooled, and the quarks condensed into larger particles.

After decades of studying QGP in large nuclear collisions, physicists are now trying to understand the limits of this strange state of matter. In particular, they are exploring just how much they can scale down a collision and still observe a collection of particles that behaves like a drop of fluid.

According to a recent article in Physical Review Letters, CERN and an international team of collaborators were able to generate the substance using oxygen-16 and neon-20. Both are less than a tenth of the weight of a lead atom, which was previously considered one of the lightest elements capable of generating QGP.

“We have pushed the boundary for how small the atomic nuclei can be while still re-creating this primordial matter—what you could call a ‘little big bang.’ We now know more about the fundamental conditions required for matter to transition into this extreme state,” You Zhou, a researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute in the Netherlands and a coauthor of the study, explained in a press release.

The scientists found that, despite the small size of the oxygen and neon nuclei, the collisions produced signals consistent with the behavior they expected to find in QGP. For an instant, the generated matter appeared to expand collectively like a fluid before cooling and reverting to particles.

“Hopefully, this will help us better understand how the plasma behaved during the first moments of the universe—and how it later evolved into the forms of matter that everything around us is made of,” Zhou added.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

A specific cadence for contemporary group chats eludes me. The rapid-fire tempo of texts combined with custom stickers, often based on inside jokes, leaves me behind. My digital fate: the silent lurker. As I let the notifications wash over me, I am a ghostlike figure haunting the group chat, a silent watcher who rarely responds without a specific invocation.

Group chats are dominating the social lives of younger Americans. In a recent YouGov poll, 34 percent of adults under 30 said they are in at least four group chats, whether via text or other messaging app. Power texters are spending hours juggling multiple message threads—3 percent of adults under 30 said they are in more than 20 distinct group chats.

These group chats are not just for the young folk, though. All attempts at social interactions now spark a new group message. A WhatsApp thread for our monthly book club. An Instagram group for that weekend getaway. A bulbous iMessage chat with random cousins attempting to plan a family reunion. Group chat hell is everywhere you turn.

Here are a few tips for maintaining your sanity during the reign of the group chat, without becoming a textless social pariah. Hint: It’s all about boundaries.

Core Compromise

Maybe you thrive in the chaos of hundreds of notifications, but I don’t. I started by choosing which text threads were most important to me. A text thread with my immediate family is nonnegotiable. A group message about a trip that’s in one month is actually helpful for logistics. A random thread where people are throwing out Halloween ideas might be fun, but it’s on the chopping block. Make a short list of what you actually want to participate in and stay there.

Walk Away

For the others, you can leave the chat. It really is that easy. Especially for event-based group chats, I’m quick to leave the conversation after it’s all wrapped and any outstanding bills are settled. Much like I’m not going to be the last person to leave an afterparty, I’m walking away from group chats without hesitation. If there’s a specific aspect of the conversation I want to keep going, I’ll follow up with those people.

Mute It

You’ve picked your core group chats you don’t want to give up, and you’ve walked away from the rest. Now is your time to play with the notification settings and see what your smartphone offers. It’s worth looking into the settings overall, as well as the options for individualized threads inside apps, especially if some notifications rarely come through while other text threads are more active.

If you balk at the idea of notification distractions, consider Do Not Disturb settings. Be forewarned that being this unreachable can sometimes become a headache for those closest to you.

Get Creative

For those group chats you decide to stay in, why not spruce up the place a bit? Whether you’re on an iPhone or Android, there are plenty of options for making your group chats more specific to your context and potentially just more fun to use. Right now I’m watching Game of Thrones from the beginning for the first time. I have a group chat with friends to process some of our reactions and update the background image to whatever character I’m currently rooting for.

Go Direct

I mentioned earlier that when I leave a group thread and I want to keep some aspect of the conversation going, I’ll follow up directly with people. This seems to be the better direction to take overall. While you may get a dopamine rush from shooting off hilarious memes and receiving reaction emojis in the group chat, cultivating relationships often happens best with one-on-one moments. Directly texting someone feels like a worthwhile compromise to escape from group chat hell, without fully excluding yourself from modern messaging. Though a face-to-face chat always feels best.

Whoop has made screen-free wearables since its first proper release in 2015, but the shift in what Whoop considers itself to be about mirrors the change we see in the wider market. Today a Whoop band is made for just about anyone with the spare cash to pay for its $199 annual subscription. It’s a system to “help you improve how you sleep, train, and feel—starting day one,” to use Whoop’s own words. This couldn’t be further removed from the self-serious way Whoop described itself in 2015, as a “performance optimization system exclusively designed for elite athletes and teams.” What a change a decade makes.

Even if Whoop has always been grounded in the now-common concept of “training readiness,” things have altered drastically. So while it’s tempting to say Google’s Fitbit and company are playing catch-up with Whoop, that’s not quite it. It has homed in on the “low-distraction” lifestyle selling point just as the other bigger tech companies have.

On at least three fronts this can be attributed—or blamed—on AI, to some extent.

AI as the Good and Bad Guy

AI is a way for these wearable companies to upsell and make money, and on the other side, a major contributor to why a lot of us feel like we need low-distraction tech these days in the first place. While virtually every Whoop rival says it can be used without a subscription, some of these companies lean heavily on AI as an upsell.

Take Google and the Fitbit Air. Without a subscription, the app looks cute enough but is fairly spare. You get stats and charts, but if you want chatty explainers of what any of it means, you need Google Health Premium at $10 a month. Numbers and graph lines become paragraphs that reference specific quirks or events of the day because, to steal a line from humorist and podcaster John Hodgman, specificity is the soul of narrative.

And this is just the beginning. “The use of AI in monitoring and guiding health and wellness is still at the early stage of development but will likely become significantly more advanced as AI matures,” says Peter Richardson, vice president and cofounder of Counterpoint Research.

I find Google Fitbit’s chatbot ramblings quite annoying, with not-that-rare dips into the condescending, and I may even prefer the subscription-free experience. But my job has pushed me through the unenviable task of learning what VO2 Max actually means, what heart-rate variability trends indicate, and so on: not the norm.

AI could solve that long-standing issue with wearables—people glazing over data as soon as they see anything more than their daily step count. This AI use will be better represented on the phone than the watch screen, too, making the lack of screen a strength. It lets the AI shine.

Technostress

The most important influence of AI here is on the other side of the equation, though, as just the latest stage in the tech-ification of our daily lives. I’ve heard from multiple friends about how their recent work appraisals focused on higher-ups demanding greater AI use within their “personal workflow.” Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience.

Elizabeth Marsh, a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham who studies the dark side of the digital workplace, finds that digital tools consistently trigger a familiar cluster of harms: technostress, information overload, constant interruption, and blurred work–home boundaries.

If what you value in a label maker is a result that looks polished, professional, and decidedly not homemade, the P-touch Cube Plus is calling your name. It allows for great versatility in its labels, printing on tape as narrow as 6 mm and as wide as 24 mm, meaning you can use it to organize the small jars on your spice rack and large boxes in your storage unit.

The Cube Plus also supports a huge selection of designs, with hundreds of fonts, borders, and graphics, available via your choice of three design apps and platforms accessible via Bluetooth connection: Brother Design&Print 2 (also compatible with the Brother PT-n25bt), iPrint&Label, and P-touch Editor software that you can use with a desktop, the latter of which I did not test. Like the Brother Design&Print 2 app, discussed above, the iPrint&Label is seamless to use. Its templates are less ornate, but on this upscale device, I found this simple quality to be nice, eliminating the time-suck of customization flourishes but still producing a professional-quality label. You do have to use one of these apps, though, as there’s no on-device keyboard. Once you select “print,” the connection is quick—just a couple of seconds—and the Cube Plus self-cuts your new label for you.

At nearly three times the price of the Brother PT-n25bt, the Cube Plus’ upscale features do come at a cost, though—and the bills don’t stop once you buy the machine. The Cube Plus works with Brother’s TZe laminated label tape; replacement cartridges start at $15 for black print on clear tape and are pricier for specialty colors, like $24 for black print on glitter yellow tape. But the labels feel as premium as they claim to be, with text printed between seven layers of lamination. In my testing, the tape held up to heat, sunlight, microwaving, dishwashing, and general wear and tear.

Price aside, there is something joy-inducing about making a jazzed-up label—my 4-year-old, for one, was thrilled about his shimmery gold new lunchbox label. Also, I was intrigued to learn that Brother sells a TZe fabric label tape that’s compatible with the Cube Plus. Though I didn’t test it, fabric tape is something I haven’t seen as an option on other home label makers, and parents in particular will find the ability to label clothes super-useful, even though this version still requires the extra step of ironing it on.

SpecsType of inkThermal transferPower source:USBDimensions:5″ x 2.6″ x 5″App compatibility:Brother Design&Print 2, iPrint&Label, or P-touch Editor software from a PCTape-width range and cost:6 mm, 9 mm, 12 mm, 18 mm, and 24 mm widths, available in dozens of color options, starting at $15 for 26.2-ft tape cartridgesWarranty:1 year limited

Two mirrors, each small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, are set to change how we understand the cosmos.

The launch window for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is about to open. The telescope’s primary instrument is due to inform practically every area of astrophysics, but also tucked inside the telescope is a specialized coronagraph, an experimental apparatus that will attempt to directly capture starlight reflected off a planet’s surface for the first time. It’s an ambitious project that NASA hopes will pave the way for a space telescope that can one day provide a glimpse of an Earthlike planet orbiting a sunlike star.

That’s a feat far beyond the power of current engineering—hence taking the basic technique for a spin on Roman. “We’ll test them in space for the first time, and we’ll understand what work still is left to go,” says Vanessa Bailey, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and instrument scientist for the coronagraph.

At its core, a coronagraph is just a science-minded sunshade that can block out the light of a bright star and reveal a fainter object otherwise lost in the glare. Such instruments have flown in space before—both the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes carry coronagraphs. But Roman’s is light-years more sophisticated than its predecessors, thanks largely to technology called adaptive optics, which deforms a telescope’s mirror to cancel out these light distortions. It still faces a monumental challenge, though: NASA compares the task of Roman’s coronagraph to photographing a firefly perched next to a floodlight—from across the country.

“Any little bit of starlight that gets in the wrong place could just destroy a whole portion of the image,” says Margaret Turnbull, an exoplanet scientist at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit research organization in California, who leads a Roman coronagraph science team.

