Each September, a who's who of executives from across Silicon Valley descends on San Francisco's Palace Hotel to charm investors at a conference hosted by the investment bank Goldman Sachs. This past week, between talk of growth and potential returns, tech titans found themselves addressing the abrupt resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon. Coxon, a 27-year-old who worked at OpenAI before joining its chief rival Anthropic, said on Tuesday that people building artificial intelligence (AI) believed the technology could destroy humanity. They are gambling with our lives, he said, these will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything. Coxon is by no means the first AI insider to publicly sound the alarm.

A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely "spooking people" inside big labs. 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.

AI leaders worry antitrust law could stand in the way of what they view as an increasingly urgent push to coordinate a slowdown in AI development. 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 that self-improving AI systems are safe. In the short term, he expects " voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established."

China slams US claims of'industrial-scale' AI theft Share China slams US claims of'industrial-scale' AI theft on social media China has issued a forceful reply against claims by the United States that top Chinese artificial intelligence companies have engaged in "industrial scale" theft of their US counterparts' AI models. The response on Wednesday comes after three US federal agencies - the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) - accused Chinese AI companies of exploiting American AI models to benefit their own systems. Tokens are the smallest units of text that AI models read, or generate. On Wednesday, China's Commerce Ministry dismissed the allegations and accused the US of seeking a "monopoly of the AI industry". "If the U.S. suppresses Chinese AI companies under the pretext of targeting distillation, China will take resolute countermeasures," the ministry said in a statement to the Associated Press.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen The rise of generative and agentic AI has dramatically changed the software-building process - and the skills required. Coursera founder Andrew Ng has listed key AI development skills. Some industry experts suggest the list is too focused on building. Engineers must also understand the business problem and risks. Is it time to think outside the box for software engineering AI skills?

Plus: Nvidia has secured $500 billion from Wall Street for AI infrastructure. Nine years after Google researchers introduced the transformer, this family of neural networks has become the engine inside every major large language model. But transformers are starting to show their age. As LLMs get bigger and better, transformers have become a bottleneck. Their dense attention mechanism becomes increasingly expensive as the amount of text grows, and they're not great at keeping track of a lot of information at once. Here are four new ideas for how to solve the transformer problem --innovations that could change LLMs for good, making them faster, far more efficient, and (maybe) even smarter.

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd at the Texas Democratic convention at the Hilliard Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 27 June 2026. Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd at the Texas Democratic convention at the Hilliard Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 27 June 2026. Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to'pause AI development' in interest of humanity Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to'stop building machines that humans cannot control' Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace. In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country's leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI models have reached a critical risk threshold and that the companies are losing control over the technology. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words.

Verity Harding tells WIRED that the US government's nationalistic attitude toward AI is evidence that a worst-case scenario is taking shape. Reports of an artificial intelligence arms race are everywhere-- even in this very publication . But what if that framing is fundamentally dangerous? Between 2016 and 2020, Harding spent her days briefing politicians across the globe, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron, on advances in AI. As the head of global public policy at Google DeepMind, Harding was responsible for mapping out ethical conundrums and potential risks.

The Download: Anthropic launches Claude Science, and California's carbon manure math Plus: The US has lifted restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models. Claude Science is Anthropic's newest flagship product At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research like Claude Code supports software engineering. Like Claude Code, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful work from concise, high-level instructions, with tools for computational biology and drug development. The launch signals that Anthropic is doubling down on AI for science, and the company will also use the product in its own research into drugs for rare, neglected diseases. Discover why Anthropic is betting big on AI for scientific research . Why California's carbon manure math doesn't add up Years ago, the state set up a system that pays cattle farmers to turn the methane emitted from cattle manure into natural gas.

The UN's independent scientific panel for AI has published its first report. Artificial intelligence development has been progressing at such a rapid pace that current governance systems are unable to keep up, the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence says in its preliminary report . The panel, consisting of members from around the world, will provide the information needed to stage the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance. It will take place in Geneva, where member states will discuss how to manage the technology, and is scheduled to begin on July 6. In its report, the panel discusses how quickly AI capabilities have evolved over the past few years.