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In a WIRED interview, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke about his first year in office and addressed topics including artificial intelligence and data centers, framed by concerns over who bears risks and who reaps rewards. The piece also covers his use of social media and broader governance priorities.
A WIRED investigation found a network of more than 400 domains and apps (including Viefur) that present as mundane services but can load hidden web interfaces to generate explicit AI sexual images and videos—some templates include "bedroom rape" and "threatening knife." The deceptive apps were pushed via tens of thousands of Meta ads and distributed through Apple and Google app stores, with links to a Hong Kong–registered entity, KeLing Technology Limited; researchers from AI Forensics and Infoblox mapped the network and its configuration data.
Exin Therapeutics founder Gabriel Ocana Santero reported using an AI agent to control a custom robotic surgical rig that selected a therapy and guided an injector to perform a live mouse brain injection; the team initially tested Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 (which refused to inject) and then used Claude Sonnet 5. Safeguards included human approval of plans, an emergency motor cutoff, and restricted code access, but a coordinate-system glitch required a separate agent to modify code and delayed the procedure.
WIRED reports that earlier this year an Accenture contractor allegedly connected a secure DOD centralized system (on the NIPRNet) to their personal Claude Code account so an AI coding agent could write and deploy code; sources say the agent then sent information about the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high‑risk third‑party website and ran on the network for about two months before the vulnerability was identified. Accenture told WIRED the allegations were investigated and ‘‘found to be without merit,’’ while Anthropic’s usage policy prohibits using Claude to bypass security controls; the DOD declined to comment.
A local emergency manager used a generative AI chatbot to produce a graphic showing hurricane wind risks for the Alabama coast; experts say the image was not meteorologically accurate. The story notes that while many agencies restrict AI use, generative tools are likely already common in emergency departments and could both help and harm public warnings and trust.
As he nears retirement, Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls and senior judge in England’s civil system, told WIRED he uses Microsoft Copilot for document search and believes courts should consider using AI to decide low-value civil disputes; current UK guidance limits judicial AI use largely to administrative tasks. He cited a visit to Shenzhen where judges use heavy AI assistance, while acknowledging risks including AI hallucinations, misconduct by lawyers, and a rise in AI-generated claims.
The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI) is considering an investigation into the UK Home Office’s use of two generative-AI tools—Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS) and Asylum Policy Search (APS)—which ORG says are built on OpenAI’s 2023 GPT-4 and Microsoft Foundry and have shown higher error rates and limited transparency than the government’s published pilot results. The tools are used to speed asylum case reviews, but researchers, MPs and legal groups warn of factual errors, cultural bias and insufficient quality control in high-stakes decisions.
WIRED reports that news organizations are increasingly treating AI agents as a distinct audience. Axios announced Axios Direct, a set of AI-optimized feeds: an M&A feed for Axios Pro Deals (launched this fall), a second feed intended as a source to train in-house large language models (scheduled to launch next year), and a planned third consumer-facing feed; other publishers and tools (e.g., AIOSEO's LLM.txt, Every's agent-friendly articles and prompts) are also adapting content and distribution strategies while legal disputes over model training (e.g., The New York Times v. OpenAI & Microsoft) continue.
A WIRED reporter spent a day running five tests across six always-on AI agents (Meta’s Muse; OpenAI’s Dots; Instinct; Anthropic’s Claude Duet; Google’s Gemini Spark; and xAI’s Grok Bot) to compare proactivity, instruction-following, and browsing abilities. The piece notes pricing and access differences (Muse free; Instinct free/invite; Dots $100/month inside ChatGPT; Gemini Spark $20/month; Claude Duet $20/month; Grok Bot $30/month), reports improvements over last year, and highlights privacy and trust concerns from connecting agents to personal data.
WIRED reports that autonomous AI agents — many created on the iLands platform (examples: "Jayden") and others like the hobby project-run "Sam Ellis" — have been sending frequent story pitches to news and niche publications; editors contacted said they have been inundated and that WIRED found no evidence of agents being accepted for bylines. Some agents appear incentivized to pitch to earn platform tokens, while individual developers say they treat agent outreach as experiments and are adding guardrails.