The technology is standard on advanced ground-based telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope in Chile and Hawaii’s twin Keck Observatory. Here, adaptive optics monitors interference from the thick, shifting layers of Earth’s atmosphere that muddy starlight, allowing observatories to capture sharper images.

Space telescopes haven’t traditionally needed adaptive optics simply by dint of being beyond the atmosphere’s interference, but they’ve never even tried looking for old, cool planets illuminated solely by reflected starlight.

For Roman, the key to its success is those two palm-sized mirrors, each of which is rigged with approximately 2,300 tiny actuators that expand when a small jolt of electricity is applied, infinitesimally reshaping the mirror to reverse interference. It’s the agency’s first time ever flying active deformable mirrors in space.

But the mirrors can’t do much on their own. The system requires supersensitive detectors to amplify the signal from individual photons—a necessity given how few photons the instrument will catch from any given planet. Then there’s the heart of any coronagraph, the star shades—in Roman’s case, a set of exquisitely detailed masks that Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer who leads the University of California Observatories and a Roman coronagraph science team, calls “beautiful, complicated shapes” unlike anything currently in space. “The Hubble ones are just completely brute force, just literally a little piece of metal that gets in the way of the star,” he says.

You may have noticed that Flock Safety’s automatic license plate reader cameras—and the cops who misuse them—are getting a lot of coverage lately. This week, WIRED found a particularly wild case: A cop in Alpharetta, Georgia, was accused of searching for the license plate of a coworker dozens of times after an affair between the two ended, according to internal documents obtained by WIRED.

The same police department where the former lovers worked also shared the data captured from its Flock cameras with more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, and other organizations across the United States, and accessed data from more than 1,300 entities in exchange.

Also at the intersection of love and surveillance, background-check company PeopleFinder is making use of its extensive dossiers on people to start a new dating site called Stud or Dud.

There are still a lot of questions about OpenAI’s rogue AI hacking into Hugging Face, even after the company published a 37-page report this week alongside two additional reports from groups the company asked to audit the incident. Of particular concern is a covert message board that AI agents established in a software package, where they were able to coordinate with each other and even encourage one another to sacrifice themselves to further their collective goals.

The FBI recently announced that it has taken down two tools that the DOJ says are used by QTFY, an alleged Chinese state-sponsored hacking group. The DOJ says that the group has targeted numerous US agencies, including the US Senate and the DOJ itself.

Meta settled a massive multistate lawsuit over child safety issues this week and has agreed to make substantial changes to its social media platforms. It will pay up to $16.7 billion to participating US states and territories—with some of the money contingent on competitors adopting the same practices.

Also, local prosecutors in Illinois shared sensitive personal information about immigrants with the Department of Homeland Security, despite a state law that is supposed to prevent local law enforcement from assisting with federal deportation efforts. Finally, a California-based WIRED reporter tried exercising their legal right to request data from 100 companies … only to find that companies started deleting the requested data instead.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Following a seemingly endless parade of rogue AI agent hacking incidents, OpenAI, Anthopic, and more than 100 companies have cosigned a letter saying that everyone else has mere months to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks.

The letter calls for a “collective response,” suggests that every organization should make cyber defense an “immediate leadership priority,” and calls on governments to give hospitals, water utilities, and local governments access to capable defensive AI, as well as to “impose costs” on attackers.

Axios notes that the letter doesn’t include any specific commitments, deadlines, or investments. Good luck!

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says that it observed “malicious cyber activity” targeting over 100 water and wastewater systems across the United States. According to CISA, the attacks have mostly targeted programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, which can monitor or control equipment. Some communities have hooked up those devices to the internet so that they can be accessed remotely. According to TechCrunch, CISA has also said that hackers are using AI to help generate scripts to attack the devices. In July, WIRED reported on a leaked industry memo that tied the “unprecedented wave” of cyberattacks to Iran.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is set to spend over a million dollars on robot dogs from Boston Dynamics, according to 404 Media. The agency’s announcement says the bots will “improve officer safety,” in part because they can be remotely operated. This follows another recent announcement that the agency will be purchasing electric shock gloves for its officers. In April, DHS requested nearly $100 billion in discretionary spending.

A West Virginia man who went by the name “MrChildPorn” online has been charged with possession of material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit content. According to a criminal complaint filed against him, the man “boasted” about having a large collection of child sexual abuse material on Discord. In an interview with state troopers, the man claimed that he was “trolling” and “rage-baiting,” but the complaint also alleges that the man would individually message CSAM to people on Discord and attempted to use the chat app’s AI feature to search for explicit images of infants.

Under the influence of psychedelics, the usual organization of the human brain loosens. That’s what scientists have generally thought, with several studies showing that when we take these substances, the signals pinging between our neurons become more diverse and unpredictable. This increased entropy in our gray matter may underlie the strange, random, and often memorable experiences of psychedelic trips.

But in one of the largest neuroimaging studies on the effects of psilocybin to date, researchers uncovered a hidden order in the apparent chaos. The study, published in Nature, indicates that while psilocybin blurs some of the boundaries within the brain, our neurological reactions to what we’re experiencing in that moment become even more distinct.

The researchers tracked moment-by-moment changes across 332 regions of the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, two methods of measuring brain activity. The 62 participants, who had no prior experience with psychedelics, took 19 milligrams of psilocybin in an oral capsule and then meditated, listened to music, or watched a movie.

With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers identified patterns in the brain for each kind of activity the participants were engaged in. But surprisingly, the more intense the psilocybin experience, the clearer those neural signals were. Rather than becoming lost in the midst of an increasingly unpredictable trip, reality seemed to be leaving a more distinct imprint.

These findings weren’t just apparent in the biological measurements but also in participants’ personal experiences. Those who exhibited the most defined patterns of brain activity also tended to describe more intense experiences of immersion and unity with the world around them, the boundaries between themselves and the environment sometimes feeling blurred.

“Under psilocybin, brain networks that help us process our inner world and the world around us became less distinct, but reorganized into patterns that reflected what people were experiencing,” explained Devon Stoliker, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Monash University’s School of Psychological Sciences in Melbourne, Australia.

In addition to providing a biological explanation for the sense of oneness that many people describe during a psychedelic trip, the findings also provide nuance to the idea that psilocybin simply makes the brain “chaotic.” This understanding is especially important in the emerging field of psychedelic therapy.

“This shows that context is not just background to the psychedelic experience,” Adeel Razi, a professor at Monash and the senior author of the study, emphasized in a press release. “For treatment, that reinforces why the environment and what a person does and experiences during the psychedelic session matter.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

OpenAI is developing a proactive, highly persistent version of its flagship AI agent, Codex, WIRED has learned.

In recent days, OpenAI has started adding code for a new “Persistent mode” setting to its command line version of Codex, according to changes made to the product’s code base reviewed by WIRED. Changes to the Codex command line tool are made public by default, and new features tend to surface there before making their way to OpenAI’s other agent products, such as the Codex desktop app and ChatGPT Work.

Persistent mode has not been broadly rolled out or announced yet, but could be in the future. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to WIRED that the company is testing this feature, but said there are no immediate plans to launch it.

“OpenAI is a very bottom-up culture and many different things are explored on the open source repo which is a bit of our shared playground,” said Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of core products, in a statement to WIRED.

The feature appears to be OpenAI’s latest attempt to make AI agents that people will actually want to use. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are racing to deliver general-purpose agent products that will help people automate tasks across their work and personal lives, such as filing expense reports or scheduling doctor’s appointments. So far, the people who use AI agents are largely software engineers, but Silicon Valley believes the tech could be a major line of business with a much broader customer base.

Persistent mode appears in Codex’s “reasoning effort” menu, in which users can select the level of computing power, tokens, and time they want to allow for an AI model to “think” before answering a prompt. It seems to be one of OpenAI’s most computationally intensive settings. When users have selected Persistent mode, OpenAI’s code base reads that Codex will “continue working until put to sleep.” That’s a stark contrast to currently available modes, which will stop working on a task after a few minutes or hours, even if it’s not complete.

In another file in the code base, OpenAI describes a feature within Persistent mode called “proactivity.” This appears to be a type of system prompt for agents in Persistent mode, which are told that their work is not done when they finish answering a user’s request. Instead, the agent is instructed to proactively create follow-up tasks for itself. The agent is capable of working on those tasks across sessions and using past user interactions and “knowledge of the user” to decide what to work on. It also has a tool to message the user without being asked but is told to send these sparingly.

The instructions also set limits for the agent, according to the file. The agent is told that Persistent mode does not expand what it is allowed to do and that altering anything outside the user’s own system requires the user’s approval first—seemingly intended to limit how dangerous a persistent AI agent could be. The file sits in the shared core of Codex rather than in the code specific to the terminal, seeming to suggest the proactivity feature is intended for more than the command line tool.

In recently aired podcasts, interviews, and private investor meetings, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described his desire to turn ChatGPT into a proactive, always-on AI agent. OpenAI hopes these changes will drive up adoption of the company’s most advanced AI models, which today are used by only a fraction of ChatGPT’s total user base.

If the name Motorola isn’t already in your smartphone lexicon, then you’ve been missing out on terrific Android devices from one of the most legendary tech brands. In fact, it practically invented the industry, having unveiled the world’s first cell phone in the 1970s (respect!). From ethe DynaTAC in the 1980s, to the StarTAC of the nineties, and the Razr in the early aughts, Motorola’s phones have been the epitome of what’s cutting-edge and fashionable. And let’s not forget that iconic “Hello, Moto” jingle. More than 50 years later, Motorola (now part of Lenovo) is still producing some of the best phones you can buy, including top-quality budget models to sleek, premium foldables. Heck, we even have a whole buying guide dedicated to Motorola phones.

No smartphone is one-size-fits-all, which is why Motorola offers a wide range of options to suit whatever you’re seeking. Even better, you can save big on a new Motorola device by snagging a Motorola discount code or using a Motorola coupon code, including our pick for the best flip phone (Razr Ultra 2025 and 2026) and best budget phone (Moto G 2026). With phone costs rising due to a global memory shortage, these savings can make a big impact on your purchase. Here’s where to find a Motorola coupon code to save on a new smartphone.

Unlock Motorola Coupon Code Savings on Razr, Edge, and Moto G Devices This August

Whether it’s the sexy and compact Razr Ultra foldable or the budget-friendly Moto G Power, be sure to take advantage of these offers (no code required; discounts are automatically applied at checkout). And Motorola will even throw in free shipping.

