Business

The China Issue

Beep Beep

Robotaxi Outage in China Leaves Passengers Stranded on Highways

A suspected system failure froze Baidu’s robotaxis across Wuhan, trapping passengers and reportedly causing traffic disruptions and crashes.

Zeyi Yang

Collateral Damage

Iran Threatens to Start Attacking Major US Tech Firms on April 1

Dell Cameron and Louise Matsakis

The Big Interview

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Katie Drummond

Backchannel

Apple Still Plans to Sell iPhones When It Turns 100

As the tech giant turns 50, WIRED spoke to executives about how they plan to win in the AI era.

Steven Levy

At Palantir’s Developer Conference, AI Is Built to Win Wars

As business soars, Palantir is doubling down on a vision of AI built for battlefield advantage—and attracting customers who agree.

Steven Levy

The Iran War Is Throwing Global Shipping Into Chaos

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen says the conflict is stranding cargo and threatening inflation.

Steven Levy

When AI Companies Go to War, Safety Gets Left Behind

We were promised AI regulation and a race to the top. Now, we’re arguing about killer robots.

Steven Levy

AI Lab

OpenClaw Agents Can Be Guilt-Tripped Into Self-Sabotage

In a controlled experiment, OpenClaw agents proved prone to panic and vulnerable to manipulation. They even disabled their own functionality when gaslit by humans.

Will Knight

Why Walmart and OpenAI Are Shaking Up Their Agentic Shopping Deal

After OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature fell short, Walmart is instead embedding its Sparky chatbot directly into ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Paresh Dave

Nvidia Will Spend $26 Billion to Build Open-Weight AI Models, Filings Show

The move could position the AI infrastructure powerhouse to quickly compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek.

Will Knight

What AI Models for War Actually Look Like

While companies like Anthropic debate limits on military uses of AI, Smack Technologies is training models to plan battlefield operations.

Will Knight

Model Behavior

Meet the Tech Reporters Using AI to Help Write and Edit Their Stories

Independent writers are using AI agents all throughout their reporting process. What’s the value of a human journalist, anyway?

Maxwell Zeff

Google Shakes Up Its Browser Agent Team Amid OpenClaw Craze

As Silicon Valley obsesses over a new wave of AI coding agents, Google and other AI labs are shifting their bets.

Maxwell Zeff

Google Is Not Ruling Out Ads in Gemini

WIRED spoke with Nick Fox, Google’s SVP of knowledge and information, about how AI is changing the company’s advertising business.

Maxwell Zeff

OpenAI Had Banned Military Use. The Pentagon Tested Its Models Through Microsoft Anyway

Sources allege the Defense Department experimented with Microsoft’s version of OpenAI technology before the ChatGPT-maker lifted its prohibition on military applications.

Maxwell Zeff

Made in China

AI Research Is Getting Harder to Separate From Geopolitics

A policy change announced by NeurIPS, the world’s leading AI research conference, drew widespread backlash from Chinese researchers this week and then was quickly reversed.

Will Knight and Zeyi Yang

A New Game Turns the H-1B Visa System Into a Surreal Simulation

Inspired by real immigrant stories, H1B.Life captures the uncertainty, trade-offs, and pure luck that shape the lives of people trying to build a future in the US.

Zeyi Yang

China’s OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies

Hype around the open source agent is driving people to rent cloud servers and buy AI subscriptions just to try it, creating a windfall for tech companies.

Zeyi Yang

ByteDance’s AI Ambitions Are Being Hampered by Compute Restraints and Copyright Concerns

ByteDance’s new Seedance 2.0 AI video model seemed unstoppable—until heavy demand strained the company’s compute capacity and copyright complaints began piling up.

Zeyi Yang

Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic Supply-Chain-Risk Designation Halted by Judge

A judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s designation, clearing the way for Anthropic to keep doing business without the label starting next week.

Paresh Dave

OpenAI Enters Its Focus Era by Killing Sora

As the ChatGPT-maker eyes an IPO, it's ditching Sora in favor of a unified AI assistant and enterprise coding tools.

Maxwell Zeff

Pentagon’s ‘Attempt to Cripple’ Anthropic Is Troubling, Judge Says

During a hearing Tuesday, a district court judge questioned the Department of Defense’s motivations for labeling the Claude AI developer a supply-chain risk.

Paresh Dave

Arm Is Now Making Its Own Chips

The chip design firm says Meta, OpenAI, Cerebras, and Cloudflare are among the first customers of its new artificial intelligence hardware.

Lauren Goode

Big Tech

Livestream Replay: The War Machine

A panel of WIRED experts dissected the defense tech industry’s impact on modern warfare.

Tim Marchman, Paresh Dave, and Carla Sertin

Palantir Demos Show How the Military Could Use AI Chatbots to Generate War Plans

Software demos and Pentagon records detail how chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude could help the Pentagon analyze intelligence and suggest next steps.

Caroline Haskins

Iran Warns US Tech Firms Could Become Targets as War Expands

Companies including Google, Microsoft, and Palantir were listed as targets by Iranian media as the conflict with Israel and the US spills into digital infrastructure.

Dana Alomar

Meta Is Developing 4 New Chips to Power Its AI and Recommendation Systems

The MTIA processors are the tech giant’s latest attempt to build its own AI hardware, even as it continues spending billions on gear from industry leaders like Nvidia.

Lauren Goode