Don't Listen to Anyone Who Thinks Secession Will Solve Anything Americans increasingly fantasize about a divorce between red and blue states--but they dread the thought of civil war. You can't have one without the other. It's become almost like a histamine response: After a shocking national event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or Donald Trump's deployment of the military to Los Angeles last June, mentions of the term " civil war " and calls for secession surge online. This kind of talk flared again in January, when two citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis, and governor Tim Walz mobilized the Minnesota National Guard to be ready to support local law enforcement. "I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?" Walz said in an interview with The Atlantic, invoking the battle that sparked the Civil War.

The Amazon Prime prank series amplifies the hijinks of workplace dynamics, while showing how people find purpose--and community--in their jobs despite impossible situations. Anthony Norman is your typical Gen Z worker: 25, a little wayward, and struggling to find a full time job. Unemployment rates are high . AI is creating a crisis for young people trying to enter the workforce. And several companies--including Amazon, Block, and Meta --have embraced tech's latest era of layoffmaxxing, with some cutting their staff by 20 percent.

The Department of Defense alleges the AI developer could manipulate models in the middle of war. Company executives argue that's impossible. Anthropic cannot manipulate its generative AI model Claude once the US military has it running, an executive wrote in a court filing on Friday. The statement was made in response to accusations from the Trump administration about the company potentially tampering with its AI tools during war . "Anthropic has never had the ability to cause Claude to stop working, alter its functionality, shut off access, or otherwise influence or imperil military operations," Thiyagu Ramasamy, Anthropic's head of public sector, wrote .

As the prediction market boom continues, backlash is growing, too, with Arizona filing criminal charges against Kalshi and public outcry after Polymarket traders threatened a journalist. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour posted a video on Wednesday of six men decked out in business casual doing push-ups on the sidewalk. "This is how Kalshi Q1 board meeting ended," he wrote on X. The board members are laughing and smiling in the video after their impromptu cardio session, and the mood is jubilant. The next day, it became clear that the team had ample reason to celebrate: Kalshi had just raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation, making the company worth on paper roughly double what it was only a few months ago.

Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours. In April 2024, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and a current AI evangelist, gave a closed-door lecture to a group of Stanford students. If these young people hoped to be Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Schmidt explained, then they should be prepared to breach some ethical boundaries. Yet Schmidt told the students to go ahead and download whatever they need to build an accurate "test" version of their AI product. If the product takes off, "then you hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up," he said.

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. The defense contractors, military officers, and corporate executives in attendance are unprepared for the weather; they'd assumed the previous day's mid-70s temperatures would hold. A cold rain turns to steady snowfall, and Palantir passes out heavy blankets. As people move between open-air pavilions, it looks like they were pulled from shipwrecks. To this self-selecting crowd, Palantir is delivering on its promises.

Plus: OpenAI is also creating a super app. OpenAI has a new grand challenge: building an AI researcher--a fully automated agent-based system capable of tackling large, complex problems by itself. The San Francisco firm said the new goal will be its "north star" for the next few years. By September, the company plans to build "an autonomous AI research intern" that can take on a small number of specific research problems. The intern will be the precursor to the fully automated multi-agent system, which is slated to debut in 2028. In an exclusive interview this week, OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, talked me through the plans.

Last year, as FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, a civil servant overseeing West Coast stations privately pledged support, according to emails obtained by WIRED. A senior Federal Communications Commission official overseeing ABC-owned California stations privately offered to assist FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's campaign last year against the Walt Disney Co. and, according to internal emails obtained by WIRED. On September 17, Carr threatened Disney with regulatory action regarding the Jimmy Kimmel monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, prompting major station affiliates to drop the broadcast and forcing ABC to temporarily suspend the show. The email, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, was titled "personal note of support re Charlie Kirk ABC/Disney issue" and quoted Carr's remarks from an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson: "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Carr said during the interview.

The Download: Quantum computing for health, and why the world doesn't recycle more nuclear waste Plus: The FBI has admitted it's buying Americans' location data. In a laboratory on the outskirts of Oxford, a quantum computer built from atoms and light awaits its moment. The device is small but powerful--and also very valuable. Infleqtion, the company that owns it, is hoping its abilities will win $5 million at a competition next week. The prize will go to the quantum computer that can solve real health care problems that conventional "classical" computers are unable to solve. But there can be only one big winner--if there is a winner at all.

The Download: The Pentagon's new AI plans, and next-gen nuclear reactors Plus: The OpenClaw frenzy has led to a new Nvidia product. The Pentagon plans to set up secure environments for generative AI companies to train military-specific versions of their models on classified data, MIT Technology Review has learned. AI models like Anthropic's Claude are already used to answer questions in classified settings, including for analyzing targets in Iran. But allowing them to train on and learn from classified data is a major new development that presents unique security risks. It would also bring AI firms closer to classified data than ever before. What do new nuclear reactors mean for waste?