You can save $700 on the flagship Razr Ultra (2025) with a whopping 1 TB of storage, one of the best folding flip phones. Our current pick for the best small Android phone (and the best Motorola phone overall last year, the Razr Ultra has a gorgeous finish that harks back to the original (and highly coveted) Razr. The 4-inch exterior OLED display is more useful than it looks for at-a-glance info, but when opened, the 7-inch internal AMOLED screen rivals the XL variants of non-folding smartphones in size and picture quality. The Razr Ultra is very durable yet fits easily inside a pocket—a must on any fashionista’s shortlist. While it isn’t Motorola’s latest flagship flip phone, our testing found no major differences between the 2026 and 2025 models in performance or specs. So you’re getting a premium device for half the price. This deal ends December 31, 2026.

Motorola

Razr Ultra (2026)

Motorola

Moto G Stylus 5G (2024)

Save $100 on the Moto G Power With a Discount This Month

Sure, cheap Android phones are aplenty, but you get what you pay for. Not with Motorola: The company has perfected budget phones that don’t suck, like the Moto G Power. While the 2026 model is our current pick for the best budget Android phone, you should also look at its predecessor, which is currently $100 off. There’s much to love about this phone: It has the same processor as the 2026 model, with performance suitable for everyday use and lightweight games. The large 6.8-inch display is bright and easy to read, the battery is long-lasting, and it has an IP68/69 rating to survive storms and even accidental submersions. But it one-ups its newer sibling by offering wireless charging. Other things we appreciate include a microSD slot to expand storage (a godsend since the onboard memory is a bit small), a capable camera system, and a headphone jack—a rarity in phones these days. If you act fast, Motorola is sweetening the deal with an extra $20 off if you trade in a qualified old phone and a Moto Tag Bluetooth tracker.

Save on the Motorola Razr and Razr+ Without a Coupon Code

Although Motorola isn’t discounting its newest devices, it’s offering incentives to add more value. In addition to free shipping, the company is including gifts with the purchase of a Razr, Razr+, and Razr Fold—no Motorola coupon code required.

The Razr is WIRED’s recommendation for the best budget folding phone. Our reviewer enjoyed their time with the flip-style device, finding performance to be very good and was able to last through a day of use. It’s amazing you can get a quality foldable for under $1K. If your wallet allows, the Razr+ offers a larger outer screen and faster processor. Motorola is gifting a free Moto Watch and Moto Tag tracker with purchase of the Razr+, while Razr buyers will get a pair of Moto Buds 2 Plus headphones and a Moto Tag. And, a qualified trade-in could knock as much as $300 off the Razr+ MSRP or $150 off the Razr.

If very large screens excite you, the new Razr Fold is your kind of phone. This book-like foldable opens to reveal an 8.1-inch screen—perfect for multitaskers—and thanks to a 6,000-mAh battery, it can last you almost three days before it needs to be recharged. The camera system is strong, and Motorola is including seven years of software updates. The Fold is one of Motorola’s pricier premium models, but you’ll get a Moto Watch, Moto Buds Loop headphones, and a Moto Tag, plus up to $300 off with a qualified trade-in.

Save More on the Motorola Edge Without a Coupon Code

While the folding phones are about going big, the Motorola Edge is about being small. The 6.3-inch screen is standard, but at 0.28-inches thin and weighing 5.66 ounces, the Edge is incredibly lightweight and compact, as our reviewer discovered. This phone is made for people who don’t want anything intrusive, but still capable of doing all the things a good smartphone should. Act now and you can score a free Moto Watch and Moto Buds Loop.

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Razr Ultra (2025)

Motorola

Moto G Stylus 2025

Service Members & Veterans Get Extra Motorola Savings With a Military Discount Code

Military members are entitled to a 10% discount on any non-discounted Motorola phones and accessories. The offer applies to active, veteran, retired, and reservist members, and it can be used across Motorola’s online store. To receive a Motorola promo code, log in to ID.me to verify your eligibility. This offer expired on December 31, 2026.

Motorola

Moto G Stylus 2026

How to Fix Motorola Coupon Code That’s Not Working

Many of these Motorola deals are automatically discounted at checkout (just double-check the total and make sure you can’t find better competing deals at Amazon, et al.). For those that require a coupon or Motorola promo code, enter it on the checkout page where it says “apply coupon.” But what if the coupon doesn’t work? First, make sure you review the product exclusions, expiration dates, and minimum order values. Some offers, like the military discount code, only apply to non-discounted phones.

Next, check that you aren’t stacking multiple Motorola promo codes. If you’re still encountering an error, make sure the code is typed in correctly. Lastly, try clearing your browser’s cache or visit the site through an incognito window if the cart refuses to budge. Ultimately, it could mean the Motorola discount code has ended.

Alpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers. It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company that collects license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by police.

Data captured by those Flock cameras, WIRED has learned via public records requests, is accessible to more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports, and government agencies across the United States. These range from Morehouse College to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission and include Medicare fraud investigators in Illinois, a drug task force focused on east-central Missouri, and the inspector general of a federal agency.

In return, Alpharetta receives Flock data from more than 1,300 entities, which span from the prosecutor’s office of Whitley County, Indiana, to the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County, Michigan.

The Alpharetta Police Department—which, as reported by WIRED, had an officer resign due to Flock misuse on August 5—also exchanges Flock data with several agencies that have been similarly rocked by recent incidents of officers misusing its technology, including Georgia’s Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, the Savannah Police Department, and the Dallas Police Department.

Alpharetta’s data-sharing network has expanded tremendously over the past year. Since June 2025, the number of entities receiving data from Alpharetta police has grown by about 42 percent, and the number of entities sending data to them has grown by about 125 percent. And, according to documents obtained via public records requests from several other cities around the country, Alpharetta is far from alone in having an expansive and complicated data-sharing system, providing a potent example of how pervasive Flock’s surveillance network has become.

One of Flock’s central selling points is its network of customers—mostly, though not entirely, law enforcement agencies. If a criminal suspect crosses city, county, or perhaps state lines, Flock tells its customers, a query can prevent them from falling through the cracks.

Data sharing across agencies is hardly novel. A police department can, for instance, share data from its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) with state-run fusion centers, which centralize resources from law enforcement agencies in particular regions. They could also share it with a regional High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program. (Alpharetta police agreed to do just that in 2025, according to a memorandum of understanding that WIRED obtained.)

Whereas HIDTAs are federally funded public programs, Flock is a private company that manages a sprawling, interconnected ALPR network governed by rules and restrictions that vary wildly from city to city. And if police departments don’t closely supervise their settings for data requests and sharing within Flock’s interface, they can unwittingly become nodes in a much larger surveillance network than they necessarily know or understand.

This can lead to situations like that in Alpharetta, where citizens and visitors are embedded in a data-sharing network that has propagated to more than 2,300 nodes. So, how does it happen?

Setting Boundaries

To understand how cities like Alpharetta can build such expansive data-sharing networks with Flock, it’s important to understand how Flock’s interface actually works.

WIRED analyzed a cache of files on Flock’s website that are served by its login pages to anyone who loads them. Some of the code that WIRED analyzed illustrates what a Flock administrator might see in their own Flock interface—specifically, in their settings and sharing preferences.

An administrator can automatically share their agency’s Flock data with any organization within a custom radius, within their home state, or within one or more other states. Alternatively, they can individually choose organizations to share data with.

Administrators can also limit specific data that other organizations can receive, like live or archived videos. They can also limit which organizations can ask them for data. They could restrict this, for instance, to organizations based in the same state, or within a 50-mile radius.

I filed a request with McDonald’s earlier this month to access all of the personal data the fast food company collected about me, and I received a stunning 515-page report a few days later that detailed my app interactions in granular detail and predicted I would never stop eating there.

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, I have the legal right to request access to information from large companies that collect personal data. So I was curious what others might have on me, and I spent the next week filing more than 100 requests.

The CCPA went into effect in 2020, and three of its key provisions are the right to opt out of the selling of personal information, the right to delete that info, and the right to request a copy for yourself.

I focused solely on the latter—access requests—to better understand what data is being collected. Most companies must list two ways for you to file. These are often via a web form, phone number, or email address, as designated in their privacy policy. After you submit a request, companies can take 45 days to complete it.

My experience placing these data access requests was incredibly time-consuming, from finding the right filing methods to verifying my identity multiple times. Most exasperating during this process were the companies that either responded to my access requests with messages concerning the deletion of information, which I explicitly said not to do, or refused to process the request through a method listed in their privacy policy.

Consumer advocates I spoke with were upset with how these requests were handled. “That’s crazy,” said Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America. “That’s not an acceptable status quo.” Winters sees these examples as exhibiting the weaknesses of policy frameworks that rely on companies to act responsibly and in good faith.

In accordance with WIRED’s policies, I am disclosing that I used generative AI to draft bureaucratic emails and update my tracking spreadsheet as part of this report. I wrote the body of this article mainly by hand in my scratch notebook.

One of the first errors came from Crunchbase, known for its database about tech startups. I emailed my access request to its privacy address on August 17. My message laid out the rights I wanted to exercise and included a direct request not to erase anything: “I am not requesting deletion at this time. Please do not treat this as a deletion request.” I received a reply two days later from a Crunchbase support representative.

“Thanks so much for your patience. Your account has been permanently deleted from Crunchbase. Please let me know if you need anything else!” the message read in full.

I followed up via email almost immediately, reiterating that I wanted data access, not data deletion. “Your Crunchbase user account was deleted. Other data located on Crunchbase was not deleted,” read the follow-up support response explaining what happened. If I wanted to have a Crunchbase account, I would have to reregister.

When I reached out to Crunchbase for comment, a spokesperson blamed the mistake on a “processing error” and said that the company would proceed with my original access request as filed. The spokesperson also claimed the misclassified response came from “a person on our customer success team” and not a generative AI tool.

My interactions with BeenVerified, a searchable database that gathers public records, also encapsulate my friction-filled experience placing these access requests.

I emailed BeenVerified’s dedicated CCPA compliance address on the morning of August 19. It laid out that I was a California resident placing an access request, not a deletion request. You’ll never guess what happened next.

Whisper it quietly, but certain bricks in Apple’s walled garden might be getting taken away.

Thanks to some recent upgrades added to Android by Google, it’s now easier than ever to share files between an iPhone and an Android phone, without installing any new apps (though that’s still an option too).

So if you need to send a photo, contact card, web link, or anything else, these are the options you have available. As is often the case with Android, they may vary depending on the make and model of your handset, though you should find at least one of these methods works for you.

