More than 200 people in roles such as engineering, finance, and communications will now be represented by the Communications Workers of America. More than 200 staffers at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the encyclopedia Wikipedia, have voted 158-14 to join the Communications Workers of America labor union. The US National Labor Relations Board counted ballots on Thursday. Three Wikimedia employees tell WIRED they will now have a mechanism to challenge management as the organization faces growing competition from AI chatbots and a drop in volunteer editors. The 25-year-old, San Francisco-based foundation employs nearly 700 people across 39 countries, most of them working remotely.

Simplifying and integrating enterprise technology can help companies move faster, respond to disruptions, and build a stronger foundation for AI, says Harish Manohar, SAP IT Director at Jabil. As companies scale, the technology supporting operations can become a liability just as quickly as it becomes an asset. Disconnected systems, site-specific tools, spreadsheets, and manual workarounds can create data silos that make it harder to spot problems early, coordinate responses, and make decisions with confidence. For Jabil, a global manufacturing company with more than 100 sites across more than 30 countries, the answer has been to make integration and simplification a priority. The company adopted a "simplify-first, then-innovate mindset," says Harish Manohar, SAP IT director at Jabil, recognizing that adding new technologies without first reducing complexity risks creating more risk. The goal is to standardize processes, consolidate where possible, and establish a more consistent data backbone across the organization. "Any innovation without simplification is going to add more complexity," Manohar says. That philosophy also changes how Jabil approaches modernization. "Any modernization or transformation should add measurable business value," Manohar says. The company is focused on connecting processes end-to-end across its supply chain and creating a foundation that can scale consistently across regions.

AI-assisted modernization can reduce the time and complexity of transforming legacy systems while creating a foundation for faster innovation, says Asifa Sherazi, CIO of health insurance at Bupa and Sanjeev Tripathi, senior VP, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector at Infosys. For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes AI brought to the economics of software development, that calculation is changing. Bupa's modernization of its My Bupa mobile application offers a case study in what becomes possible when a legacy migration is treated as a business transformation rather than a technology rewrite. Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi describes the risks of waiting for legacy systems to become an emergency: "The end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once." For Bupa, moving its application from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin improved the app rating from 3.7 to 4.7, while the user-perceived crash rate fell by nearly 24 percentage points on Android and eight points on iOS. "What they'll notice is that when they need us, often at a stressful moment, it just simply works," Sherazi says. Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president and region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, contends that AI is helping change the equation. "The emergence of AI is fundamentally shifting the economics of modernization," he says, reducing the effort, risk, and time traditionally associated with these programs. At Bupa, combining AI-assisted reverse engineering with forward engineering helped deliver the transformation in approximately 60% less time than would have been possible in the pre-AI era.

Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. A fter reading Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I'd set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or '80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I'd confiscate all of their science fiction. As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get--maybe couldn't get--was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away.

Bill Gates says we've passed AI's danger thresholds. In a new interview, the billionaire philanthropist sounds an alarm on the urgency of getting our AI policies in order. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in the water, and across the lake to the Olympic Mountains that define the horizon. Because if the scene is placid, the messenger is not. Seated across from me at a conference room table, Bill Gates is rocking back and forth in his chair, totally animated. And the more he has to say--about the threats of terror or economic collapse or just losing control of our AI systems--the more agitated I find myself becoming, too. The philanthropist and former Microsoft CEO says he has been growing increasingly alarmed by the rate of change at which AI technology is advancing, especially since guardrails are not keeping pace. In a new essay published today, Gates argues that we have passed the points where multiple potential dangers should have been checked. "We've crossed the threshold in terms of [AI's] bio-capabilities, cyber-capabilities, psychosocial capabilities, job-market-destruction capabilities, and even the lack of control," he said in an interview with about his new memo "I'm just stunned at the lack of concern and discussion outside of the industry." In an effort to wake the world up to what he sees as a rapidly growing societal disrupter, the 70-year-old tech titan has begun sounding the alarm as a "shrill voice," both publicly with his new essay (the first of multiple he plans on the topic) and in meetings with the press, and privately in conversations with industry, government, and civil society leaders. And while Gates is calling attention to a number of issues, his warnings about the bio-capabilities of the current frontier models are especially chilling. "Any model that can make novel molecules should be monitored," he says.

Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI? In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone's data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever. Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product--whether people want it or not--is driving new users in droves to Proton's products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Yet Yen is anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo--just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that's more voluntary and preserves users' privacy far more than the typical tech giant. That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen's views don't cut cleanly across party lines--from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden's leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that's not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts. ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You're a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right? I'm not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator.

Robotics company Foundation says its humanoid robots could conduct autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance along the border, though DHS says no formal contract is in place.

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Akari describes her work on augmented language models, where language models are trained to use other models and tools. This has already resulted in OpenScholar, an open-source model which helps scientists to synthesize vast amounts of scientific literature. You were awarded the 2025 AAAI Doctoral Dissertation Award. What was the topic of your dissertation research, and why was this an interesting area of study to you? My PhD dissertation was on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models.

The CEO of Foundation Future Industries, which counts the president's son as its chief strategy adviser, tells WIRED it's exploring some "kinetic things." Some companies want their humanoid robots to fold your clothes. Others want them in the workplace . Sankaet Pathak and his startup Foundation Future Industries have a slightly different goal: produce an all-American robot supersoldier. Pathak, Foundation's CEO, says his company plans to start giving its humanoids lethal capabilities soon, although he declined to share specifics.