In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the "department of government efficiency", he declared that governments were poorly configured "big dumb machines". To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that "the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers". Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need "God mode", an overview of the whole. If the mandate of Doge was to "[modernise] federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity", in the words of the executive order that launched the initiative on 20 January 2025, the reality was a strengthening of the state's surveillance capacities. Over time, Musk had become convinced that the real bugs in the code were people, especially the non-white illegal immigrants whom he saw as pawns in a liberal scheme to corrupt democracy and beneficiaries of what he called "suicidal empathy". He understood empathy itself in coding terms.

A whistleblower complaint alleges John Solly claimed to have stored highly sensitive Social Security data on a thumb drive. Solly and Leidos, his current employer, strongly deny the allegations. John Solly, a software engineer and former member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is the DOGE operative reportedly accused in a whistleblower complaint of telling colleagues that he stored sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) data on a thumb drive and wanted to share the information with his new employer, multiple sources tell WIRED. Since October, according to a copy of his résumé, Solly has worked as the chief technology officer for the health IT division of a government contractor called Leidos, which has already received millions in SSA contracts and could receive up to $1.5 billion in contracts with SSA based on a five-year deal it signed in 2023. Solly's personal website and LinkedIn have been taken offline as of this week.

Tesla loses place as world's top electric vehicle seller to China's BYD Tesla has lost its place as the top global seller of electric vehicles to Chinese company BYD, capping a year defined by outrage over CEO Elon Musk's political manoeuvring and the end of United States tax breaks for customers. The company revealed on Friday that it had sold 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, compared with BYD's 2.26 million vehicles. The sales represented a 9 percent decline for Tesla from a year earlier. However, the market has become increasingly crowded with competitors, with China's electric vehicle market bounding ahead. Musk's embrace of US President Donald Trump in 2024 and subsequent spearheading of a controversial "government efficiency" panel (DOGE) behind widespread layoffs of federal workers has also proved polarising.

Though the drama surrounding Elon Musk was frequently absurd and unpredictable, it was also consequential. Though the drama surrounding Elon Musk was frequently absurd and unpredictable, it was also consequential. Elon Musk's 2025 recap: how the world's richest person became its most chaotic How the tech CEO and'Dogefather' made a mess of the year - from an apparent Nazi salute during his White House tenure to Tesla sales slumps and Starship explosions T he year of 2025 was dizzying for Elon Musk . The tech titan began the year holding court with Donald Trump in Washington DC. As the months ticked by, one public appearance after another baffled the US and the world.

Elon Musk walks to the White House after landing in Marine One on the South Lawn on 9 March in Washington DC. Elon Musk walks to the White House after landing in Marine One on the South Lawn on 9 March in Washington DC. We still don't really know what Elon Musk's Doge actually did W hen Elon Musk vowed late last year to lead a "department of government efficiency" (Doge), he claimed it would operate with "maximum transparency" as it set about saving $2tn worth of waste and exposing massive fraud. Today, with Musk out of the White House, Doge having cut only a tiny fraction of the waste it promised, and dozens of lawsuits alleging violations of privacy and transparency laws, much of what the agency has done remains a mystery. The effects of Doge's initial blitz through the federal government - which included dismantling the US Agency for International Development ( USAID), embedding staffers in almost every agency and illegally firing people en masse - are still playing out.

DOGE dominated the news this year as Elon Musk's operatives shook up several US government agencies. Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, has gone through several iterations, leading periodically to claims-- most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management--that the group doesn't exist, or has vanished altogether. Many of its original members are in full-time roles at various government agencies, and the new National Design Studio (NDS) is headed by Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, a close ally of Musk's. Even if DOGE doesn't survive another year, or until the US semiquincentennial--its original expiration date, per the executive order establishing it--the organization's larger project will continue. DOGE from its inception was used for two things, both of which have continued apace: the destruction of the administrative state and the wholesale consolidation of data in service of concentrating power in the executive branch.

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.

WIRED Roundup: DOGE Isn't Dead, Facebook Dating Is Real, and Amazon's AI Ambitions In this episode of, we bring you the news of the week, then dive into how some DOGE operatives are still at work in the federal government--despite reports claiming otherwise. Uncanny Valley host Zoë Schiffer is joined by senior editor Leah Feiger to discuss five stories you need to know about this week, from how Amazon is trying to catch up in the AI race to why Facebook Dating is more popular than ever. Then, they dive into how--despite recent reports claiming that it's over--DOGE operatives are still very much working across federal agencies. Who the Hell Is Actually Using Facebook Dating? Sex Workers Built an'Anti-OnlyFans' to Take Control of Their Profits Here's What Its Operatives Are Doing Now 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 bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including how despite some reports claiming that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is pretty much over, DOGE people are actually still at work across federal agencies. I'm joined today by our senior politics editor, Leah Feiger. How are you doing today? I am great because I've spent the day with you, but our gentle listeners don't know that. So the first story this week is one that I saw and I thought, you know what? Leah's going to want to talk about Amazon's artificial intelligence prowess.

You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and farm your own fish and vegetables. This is the life of Marcin Jakubowski, the 53-year-old founder of Open Source Ecology, an open collaborative of engineers, producers, and builders developing what they call the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). It's a set of 50 machines--everything from a tractor to an oven to a circuit maker--that are capable of building civilization from scratch and can be reconfigured however you see fit. It's all part of his ethos that life-changing technology should be available to all, not controlled by a select few. What it's like to find yourself in the middle of a conspiracy theory Last week, we held a subscribers-only Roundtables discussion exploring how to cope in this new age of conspiracy theories.

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent substantial intellectual and economic investments, yet their effectiveness can inadvertently facilitate model imitation via knowledge distillation (KD). In practical scenarios, competitors can distill proprietary LLM capabilities by simply observing publicly accessible outputs, akin to reverse-engineering a complex performance by observation alone. Existing protective methods like watermarking only identify imitation post-hoc, while other defenses assume the student model mimics the teacher's internal logits, rendering them ineffective against distillation purely from observed output text. This paper confronts the challenge of actively protecting LLMs within the realistic constraints of API-based access. We introduce an effective and efficient Defensive Output Generation (DOGe) strategy that subtly modifies the output behavior of an LLM. Its outputs are accurate and useful for legitimate users, yet are designed to be misleading for distillation, significantly undermining imitation attempts. We achieve this by fine-tuning only the final linear layer of the teacher LLM with an adversarial loss. This targeted training approach anticipates and disrupts distillation attempts during inference time. Our experiments show that, while preserving the performance of the teacher model, student models distilled from the defensively generated outputs demonstrate catastrophically reduced performance, demonstrating DOGe as a practical safeguard against KD-based model imitation.