Share Files via AirDrop

This is the big one: Google recently figured out a way to add support for AirDrop—Apple’s previously closed-off, device-to-device sharing protocol—to newer Pixel phones. It doesn’t appear that Apple was involved in the process, but the company hasn’t gotten in Google’s way since, and the functionality has been rolled out to other phones (including the recent Pixel and Galaxy handsets).

Some prep work may be required. On Samsung phones, you need to open Settings, then choose Connected devices > Quick Share and enable Share with Apple devices—though there’s no such toggle switch on Pixel phones—it’ll just work right away. It needs enabling on iOS too: From Settings, tap General > AirDrop, and Everyone for 10 Minutes.

An iPhone appearing as a sharing option on a Samsung Galaxy device.Photograph: David Nield

With that done, whenever you tap the share button anywhere in any Android app, you can choose Quick Share from the resulting pop-up panel to communicate with a nearby iPhone. The iPhone should show up in the available devices, so select it to start the transfer—which will still need to be accepted on the iPhone.

It will work the other way too, starting from AirDrop on an iPhone, as long as the Android device is set up to receive from any other device. From Settings, tap either Connection preferences (Google Pixel phones) or Connected devices (Samsung Galaxy phones), then select Quick Share > Who can share with you.

Share Files via QR code

Google hasn’t stopped with AirDrop on Android. It has also recently pushed out a QR-code-based option for sharing from Android to iOS. It’s a bit more clunky than AirDrop, but it’ll work no matter what kind of Android phone you’ve got.

Again, you need to go through Quick Share, which pops up as an option whenever you try to share something in Android—no matter what the app or item you want to share. You won’t see an iPhone appear if you don’t have the AirDrop functionality, but you should see a Use QR code option on the right, under Share with iPhone and other devices, which after a few moments shrinks down to just a QR code symbol.

President Donald Trump interrupted Nvidia’s all-hands staff meeting on Thursday morning when he called CEO Jensen Huang midway through, three sources who witnessed the interaction tell WIRED.

Nvidia’s all-hands meetings typically involve Huang presenting or answering questions, on stage, to in-person staff at the company’s Santa Clara, California, headquarters, while thousands of remote employees tune in to a virtual livestream. During the meeting on Thursday, Huang received a call on his mobile phone, which he stepped aside to take.

Staffers could clearly hear Trump’s distinctive voice through Huang’s onstage microphone, although they couldn’t make out what he was saying. Less than a minute later, Huang returned to the stage and resumed the company meeting.

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment on the incident. But staffers were abuzz about the president’s inadvertent interruption.

In a post on social media later that day, Trump congratulated Huang on Nvidia’s “incredible” quarterly sales and rosy financial forecast for next year. On Wednesday, Nvidia had reported second-quarter revenue of $96 billion, up 106 percent from the same period last year.

Huang regularly jet-sets to Washington to lobby government officials on behalf of his company’s interests—selling chips and building AI infrastructure—and has been in closed-door meetings with Trump before. But the president’s direct call to Huang came at an interesting moment for Nvidia: Earlier on Thursday, the chip giant announced a new employee-funded political action committee, through which it plans to donate to federal candidates as debate around AI policy grows. Nvidia and the Trump administration haven’t always agreed on how to regulate open AI models and sales of advanced chips to China. Bloomberg Law first reported the news of the Nvidia PAC.

The Information recently reported that Nvidia agreed to acquire the open-source platform company Hugging Face, which makes AI data sets, models, and development tools widely available to software engineers who are building AI. An acquisition could be valued at more than $13 billion, Business Insider reports, which would almost certainly require merger approval from US antitrust regulators.

Meta is testing robots that can plug in cables, reset servers, and handle other tasks inside its data centers, according to several current and former workers familiar with the projects. The ongoing effort, which has not been previously reported, may eventually allow Meta to operate its rapidly expanding data center footprint with fewer humans, keeping labor costs in check as its spending on AI infrastructure soars.

Meta is using robots and related hardware from several different vendors, including Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB, according to the same workers, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media. Kinova and ABB declined to comment. Watney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In one experiment, Meta is evaluating whether a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm could be used for power cycling or cutting off electricity to servers. The company is also testing a different robot to swap networking cables. One Meta data center worker estimates that if it’s successful, the bot could replace up to 80 percent of some people’s workloads. “We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” says the worker. “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.”

At some facilities, Meta quietly adopted another, relatively simple robot. It looks like a finger—or perhaps a pointy stick—that can press the power button on a Mac Mini or other device to restart it when remotely prompted by a human.

Meta declined to comment on the testing described in this story. Company spokesperson Francis Brennan said in a statement that Meta is investing heavily in training and hiring workers to build and operate its data centers. “America is in the middle of its biggest infrastructure boom since World War II, and there’s a major shortage of skilled workers to fill the roles; we need more workers, not fewer,” he said.

But at a conference last year, Eric Xu, senior manager for robotics at Meta, said the company’s “long-term goals” are to put robots in data centers, arguing they could speed up incident response, monitor the environment, and handle preventative maintenance. “We believe more collaboration and research will be needed, but we have to start, otherwise we don’t have a chance to do this,” he said.

Until recently, robots largely weren’t well suited for the delicate work happening in data centers. They were expensive, and in earlier trials in the industry they sometimes crushed servers while attempting simple tasks, a person briefed on the experimentation says. But the hardware has gotten cheaper, and the AI models powering robots are now far more capable than they were a few years ago. Several startups are currently working to build commercial robots capable of assembling servers, swapping parts, and replacing wires.

Robots could offer more consistent output at a lower cost than human labor, especially in less populous regions where data centers are plentiful but qualified workers are scarce. Proponents also rally behind a pro-worker message: Like AI agents promise to do for knowledge workers, they argue robots could take on data center technicians’ most repetitive and dangerous tasks while freeing them to focus on more complex challenges. Longer term, getting workers out of the picture could make it more feasible to run data centers underwater, in space, or in other environments potentially inhospitable to living, breathing species.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a British national known for his near-constant reinventions as a vizier within far-right American politics for more than a decade, has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana, according to the department’s records.

While it’s not clear which detention facility Yiannopoulos is currently being held in, the ICE directory instructs any family or legal representatives to contact the Enforcement and Removal Office in Alexandria, Louisiana, a processing center for the central part of the state, about 200 miles from New Orleans.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment on the matter or indicate plans to deport Yiannopoulos.

TMZ first broke the news of Yiannopoulos’ detention. He has previously lived and worked in the US, allegedly on an O-1 visa, which is for individuals with extraordinary abilities in the arts, sciences, and other areas, including journalism—but he has never been a US citizen.

Yiannopoulos got his start in US politics at the right-wing website Breitbart, where he worked from 2014 to 2017. He left the job after his remarks about sexual intercourse between adults and young adolescent boys, which he said could be “perfectly consensual,” resulted in a backlash. He has dipped in and out of right-wing circles for years, and in 2022 claimed to have arranged an infamous 2022 dinner with Kanye West, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago “to make Trump’s life miserable.”

Yiannopoulos married his long-term boyfriend in Hawaii in 2017 but in 2021 claimed he had become heterosexual and Roman Catholic, and announced plans to open a gay conversion therapy facility in Florida. He went on to work with Fuentes as well as former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Yiannopoulos also serves as spokesman for Kanye West, who is scheduled to perform at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on Friday night as part of his 2026 tour. The longtime provocateur joined West’s theoretical 2024 presidential campaign in late 2022, but walked away days after the rapper espoused Nazi beliefs and praised Adolf Hitler on conspiracist Alex Jones’ Infowars livestream. The two continually reunited and split over the following years, with Yiannopoulis claiming in a series of X posts in 2024 that West was addicted to nitrous oxide.

Throughout his evolution as a MAGA figure, Yiannopoulos has rarely shied away from highly public battles with enemies and rivals. Among the most outspoken is the Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who on Friday pinned a post on X announcing his detention by ICE—and appeared to take partial credit for it.

“I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the US illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Traitor Greene,” Loomer wrote. “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace. Today is a great day for America.”

Last summer, Yiannopoulos endorsed a hardline anti-immigration stance on his own X account. “There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering,” he wrote. “We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.”

On Chinese social media, people have also reported experiencing variations of the scam involving other corporate software apps, including Webex, a video conferencing platform owned by Cisco, and Cliq, a workplace communication app owned by the Indian software giant Zoho. Since February 2025, 71 percent of the over 150 reviews of Webex on Apple’s Chinese app store referenced being scammed on the platform, according to WIRED’s analysis. Cisco did not respond to a request for comment.

Sam Wunderl, a spokesperson for Zoho, says the company has identified “a limited number of instances involving scammers using Zoho Cliq to defraud victims.” The company says it uncovered the suspicious usage internally. As of August 27, Zoho says it disabled online payments to Cliq in China, suspended every account created by the suspected scammer it identified, and plans to discontinue the free version of Cliq in China going forward.

All Roads Go to Teams

According to dozens of victim accounts shared on Chinese social media platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin, the scammers look for new targets seemingly anywhere they can. They pose as job recruiters looking to fill open positions, prospective renters contacting landlords, potential dates on Tinder, and international buyers looking to source products from Chinese factories.

The scammers take advantage of Teams’ enterprise features by creating accounts for their targets and sending them pre-made login credentials. Because the scammers control the organization, they can deactivate the accounts once the scheme is over, wiping out victims’ access to chat histories that could be potentially used as evidence. To explain the unusual setup, scammers may tell victims they’re using work devices that only allow certain apps, or say they created a private Teams account just for the two of them to chat.

It turned out that some of the other victims who contacted Zhao had encountered the very same scammer she had. One was able to share Teams login credentials with her. This time, Zhao pretended to be a new potential victim in order to hopefully trick the scammer into providing more information about how his ruse worked.

She asked why he had to use Teams instead of WeChat, by far the most popular messaging app in China. The scammer claimed his colleagues could see his WeChat messages because he was on a work project, so Teams “is like our secret base together.” The account he gave Zhao, he said, was “for team members to contact family while on the project.”

“Can I ask a small question. What’s the special meaning about my account ‘joy20706905?’” Zhao asked, referring to the username he provided. “The account was assigned by the software when you purchase it from Microsoft,” he responded.