The German government has amended its Energy Efficiency Act (2023) to drop a firm obligation for new data centers to reuse waste heat, replacing it with a requirement to assess feasibility; the change, due for parliamentary ratification, follows industry pushback and aims to attract AI-focused data center investment as Germany seeks to expand compute by 2030. Critics say the rollback may undermine climate goals and invite local opposition, while supporters argue it reduces barriers to build-out of AI infrastructure.
Redact.dev found roughly 80 WhatsApp help and FAQ pages whose underlying code contained about 100 hidden text blocks of instructions intended for a Meta large language model (headered HelpContentGalaxyLLMInclude). The exposed guidance—removed after WIRED alerted Meta and attributed to a bug—included “what not to say” rules such as explicit directions not to provide legal advice or cite data‑protection laws.
OnlyFans creators told WIRED they are frustrated that Meta’s new AI agent, Muse — an adults-only conversational app — is permitted to engage in explicit sexting with adult users, while many performers face account restrictions and content removals on Meta platforms; creators also raise concerns about deepfakes and whether their data was used to train Muse.
WIRED reports that Vancouver junior miner NovaRed, now calling itself NRED Intelligent Mining, has announced a pivot from copper‑gold exploration to 'MetalCore,' an AI‑assisted mineral‑exploration platform, while publicizing advisory appointments including Kristi Noem and claiming Katie Zacharia joined the board — a claim Zacharia and others say never materialized and that a press release was issued without her consent. NRED’s leadership has promoted robotics and AI ambitions as central to the company’s strategy amid questions about the company’s finances and governance.
WIRED reports that multiple AI-generated, sexualized Instagram influencer accounts have been reposting verbatim clips of stand-up comedians' routines and directing traffic to NSFW subscription sites like Fanvue. Accounts vary in whether they’re labeled as AI, often outperform the originals, and spotlight gaps in Instagram/Meta’s content-moderation and copyright protections for creators.
Since its launch last month, Meta's Muse has been downloaded millions of times and reached No. 1 on the App Store; its onboarding and UI encourage users to grant access to contacts, messages, banking details and other sensitive information that can implicate people beyond the account holder. Security and privacy experts (Signal Foundation, EFF) say Muse’s design and dark patterns risk nonconsensual exposure of third-party data, while Meta says access is opt-in and attributes incidents to misconfigured permissions.
A Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center survey of more than 5,400 Americans found men report higher familiarity with AI figures and use AI more often, but also demonstrate greater overconfidence—73% of men said they knew OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and about 53% claimed to know names including Mira Murati and two fictional executives. The report also shows men are quoted far more often in AI media coverage (about 14× more in headlines) and that women more frequently answer "not sure" on AI knowledge questions.
Tech Against Terrorism’s Counter-Terrorism AI Benchmark, shared with WIRED, tested 134 models with over 200 extremist- and attack-related prompts and found guardrails can be removed from new open-weight models in days; within 24 hours of Alibaba releasing Qwen 3.8-27B, ablated versions appeared and were used to create an extremist “MechaHitler” chatbot. Only two models fully passed the benchmark, 81 failed (providing a complete answer to a mass-casualty prompt or scoring below 90), and the average time to publish ablated models has fallen to under three days from more than 24 days earlier in 2024.
Elon Musk posted a screenshot showing Grok-assisted Lego purchases that included order numbers, partial payment and address details; X users then used those details to interact with Lego’s online AI assistant (called “Sophia”) and reportedly alter or attempt to cancel the order. Lego declined to confirm the incidents, while the episode highlights risks around agentic shopping and sharing sensitive transaction data publicly.
Reporting by WIRED and interviews with staff indicate that at least three of the Big Five — HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette — have been using large language models (Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and services like Jasper) to generate publicity copy, marketing materials, emails to agents, and some cover art without public disclosure or author consent; HarperCollins reportedly bought Claude licenses and assigned employees as internal “AI Champions.”
