B rendan Foody is 22 years old and runs a company worth billions. This August, I met the young CEO in a glass conference room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a " master plan," as he calls it, to upend the global labor market. His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told me, AI could automate 50 percent of the tasks that people do today.

Plus: Cisco discloses a zero-day with no available patch, Venezuela accuses the US of a cyberattack, and more. Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED this week show that United States Customs and Border Protection is transitioning from testing small drones to using them as standard surveillance tools, a move that will further expand CBP's already extensive dragnet that in some cases extends far beyond US land borders. Meanwhile, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning to incorporate a broad cybersecurity contract that will include expanding employee surveillance and monitoring . The move comes as the US government is escalating leak investigations and condemning internal dissent. The Chinese-language artificial intelligence app Haotian can be used to create "nearly perfect" face swaps during live video chats, and it is a favorite tool of Southeast Asian scammers.

Finally, he gave the summaries to his fine-tuned model, and he asked it to compose passages "in the style of Vauhini Vara." Going into all this, I was self-assured, even smug. I'd always felt that my style was original and, more important, that my books were totally distinct from one another. I figured that, even if the A.I. model could imitate my past books, it couldn't predict the style of the novel in progress. So, when Chakrabarty sent me the A.I.-generated imitations, I was genuinely confused.

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Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi attends a summit with five Central Asian nations in Tokyo on Saturday. Japan and five Central Asian nations adopted a joint declaration at their first summit, held in Tokyo for two days through Saturday. The declaration identifies transportation infrastructure development, decarbonization and people-to-people exchanges as three priority areas. The current rapidly changing environment surrounding Central Asia, due to recent changes in the international situation, is making regional and global cooperation more important, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said at the summit. The summit was also attended by the leaders of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Are these AI prompts damaging your thinking skills? What was the last thing you asked an AI chatbot to do for you? Maybe you asked it for an essay structure to help answer a tricky question, provide an insightful analysis of a chunky data set, or to check if your cover letter matches the job description. Some experts worry that outsourcing these kinds of tasks means your brain is working less - and could even be harming your critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a study showing that people who used ChatGPT to write essays showed less activity in brain networks associated with cognitive processing while undertaking the exercise.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party says that an envisaged new requirement of Japanese proficiency for obtaining permanent residency was prompted by many reports of issues involving foreign residents in local communities and administrative procedures resulting from their lack of Japanese language skills. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party is considering adding Japanese language proficiency as a requirement for permanent residency for foreign nationals, sources familiar with the matter have said. To obtain the status, foreign nationals will also be mandated to take a program aimed at helping them smoothly integrate into local communities, the sources said Friday. The envisaged new requirements will be included in a draft package of proposals on policy for foreign nationals, to be compiled next month for submission to the government. According to the Immigration Services Agency, the number of foreign residents in Japan stood at about 3,956,600 as of the end of last June.

SoftBank races to fulfill $22.5 billion funding pledge to OpenAI by year-end SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son attends an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo in February. NEW YORK/TOKYO/SAN FRANCISCO - SoftBank Group is racing to close a $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end through an array of cash-raising plans, including a sale of some investments, and could tap its undrawn margin loans borrowed against its valuable ownership in chip firm Arm Holdings, sources said. The all-in bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm's position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank's entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia, offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile U.S. stake and slashed staff. Son has slowed most other dealmaking at SoftBank's Vision Fund to a crawl, and any deal above $50 million now requires his explicit approval, two of the sources said.

In today's episode of, we dive into five stories--from AI to DOGE--that encapsulate the year and give us clues as to what might unfold in 2026. For better or for worse, this year had it all--from the AI industry shaping the global economy and our lives, to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency taking over US federal agencies under Elon Musk's leadership. In today's episode, host Zoë Schiffer and executive editor Brian Barrett get together to reflect on some of this year's key moments--and how they give us important clues as to what we can expect this upcoming year. The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Today on the show, we're wrapping up our news episode series by reflecting on the trends and stories that shaped 2025. And who better to do that with than Brian Barrett, our executive editor who works tirelessly in the shadows? Thank you for having me. Happy to emerge from my shadowy lair. What a year it's been, and I'm so excited for it to be almost over. Because it's been quite a year news-wise, safe to say, especially in tech and politics. Honestly, it was a little bit tricky to pick which trends we should discuss today, but we settled on five stories that kind of encapsulate this year pretty well, and I think give us clues as to what is going to be unfolding in 2026. The first one that I want to talk about is dear to my heart, and it's about AI data centers. So we all know that the investment, the amount of money being spent on data centers is absolutely staggering, with companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft tripling down on AI infrastructure spending this year. But it's not just about the money that's being spent.

A protest against a planned data center in Decatur, Georgia. A protest against a planned data center in Decatur, Georgia. Analysts see'global construction frenzy that shows no signs of slowing' amid surge in demand from AI boom A new report finds that investment in the worldwide data center market reached $61bn this year, setting a new record atop the wave of the artificial intelligence boom. The analysis by S&P Global, first reported by CNBC, documented what the market intelligence firm called a "global construction frenzy that shows no signs of slowing", to build out the massive real estate, hardware, and energy requirements driven by insatiable demand from AI companies. S&P pegged 2024's investment in the data center market at $60.8bn, just below the 2025 number.