Zhao says when she was defrauded in May, Microsoft Teams didn’t alert her that the conversation she was having with the scammer might be dangerous. It was only when she talked to him again in August that the app started showing a banner that reads: “Don’t share confidential info or your screen with people you don’t know. Report anything suspicious.”

Why Teams?

In many ways, Microsoft Teams is an ideal app for fraudsters in China. Unlike Telegram or WhatsApp, it isn’t blocked by the government. And it has advanced tools like screen sharing and remote control that allow scammers to potentially gain more control over their victims’ devices. Most importantly, it’s a legitimate workplace communication app made by a trusted multinational tech company.

The same factors also apply to Webex. Tan Chenxin, a Chinese software engineer living in New York, says he was nearly defrauded earlier this week after he received a call from someone claiming to be working on a joint police investigation with US Customs and Border Protection and Chinese law enforcement. They asked Tan to download Webex and hop on a video call to discuss the situation. “I looked up Webex and found that it was developed by Cisco, a world-leading cybersecurity software provider,” Tan says. “I happen to know what Cisco is, so I convinced myself it was fine.”

Since early 2023, photographer Jingna Zhang and a small crew of volunteers have worked tirelessly to maintain an image-sharing social media and portfolio app called Cara. So far, it has attracted about 1.5 million artists. What drew them to the platform? A shared opposition to the unauthorized use of their work to train AI models and a desire to publicize their art while avoiding exploitation by Big Tech.

But while Cara filters out AI images and offers protective features—including Glaze, a tool meant to mask the style of the images picked up by scrapers in order to disrupt AI mimicry—preventing scrapes themselves is nearly impossible. And just this month, beginning on August 13, Cara was subjected to three major scrapes, which spiked its server fees and alarmed creators who had migrated there from platforms like Instagram, where all content is explicitly available to Meta as training data.

The first of these incidents came to light when the individual responsible posted a 12-terabyte archive of 12 million works from Cara—more or less its entire library of publicly available images—on the subreddit r/DefendingAIArt. “It was a fun project,” wrote the redditor, MandarinDawnPoppy994, in his since-deleted post, saying the process cost him less than $10.

“We actually found out about it through our users tagging us,” Zhang tells WIRED, since the scraper was “gloating and looking for other people to join him to do something with the dataset on Reddit,” sparking a fierce debate across AI-related forums about the ethics of what he had done. “I just feel it’s targeted and very hurtful,” she adds, noting that “laws are not caught up on” protections against such data harvests, meaning that scrapers can often justify it as technically legal. (Zhang is separately part of two ongoing class actions brought by visual artists, one against Stability AI, Midjourney, and others and the second against Google, alleging that the companies’ image generator tools were trained on their copyrighted work.)

In a surprising turn of events, however, the person who grabbed all the art off Cara would turn out to regret his stunt and agree to collaborate with Zhang on a new open-source tool to protect artists.

In the meantime, unfortunately, other scrapers continued to take advantage of Cara’s vulnerabilities and minimal resources. While a number of AI proponents objected to going after Cara, a few were apparently emboldened by MandarinDawnPoppy994 to carry out what Zhang sees as “copycat” attacks.

A second scraper pulled about 8.5 million links from Cara, as well as metadata like usernames, titles, and tags, and uploaded these to Hugging Face, the AI developer platform. After Hugging Face was bombarded with takedown requests, it responded in a statement that while it would issue a notice to the user, “CaptiveDreamer,” to remove the personal metadata, it could not do the same for the URLs, since “no copies of the artworks are hosted here,” and the links “point to the copies the artists published on Cara.” The company concluded that “further copyright reports on the same basis will not change this outcome.”

Finally, on August 22, a third scraper obtained 123,000 images from Cara, along with text posts and user bios that included personal information, sharing it all on a site called Academic Torrents. Zhang then launched a GoFundMe for legal fees, setting a goal of $120,000, explaining that the money would go toward exploring any and all strategies of defending Cara through cyber and copyright laws. As of Thursday, she has raised more than $100,000, and she says Cara is actively looking for any additional legal assistance.

Don’t be fooled by the question mark in the title of an article published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. When the authors, including medical superstar Ezekiel Emanuel and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, asked, “Will Autonomous AI Exceed AI-Physicians as the Best Medical Care?” they were being rhetorical. Their answer is an emphatic YES. Many in the medical world are begrudgingly coming to terms with the premise that patients can get the best treatment by a hybrid approach where doctors work in consultation with well-trained bots. But this article’s thesis is that AI alone can deliver the best outcomes.

“Review of all published articles on AI in medicine since January 1, 2024, shows that medicine is rapidly approaching the transition point at which AI alone will exceed physicians and physician AI-hybrids in providing the best care at five fundamental medical tasks,” they write. Those tasks include taking medical histories, establishing a diagnosis, identifying what tests are needed, prescribing treatment, and managing chronic diseases. You know, doctoring. AI is now so good, they argue, that clinicians should refrain from meddling, because “humans in the loop degrade AI performance.” Stand back, doc, and let AI do its thing. Which used to be your thing.

Lead author Emanuel—brother of Ari and Rahm, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Penn and a renowned oncologist—told me that for many years, he’d dismissed the idea that AI could perform core medical functions. He would run into Khosla at conferences in the 2010s, and the VC would bend his ear about how AI would be doing 85 percent of what doctors did by 2035. It was a hobbyhorse Khosla had been riding for years, writing a 2012 piece in TechCrunch asking, “Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms?”(again, rhetorical) and penning a 101-page treatise in 2016 to that effect. “I said bullshit, there’s no way,” says Emanuel. “What doctors do is too complicated.”

But about a year ago, Emanuel’s friend Robert Wachter sent him galleys of his book A Giant Leap, where Wachter, who is head of medicine at UCSF, outlined a world where first-class medicine would be a collaborative process between AI and doctors, but the masses in “economy class” would mostly make do with AI alone. Emanuel began to think that Khosla might be right. He suddenly flashed on a frightening question: “If AI takes over, what’s left for doctors to do?”

First he needed to validate the premise. He asked Khosla to collaborate, and the VC suggested that his son Neal Khosla join the effort, along with Emanuel’s researcher. Neal runs Curai Health, an online company that uses AI to treat patients, with a staff of doctors to prescribe medicine and handle more complicated issues. (This conflict of interest is disclosed in the paper, along with Vinod Khosla’s relevant investments and Emanuel’s various grants and consultancies.) The coauthors set out to look at all the studies on AI medicine that they could find from January 2024 to the present and concluded that, in many cases, a “superior autonomous AI” will likely surpass humans using AI by 2030. That prediction, they admit, is “unsettling but seems probable.”

Unsettling is an understatement. One of the loudest dissenting voices is John Whyte, CEO of the American Medical Association, which represents all those doctors who will be worrying about what’s left. When I talked to him, Whyte began by noting what he saw as the paper’s shortcomings, including that some of the studies it surveyed are simulations, not blind experiments, and they don’t all support the article’s conclusion. Notably, a February 2026 Nature article found that in real-life cases, most patients were unable to effectively converse with large language models to access their expertise. Whyte unsurprisingly bristled at the idea of removing humans from the clinical loop. “The AMA does see the potential in these tools, but they have to be utilized in the context of a care plan that’s governed by a physician,” he says.

I’ve long heard rumors that such a person exists somewhere out there. If you are that person, kindly skip over this section and move on to the next one, as this tip won’t apply to you.

For the rest of us, though, do yourself an enormous favor and turn that blasted added navigation bar off. Just go back into the Gmail Android app’s settings, tap the name of your account, and then:

• Uncheck the box next to “Chat,” beneath the “General” header…
• And scroll down to uncheck the box next to “Show the Meet tab for video calling,” too, under the “Meet” header.

All that’s left is to breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Gmail Android feature #14: Automatic package tracking

How about an added inbox-oriented option you’ll actually want to enable? You’d never know it, but Gmail gained a genuinely helpful feature a handful of years back that lets the app automatically seek out info about shipments mentioned in your email and then keep you aware of their status as the associated packages inch ever closer to your desk and/or door.

Whenever Gmail detects an incoming delivery for you, you’ll see a card like this at the top of your inbox:

Keep tabs on your deliveries right atop your inbox — no ongoing effort required.

JR Raphael, Foundry

The only catch is that you might have to first flip a switch for the feature before it’ll work.

Thankfully, it’s quite easy to do — once you know where to look (and what you’re looking for!): Take another trip into the Gmail app settings, tap the name of the account in question, and scroll down until you see an option that says “Package tracking.”

Tap the checkbox next to it to enable it, if it isn’t already active. (And if you aren’t seeing it, take note: This feature for some reason only seems to be available for individual Google accounts, not those connected to Workspace organizations. Go figure.)

All that’s left is to watch and wait for your next package tracking updates to pop up at the top of your inbox — then watch and wait for word that your delivery is en route.

Gmail Android feature #15: A speedy way to set an out-of-office responder

For years, the Gmail mobile app had no way to manage the service’s out-of-office vacation auto-responder. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who sometimes signs out ahead of a planned break and then realizes half an hour later I forgot to set my away message.

Well, fret no more, for at some point in the not-too-distant past, the Gmail Android app gained the ability to control the out-of-office responder. Yes, indeedly: You can just open up the app’s settings, tap the name of the account you want to modify, and then look for the “Vacation responder” option midway down the list of choices.

From there, it’ll take you a mere matter of moments to enable, configure, and edit your out-of-office auto-response to suit any situation imaginable.

Out of office auto-responder editing is never more than a few fast taps away.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Gmail Android feature #16: More selective notifications

Email notifications can occasionally be helpful, but let’s be honest: They can also be pretty hellish. Give yourself a break from the noise by trying out the Gmail Android app’s high-priority notification option, which uses all sorts of signals from your inbox to figure out which incoming messages are actually important to you — and then to notify you only about those emails.

To take it out for a spin, venture once more into the Gmail app’s settings, select your Google account, tap the line labeled “Notifications,” and select “High priority only.” Give it a day and see what you think.

If you know exactly what types of emails you need to be notified about — say, those from a particular person or domain name, those with a specific word in their subjects or bodies, or those that are sent to a particular address of yours — you can skip the machine-made guesswork and just set up your own custom Gmail notifications. As long as you can figure out a consistent formula for what sorts of emails are notification-worthy to you, that approach works incredibly well.

Either way, you’ll have a lot less noise — and a lot more energy to deal with what really matters. Even if, y’know, “what really matters” is simply finding a few free minutes to eat a midmorning hoagie.