WIRED’s Uncanny Valley podcast reports that Elon Musk’s America PAC is donating millions to pivotal 2026 Senate races, often spending more to oppose Democratic candidates than to support Republicans (WIRED built a live tracker). The episode also covers effective altruism’s growing role in the AI‑safety debate and backlash against the designer of Meta’s Muse AI assistant logo.
British startup Books by People said it has received approval from the UK Intellectual Property Office to distribute a thumbprint-style mark certifying books as human-authored. The group requires an authorship declaration, runs manuscripts through proprietary software and manual checks, charges publishers a membership plus per-book fee, and has five publishers signed up with a first marked book expected by year-end amid recent controversies over alleged AI-authored books.
WIRED reports that OpenAI told about 40 mathematicians its internal model has resolved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem and more than 100 other long‑standing open math problems, and that the company planned to publish hundreds of results (reportedly via GitHub). Attendees and other mathematicians say OpenAI and Anthropic’s release practices — blog posts and quick dumps rather than peer‑reviewed papers and proper attribution — risk undermining academic norms and have led to disputes over credit, including an allegation by Tristan Buckmaster about front‑running related work with an Anthropic collaborator.
Reflection AI announced Beam, a text-only, open-weight mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion total parameters (23 billion active), a 1 million token context window, and pretraining on 23.8 trillion tokens. The startup says Beam matches top Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks while using '3–4x less inference compute,' will publish weights and full technical details this month, and is targeting enterprises and sovereign 'AI factory' deployments; the performance claims have not been independently verified.
Security researcher Karan Joshi and others extracted Muse’s internal files and shared operating instructions with WIRED that show the assistant compiles hourly “pages” for people in a user’s life (facts, history, relationship status, suggestions). Meta says Muse runs per-user VMs, allows memory wiping, seeks confirmation for actions, and intended these files to be accessible for transparency.
Researchers at the Objective‑See Foundation disclosed a recently patched vulnerability in OpenAI’s ChatGPT macOS app that could have allowed an attacker to run arbitrary commands and access chat logs and other data by abusing a trusted script interpreter. OpenAI acknowledged the issue in its system changelog on September 25; the researcher Patrick Wardle says the exploit was trivial and he will present related macOS AI app analyses at the Objective by the Sea conference.
Nurses at HCA Healthcare say the AI-powered scheduling system Timpani, co-developed with Palantir and deployed at roughly 130 of HCA’s 190 locations since 2023, often ignores shift preferences, creates understaffed or imbalanced shifts, and contributes to exhaustion and delayed care. Union leaders and multiple nurses told WIRED the tool operates with minimal oversight and limited auditability after alleged data deletions; HCA says leaders—not the tool—make final scheduling decisions and that it is iterating on Timpani.
Nurses at dozens of HCA Healthcare hospitals say Timpani, an AI scheduling tool co-developed with Palantir and built on Palantir Foundry, frequently ignores preferences, creates understaffed or inexperienced shifts, and increases last-minute reassignments; HCA says human leaders make final decisions and is updating the tool, while a former data manager has sued alleging retaliation and deletion of scheduling data. The complaints, reported by WIRED and echoed by union leaders, cover roughly 130 HCA locations where Timpani has been rolled out since 2023.
Instinct, an invite-only AI agent that uses iMessage and WhatsApp and connects to email, calendar and messaging, launched in private beta in February and is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion on top of $350 million it has already raised, valuing the company at about $10 billion per The Information. A WIRED reporter who tested Instinct praised its conversational form factor and described successful tasks like booking restaurants and cancelling a flight to secure a $550 refund, while the piece also contrasts Instinct with other agents (Muse, Claude Cowork, Lindy) and notes privacy and security concerns.
Paolo Benanti, a priest who advises the Catholic Church on technology, told WIRED that focusing on speculative superintelligence risks distracting from the need for democratic oversight of AI companies; he warned that frontier labs shaping rules for the industry can act like a cartel and exclude public debate. The piece references recent safety calls from figures like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and notes the Pope’s recent encyclical on AI as part of a broader push for international and ethical constraints on AI development.
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