Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried? Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014. It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine. A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road.

"It's more exhausting," says Afer, a deputy commander of the "Da Vinci Wolves", describing how one of the best-known battalions in Ukraine has to defend against constant Russian attacks. Where once the invaders might have tried small group assaults with armoured vehicles, now the tactic is to try and sneak through on foot one by one, evading frontline Ukrainian drones, and find somewhere to hide. Under what little cover remains, survivors then try to gather a group of 10 or so and attack Ukrainian positions. It is costly – "in the last 24 hours we killed 11," Afer says – but the assaults that previously might have happened once or twice a day are now relentless. To the Da Vinci commander it seems that the Russians are terrified of their own officers, which is why they follow near suicidal orders.

Some millionaires might be happy frittering away their hard–earned cash on speed boats, golfing holidays, and perhaps the odd football team or two. But William Sachiti is far from your run–of–the–mill businessman. Much more Blofeld than Bill Gates, Mr Sachiti has decided to use his millions in a far less conventional way. Naturally, that meant buying a Cold War RAF base and firing up the radar station to hunt for UFOs. From his'supervillain lair' in the nuclear bunker beneath former RAF Neatishead, Norfolk, Mr Sachiti is building what may be the world's most sophisticated UFO–hunting machine.

Small racing quadcopters carrying explosives, known as first-person-view drones or FPVs, have become the dominant weapon in the war in Ukraine. Now, some are fitted with solar cells so they can wait for extended periods to ambush targets, turning them into a new type of land mine. "The drone can sit by a road or choke point and when it acquires its target, it can then do a quick sprint to the target," says Robert Bunker at US consultancy firm C/O Futures. Drone ambushes, where the devices land beside a road or on a building and wait for a target, are already commonly carried out by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. But even with their engines turned off, their camera and radio communications drain the drones' battery, limiting waiting time to a few hours at best.

On 1 June, Ukraine stunned the world with an audacious attack against Russian airbases. Using cheap, small drones concealed inside trucks that had penetrated deep into Russian territory, Ukraine was able to hit dozens of nuclear-capable strategic bombers, taking out 7 billion of military hardware. The drone-smuggling attack, codenamed Operation Spiderweb, was an incredible feat of military planning – but it also highlighted a vulnerability that has defence chiefs around the world concerned that their assets could be hit next. "The risk potentials of small drone attacks to US or UK air bases right now are 100 per cent," says Robert Bunker at US consultancy firm C/O Futures. "You simply need a group with the intent and capability, which is a very low bar to overcome."

In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable--now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking. To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?

The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters ("seasteading") or pro-business "freedom cities" such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island. Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don't actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body "upgrades", its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court. Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power. The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 "freedom cities" on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump's pledge into reality. "The energy in DC is absolutely electric," Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill.

It was once one of Cold War Britain's best-kept secrets. But now, you can take a look inside the'top secret' bunker where the government prepared for nuclear war. For the very first time, incredible 3D scans reveal the interior of the Nottingham War Rooms. Built between 1952 and 1953, the rooms protected one of the 11 Regional Seats of Government which would have controlled the surviving population in the event of an atomic blast. Inside, you can still see the original dormitories, kitchens, and offices built to house up to 400 government officials.

I'll tell you what mine is: death. I am not really built for battle – I need five cups of coffee just to function and I have terrible allergies. My body can't even handle pollen, it's not going to do well with nuclear war. Plus, even if I was hardier – who wants to live a few extra months in a completely destroyed world? As you have probably noticed bunkers have become the ultimate status symbol among the 1%.

For this week's TIME100 Most Influential Companies cover story about OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, TIME's former editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal sat down with a number of company executives in early May, including two sessions with Altman, transcribed below. The conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity. Sam Altman: One thing I use it for every day is help with summarization. I can't really keep up on my inbox anymore, but I made a little thing to help it summarize for me and pull out important stuff from unknown senders, and that's very helpful. I used it to translate an article for someone I'm meeting next week, to prepare for that. This is sort of a funny thing, I used it to help me draft a tweet that I was having a hard time with. Not as much as it might have seemed from the outside.