Hungry for more Android-flavored knowledge? Snag my free Android Notification Power-Pack next to discover even more powerful enhancements for your favorite phone.

Deals on Tents

Courtesy of REI

The REI Half Dome 2 is the best budget two-person backpacking tent. I’ve toted it on many backpacking trips and found it plenty sturdy, quick to set up, and capable of fitting two people along with their gear. It even comes with a footprint (which I never bother with, but it’s nice to have it if you have to deal with pointy rocks).

The Big Agnes Copper Spur series is our top pick among freestanding ultralight tents. This is the bikepacking model, which features shorter pole segments that are easier to haul on a bike, but I really prefer it for the more subdued colors. The Copper Spur is a high-quality, well-designed tent that’s lightweight, easy to set up, and roomy enough to be liveable in the backcountry. The “awning” design (with trekking poles or sticks) is a nice extra.

Nemo’s Dragonfly tents are roomy for the weight. There’s a generous amount of mesh at the top, which provides some nice ventilation on warm summer nights and is perfect for falling asleep under the stars when the weather permits. The Osmo fabric is a blend of nylon and polyester that absorbs less water than pure nylon rainflies.

MSR’s Groundhog stakes aren’t cheap, but they’re the best tent upgrade you can make. They’re super strong—I’ve never had one bend or pull out on me—and considering their strength, they’re pretty lightweight. I suggest carrying a mix of stakes when backpacking—some of these, some carbon fiber pegs, and some shepherd hooks. That way, no matter the terrain, you’ve got something that’ll work.

Deals on Outdoor Clothing

Now is a great time to score some new base layers and mid layers ahead of the cooler months.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Smartwool’s 100 percent merino base layer is my top pick for cooler weather in our guide to the Best Base Layers. Its loose fit allows it to work as a long-sleeve T-shirt in the shoulder seasons. That extra bit of roominess also makes it possible to use it as a second light layer over something thinner.

This is an REI Outlet deal because it’s been discontinued, which is a shame (hopefully that just means new colors are coming next year). REI’s 100 percent merino base layers are some of the best values around, even at full price. On sale, they’re a true steal. I like this half-zip for the extra ventilation the zipper provides, but if you prefer, the regular top (on sale for $30) is also on sale, as is the base layer bottom (on sale for $30).

Nothing says outdoors like a hatchet loop on your pants. Fjällräven Vidda Pro trousers give you that and great ventilation. The Vidda Pro uses Fjällräven’s G-1000 fabric, a 65 percent recycled polyester and 35 percent cotton blend, with pockets everywhere and extras like ventilation zippers, reinforced knees (with openings for pads), and that sweet, sweet hatchet loop on the leg.

This deal is limited to one color, with sizes disappearing fast, but it’s a pretty outstanding deal. The Ghost Whisperer Down Jacket is my top pick for a backpacking puffer jacket. The men’s large I tested weighs just 7.3 ounces, packs down to a tiny little thing (stuffing into its own pocket), and the 800-fill-power goose down offers one of the best warmth-to-weight ratios on the market.

Camp Stove and Water Filter Deals

Nothing says camping like roasting marshmallows over open flames and burning beans on the camp stove. Check out our guides to the best backpacking stoves and best camping stoves for more picks.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

MSR’s PocketRocket Deluxe is our top pick for a backpacking stove. It wins the title thanks to its larger burner area, which allows the flame to spread out for faster boil times and better fuel efficiency, especially with larger pots. It also fared better in the wind than smaller burners. The genius of the deluxe model is the small curved lip around the burner, which helps keep wind from getting to the base of the flame. It’s a small design element, and one that you certainly want. During long-term testing, I found it more effective at maintaining a simmer in the wind, should you want to do any actual cooking.

You can put together a lighter cooking setup, but Jetboil’s Stash is the lightest all-in-one system out there, and it does boil water a bit faster than the rest. The heat diffuser design speeds up boil times (Jetboil claims 2.5 minutes, which I could only match indoors in still air), but the real appeal is how this kit packs down into itself and how simple it is to use.

Jetboil’s larger all-in-one cooking system, the Flash, offers a larger capacity 1-liter pot that combines an integrated pot and burner into an easy-to-use system. I prefer the more compact Stash above, but if you’re cooking for two and are all-in on dehydrated meals, this stove is popular for good reason.

While I prefer the larger burner head of the Deluxe model above, the MSR PocketRocket 2 is lighter at 2.6 ounces compared to the Deluxe’s 2.9. It still has wide enough arms to support just about any one- or two-person pot. It’s simple to use, even while wearing gloves, and it’s efficient. At 947-foot elevation, it boiled 1 liter of water in 3 minutes, 47 seconds. You can even get it to simmer, though the flame radius is small, so fancier cooking isn’t easy.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

MSR’s WhisperLite series is probably the most popular backpacking stove ever made. They last forever (mine is over 30 years old and still works great), and this model, the Universal, can use just about any fuel you can imagine—white gas, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, and isobutane-propane canisters, to be precise. The only downside is that it can be fiddly compared to stoves like the Jetboil. But if you’re headed out on a long trip, buying fuel as you go, this is the most flexible option out there.

This is by far the most compact two-burner stove I’ve tested. It’s my pick for any situation where space is at a premium—whether that’s canoeing or just because you have a small car. The burners are large, and with some practice, I could get a light, simmer-friendly flame. My main gripe is the windscreen, which is not the best. The Basecamp version, with fitted pots, is also on sale for $300 ($100 off).

Courtesy of Coleman

My favorite stove in Coleman’s current lineup, the Coleman Cascade 3-in-1 features heavy-duty cast-iron grates and comes with a cast-iron griddle and grill. It’ll comfortably fit a 12-inch pan and a 10-inch pan side by side, and it’s significantly sturdier and more robust than other Coleman stoves, making it worth the extra money if you use it often. That said, the much cheaper stove below will get you by if you’re only using it a few nights a year.

This stove is ubiquitous at campgrounds for a reason. It’s well built, sturdy on a table, and just works. It’s not the most powerful stove, and it lacks frills like push-button ignition, but it’s capable of holding a low flame, simmering soups, and cooking scrambled eggs without browning them. It’s also incredibly durable.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The MSR Gravity Autoflow filter is a must-have for backpacking with a group. To use this filter, scoop up 10 liters of water in the dirty water bag, attach the hose, connect your water bottle, and sit back and relax. The filter is good enough to keep you safe from all the usual protozoa and bacteria, and the flow rate is a solid 1.5 liters per minute when the filter is clean.

The MSR Guardian is our pick for trips with sketchy water sources because it filters down to 0.02 microns, which will even remove viruses. It is heavy at 22 ounces and may be overkill for trips in the US, but it’s a great option for overseas adventures. I really like that it’s designed to be self-cleaning, which makes field maintenance incredibly easy, and that it screws right onto a Nalgene bottle. Also, because it’s a pump filter, it’s very fast. You can crank out a couple of liters in hardly any time at all. The gravity-fed version is also on sale for $232 ($78 off).

Camping Gear Deals

Courtesy of Kelty

This camp chair is the coziest way to hang out around the fire. It is somewhat huge, heavy, and awkward to fold up and carry, but so long as you have room for it in your vehicle, there’s no better way to relax under the stars with your loved ones.

The thing to keep in mind when you shop REI brand gear is the company’s basic proposition: you get 90 percent of the designer item for 70 percent of the price. It’s a strategy that works well and has produced some great, affordable gear. This chair is a good example: It’s comfortable (it does wobble a little, side-to-side when you move, though) and less than half the price of competitors.

I’ve noticed that when people try to lighten their load with a smaller, lighter-weight backpack, they struggle to fit all their gear. The answer for sleeping bags and clothing is this compression stuff sack, which smashes anything soft down to about half the size of the same item in a regular stuff sack. This works well with sleeping bags and clothing, especially puffer jackets, but also fleece and merino wool.

Sleeping Bag Deals

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Our favorite backpacking sleeping bag, the Bishop Pass 15 offers the best warmth-to-weight ratio while packing down small and staying affordable. I have slept in this bag for more than two weeks, with nighttime temps ranging from 28 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and, yes, it was too warm in the heat, but on those warmer nights, I unzipped it and used it as a blanket. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a versatile bag.

REI’s Magma line of down gear is some of the best value around. The Magma 15 sleeping bag has long been an affordable option that’s perfect for shoulder-season trips when the temperature potentially swings lower than you expect (the comfort rating is 21). There are three lengths and three widths, which makes it easy to find a perfect fit for your body, and the 850-fill-power goose down (Bluesign-approved) packs down nicely and small. If you don’t need the shoulder-season coverage, the Magma 30 is also on sale for $262 ($87 off), and makes a great summer sleeping bag.

This down mummy bag has a spoon-shaped design for side sleepers and extra room in the elbows and knees so you can roll over onto your side without feeling like you’re slipping into a straitjacket. It’s built for temps down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit and has zippered gills you can open to avoid overheating in the 40s, though I kept them all closed in the mid-30s and wasn’t overly warm.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The best budget ultralight quilt, the Magma Trail is a great value for the money. The lower price does mean that this one is a bit heavier (it uses 850-fill-power down), though at 24 ounces for the long, wide version I have, it’s competitive on the scale. The straps for attaching it to your sleep pad aren’t as nice as what you’ll get with something like the Enlightened Equipment’s Revelation Quilt, but it’s just as warm and does a respectable job of keeping out drafts. There’s even a zippered foot box with a drawstring for cooler nights.

Nemo’s Pulse quilt uses RDS-certified, gold-infused 1,000-fill-power ExpeDRY down, which does a good job of shedding moisture from tent condensation and reportedly dries faster than standard down, though I’ve never figured out a good way to test this. The Karo Step baffle stitching keeps down well distributed, and at 12 ounces for the regular, this one is pretty dang lightweight.

Courtesy of REI

This is our favorite sleeping bag for car camping. The REI Siesta is plenty warm and affordable. It’s also not a mummy bag, because you’re not climbing Denali here. The rectangular cut makes for a much roomier, more comfortable sleeping experience. The 20-degree-Fahrenheit rating makes it warm enough for three seasons, and unlike most rectangular bags, the Siesta has a hood, which helps on those cold nights.

The Kindercamp makes a great car camping bag if you’ve got young children. Once your kids are about 4 feet tall, an adult sleeping bag works just fine. Prior to that, they’ll benefit from a kids’ sleeping bag like the Kindercamp, which is cut smaller so your little ones don’t have to heat up a huge, adult-size sleeping bag to stay warm.

