Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? We hear a lot about how AI is accelerating drug discovery. But the number of drugs approved by the FDA has remained constant through the AI revolution, at around 50 per year. "The biggest problem in bringing new medicine to patients hasn't been drug discovery for a long time," says Ben Liu, the founder and CEO of Formation Bio, an AI company working in the biotech space.

Do You Feel the AGI Yet? According to some predictions, 2026 is the year that an all-powerful AI will arrive. H undreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the AI industry in pursuit of a loosely defined goal: artificial general intelligence, a system powerful enough to perform at least as well as a human at any task that involves thinking. Will this be the year it finally arrives? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and xAI CEO Elon Musk think so.

The autonomous vehicle industry is heating up thanks to advances in AI. But can those same innovations help startups like HyprLabs build safe tech? For the last year and a half, two hacked white Tesla Model 3 sedans each loaded with five extra cameras and one palm-sized supercomputer have quietly cruised around San Francisco . In a city and era swarming with questions about the capabilities and limits of artificial intelligence, the startup behind the modified Teslas is trying to answer what amounts to a simple question: How quickly can a company build autonomous vehicle software today? The startup, which is making its activities public for the first time today, is called HyprLabs .

In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+. The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years.

OpenAI turned 10 yesterday, and President Donald Trump incidentally gave the company a very special birthday gift: a sweeping executive order aiming to dismantle and preempt many state-level regulations of artificial intelligence. "There's only going to be one winner here, and it's probably going to be the U.S. or China," Trump said in a press conference announcing the order. And for the United States to win, "we have to be unified. Almost all of the AI industry's biggest players have been pushing for this move. OpenAI has been asking all year for the Trump administration to preempt state-level AI regulations, which the company believes would be burdensome in various ways; Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and the major venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have made similar requests.

Anthropic's Daniela Amodei Believes the Market Will Reward Safe AI The Trump administration might think regulation is killing the AI industry, but Anthropic president Daniela Amodei disagrees. The Trump administration may think regulation is crippling the AI industry, but one of the industry's biggest players doesn't agree. At WIRED's Big Interview event on Thursday, Anthropic president and cofounder Daniela Amodei told WIRED editor at large Steven Levy that even though Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, may have tweeted that her company is "running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering," she's convinced her company's commitment to calling out the potential dangers of AI is making the industry stronger. WIRED's iconic series returned to San Francisco with a series of unforgettable, in-depth live conversations. Check out more highlights here .

Why is AI making computers and games consoles more expensive? The latest commodity coveted by the AI industry is computer memory, and the sector is signing deals directly with manufacturers for billions of dollars worth of chips - the very same chips that consumers use in smartphones, laptops and games consoles. At best, this is driving up prices, and at worst, it is causing shortages that limit production. Why does AI need so much memory? AI models are very, very big.

The diverging path of China's two leading AI players shows where the country's artificial intelligence industry is headed. DeepSeek and ByteDance, the two leaders of China's AI industry, are adopting vastly different strategies. On Monday, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.2, another open-weight model that anyone can tinker with. The startup says it performs on par with the latest models from OpenAI and Google, and it even beats them on some key mathematics benchmarks. That same day, ByteDance, whose dominance in AI applications we covered previously, introduced ways for people to use its chatbot, Doubao.

Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new tie-up that includes a $30bn commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft's cloud services, the latest high-profile deal binding together major players in the AI industry. Nvidia will commit up to $10bn to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5bn, the companies said on Tuesday, without sharing more details. The announcement underscores the AI industry's insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence. It also ties major OpenAI-backer Microsoft, as well as key AI chip supplier Nvidia, closer to one of the ChatGPT maker's biggest rivals. "We're increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we'll go to market together," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video.

Booth is a reporter at TIME. Booth is a reporter at TIME. When Sam Altman arrived at Helion Energy's small Redmond, Wash., office in early 2014, nuclear-fusion textbooks tucked under his arm, the company was focusing its efforts on research and development. By the time he left, several days later, he had persuaded the fusion-energy startup to chart a more aggressive path toward deployment, CEO David Kirtley recalls. A year later, Altman, who was co-founding OpenAI around the same time, invested $9.5 million in Helion, taking the role of chairman.