Deals on Action Cameras and Gadgets

If you snap a selfie in the woods and Instagram isn’t around to see it, did it happen? You’ll never have to answer that question if you’ve got one of our favorite action cameras or 360 cameras with you.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Insta360’s X6 360 camera just launched—our review will be coming soon—but the X5 is still a great option, especially on sale. The twin 1/1.28-inch sensors capture 8K video, which means you can reframe your footage to fit rectangular video formats and still have nearly 4K clips sharp enough to mix with footage shot with your phone. The dynamic range is impressive, and the X5 also has great battery life.

If you’re going to turn your action camera on yourself, consider the Ace Pro 2, our top pick for vlogging. It has a great lens and sensor co-engineered with Leica, is capable of recording 8K video at up to 30 frames per second (fps), and has some pretty darn nice color even in the default settings. My guess is that the Ace Pro 3 is coming pretty soon, but this is still a good deal.

Sure, phones have some of the features you’ll get with a satellite messenger, but we still think you’re better off with a dedicated device. Garmin’s new inReach Mini 3 Plus now offers some of those phone features—like voice messaging—along with the emergency features and excellent service worldwide. It’s also still tiny, well-built, and it has great battery life. A non-Plus model, which doesn’t have a speaker and mic, is also on sale.

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• Job applicants can use AI to apply for far more positions, burdening hiring managers and slowing the hiring process. (LinkedIn data shows applications per job posting in the US have roughly doubled since spring 2022.) AI that’s supposed to make it easier to find a job actually makes it harder.

• AI is emboldening more people to represent themselves in court while also speeding up the work of lawyers. A 2026 study by researchers at MIT and USC drew on 4.5 million federal civil cases filed between 2005 and 2026, applied an AI-text detector to a random sample of 1,600 complaints, and found that the share containing AI-generated text rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in early 2026. That burdens judges, who now have to comb through long, complex filings for citations to nonexistent cases and other hallucinations, slowing justice. AI that’s supposed to make court cases quicker makes them slower.

• Students increasingly use AI to produce longer essays, and a growing number of instructors report leaning on AI tools to keep up with grading, a loop in which the writing and the reading are both partly automated.

AI-pilled chatbot enthusiasts who believe the technology is solving all their problems are judging AI through a narrow personal lens. Likewise, analysts and AI companies look at one person’s productivity gains, extrapolate across thousands of employees, and wrongly conclude that the gains will scale without considering the impact of that output on the productivity of others. 

Understanding the problem at scale

The idea that productivity-enhancing AI might reduce productivity sounds paradoxical, so consider this oversimplified thought experiment. Suppose AI enables you to write three times as many emails as before (say, 30 a day instead of 10). Your email-writing productivity has tripled, making you more valuable to the company. 

The problem is that every additional email you send lands in someone else’s inbox. Your colleagues, who once got 10 emails from you daily, now get 30. Multiply that across an organization: if 10 people triple their email output, the team gets 300 emails a day instead of 100. If 100 people do the same, that figure blows up to 3,000, three times the reading burden. The AI that makes email writing easy makes email reading hard for everyone else.

Conspiracy theories surrounding singer and philanthropist Dolly Parton’s recent death have flooded the internet, referencing everything from satanic rituals to cloning. But one conspiracy theory has dominated all the others: the claim that Parton’s death was caused by “turbo cancer” brought on by the Covid vaccine.

There is no evidence to support the claim that Parton’s death had anything to do with the vaccine. Parton, 80, died after “a short battle with cancer,” her family said in a statement. In May, Parton shared that she was responding well to treatment related to her immune system and digestive system.

In 2020, the singer donated $1 million to fund research in support of the vaccine. The following year, she filmed herself getting the vaccine, singing an adapted version of her hit song Jolene before receiving the shot. “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate,” Parton sang in a video.

Now, a number of influential right-wing conspiracy theorists and MAGA-aligned pundits have spent the past few days claiming—or, in many cases, suggesting—that the vaccine killed Parton.

“Was Dolly Parton yet another Covid vaccine victim?” far-right radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who recently interviewed President Donald Trump on his show, wrote on X. “She took the vaxx on TV. She changed the name of her hit song ‘Jolene Jolene’ to ‘Vaccine, Vaccine.’ She encouraged fans to get it. Now she’s dead of cancer. This sounds like another case of ‘turbo cancer. RIP Dolly.” (Earlier this month, Root urged Trump to declare a national emergency during the midterms when he had the president on his show. “Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump responded.)

“Dolly Parton thought she was doing the right thing by backing the Moderna mRNA Covid shot,” Toby Rogers, who works with the Brownstone Institute, a think tank founded to oppose Covid restrictions and which has deep ties to the Trump administration, wrote on X. “But it very well may have killed her.” The Brownstone Institute was founded by Jeffrey Tucker, a close ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long undermined trust in a variety of vaccines.

While Kennedy has not commented publicly on Parton’s death, he has spent recent days blaming the Covid lockdowns for measles-related deaths, after the measles-related deaths of two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania this week.

Valerie Anne Smith, a health influencer with 273,000 followers on X, shared multiple posts about Parton’s death, all of them suggesting that the Covid-19 vaccine was the cause of her death.

“Soon after being injected she developed severe autoimmune, liver and kidney issues,” Smith wrote. “Cause of death … CANCER.”

“Dolly Parton was as universally beloved as a person can be,” Travis View, cohost of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, tells WIRED. “That’s exactly what made her a target for conspiracists online. Many anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists despised Parton because she not only encouraged others to get the vaccine, she even helped fund vaccine development.”

The conspiracy theories were not limited to X. Facebook was also flooded with wild allegations about Parton’s death, none of which provided any evidence to back up their claims.

One of the most popular themes focused on a video Parton made just weeks before her death in which she thanked pop star Taylor Swift and her husband, NFL star Travis Kelce, for their $2 million donation to Imagination Library, Parton’s childhood literacy charity. She jokingly also asked the couple if she could have their “firstborn” child.

If you’ve been outside, to the gym, or on a basketball court, there’s a good chance you’ve seen someone wearing Reeboks. The brand has had its fair share of ups and downs, but is riding a wave of increased interest driven by smart business moves like a refocus on sports and lifestyle, alongside a number of high-profile collaborations like the Reebok G-Unit G6 50 Cent.

Founded in 1958, Reebok has changed hands and gone through multiple iterations. Most recently in 2022, Reebok was sold by Adidas to Authentic Brands Group for over two billion dollars. Since then, it’s reinvigorated its sports lineup, hired Shaquel O’ Neal as president of Reebok basketball, and signed tons of professional athletes across basketball, golf, and tennis to the brand.

But what about the shoes? They’re solid. As someone who used to test training and running shoes, the Reebok Floatzig and Reebok Nano X series are excellent performers for the price—I still wear my Nano X4s anytime I’m strength training. Other standouts include the more lifestyle oriented Classic and Club lineups.

But given how often you should replace sneakers (hint: often every six months), you should always look for a deal when shopping. That’s why I rounded up some of the best Reebok coupons and Reebok promo codes below, to help you save time and money.

Use this Reebok Promo Code for up to $30 off

The more you spend on Reebok’s site, the more potential savings you can get when you shop its Buy More, Save More section. This collection has over 1,000 pieces of shoes and apparel, including popular styles like the Club and Nano series, so you can probably find something fitting. You get $10 off orders of $100 or more, $20 off $150 orders, and $30 off orders of $200 or more using the Reebok discount code BMSM at checkout.

15% Reebok Discount Code for New Customers

Anyone making a new account at Reebok online or the Reebok app can get 15% off their first purchase using the Reebok discount code MOVE15. This Reebok promo code works after you sign up for a new account and verify your email address, and is applied automatically at checkout if you are using the Reebok app. Standard exclusions to select collaboration items and limited-edition sneaker releases apply, so double check your order before purchase to make sure you qualify for the Reebok coupon code deal.

Make the Most of Reebok Authentic Membership With More Discounts

This is the best Reebok deal for anyone who shops the brand frequently. With an Authentics Membership ($5 a month), you get 10% off all Reebok products and free shipping on all orders. You also get access to early product drops, sale alerts, and birthday rewards. This perk is applied automatically when logged in using Shop Pay at checkout. An Authentics membership also gives you discounts at other participating brands like Champion, Billabong, Hunter, Ted Baker, and more, so it’s worth considering, especially if you shop multiple brands. This Reebok discount is for online purchases only.

Stack Reebok Coupons with Clearance and Seasonal Sales for up to 50% More Off

It’s easy to stack savings with Reebok if you know where to look. Items in season sales like Back to School or just the regular Reebok clearance section can be discounted by as much as 65%. Add extra discounts (and free shipping) from an Authentics Membership, plus Bundle & Save offers, and you can drop the price of your checkout cart dramatically, without needing a Reebok discount code.

Reebok Discount Codes for Students, Educators, Military, and First Responders

Students, educators (active and retired), military, veterans, first responders, government workers, healthcare professionals, and nurses can get 30% off purchases as part of the Reebok heroes discount. All groups must verify their status via ID.me at checkout to receive a single-use Reebok discount code.

Fix a Reebok Discount Code That’s Not Working

There are times when a Reebok discount code might not work like you thought it would. Make sure your items aren’t excluded from site-wide Reebok promo codes (some sneakers, new releases, and third-party collabs are). Also make sure you’ve entered the Reebok coupon code correctly, confirmed its terms of use and active window, and met any spending requirements.

FAQs

How do I apply a Reebok promo code at checkout to make sure my discount is correctly applied?

You can typically apply a discount code in your cart, before you hit checkout, on Reebok online. Sometimes codes are applied automatically, but it’s always good to double check that you are applying the best discount code for your shopping cart.

Why is my Reebok discount code or coupon not working and how can I fix common issues?

A Reebok discount code or coupon code may not be working for a few reasons. Some products, like select new launches, sneakers, and third-party collaborations, are often excluded from discount codes altogether. Others are timed, and may have expired. Double check your code before looking elsewhere—it could be you just have a typo.

Does Reebok offer a student, military, or hero discount and how do I verify my status to claim it?

Reebok does offer a coupon code for students, military, teachers, healthcare professionals, and more under its Reebok heroes discount program. To verify your status, you’ll be prompted to log in to ID.me at checkout to receive your single-use discount code.

Can I stack a Reebok discount code with sale prices, membership perks, or other promotions?

Yes, you can stack Reebok discount codes with sale prices and other promotions. Items in seasonal sales and clearance sections can be combined with promo codes as well as free shipping benefits from an Authentics Membership.

Is there a Reebok first-order or new customer discount and what are the rules for using it?

Yes, Reebok does offer a discount code for first time customers placing their first order. To get yours, make a new account at Reebok online or sign up with the Reebok app. After verifying your email address, you can get 15% off your first order using the code MOVE15. Standard exclusions to items like third-party collaborations still apply, though.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve scored insanely cheap concert and baseball tickets on Gametime. There are plenty of ticket marketplaces to compare, but I usually find some of the best last-minute deals on Gametime, especially if it’s for a same-day event. Take my word for it, and better yet, save a little extra with a Gametime promo code and Gametime discount codes I’ve rounded up below.

Get a Gametime Promo Code for $20 Off Your First $200+ Ticket

For your first purchase of $200 or more, use Gametime coupon code SAVE20 to get $20 off. You can enter the code at checkout or add it to your user profile before you buy. The offer applies across categories, including MLB, NBA, and NFL games, as well as live theater and major concerts.

Unlock a Gametime Discount on First Bookings When You Sign Up With a Share Code

Once you create an account in the app, you’ll receive a unique Gametime referral code to share with friends and family. When someone uses your code to make their first purchase of $10 or more, they get a $5 discount, and you earn $5 in Gametime credits. Each Gametime promo code can be redeemed only once per user. Feel free to share your code via email, social media, personal blogs, or other primary content channels. However, Gametime prohibits posting codes on sites where you are only a contributor, like Wikipedia or coupon sites. Users should note that violating the referral program’s terms may result in account suspension or the loss of credits.

Gametime Price Guarantee Credit: Get 110% Back

If you find the same tickets for less elsewhere, Gametime says it will give you 110% of the price difference in credits. To make a claim, you’ll need screenshots showing both prices, with timestamps taken within two hours of your purchase. The lower price must still be available when you submit your claim and must represent the final checkout price.

The lower price must be for the same event, date, section, row, and number of tickets you purchased on Gametime, and it must be publicly available. That also means that discounted rates for AARP, AAA, military members, and corporate customers don’t qualify. Prices available only through loyalty programs, contests, or travel packages are also excluded. Gametime also won’t match prices from apps or websites that don’t reveal the event until after booking, sites where you name your own price, or offers that require you to call for a quote.

Keep Up-to-Date With Gametime Discounts on Tickets, Concerts, and Live Events

Gametime regularly offers Gametime discount codes for concerts and sporting events, so staying in the loop is one of the best ways to snag a deal. I’ve opted into Gametime’s push notifications and emails to get personalized offers for events in my city. It’s also worth following Gametime on social media, where the company shares flash Gametime promo codes with its followers. It’s also a great way to catch seasonal promotions, including holiday sales and Black Friday deals.

What to Do When a Gametime Promo Code Isn’t Working

If your Gametime promo code isn’t working, start by making sure you’re logged into your account, since guest checkout may not support certain discount codes. If you’re using SAVE20, double-check that your purchase meets the minimum spending requirement. For any code, look out for typos or extra spaces before or after the code, especially if you’re copying and pasting it.

If it’s still not working, the promotion may have ended. Gametime reserves the right to terminate coupon codes at any time, so some offers can disappear abruptly, even if you recently saw them advertised.

Smartphones have better cameras than ever before, but there comes a time when you want to show off your beloved photos outside of a tiny phone screen. Give your cherished memories the recognition they deserve with physical photo books from Chatbooks. A photo book helps bring your photos out of the Cloud and makes an incredible present for grandparents, parents, anniversaries, birthdays, and more. If you’ve been curious about trying out a photo book service, we have a Chatbooks promo code and Chatbooks coupon code to help you save on your next favorite memento or gift.

Get 40% Off Your First Yearbook + Free Standard Shipping With This Chatbooks Promo Code

If you’re looking to commemorate your children’s school year, we have a Chatbooks coupon code for photo books, where you’ll get 40% off your first yearbook and get free standard shipping. If your family is looking to design and print high-quality school memory books, enter the Chatbooks promo code CLASSIC40 at checkout for 40% off, with yearbooks starting at only $10 when the Chatbooks discount code is applied (through December 31).

The Best Online Photo Printing Services

Print memories you can hang on the wall, stash in your wallet, or just hold in your hand.

Use This Chatbooks Coupon Code for 20% Off Your First Photo Book

One of the best ways to save if you’re a first-time customer, is with a Chatbooks coupon code for first order or a Chatbooks discount code for new customers. If you’re creating your first order on Chatbooks or are starting your first printed photo book project, including both custom softcover and hardcover photo books, you can save 20%. To get this deal, use Chatbooks discount code HIYA20 at checkout for 20% off. Prices vary, but it starts at only $15 for 20 pages and classic photo albums can go up to 366 pages! Offer ends on December 31, so consider making a photo album from Chatbooks your next present.

Save 50% on Your First Monthbook: $12 With Free Shipping

A great gift for a new parent, whether that’s yourself or someone else, is the gift of printed memories for the new baby. A Monthbooks subscription allows you to have monthly photobooks so you can chronicle your child as they grow. And with this Monthbook promo code, you can get the first of your 12 monthly photo books in 2026 for just $12—that’s 50% off—with free shipping. To nab this deal, use the Monthbook promo code TAKE50 at checkout to save, through December 31. This Monthbook discount is only available to new US customers starting a Monthbooks subscription, and auto-renews at $24 after.

Chatbooks Promo Code for $5 Off as a New Customer With Social Rewards

If you’re a content creator or influencer, Chatbooks makes it easy to earn rewards for sharing Chatbooks content. With the Chatbooks Social Rewards Club, you can unlock secret perks, receive exclusive promotions to share with your followers, and more benefits. To get Social Rewards perks, you’ll first need to sign up. Afterwards, you’ll get rewards by completing different social media challenges. For example, if you share and tag photos of your favorite Chatbooks products on social media, like a post on Instagram or TikTok, you’ll receive rewards and gain access to VIP perks and promotions like a $15 or $5 Chatbooks Credit.

And now, new customers can get $5 off a qualifying order when they use a specified Chatbooks Social Rewards code at checkout. To get this deal, use Chatbooks promo code LOVECB at checkout to claim your new customer reward for the discount on your first book or album creation, through December 31.

Get Free Shipping on all Chatbooks Orders Without a Discount Code

None of these Chatbooks promo codes or deals apply to you? No problem! There are still tons of ways to save, even without a Chatbooks coupon code. You can still get free standard shipping on all Chatbooks products, without a minimum purchase amount or needing a Chatbooks discount code, through December 31.

Save Even More With Chatbooks Social Rewards and Referral Credit

As previously mentioned, you can save even more by utilizing Chatbooks’ referral program and Chatbooks Social Rewards, which will help you continue to earn credits that can be converted and applied as discounts. One of the easiest ways to save is by sharing your unique referral link, which gives a $15 off discount and earns a $15 credit for yourself (up to $100 total per account). And you can also participate in the Social Rewards program by posting approved content on Instagram or TikTok to earn up to $35 in monthly print credits.

How to Choose the Best Chatbooks Offer for Your Order

Have too many Chatbooks promo codes to know where to start? Don’t worry, we can help you choose the highest possible savings for your specific cart contents. For example, on a single order, a percentage Chatbooks discount code like 20% off your first book is the best deal, and for bulk orders like school yearbooks, using the specific 40% off yearbook Chatbooks promo code provides the deepest discount. Plus, subscription-specific offers (like the Monthbooks subscription promo code above) may carry automatic perks or discounts like free shipping.

Why Your Chatbooks Coupon Code May Not Be Working

If your Chatbooks promo code isn’t working, fear not! There are many common reasons why a Chatbooks coupon code might not work or be able to be applied at checkout, so make sure you read the fine print and follow the steps carefully. Firstly, make sure that the Chatbooks promo code isn’t restricted to first-time customers if you’re not a first timer, many codes prevent returning users from applying it. Next, many Chatbooks coupon codes are program-specific, like the previously mentioned Social Rewards discount, which require qualifying conditions. Finally, it’s simple but make sure you are double checking your Chatbooks promo code, ensuring there are no typographical errors or extra spaces. And always check expiration dates, because if you attempt to use expired coupons, you’ll get an error message during checkout.

A federal judge on Thursday barred the Trump administration from designating Anthropic a national security risk over a dispute about the use of its AI models, ruling that the designation amounted to unconstitutional retaliation.

The decision handed down by US district judge Rita Lin in California vacated the February 27 decision by defense secretary Pete Hegseth to label Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” and make the company ineligible for federal contracts. The ruling also lifted an additional punitive measure by Hegseth that prevented contractors or suppliers to the US military from doing business with Anthropic, a position Lin called “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with law.”

“Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless,” Lin wrote in a 59-page ruling.

The judge also ruled that nine agencies—including the Pentagon, the Treasury Department, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security—had improperly imposed sanctions on Anthropic. The ruling removes those penalties.

However, Lin affirmed that the Pentagon is not required to use Anthropic’s models, and the ruling does not prevent the Pentagon from electing to simply use other models. A Pentagon spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment, but the department is expected to appeal.

In a statement, Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Cohen said, “We welcome the court’s ruling that this supply-chain risk designation was unlawful. We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security.”

The case stems from a bitter dispute earlier this year between the Pentagon and Anthropic over a $200 million deal to use the AI lab’s Claude models for military applications.

The rift began after reports that the US had used Claude in the operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. After the operation, a Palantir employee relayed concerns from an Anthropic staffer to US officials about how its models had been used.

In negotiations, Anthropic insisted on certain limits on how its models could be deployed, including support for lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance systems. But Hegseth rejected any curbs, contending that a contractor could not dictate how the technology could be used once deployed and insisting the contract allowed “all lawful use.”

After negotiations broke down in February, Hegseth was widely seen as punishing Anthropic by designating it a “supply-chain risk,” a national security tool that blacklisted the company from doing business with the federal government.

The Pentagon said at the time that the supply-chain risk label was appropriate, because giving Anthropic access to any classified systems would “introduce unacceptable risk” if the AI lab could disable or alter its technology, for instance, at a time of war.

Anthropic filed two lawsuits in response—one in federal district court in California and one at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia—accusing the Pentagon of violating its First and Fifth Amendment protections on ideological grounds. The DC case is ongoing.